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?



"thank you all for coming"

Our support group meets on the second Wednesday of every month.  At one meeting, held in the cramped upstairs of the local church, the power failed.  The facilitator lit a candle and placed it in the center of the group.  Sitting in a circle, we mourned our children and one another’s by candlelight as the summer night drove the oxygen out of the room and the shadows higher and higher up the wall. 

This meeting was auspicious.  It was the first in which M. and I were not the group's newest members.  Two new couples had joined, starting me and M. down the path to veteran-hood.  As each member of the circle told her story, one of the newcomers would interject, interrupt, and break in: her thirst to be understanding and to be understood so deep and parching, no amount of relating could slake it.  The other new mother, having shared her story, said very little.  She just looked around the room, listening, maybe searching our shadowed faces for what she will look like three months, ten months, two years down the timeline.

After that night, the group moved back to the upstairs library of a nearby synagogue.  We are surrounded by books with titles like The Long War and Sands of Sorrow.  Joy and Remembrance and We Had a Dream.  And Babi Yar, which looks like Baby every time I light upon its spine.  At each meeting, I hope there will be no new members.  Every time there are, it is a reminder of a hard and disorienting fact: that after your babies die, and while you are at this point or that in the grieving process, other people’s babies die, too.  This throws a hard light onto at least one self-deception of the bereaved: the world has not, in fact, stopped.  It is spinning right along.  Grief just makes you forget the motion for a little while—so long as you don’t happen upon other people as they are hurled over the side.

When M. and I were new to the group, maybe this is what we meant to the longer-standing members.  I know when I first see the new initiates, that is what they mean to me.  At the same time M. and I were say, driving to Phoenix, or walking in San Diego, or beginning therapy, or realizing how near the due date was, someone else was just then experiencing that first something’s-wrong punch of terror, crying their first anguished cry, or watching a little casket descend, rocking in the breeze like a bassinette, just as Gus’s and Zoey’s did.  

Listening to the newcomers tell their stories, repeating ours, hearing the further-along members share the new, surprising shapes their pain has taken, I came to see that we are not a portrait of grief.  We are a telescopic view. 

Seeing where the new members are in their mourning and recognizing in where they are now a place you once were—this is not looking in a mirror; it is looking back in time.  It is to peer through a lens into deep space, to see a cataclysm as great as the distance its light has crossed.  It is to try to reconcile its fundamental gone-ness with its vital now-ness.  And it bends the mind, because how could anything so violent and so exquisite, be the past?  It is to see the after-effects of the Big Bang: not happening now of course, but to all appearances absolutely now. 

This is as fitting an image as any, the Big Bang.  It was a calamity that birthed a universe and forever veiled what existed before—hiding it not only from sight but also from imagining.  Ask any of us there in that upstairs libary, each of us intimate with who the others have become, but still strangers to who they had been: what were our children’s deaths if not that? 

What experiences have you had “mentoring” babyloss parents or with support groups?  How did the experience of being a more established member of the community differ from being a newer one? 

Making Room

I have never been to the cemetery in the early morning or the late afternoon when the shadows are longest.  The shadows cast by Zoey and Gus were always long enough. Especially when it came to trying again and—finally—this subsequent pregnancy.  The premature loss of Zoey and Gus made our later infertility that much crueler.  It promised a greater chance of future premature losses, so we were not supposed to hope for twins again.  Discovering M. was carrying twins again (another boy and girl, no less) made this such a close parallel to a year ago, we could not let this pregnancy become its own entity.  Not until 22 weeks, 4 days—an arbitrary milestone to most, but one day longer than Zoey and Gus were with us.

With this pregnancy, I was less afraid that something would go wrong, but more certain.  From blogs and our support group, we derived much healing, but also something darker: the knowledge of what is out there.  Cord accidents and stillbirths and premature labor and even the killing space between the bed and the wall.  It could be harder to take in than it would have been a year earlier.  Having suffered does not immunize you from later suffering.  Indeed, judging from some of the stories we heard unfold, it just might make you a gravity well for it.

But it was larger than that.  Losing Gus and Zoey reoriented my sense of how nature operates.  It left me knowing what everyone else does not: that the sun rises in the west, that rivers run the other way, and that the young are not born to bury the old, but to be buried by them.  Call it the Natural Reorder of Things. 

Of course, I know this is not how it works intellectually—but what difference does that make?  One day, listening to Bill Bryson’s scientific survey A Short History of Nearly Everything, it strikes me: imagine witnessing the impact of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and nearly seventy percent of life on Earth.  Now imagine a survivor, one of those scurrying little mammals, peeking out from its burrow to behold the lava flows and the earthquakes, the wildfires and the ash, and the gone-ness of the sun.  Ask yourself if this little creature believes you when you say, “Don’t worry.  The world isn’t usually like this.”

M. put it more directly.  “We can’t go back to being those naïve, happy pregnant people.”  I would laugh when she said this.  I belong to a line of award-winning worriers (Best Free-Floating Anxiety, Best Worst-Case Scenario, Best Achievement in Hand-Wringing), so even though my attitude toward pregnancy had become more apocalyptic, I was never that naïve person to begin with.

Before Zoey and Gus died, I worried.  After M. became pregnant again, I waited.  This was both a subtle difference and a seismic shift.  Whatever would take these children away was an inevitability, and I could be only as passionate about it as I am about the fact of the sun setting.  After all, they belong to the same natural order.

---

When we reached 22 weeks and 4 days, and then 24 weeks, and as we passed 28 and then 30, M. allowed this pregnancy to become its own pregnancy, and not only an extension of our loss.  Then so did I.   Soon, I was thinking less about how Zoey and Gus were affecting my experience of this pregnancy.  Instead, I was thinking more about how this pregnancy was affecting my experience of Zoey and Gus. 

There were many details and decisions to consider—some we never got to make for Gus and Zoey, others that we had, and for that very reason, had delayed for too long.  With my attention so insisted upon, Gus and Zoey seemed to be getting further away.  Background and foreground had moved toward each other, through each other, and were now switching places. 

This may have been the only real inevitability.  Because, as I discovered, you cannot keep all things equally close at all times.

Sometimes, this feels right.  Other times, it feels—not quite wrong, but regrettable.  Late one morning in the last weeks, hungry and sleep-deprived, I see the names we have picked out as blocks of the colors that, for some reason, I associate with them: a midnight-blue and a translucent silver.  Then, for the first time, I see Gus and Zoes’s names in sienna and lavender, and sense that I am being severed from whole parts of the color spectrum.   

But there is also a way in which this pregnancy has helped me keep Gus and Zoey closer by.  Historically, I have never been one for change.  When I was twelve, my mother replaced the silverware without telling me.  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded. 

“Because I knew how you’d react,” she said. 

“You’re right,” I said. 

So, change.  Never my thing.

One night, around Week 24, I am alone in the house, in the room that is our once and future nursery.  I am thinking of the twins to come, and remembering the babyhoods of my nephew and niece.  Knowing how quickly and constantly infants change, I am already a little sad for how momentary all of the twins’ phases will be.  For how each advance, each step forward, however wonderful, also makes their previous selves irretrievable.  I know that we are really talking about newness, about life, but I see it as farewells, one after another, a constant stream.

Then I think of Zoey and Gus.  First comes a stab of guilt, but then the balm of suddenly knowing how I will make room for all four of my children, how I will give each set of twins its privileged place.  The children M. is carrying, should we be blessed with their arrival, will always be people in flux.  They will not be like their siblings, Gus and Zoey, who will always be what they are now.  This, I decide, is to be my compensation for the strangeness of having a son and daughter who live and change, and a son and daughter who are gone. 

This is to be my unique comfort.

Zoey and Gus: my children who never change.

How have subsequent changes in your life been colored by your loss?  How has your grief changed to accommodate new circumstances?



A Father's Day Visit

Please welcome Eric, father of lost twins Zoey and Gus and husband of M., to our Glow company of writers. We've spent the last several weeks poring through submissions, and we're so grateful for all the new voices and friends we've met in the process. Eric and the other new writers, both full-time and occasional, bring new stories, reflections, and energy to our community, and we're grateful for it.

This is Eric's first blog post ever, anywhere -- so be gentle. Or don't. Either way, feel free to call him what we do: Blogless Eric. It lends an air of mystery. He's like a pirate. He might have an eyepatch. I can't be sure. But we're glad he's with us.

~ Kate

photo by digitalalan

For Father’s Day, there are two things M. has decided she wants to do.  She wants to buy me dinner, and she wants to visit Gus and Zoey. 

Zoey and Gus were born on the first full day of spring in 2009.  They died that day, too.  A week earlier, M.’s pregnancy suffered “a sudden, severe complication,” as I called it in message after message sent from our hospital room.  We buried them in a section of the cemetery near my friend, Harold.  He had been like a grandfather to me, and his widow said she would like to believe he would be a good grandfather to them.  These days, when I picture his funeral, I have to adjust the image because the camera is facing the wrong way.  It is not trained on his grave, but on the empty spot up the hill that will be my son’s and my daughter’s—but not for another three years.  That’s memory for you, I suppose.

Getting to the cemetery takes about 35 minutes and four freeways: the 90 to the 405 to the 101 to the 134.  We exit at Forest Lawn Drive—named, I presume, after the cemetery of which our cemetery, Mount Sinai, used to be a part.  Since burying Gus and Zoey, we have come to the cemetery many times.  Just a few visits ago, M. suggested that by getting off one exit sooner (Buena Vista Street), we would actually get to the cemetery faster.  And M. is often right about these things.  Still, I have never gotten off at that exit.  Because this is how we go to the cemetery. 

Today, the drive from our house to the exit ramp takes its 35 minutes, but working our way down the exit ramp takes another fifteen.  Cars are backed up from the ramp onto the freeway.  “What the hell’s going on?” I mutter. 

“It’s Father’s Day.  Other people are probably thinking the same thing we are,” M. says. 

The ‘80s station plays some Billy Joel.  Through the staccato-heartbeat rhythm of the intro, and even through “Whatsamatter with the clothes I’m wear-in,’” I don’t realize the song is “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.”   For another few beats, I still think it’s “Only the Good Die Young.”

Then I realize something else: M. meant children are visiting the graves of their fathers.  I thought she meant fathers are visiting the graves of their sons and daughters.  Because isn’t that what fathers do on Father’s Day?

At Zoey and Gus’s graves, I do not say anything.  I do not pray.  I do not talk to them.  I do not tell them that we will always be their parents but that we also want to be parents to children in this world.  I had planned on saying this, on explaining ourselves, as M. is now very pregnant with their brother and sister and it might be awhile before our next visit.  But I have told Gus and Zoey this already—from this same spot.  On their due date, in fact, when M. and I came to the cemetery straight from our first consultation with the perinatologist about trying again. 

Instead, I sit down at Zoey’s grave, with M. sitting at Gus’s, and we clean.  I wipe the dirt off Zoey’s gravestone.  I scrub the grit out of the engraved letters of her name.  It is Father’s Day, and this is how I talk to my children: in solvent and cotton swabs.

After our visit and throughout the day, I talk with some of the fathers in my life.  I wish them a happy Father’s Day.  Few, if any, wish me one.  I’m sure it’s innocuous.  I’m sure they don’t see the greeting as a badge they are withholding from me.  I do, but at the same time, I understand.  After all, my weeks are not structured around play dates and check ups.  My days are not punctuated by fevers and falls and scraped elbows and bruised feelings.  I do not live with worry for Gus and Zoey’s futures or under the shadow of losing them a second time.  And unlike some of the bereaved parents I have come to know, I do not have other, living children for whom I had to be brave today.  And the day before that.  And the one before that…

On any random day—no, on every single day—I don’t do the work.  So should I really be seen as part of the club? 

Those friends who are where M. and I are (the enlisted, as opposed to the civilians) say so.  So when I email them about this facet of Father’s Day, it brings them to a boil even though I can only manage a simmer. 

But our friends may be right.  What fathering I can give, that club cannot.   Other parents clean their children’s rooms and wounds, not their graves.  Other parents have children whom they trumpet, not ones to whom every reference must be measured: firm enough to give their memory substance and to add to its length, airy enough to signal that it’s alright, that their presence in our lives is an everyday thing—just like that of everyone else’s children.  That can be the trickiest part.  While other parents manage their children’s experiences of the world (or want to, or try to, or try to when they shouldn’t), we have to manage the world’s experience of our children. 

So we mention their names.  We put pinwheels in the earth where they are buried.  We protect their place in the world.   We do what fathers do.  We give them what home we can.

How have you been recognized (or not) on Father’s Day or Mother’s Day?  How would you want to be?  What rituals do you have to mark the day?