stepping back

Anyone who knows me well knows that an email containing the phrase, “I am pleased to say that I surpassed even my own expectations,” would immediately turn me off. 

I’m not a big fan of blatant self-promotion. A bloated ego makes me cringe in the same way executives who wink at women do. Both apply here, and it’s just… ugh.

This particular chap at the office intends to recreate a fundraiser he initiated last Christmas that culminated with a visit to the local children’s hospital to hand out presents and hand over a big cheque. All well and good (minus of course the percentage of intentions that are shamelessly selfish). Except this year it’s within my remit to oversee stuff like this. And I know the hospital far too intimately, particularly the cardiac ward and PICU.

.::.

My memories of the place certainly haven’t faded - far from it. Instead they’ve morphed from shocking flashbacks and taken the alternate, slinky form of dreams and nightmares both.  There are still frequently nights when I relive the hours before and after Sadie died down to the minute. I can’t help it; I don’t know if that ever stops. In a crazy way I’m sure I’d miss it if it did.

I remember the smallest detail, down to the round metal buzzer we would press to gain entry into the ward. I’d say the same thing each time, “Hello, it’s Sadie McKay’s mother,” before hearing the door click and squirting a generous dose of antibacterial cream onto my palm as the door closed behind me. How I felt protective and dizzy and absolutely incredulous on the day we arrived via a silent, steady ambulance.

I remember walking out for the last time, and in a scene straight out of a hundred movies we’ve all seen, I stared from the backseat window as a woman ran to the car trying to reach us before we left, waving her arms at a driver who failed to notice her.  Our counsellor from the ward.  Her eyes locked with mine and I didn’t flinch. I knew I would hate her for whatever came out of her sad mouth beneath her very sad eyes.

.::.

Back to this jackarse with his ambitious plans to surpass even himself. 

Managing this would mean regular contact with the hospital and attending the event itself.  If I’m honest with myself, I can’t imagine a purer form of torture than having to go back there.  And a little part of me is disappointed in myself for that. I would love to be one of those women who takes on a cause because it’s close to her heart and puts her philanthropic urges to good use in the place where she lost so much, helping herself to heal and helping give hope to others. I’m sure you know someone wonderful and strong like that.  As much as I’d like to be, I don’t think I’m that woman.

.::.

What about you? Have you been back to the place where you lost your child? How did it feel?

shelf space

In the living room, on the end table, under the lamp, is a plaque commemorating the hundred trees that M.’s mother and stepfather had planted in Zoey and Gus’s memory.

Across the room, on the built-in shelf, are two large photographs: one of Gus’s name etched in the sand of an Australian beach, the other of Zoey’s.  The pictures were put there by my mother-in-law, who moved them to this place of prominence in the hours before we brought home Gus and Zoey’s siblings, Ben and Ellie. In each picture, the name appears beyond the reach of a wave that would lap it into nothingness, and underneath the sun as it gives a goodnight kiss to the horizon. Of course, this was only my assumption: that when the pictures were taken, it was just before night, not dawn.

In the den, on top of the bookcase, sits a wicker basket. The basket contains the rest of the physical evidence of Gus and Zoey: sonogram pictures, a hospital wristband, a receipt from the purchase of the baby furniture (and a receipt from the refund), condolence cards, and more. Some of it is gathered in the scrapbook M.’s mother began, not realizing that the one she bought matched the paper from our wedding invitations.  Some of it is not.

If the house were on fire, the basket may be the one thing I would save that is not a person or a dog. But on the days when there is no fire, it is something I don’t always think very much about. Something I see without seeing. On those days I see not the basket, but a basket-shape—a shape nestled among a vase-shape and box-shapes and oversized-stuffed-animal-shapes.

Still, inside the basket, there are a few objects I think about more often than the rest: six Polaroids of Gus and Zoey taken by the hospital after their deaths. Though closely related, these pictures are not like the company they keep in the basket. They are not sign-in sheets or parking medallions or the page torn from a hospital room’s wall calendar. They are not symbols or signifiers. They are the most direct evidence there is that our babies ever were.

---

Since Ben and Ellie’s births, I have taken approximately 2,400 pictures (although I am frequently reminded that many include, or are simply of, the dog). Of Gus and Zoey we have just three each. Worse still, they are not very good. They are cold and clinical and seem chemically unstable. As if being kept out in the light just extra moment would erase the likenesses entrusted to them. 

Polaroids of the dead. What else would you expect?

I last saw these images of Gus and Zoey the week Ben and Ellie came home. Almost a month earlier, during one of our last doctor’s visits, I remarked to M. that when these babies arrive, they will look huge. Consider our frame of reference, after all. But later, when M. was looking at the Polaroids—this time as a new mother—and I glanced down, I was staggered by Gus and Zoey’s smallness, by their fragility, even though they were already gone. In fact, for just a sliver of a moment, I did not realize I was looking at babies, let alone at my own. This was what Ben and Ellie had accomplished after just ten days of life: swapping their side of the prism for Gus and Zoey’s. 

Several times in those first weeks Ben and Ellie were with us, M. commented on how much Ben looked like Gus. Now she says Ben looks like me. As he fills in, his resemblance to Gus fades. And as the resemblance fades, the before-and-after line that separates the loss of one pair from the arrival of the other seems to grow wider and more impermeable. So I am making a place inside myself for a paradox: I have two sons, but my sons have no brothers.

We make places for lots of things.  We keep the physical ones—mementos, totems, emblems, symbols—because they are powerful.  But their power is not just the power to make us remember; it is the power to make real, if only for a moment, a space where two states overlap: the state of having and the state of once having had.

What objects embody the memory of your lost child or children? Does looking at them bring you comfort or refresh your grief? Were you surprised by any of the items you found meaningful and wanted to keep?

rain rain, stay

I love the weather.  I love how it creates and frames a day.
I love the approach of a storm.
Wind, rain and snow--hail even if need be--I relish the raw natural cacophony.
Tonight it pours and I appreciate the drenching.
Tonight the soggy cold fits my mood perfectly.
The thought and memory and internal existence of my lost son Silas is like the weather for me.
Some days I am bright and beautiful, filled with the overflowing abundance of everyday life.
Knowing loss and awfulness intimately I cherish even more the moments of truth and love.
Low pressure, light of being, effortless ease through the breezy afternoon.
Other nights I am dark and full of storms.  I cringe at the chill and dodge the sodden stream of rain.
Nothing lifts me up.
Nothing can cut that chain of despair.

And then there are nights like these.  Nights where I only know what I have.  Nights where I only know what exactly is true despite all arguments to the contrary.

His life and his death blow through me like pressure systems on a continent.

My hope and my failure, our dreams and our despair; they are the precipitations and condensations of facts caught in the currents of life;  they are the thunderheads and tornadoes of fear;  they are the beams of sunlight on his red, blazing tree.

I have no idea how to live this life anymore.  I thought there was a path, a way of being and regard for the Universe that I thought would get me all the way through, as long as I stayed true.

Not so.

There is only what there is and then there is everything you do with that and it is all up to you.

No one promised perfection, and if they did, as you know, they were lying.  The closestto perfection is knowing that right now, right here, there is nothing else and no other way to be.

These are our lives.  We make of them what we can, what we will, what we want.  Hopefully, what we hope.
All you can do is accept it or fight.
If you don't know already,
I regret to tell you
fighting against the Universe
is the most futile fight of all.

This is it.  There is rain and cold wind.  There are sunny days.
Sometimes the sun burns, other times it is the source that fills you with light and lifts you through the day.
Sometimes the rain drenches and soaks and floods you away.
Sometimes the rain helps you to grow.

I am always a little bit happy when I'm sad, because I can feel Silas so close.
Sometimes I am sad when I'm happy because I know it is not the way I want it to be.
Good enough is good enough to get me by, most of the time.
But when it is not, I drown, and I love that too because it proves that I am alive,
that he was too,
and most of all
that I will never forget his soul, even in the sun.  Even in the rain.  Even in the night.  Even in my dreams.  Even in my eyes.  Even on my skin.

Even, eventually.

Always.

I would love to read a stream-of-conscious prose poem or regular poem about your lost child, or how you feel about it, or anything you want.  Details, imagery, specific truths to you, please let them flow and put them on the page.  What do you feel today?  What does the weather say to you?  How do you connect to your lost child beyond regular words and sentences?

ghost story

The growl cuts through our nighttime routine.

Beezus and I stop, my heart beating wildly at a sudden, unnoticed danger. We glance at each other then the dog, then at the direction the dog is staring, poised in attack mode. Blackness envelopes the children's bedroom, and the dog stands just outside the door. The hair on the scruff of his neck is raised. As the dog bares his teeth again, my daughter scurries behind my legs.

"Mommy, the dog is barking at a people."
"Honey, there are no other people in our house. It is night. We are the only ones."
"Mommy, the dog is barking, because he is scared because we are the only people."

It was the perfect night for ghosts. You know, in the most clichéd of ways, it truly was a dark and stormy night. The wind rattled our windows. Ominous had been defining my mood for weeks. The chill of a harsh January winter had taken residence deep within me. I was waiting for something to happen. My husband was pulling an overnight shift at the hospital, and I was too pregnant with my son to fight a break-in.  I stared into the dark room allowing my eyes to adjust to the light.

Oh, please just let it be a ghost. Please let it be her.

I tiptoed gently into the room, the dog staunch and rigid at my right leg, the girl behind my left leg. And my eyes rest on a balloon hovering at person height, not quite enough helium to stretch to the ceiling, and not empty enough to fall to the floor.

I know how you feel, balloon.

I swat the balloon into the corner. "It is only your balloon, love, scaring the dog because it looks like a people." And I walked back sullenly. Why wasn't it Spectral Lucy? It is so terribly sad to yearn for my dead daughter to haunt our house, slam doors, drop papers, blow the curtains around when there is no wind. I want her to rock on the antique chair my mother-in-law gave us for the late night feedings.

photo by Paulo Brabo

Sometimes in the most earthly, normal way, I get a whiff of my grandfather--that distinctive crotchety old guy bouquet of overly applied cologne with overly applied aftershave mixed with some Bengay and peppermints. I will be reading a book and the smell of him will drift through the room, like he just walked into the room asking me to check the score of the game. And I don't care if my memory neurons just misfired, or if my old neighbor with a penchant of Old Spice just walked by our house, I take the moment to sit with my dead grandfather for a moment.

Hello, Pop. I miss you.

:::

"Mama, Lucy is stuck behind the red couch!"

My head shoots upward from my crumpled, intense, and near-sighted writing position. I stare at the door. I am immediately rigid in my office chair, as though I have been injected with very cold water right into my spine. Then I look back at my computer screen again, rereading the paragraph I had just written.

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.'

I was working on the final edit of my last post Milagros while Thor napped and Beezus played. I wasn't quite sure how I wanted that paragraph to read, but I could visualize myself kneeling on our red couch, next to the antique secretary where Lucy's ashes sit in an urn, peering over the back of the couch, whispering to my dead daughter, "We are leaving now, love. Be back soon." As soon as we'd get home, I'd make a cup of tea, tell her about our day. It would be like having a portal to Lucy behind the couch, because I never did the rosary for her.

"Mama, Lucy is really stuck behind the couch!"

I am a rational woman. A cynic mostly. Someone who wrestles with my belief in God and in the afterlife. I sometimes believe in a little of everything and, other times, in absolutely nothing at all. I am the kind of person that devoted her entire undergraduate degree to studying religion and still consulted a five dollar psychic to find out what happened to my daughter's soul after she was stillborn. I desperately want to believe that the things that go bump in the night are my daughter, but I mostly find balloons where ghosts ought to be.

"Mama, Lucy is really really stuck behind the couch. Come quick."

I don't know her. I don't know what color eyes she would have, what room was her favorite.  I don't know what perfume she would have chosen for herself, or what chair would have been her favorite. I have no sense of who she would have been. I construct who I thought she was in my head, but as I watch my six month old son grow, it reminds me that even the things I did know about her would have changed, like her eye color and hair and her perfect little nose. So, now it feels like I don't know anything about her except that she died in me.

I mourn getting to know her well enough to sense her presence. Like my grandfather, I want to smell her spirit when the right combination of memory neurons fire. But Lucy is just a blank hole, a girl-shaped cut-out in my memory. The negative space of Lucy would have been filled if she had breathed or laughed. It was a room in my heart and brain that I saved for just her. I lack the ability to imagine a newborn ghost as anything but a tiny thing that couldn't lift its own head, let alone walk the halls at night. Maybe that is what I would ask a prophet or psychic or the Oracle of Delphi, can you talk to the stillborn? Can you have a real conversation if they only gurgled if they lived? Can a stillborn child haunt your house? Can she fly through your hallways and slam doors and blow out candles and scare the dog? And if she can, can you ask my daughter to haunt me?

"Mama! Lucy is stuck! I can't reach her."

I try not to focus on signs, and ghosts, and hauntings, and yet, God, I want Lucy to haunt my house. Far beyond scaring me, that would comfort me, wrap me in warmness. I would call to her. I would whisper to her. I would find myself photographing dark rooms searching for one tiny orb of Lucy and post it to the family along with the pictures of the other children with ice cream smeared across their face. I would get to know her. "There's Lucy." I would point to the photograph. "She loves that rocking chair and the smell of candles blown out."

I walk tentatively into the front room. I am savoring the moments of having my daughter call to me about Lucy. Just hearing her name said without tears and heartbreak some days is enough. As I walk closer, I grow afraid, suddenly, of finding her urn behind the couch, something that only occurs to me as I walk into the room and find Beezus kneeling on the red couch, peering over the back. It is the same exact position I had just written myself into a few moments before.

"Lucy is stuck, Mama." And her little finger gestures behind the couch as she blinks back tears in the over-exaggerated emotion of a toddler separated tragically from her favorite doll. I see the rest of our peg family lying all over the couch, except Lucy. 

This is the moment I crave, the one I just wrote about, having her here with us in spirit, feeling her ghost in our daily lives, having a portal to Lucy. Maybe Spectral Lucy forced the Lucy doll down there, just so I would know. Maybe she is watching after all. I stop myself and look around for her. I sniff the air. Listen for the wind chimes. It is so ordinary a moment I doubt the extraordinary-ness of it. I wait for the punctuation mark that never comes. I feel nothing but massive coincidence, even though all these weeks later, I can't quite shake it. The Lucy moment passed, if there ever was one, and I am back to being a toddler mama reaching a little peg doll from behind the couch.

I saved Lucy. That is the thing about naming inanimate objects your dead daughter's name, you get the extraordinary task of saving them, putting them to bed, depending on how maternal your toddler is, or just saying her beautiful name in regular life without cringing. Beezus ran off again in the other direction talking to her peg family about their adventure of being stuck behind the couch. I think about the paragraph on the computer again, lean over the back of my couch and close my eyes.

"Hello, my love," I whisper. "I miss you."

Do you believe in other-worldly encounters? Have you ever had any ghostly or supernatural experiences with your child? Do you feel your child around you? Have you ever had any extraordinary experiences in your grief that have comforted you? What kind of signs do you crave from the other world?


The sum of all fears

I was lucky. I've said it before, and I will say it again. I was lucky to have had the level of care I did in my pregnancy with A. I was lucky to have had Dr. Best then, and for the subsequent pregnancy too. I was lucky, because in the end I was left with no guilt. I was worried a lot in that pregnancy, and Dr. Best took me seriously every time. Every time. There was nothing we could've done. Nothing anyone could've done. And so when A died, when he was born, when we went home without our baby, we were sad and we were crushed. But I didn't feel guilty.

I can't tell you anymore whether I appreciated the significance of the not feeling guilty right from the get go. I can tell you that one of the first things Dr. Best said was that it was not my fault. He was very emphatic about that, though I told him I couldn't find fault if I wanted to. I understand now that he has seen too many women blame themselves, and I love him all the more for trying to care for me in this way even as I lay there still pregnant with my dead son.

I can tell you, though, that once I was functional enough to find the keyboard, once I found the world of bereaved blogging, I knew. I knew how incredibly lucky I was every time my heart broke for another mother feeling guilty. Guilt over the betrayal of one's body. Guilt over decisions. Guilt over listening to medical professionals who turned out to have been speaking out of their asses. Guilt over a stray remark, over thoughts. Guilt, guilt, guilt. I wanted to take it all away. I knew I couldn't. I didn't know how they did it-- the grief was terrible, overwhelming, heavy enough. To think about others out there having guilt piled on top of the whole shit pile? But it seemed cruel. It seemed too much. I know, and I knew then, that we all carry what we have, that we do it because we have to, because there is no other way. And yet I still feel sad for anyone having to carry the extra burden. If that is you, I am sorry. I am so sorry.

We talk about fears often. There is a good discussion happening on our discussion board now on that very subject. Sometimes we call our fears our crazy. Nothing wrong with a good shot of crazy, if you ask me. But see, I don't think of my biggest fear as crazy. I think of it as a very rational response to my experiences. Can you guess what it is? I bet you can. It's not a thing, really, it's a feeling. I am afraid of guilt.

When I became pregnant with the Cub, I told Dr. Best I needed to cover my ass. I needed to know that every little thing was been checked and rechecked, that everything humanly possible and impossible was been done. Before I was pregnant, when we were gearing up to try again, I told Nurse Kind that I didn't think I was broken exactly, but that another loss would break me. By the time I was pregnant, I knew that wasn't true. I would live and I would function, because, DUH, I'd have to. But please, oh please, I didn't want to think about having to lift the guilt too. 

We got lucky, and the Cub came home with us. Though the aftermath of that pregnancy is still messy and complicated and still doing a number on my head despite over a year of therapy. But even in the here and now, in the non-pregnant world of mine, my biggest fear, I think, is still guilt.

I shudder to hear of a death of a child. Any child. Anywhere. And I'd be lying if I said I never think about some stupid ass accident or some horrible disease taking one or both of my living children away. Or my husband. Or my sister. Or my parents. Oh, I'd be lying. But I'd also be lying if I said those were my worst fears.

Last year JD had a whole load of business trips, some on the long side. His business trips mean various things for the family schedules at different times, but they nearly always mean having to get Monkey from gymnastics at least once right around the time of Cub's bedtime. Which means having to take him with, and can mean him doing a command performance as one of his favorite characters-- Crankasaurus or worse, the Drama Prince-- upon our return home. There's exactly one escape hatch from Drama Prince bedtime, and that is if he falls asleep in the car on the way home. Unsurprisingly, driving back I tend to glance into the rear view mirror, trying to see whether we have liftoff.

So this one time I saw Cub losing his epic battle with the sleepies just before the light where we hang a left, not two minutes from our house. He wasn't out yet, certainly not out enough to be transportable to bed, but it was a matter of minutes. So I drove the long way around. Straight through that light, left at the next, three blocks up, back on the parkway, around the roundabout, take the fourth street, straight, left, and finally right onto our street. You know what I was thinking about the whole time I was driving the extra oh, I don't know, 2-3 miles? The whole barely five minutes of it? While also, I note, having a conversation with Monkey about, I think, her new and improved bar routine? I was thinking, see, how stupid it would be if we got hit by a drunk or sleepy driver while taking the little detour. I wasn't, notice, thinking that while I dragged the Cub with me to pick Monkey up, even though had JD been home, I would've gone by myself. But for that tiny little detour? Yeah, baby, I was. I decided it was because the extra drive wasn't strictly necessary. I didn't have to be there-- I was doing it for convenience. And sanity, but you know, mainly for convenience.

A couple of months ago I was trying to catch up on my reader. I'd fallen hopelessly behind, but now I was trying to come back to blogging (again... sigh). A few weeks before I did the "mark all as read" thing, but since then the reader began accumulating posts again, and so I was trying to scan through those. One caught my eye, a post from a bereaved mother about an acquaintance of hers, and I read every word of it. I could tell from the start it wasn't going to end well-- can't tell you exactly what it was but my spidy dead baby sense was tingling like crazy. Sure enough, it ends with a dead baby. Dead toddler, actually. Which would be horrific any day of the week. But the toddler, see, she died in a bathtub accident. And the thing that made that story so horrific for me, so completely devastating, was the thought of the guilt the parents must now be feeling. Whatever actually happened, whoever was supposed to have been watching the toddler, you know the parents would in the end feel responsible. How could they not? For days I thought of that story, for weeks even. Chill, every time. Frozen horror.

In the world of dead babies on of the horrid things is that we know not very much about our dead children-- likes, dislikes, the sound of their voices, their laughs, often not even the color of their eyes. Not knowing makes the void seem somehow more cruel. Toddlers, they have personalities, adorable little bits of shtick, a sense of humor. To have all of that taken, snuffed out-- must be horrible. But that wasn't what was making me cold and clammy every time I thought about it. I wasn't maniacally hugging the Cub, wasn't imagining what I would do if he was gone. No, I was trying to comprehend how on Earth you get up and make breakfast for your older kids when you should be making it for all of them, and when you don't have to think very hard to feel guilty over her absence.

This is also, I believe, why I was obsessing over that detour-- to differing degrees these two scenarios are about the what if of not being able to escape the blame in my own head. I've told so many bereaved mothers that they are not at fault. And I know had we been hit while taking that detour it would've been the fault of the one doing the hitting, but I also know it would've been hard to convince myself I had to have been there for them to hit.

So I own it-- I am afraid of guilt. I am afraid of the unfixable being my fault. I am used, now, to the weight of grief. I recognize it when it reminds me of its constant presence, when it pokes me in the middle of what had seemed like a harmless conversation at work, at the park, at a store. I recognize it and nod back-- I know you are here, I know you will be here, it's ok. Perhaps I lack imagination sufficient to see myself in that kind of a relationship with guilt. Guilt seems uglier to me, more demanding, it just seems like more. I know we all do what we have to do, and carry what we are given. But I am lucky, and boy do I wish to stay that way.

What is your relationship with guilt? Is it part of your grief or have you too managed to escape it? What is your biggest fear? Is it something you think about a lot or something you do your best not to think about at all?