Helped-less

I fucked up.  It was the two year anniversary of Silas passing, Lu and I couldn't be together because of work, and I had no idea what to do.  So I planned nothing.

Didn't call anyone in advance, didn't make any plans. With Lu away it was  doubly difficult for both of us.

As the day approached I could feel myself tightening into that same awful shape again, where simple things like food and sunlight became taut and painful.

What do I do with the day my son was born and passed away?  The sheer awfulness of the anniversary immobilized me.  I was locked up completely.

The fact is, I have difficulty with events that are far away in time or in space.  A trip a month from now is practically non-existent in my mind.  Something I need to do six months from now is hard for me to comprehend today.  Lu has always been the long-distance planner.  Tickets, itinerary, the calendar blocked off with days when we are busy are all part of her repertoire.

All I have ever been good at is dealing with right now.

Right now I should be picking up the remnants of an epic 2 year birthday party.  Discarded milk bottles strewn about the house.  A blankie over the lamp, cheerios in the couch and the Wiggles still blasting from the stereo.

Do the kids do the Wiggles anymore?  I have no idea, obviously, I was at a bar getting burgers and beers with a few friends instead.

It became an anti-party.  More people weren't invited than those that attended.  With my no-kid rule in effect, it meant 1/2 of many of my close friends and family couldn't attend, cause someone had to watch the little ones.  I suppose I could feel bad about that, but I don't.

For one day, I figured, I got to be as selfish as I wanted.  All the days of the year I have to grin and bear the beauty of all the offspring of all of my friends and family.  Jealousy threatens my soul every day, every moment, as I look around and see everyone with all their little kids, their lives and their futures manifest in these new humans.

And still, now, once again 2 years later, all we have is memory and despair when it comes to our little lost son Silas.  The impossibility of all of this remains as disconcerting as the day he died.  Despite my complete embrace of the reality of the situation, a part of me still cannot believe it and probably never will.  Guess that embrace is not so complete after all.

That disbelief impaired my ability to figure out what the fuck I wanted to do with Silas's day.  I don't even know what to call it.  I mis-communicated with my brothers, they thought I was away.  I neglected to request the presence of many I love to be with.  I didn't even consider what options I had, I just thought... nothing.  I just thought, this is it.  This is all I have.

2 years ago he was supposed to be born and instead he died.  That was the extent of my ability to think about the coming day.  2 years ago sadness and despair and awfulness crashed into our lives, and into the lives of the people that love us.  I hate that feeling.  I hate being the conduit for such a terrible event.  I hate how the story of our son makes people impossibly sad.  And most of all, I hate how there is nothing I can do about any of that, now.

The only way to fight all of that is by going straight forward into everything else.  I managed to communicate clearly enough to get one friend to block off the day.  Another friend called to tell me she was going to be hanging out with me no matter what.  Just days before Saturday another couple declared they would be coming by to be with me and all I could say was yes, thank you, and no I have no idea what we will do.

The night of the 24th I stayed up until almost 5am.  I had worked late and couldn't sleep when I got home.  Lu was away so the kitty is now my best friend and we sat up watching TV until the wee hours of the morning.  In a way it was like a vigil for me.  It reminded me of the long, long night when Lu was in labor.  It felt right to go late, to do away with the usual rhythms of life.  The rhythm of our lives has been disrupted, utterly, and these days I'm used to not sleeping well anyway.

In the morning I didn't move.  I could have stayed there all day, and maybe someday I will, but on this day I got up, had breakfast and then of all things, I cleaned.  With Lu away it has become something of a man-pad, and with friends on the way, I had to get things back to "acceptable for normal humans."

We went to the park and the leaves on Silas's tree were already starting to blaze red with the changing season.

I stood there for a while with my hand on its tiny trunk.  The tree is a beautiful reminder of our son, but it does not compare to the mobile, vibrant life of a living two year old.  I stood there and held the tree and then my friends came over one by one and held me for a moment.  Their hugs were vital and so was their presence.

We played wiffle ball and anything past his tree was an automatic home run.  Later we went back to the house, sat in the yard, listened to music and had some beers.  From there it was off to my favorite restaurant downtown where we managed to score 6 seats in a row at the bar on a busy Saturday night.  Poker closed out the night and though I didn't win, looking around and seeing the faces of some of my friends made the knot of despair loosen a bit.  I don't have my son, but I do have great friends and an amazing family.

Next year I know what I need to do.  Right up front and right away, as the day approaches I need to reach out to those around me and tell them one thing.  I need to tell them that I will need help on that day.  I cannot wait around hoping someone will save it for me, because no one knows what you need unless you say it.

Unfortunately, no matter how many times I say I need my son I cannot change that he will always be gone, and that I will always miss him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Do you have trouble telling people what you need?  Do you expect people to 'just know' what to do?  How have your memorial days changed over the years?

a walk among friends

Today's post comes to us from Louise of Radar of Chance. She writes: "...'After' began in May 2009. Laura was a gift: a surprise pregnancy when clomid was the order of the day, a 40th birthday present, a second daughter to a mother with six brothers, new life and hope when our lives had veered off the path of plain sailing. She was all these things and before we knew it she was gone...."

photo by maine momma

My friend is pregnant.

I am not.

With every bit of my being I yearn to be pregnant. My fantasy is not of some cute child to dress up and show off, when I think of pregnancy. My fantasy is labour. I want to feel a baby being delivered out of me. I want to feel the effort and pain of labour, and feel it with the hope that the baby who slithers out of me will roar, will nuzzle, will pee, will stare at this strange new place with big, dark, all-knowing, out-of-focus baby eyes, will breathe…….

But my friend is pregnant.

I am not.

There are two people in this world that are allowed to be pregnant, two people whose pregnancies I could genuinely rejoice in. Everyone else is in a category somewhere between envy and so-can’t-deal with-this-at-all. This friend is one of the two people.

She has been pregnant before. This time two years ago, she was bubbling over with excitement for the life that was growing inside her. She had asked me to be her birth companion (if I wasn’t pregnant. Why would I be pregnant? That was not on our agenda.) I was bubbling over with excitement for the life that was growing inside her.

I got a phone call after her twelve-week scan. “My baby has died.” Not before a lifetime of plans and dreams had been made for this child and her love for this child had taken root and entwined itself deep deep down in the depths of her soul. I had never seen someone hollow with grief before.

She became pregnant again and miscarried again, this time just before I found out I was pregnant with Laura. We could have been pregnant together, she just a week or two ahead of me. Our babies could have been friends. Telling her I was pregnant with Laura – an unplanned, most unexpected pregnancy after three clomid babies – was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

Throughout my pregnancy with Laura, as she journeyed with her own loss and sorrow, this friend was a constant presence. She talked on the phone with me for hours when we were told, after our twelve-week scan, that Laura was high risk for Down’s Syndrome. In all her pain she still accompanied me. She rejoiced in my blooming body. She came shopping with me for maternity clothes. She stayed on the phone when I had no words and only tears were flowing.

And then one day I called her and said, “My baby has died.”

She was there instantly. We walked the hospital grounds together, the sun shining, me still beautifully pregnant. She left me a notebook and pencil, just in case…. I woke at 5.00am the following morning and began to write.

While I was in labour she went shopping and bought the babygros I had spotted, but hadn’t yet got around to buying. We didn’t ask her, she anticipated the need and offered. They were left at the front desk of the hospital for us as I delivered Laura into this world, perfect tiny girl babygros.

She came to meet Laura. She couldn’t hold her – not because she was afraid to hold a dead baby, but because her own yearning to have a baby was so strong, she was afraid she would not be able to let her go if she did hold her. And yet she came and sat with me and cried with me and stared in wonder at the beauty of our little Laura.

My friend is pregnant. I called to visit her a while back and wondered, “Is that a pregnant bump?” She was only six weeks, but it is twins. She is allowed to be pregnant and I am able to rejoice in this pregnancy, but……

In the time since Laura has died, I have been learning a lot of things about myself. Most of this learning, this unfolding of who I am now, has come after the fact – after I have found myself in a familiar situation, but reacting differently from before. I don’t know this world anymore, or I don’t know who I am in it.

I gave my pregnant friend a bag filled with my maternity clothes- it will save her money and they’d just be gathering dust with me. Yesterday I met her and she was me – my top, my trousers, my pregnant bump. This is the unknown territory. These are the things I don’t know. I’ve always passed my maternity clothes around. But this time it is different. This time there is Laura, in all her absence at the centre of everything. When does hard become too hard to bear?

I will walk with my friend through her pregnancy because there is nothing I would rather do more right now. I can handle the clothes. It hurts, but I can handle it and frankly a pretty high proportion of life hurts right now anyway. A few clothes won’t tip the balance either way.

The other day she started talking about doulas. I reminded her I was here if she wanted me to be her companion this time. She had been afraid to ask. She is acutely conscious of how hard it could be for me. I am too, but I’ve never been at a birth that wasn’t one of my own children. Does losing Laura mean I have to step back and deny myself a whole range of life experiences just in case they might be too painful for me?

My friend is pregnant and I will walk with her through her pregnancy.

I am afraid because I am a different person now and I don’t and won’t know a lot of the differences until situations reveal them to me. I don’t know how I will react and that is a risk that I am taking. But, I will be walking with my friend and her growing babies, carrying joy and fear and sorrow and hope with me every step of the way.

How do you feel about other people’s pregnancies since your loss? Do you have friends who make you feel differently about pregnancy? How do you cope with the challenges that other people’s pregnancies present to you? How do you look after yourself and offer support simultaneously?

i don't know what to say

Gus and Zoey are our children.

No, that’s not it.

Gus and Zoey were our children.

No.  That’s not right, either.

Gus and Zoey are our children, but were our babies.  Because they will always be our children, but whatever else they are, I do not think they are “babies” anymore.

Many months after Gus and Zoey were born and died, and months into the process of trying to have children again, I was not sure how to talk to myself about what happened.  I referred to Gus and Zoey’s deaths as an it.  “Before it happened…” “When it happened…” “After it happened…”  But it is not an it.  It is a they.

Of course, I knew this from almost the beginning.  Our return from the hospital had felt like a defeat: our family was the same size it had been when we left home more than six days before.  Reading all the emails that were waiting for us was a good diversion—in fact, just seeing how full the inbox was distracted me from just how full the house was not.  But one message underscored it.  It was from a former colleague, saying how sorry she was to hear about our losses.  Plural.

No one had put it that way yet.  Not even M.  Not even me.  

I tried to stay mindful of this—that it was Gus who died and Zoey who died, and not Gusandzoey who died—but I couldn’t.  Throughout the pregnancy, and then after, thinking of them as a Gusandzoey was the only way I ever came to know them.  One time, a woman who had lost her adult child counseled me that I could still honor the twins by doing things they liked.  I smiled and nodded, a little ashamed at how easily I faked my empathy, and thought, they didn’t like anything.  They weren’t here long enough to like hiking more than skiing, or Chinese over Italian.  That may have been when I realized it: I could miss them, but never know them.  Or rather, I could know them, but only as an idea.

Also, the thought that I had buried two individual babies—the one and also the other—was probably too much.  It would require more of my mind than I had.  We’ve all experienced this, I think.  As persons and maybe even as a people.  After all, there were hours and miles between the blast that destroyed Hiroshima and the one that destroyed Nagasaki, yet we talk about when America dropped “the bomb.”

So I came to talk—and think—about all of it in the singular.

Last spring, I tried to explain some of this to my friends Jack and Elizabeth on a visit back east to introduce them to my college town.  Walking up Main Street, I told them I was only recently feeling Gus and Zoey's distinctness from each other.  I told them about finally appreciating that I had buried not one, but two babies.  I told them about the enormity of that, the strangeness, while we walked past the shops and restaurants that were not there when I was there.

"That was the hardest part of the funeral for me," Elizabeth said.  "Seeing the two tiny caskets side by side."

That’s when I felt something split inside my head the way heavy air can be split by thunder.  Brought back to the funeral, but seeing it through Elizabeth's eyes, I told Jack and Elizabeth something I had not told anyone else until that moment—not even M., not even myself:

That when I picture the funeral, I usually picture one coffin. 

I did not add that when I do see the second, it is less distinct, a gray, coffin-shaped shadow peeking out from behind the first.  Of course, I've always known there were two.  After all, there was that bit of madness when the funeral director rushed up to the grave, double-checked his notes, and had the coffins swapped, so that Gus would be buried in Gus's grave, and Zoey in hers. 

But just as the one way to describe their deaths is really two, the two are really four.  I realized this a day or so after Elizabeth’s remark, when remembering what a two-year-old said on our last visit to the cemetery. 

It was the one-year anniversary of our losses.  The gravestones had just been placed.  This was our first time seeing them.  Friends from the support group were already in the cemetery, having visited their son, who was stillborn almost four years ago. 

They were waiting for us at Gus and Zoey’s graves.  M.’s mother and stepfather were with us; our friends’ two-year-old daughter was with them.  She knows about her older brother, and about Gus and Zoey, too. 

After we talked for a while, and after our friends had shown us the products they keep in the car to clean their son’s grave, and how they cleaned Gus and Zoey’s for us, we began saying our goodbyes.  “Is there anything you want to say to Gus and Zoey?” our friend asked her little girl, holding her.

There was.  She blew kisses at the gravestones.  “Happy birthday, Gus and Zoey,” she said.

How have the ways you describe your loss changed over time?  Have you been surprised by how you remember (or misremember) events immediately following your loss?



milagros.

photo by emdot

I search through the cases of milagros. Through silver hands, patina-ed trucks and copper lungs. Medals of disembodied legs and small praying men with hats held in hands. I settle on a sacred heart, flames rising from its fold, and, at the last minute, point to a pair of eyes for Santa Lucia, for my daughter. I seek ritual now. The repetition of the familiar helps me touch my childhood, reminding me of comfort. When I get home, I dig out my antique wooden Virgen de Guadalupe. I place her over a handwoven fabric, light a candle and pin the ex-voto to the cloth. I am trying to remember a roadside shrine I found once on the Ruta Puuc, the road that follows the Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

It was a decade ago that I followed the road with a rental car and a day pack. When I passed the unadorned shack on a road from the ruins of one Mayan temple to the next, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe caught my eye and I quickly pulled the car off the road. Lit and unlit candles dotted the ledges and floor of the little alcove in the middle of nowhere. Pictures, letters and thousands of milagros, little metal folk charms of body parts or saints, surrounded the statue of her. Each symbol imbued with its own individual and very personal meaning--some a prayer for healing, others a call for fortune, a change of luck, a dream of love or a need for strength. I hardened fast to the spot in front of the makeshift altar, enraptured with something primal within me, my indigenous roots suddenly alive to magic and the gods. There is a way Latin American culture, my culture, seamlessly ties together the ancient, Pre-Columbian with the  New World; the pagan and the Catholic; the profane and sacred.

A decade later, after Lucia was stillborn, I recreate the same shrine in my living room. I wanted all those things in my grief--a miracle, a prayer, a call for fortune and a dream of love. I set the Virgin up in the center. They call her the "Mother of the Apocalypse." Apocalypse, indeed. I add a sugar skull, a picture of St. Lucia, a rock, some water, a drippy candle, a Buddha and a mizuko jizo. A bit of heaven, of earth, of water and of fire, the altar seems to touch an ancient secret in me I have only just  remembered during the ritual. I whisper it to myself, "We have all grieved." Humans, that is. Humans have always grieved.

Humans have always pleaded with ancestors and visions of saints and demons and volcanoes to alleviate that which aches within us. We have invented religions around it. We have knelt in front of shrines to Coatlique, or the Virgin, or Demeter, and asked her to heal our broken hearts, to give us back our children. I feel connected to this sense of universality of babyloss. Maybe it is the only religion I have now, the only thing I really believe--that babies die and parents grieve. It has happened for so long and so often, in the first stories of the universe, that I bend my head in shame for being surprised that it happened to me.

:::

My mother reminds me again that I should have had a funeral for Lucia, so that she can have some closure. "It is different in my country. The whole town would come to help lead Lucy to heaven. She will be stuck here." And I instinctively look around my house.

Please let her be stuck here, I think. Maybe in that space between the couch and the wall. I could kneel on the cushion and peek into that spot, 'Hello, love,' I would say. 'I miss you.'

My mother says that in her country she would have the baby's body interned in the house. In the living room. They would set up chairs. The people would come, she says, the local village ladies who always pray rosary for the dead. They would coo about how beautiful Lucia looks, and everyone would see her as a baby instead of something unmentionable after a long pregnancy. For a week, every night, the women and her family would pray rosary over the dead. Light candles. Her sisters would sit. Every once in a while, a cousins would come before going out drinking that night.

"My sisters will cry when they are moved to cry. They will fix black coffee and plain soup. Her soul goes to heaven that way."

The silence of disappointment sits between us.

"You eat soup? At the equator?"
"It is tradition to not make anything spicy or interesting."
"Huh." My mother stares at me, as I stare at my chewed fingernails.
"It helps, Angel."
"But you don't even really believe in this stuff, Mama." I protest.
"What does believing matter? It helps. Those rituals are important. Maybe you just need a funeral for her for you to heal. Believe me, at the end of the week, after sitting and praying the rosary every night with those women all covered in lace, you accept the death. We all walk to the cemetary after the week is over. The vultures fly around and stare at you. You don't expect anyone to walk through the door after that. "

I never expected Lucy to walk through the door.

Though I have seven living aunts and three uncles, forty-seven first cousins and double that in the second cousin category, I have no aunts in this country anymore. Very few cousins, respectively. There are no village ladies. There is no way our baby can lay in our living room. I live in suburban New Jersey. My neighbors, while kind people, don't pray rosary at dusk for the souls of dead babies and grandmothers, or make huge vats of tasteless soup so we can mourn properly. My husband and I made decisions for our mental well-being, but I didn't quite think of my mother, or how American our decision seemed to be to my entire Panamanian family. It seemed right to have Lucy cremated. To fold her into the fabric of our daily grief.  To spare everyone a funeral the day before Christmas. I feel like I have always had my feet in two worlds. Panamanian and American. Brown and white. Joyful mothering and grief-stricken mothering. The living and the dead. And some days I feel like I fail both sides of each of those coins.

:::

After Lucy died, I ask my mother how to translate stillborn into Spanish. "We don't use that word 'stillborn' in my country. No one talks about it."  And I remind her that no one really talks about it here either, but we still have a word for it. She sighs and reminds me that she was eighteen when she came to the United States and she doesn't know all those adult words. The only thing she knows is nacido muerto, born dead. It is much more blunt than stillborn, which has the sort of poeticism to which I am drawn. But truly, Lucy was born dead. Beautiful and dead. Nacido muerto.

We have a long tradition of storytelling in my Panamanian family. Of hyperbole and tall tales over liquor and candlelight. Magical and wild tales of my grandparents and their parents are woven with both the vivid and proper. My family has stories of stabbings and sex. Music and cigarros. Affairs and guitarras. We even have stories of lost babies, found again decades later on the arm of a son, and affairs that end in our legacy. I weave my own tales, some days, about my daughter's afterlife. I tell them to no one in particular. I whisper the words, "Mi Lucia nació muerto." Then I set the story in a place of my invention, a dirt road cut through the jungle, pyramids rising in the distance and roadside shrines dot the way. The air is thick there with humidity and rainforest perfumes. And they sit, my Indian grandfather with his Seco and milk, his arm around his round wife, mi abuelita. My great-grandmother Isabel plays guitars and sings bawdy Catalan songs of death and sex. Lucia spins, her skirt flaring around her like a flame, as they clap for her young, beautiful spirit.

Did the cultural traditions of your family bring you comfort or conflict? Have you used rituals in your grief, and if so, how? Have you found yourself attracted to the traditions of another culture or religion? How have you adopted rituals into your grief and search for comfort? Have you integrated different cultural or religious rituals into your life?


The thin (disappearing?) line

I'm sure you're all anxiously awaiting the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V (also known as DSM V, replacing DSM IV). You should be. In now-outdated edition IV there apparently was a footnote of sorts that made grief an exclusion to depression. In the draft edition of V however, the footnote is removed, and grief is essentially enveloped into the definition of depression. Which means, you, me, anyone who experiences a loss that s/he mourns (well, mourns deeply for more than say two weeks), will be thusly classified as suffering from depression. (To reiterate, right now V is in draft stage. The following discussion is on a possible -- but significant -- change in psychiatric diagnosis.)

If you've ever been hit up in a doctor's office by the quicky depression Q&A, you know it asks such things as, Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you have trouble focussing and making decisions? Has your appetite changed recently? And if you check yes to a certain number of these, you go on the doc's radar as being depressed. But if you're grieving the death of your child(ren), many of us probably answer yes to these questions, too. Have you lost joy? Does it take a great effort to do small things? Do you ever think about killing yourself?

So how to tell the difference between grief and depression? Is there a difference or is this a matter of semantics? Does it help or hurt our case when we say things like, "You never really get over it, you get through it and learn to live with it"?

There's an NPR news article on this shift in classification here.  According to this article, there is in fact a difference between bereavement and depression, but according to the doctor quoted therein it seems to be one of time: weeks. Not months, but weeks. If you're not rethinking some of those questions above in the space of 14-21 days, you will now be hit with a diagnosis of depression.

Huh.

Allen Frances has emerged as one of the lead critics against this particular change. Frances was the chairman of the group who devised DSM IV, and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times highlighting his concerns. (Op-ed can be found here; sign in may be required.) Among Frances' problems with the proposed change from IV to V are that healthy people who happen to be hit upside the head with a loss will now be labeled as depressed. Which is a problem if you're applying for health care or a job. Frances also worries that drugs will now be willy-nilly doled out to people in mourning, who either won't need them, or will unnecessarily remain on them. Frances writes,

Turning bereavement into major depression would substitute a shallow, Johnny-come-lately medical ritual for the sacred mourning rites that have survived for millenniums. To slap on a diagnosis and prescribe a pill would be to reduce the dignity of the life lost and the broken heart left behind. Psychiatry should instead tread lightly and only when it is on solid footing.

+++

I used anti-depressants, but they were not foisted on me by a doctor in the hospital. They also came later than two-three weeks. On the contrary, I went about a month or six weeks until it hit me one day that I was no longer functioning in a capacity that I needed to for the safety and well-being of my two-and-a-half year old. (I wrote about my decision to use anti-depressants here on Glow; the post can be found here.) I was also in the care of a psychoanalyst, and the decision to go on medication was entirely mine -- as was the decision to go off them in six months. They did not take away my pain or mitigate my grief. They did not put me in a fog, or even make me feel better. They helped me function. I still felt the awful full force, but could now drive and lift myself out of bed and otherwise make sure my toddler didn't play with knives while I hid under the covers.

Perhaps I'm different in that I actually sought help, and I'm wondering if there are babyloss parents out there who should but are caught in that whole "Can't make decisions" and "Small things are difficult" mode and don't pick up the phone to make that appointment. Or maybe I'm the rarity of which Frances speaks who actually needed treatment.

I'm a bit confused about the change from IV to V because it seems that there are already clear markers in place in order to make this distinction, markers that medical professionals are quite comfortable with. When I interviewed a grief counsellor for this site (interview found here) I asked her point blank what the difference was between grief and depression, and she gave a long and nuanced answer involving "normal" and "complicated" mourning, and the ability to "bracket" one's feelings later in the process and keep them somewhat separate from other parts of their lives. She also pointed out that it takes much longer than a few weeks to process loss and go through some of the more severe feelings. It seems to me this makes an enormous amount of sense. Are the people writing version V worried that psychoanalysts won't be able to do their jobs properly and discern these gradations? (Hey wait, aren't psychoanalysts doing the re-writing? Are they saying this is too difficult a job, or they can't be bothered, or what?)

Although I agreed almost entirely with Frances' arguments, I bristled a bit at " the sacred mourning rites that have survived for millenniums." Because I think babyloss is it's own little dark corner of bereavement, and I think we show here and on our blogs on a weekly basis that contemporary society has a ways to go before it wholesale accepts our particular grief as a healthy if not painful and uncomfortable process that people experience. Babyloss parents frequently speak of having no one to turn to or talk to, and in fact, document people turning and running in the other direction when given their news. God bless the internet, because places like this -- here, online -- have become a life-line for many who need to grieve and make sure they're in some bounds of normalcy. As we all showed a month or so ago when I asked for input on funeral services, there aren't as much "rites" as there is "getting through the moment to the best of our abilities." So where does this put us on the analytic scale? Are we difficult to place? So difficult that we might as well just lump us in the larger definition of depressed? I'm not saying because we as a group lack a cohesive and common social experience ergo we need Zoloft; perhaps this is a clarion call to examine babyloss more closely and for society to agree to abide and sympathize with us and give us the support that we so desperately need.

+++

I want to open this to discussion to the people whom it actually affects. You. And find out what you think.

But.

I don't mind anyone here getting defensive about being labeled depressed right out of the gate. Hell, I'm a bit pissed about it all, too. But I think we need to be a bit careful that our arguments against Draft DSM V's line of thinking don't play into any preconceived negative notions of depression, therapy, and anti-depressants. Society may not know how to deal with babyloss parents, but let's face it -- we're also battling a stigma of depression that paints its sufferers as weak. Weak and perhaps suicidal, delusional, or even alcoholic depending on what Lifetime movie you've seen recently. And there are people here, who read here, who have sought out therapy and used anti-depressants to their advantage, who have crossed that line between mourning and depression. Let's not take them down, too.

And what I'd really regret is slamming the new proposed change and taking down anti-depressants with it and then leaving a newly bereaved parent saying, "Well hell, I'm just grieving goddammit." And not wanting to eat his or her words two months later when they get knocked to the ground and are scraping the barrel because sometimes it's hard to make a decision, and sometimes its really hard to make a decision where you have to admit you were wrong about something, publicly. It shouldn't be that tough to ask for help, and to get it.

If I've learned nothing else writing and reading around here over the past few years, it's that everyone grieves differently. So I ask that in the comments, we're mindful of this.

So let's hear it. How do you feel about the proposed change that will essentially make grief a mental disorder? Semantics? Do you see a problem that could impact your life directly? Do you feel funny being labeled as such, or relieved that someone is even paying attention? Do you think you ever crossed that line between grief and depression, or think that you could? If you could address the people drafting DSM V, what would you tell them that you think might be helpful in making their decision? I realize many of you have already addressed this issue on your blogs -- please post a link to any posts in the comments.

other women

The groom’s sister looks pale and smiles wanly. Her black cocktail dress fits trimly over her belly; she looks six, maybe seven, months along. In the reception hall she is seated alone across the table from me. Her place setting is adorned with a small white candle and a photo in a black felt frame— her father, who died a few years ago. 

I happen to know that hers is an IVF baby. That she is 39, single, and has decided to parent alone. Her grief is so palpable and familiar—alone with sadness at a happy event— that I find myself wondering if this is her first pregnancy attempt, or if there is a loss in her past, or if her baby has complications. She looks so ethereally sad for someone whose brother is getting married. Maybe she just misses her dad.

I should ask her. This new, compassionate me, who is supposedly unafraid of grief, should ask, How are you really doing? But I don’t. I make small talk. I am embarrassed.

I am faking this wedding. I am going to have a good time, dammit. One of my best friends is getting married, the banquet hall full of old acquaintances, and I just want to pretend I am okay. So I do. For the first time I put a huge parenthesis around my dead baby and prattle on about my beautiful stepdaughter, my great new husband, our upcoming move, and how beautiful the bride looks. This is how I get through it. This is how I have a good time.

Later I regretted this portrait of my life. Not because I hid my baby daughter—there isn’t a person in the room who meant enough for me to share her name with them. But because of the other women I might have wounded with my fakery. Because in that moment I chose to continue the cycle, chose not to break the silence.

At the wedding, I try to be cheerful with Alice, who is spending the evening at the edge of the terrace, the edge of the ballroom, the edge of the crowd. She is fidgety with an angry look on her face. Her very tall husband smiles at everyone, mingles, brings her drinks. I’ve met her only once, at a shower she threw for the bride. There she let something slip about how painful fertility testing is. I see the look on her face tonight and wonder. How many losses? How far long? How many failed cycles? How many bad test results? To me, she looks like grief.

photo by laura mary

When I approach her, she barely responds. Her husband swoops in with drinks. Conversation falters. We end up chatting about my stepdaughter and her adventures at summer camp. This is stupid, given what I know. I want to say, How is the testing going? It’s okay to talk to me. I know something about this. But I don’t. I smile and mention Lilly’s name too many times. Finally, we sidle away from one another. But I watch her all night.

Later I find Nissa, a vivacious Filipina in her late 40s with a poet for a husband. I used to pal around with her and the bride, but that was years ago. She wants to catch up and hear my news. I tell her I am a stepmama, and that I am about to move to her old stomping grounds in the west of the state. Her husband points out that they grow good weed there, not that he’s tried it. We laugh.

As I speak, she hears happiness in my voice. She doesn’t hear the parenthesis. So you like being a parent?, she asks. Oh, that is so great, oh…. She looks up at her husband, and I see the pain cross her face. They have never been able to have children. And now I am the jerk, bragging about “my child” to the childless. I could have told her then about Angel Mae. She would have been kind about it, but it would have felt like backtracking. See I am not really a jerk because my baby died and I haven’t been able to get pregnant again either…

But at that moment, I don’t know how to say it. She is wearing a bridesmaid dress and has a champagne glass in her hand.

Jane is on the dance floor. I haven’t seen her since college. She moved to Colorado, then Paris, then back to the Southwest. She is lively and nerdy and gorgeous, just as I remember her. It has always been hard to get a negative word out of her; she smiles broadly even as she tells me about rupturing her Achilles tendon a week before her wedding. The kids are doing great, she says, total opposites in personality, though. Her younger one is adopted.

I could ask why they chose to adopt. I wonder about losses and secondary infertility. I look for answers in her face, but she is still smiling and grooving as Prince’s Seven blares loudly from the speakers. Maybe she adopted simply because she was adopted herself.

She asks if I am on Facebook. I tell her I used to be but not anymore. Why not? I dodge the question.

Maybe this is just me, seeing loss everywhere. Maybe these women felt fine and could have cared less what I rambled about. Maybe I should mind my own business. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t make myself into the crazy dead baby lady at the wedding.

Maybe. But I’m pretty sure I’m right about this—that at such a happy occasion, there were sad hearts wandering the ballroom. So I’m still thinking about those women, wishing I had spoken up, wishing we could each have felt a little less alone. But silence was my survival that night. Maybe it was theirs, too.

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These days, how are you with other people’s pain and grief (hidden or revealed)? Has your own loss made you bolder about being with others who are hurting? What is it like when you say the wrong thing, or nothing? Have you ever publicly broken the “time and place” rules because you needed to talk?