Ghouls

Iris reaches a pale hand out to press against the walls of my womb. She tugs on my umbilical cord and then she’s gone.

Don’t haunt me, baby. You are too small to move things around and make the lights flicker.

I see her in the corner of the mirror and her head lolls forward to display a bulging fontanel.

This is not a pretty thing at all, this grief. She was not a pretty thing. Dead things are not pretty, they are cold and the colour of oil on tarmac.

I sit in meetings and push my thumb against a sore on the knuckle of my right index finger. I am alive and my body relishes its welts. She hovers and reminds me of the other hurt. She is a gasp.

She is my breath. She has no breath. Gasp. Inhale. Exhale. Irisssssssssssss. She rustles the paper in my hand.

I want to write something for you. Something that will make you feel less lonely. My heart squirms like a chicken foetus in an egg.

There is no way to say the things that must be said. I am not wise, I tell ghost stories to the internet.

I should be sold next to pumpkins and plastic skeletons. Do you like to be scared?  Come and sit next to me. Hush. Be very quiet. Do you hear that nothing? That’s my daughter laughing.

If you don’t have something nice to say... then say it here. Do you ever find your grief a bit gruesome? 

the relentless pursuit of living

I'm used to the lies by now.  They are common and easy to say.  I say them for the sake of other people, but also for myself.  I have to lie so that I'm not always the guy that sucks the air out of a room, even if that room is the entire outdoors on a glorious fall day at the farmer's market and someone has questions about me, about my life, about how I'm doing.  There is no point in ruining every idle conversation and friendly chatter with truth about my dead son Silas.

You're welcome everyone I spared the honest recounting of my recent life.  It isthe absolute least I can do, and it cuts me with a slice of sadness every time I do it.  Three years since he died and it is still recent to me.  Because it is not so much that time has healed my wounds as much as it is that the wounds themselves are the very nature, the very fabric, of my everyday existence.  I miss Silas as a matter of course, just like breathing, just like moving my body, like blinking, like the beat of my heart.

I am still amazed to have learned that a heart can remain beating when it feels like only dust and awful and the endless void inside.  I am compelled to go forward, no matter the pain of my past.  If anything, his lost life is a fuel for me to live twice as hard, twice as present, twice as calm as I ever would have before.  Not enough, of course, it will never be enough.

Things don't always happen for a reason, and it is always better with Silas sleeping in a room just beyond the wall.  That is a lie I usually don't let people tell me.  That's one I have to correct whenever that awful platitude is thrown in my face. I try to be nice about it, but I can't help but say that no I don't think everything happens for a reason.

I think each of us are a living force to make reason and sanity and beauty and love out of absolute chaos and despair.  We lie to ourselves about feeling okay until one day it sticks a little bit.  We pretend that it is fine to not demolish everything we see out of rage and loss.  We answer the questions.  We smile through the pain, feeling the smile our son or daughter might have shared through glorious living genes.  We breathe their lost thoughts.  We dream their silent fears and inchoate hopes and live a tiny shadow life sometimes of what should be.  What could have been.  What isn't.

I have to remind myself that I'm not crazy sometimes.  When I wake up from the dream where I've missed the flight again, but I don't really care, but I do because I should but I really don't.  I have to lay there for a moment and chill, hoping there are still hours before the appointed time of get the fuck out of bed or else.  And I lay there and wonder how I'm not crazy, with a dead son and lost future and all.  It feels good, then, in the cool autumn morning, when I feel dream-crazy and life-crazy and sleepy-person-lazy-crazy and realize that everyone feels this way.  Everyone lies about how okay they seem to be going down the road feeling fine.

But look at the art. Look at the movies and books and paintings and poets.  Read the headlines.  Walk the streets.  There are endless crazy universes inside everyone's head.  A precise and compelling recounting of life and death and love and loss inside the brain of everyone around you.  Some are people of this community that don't even know we exist.   Babylost medusa crazed father parents that don't have their kids are out there in the towns and cities and hamlets where all of you live.  Not to mention families that are victims of car accidents, cancer, embolisms, old age, and on and on.

The people around us tell us lies to help themselves, to save us, to get by.

I always wanted to crush every moment of time that I have into a succulent nectar of life itself that I could wallow in and enjoy.  I thought that raising my son Silas was going to be the way I could do that.  I anticipated a rich life remembering my childhood as I stood there amazed at his development.  I thought I was going to be the best dad of all time.  I couldn't wait to learn everything I couldn't even begin to comprehend as I watched my son live his amazing life.

September 25, 2008 was supposed to be the start of an incredible chapter of life and growth and offspring and hope in my life and instead it was the complete opposite.  And when he died I had a choice.  I could give up or I could go forward.  For a moment the choice was absolutely clear.  When I was told that he was dead in that moment I could have followed him along directly.  A leap off the building.  A scalpel.  The wall and my head. But then right away thoughts of Lu and family and friends flooded my brain.  I had to be strong because this situation was already going to fuck everything up forever and I couldn't also double down and make it worse.

So for many, many months, not killing myself was the baseline I had established as "doing pretty good."   Plus, when you start there, getting out of bed is like successfully ascending Mt. Everest.  I gave myself accolades for simply going outside for a little while.  But those impulses kept growing, kept beating in my heart, kept pushing me forward.  I learned to lie and love it.  I learned to breathe again.  And yet I'm still not sure I can reconcile what my life should be vs what it is today, right here, one month out from Lu's c-section and the start of everything that comes next.

Everything is always coming next, and it is the incredible human spirit, our very nature, that allows us to face the day and tell the lies and forge the hope we have no right to expect and yet we do, and we do and we do.

Make your lies wishes.  Live extra bright and do not let the lies you have to tell stop you from living your life as honestly as you can.  We will always have a special armor, a veneer of experience that is too awful to wish on anyone but also incredibly, terribly, powerfully true.

Go easy through your day and let the simple, innocent grace of your lost child guide you toward patience and serenity.  Oh and also, don't go any more crazy than you are.  We're all crazy enough as it is, and that's the truth.

What are your lies?  What are your truths?  Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?  How do you fit the truth of your lost child or children into your sense of the how the world works?  Do you feel crazy and okay like me?

Nitpicker

I am a professional nitpicker. I sift through documents, link them up to one another, count them, summarise them. Before my daughter died, I’d spent nearly five years analysing other people’s sad stories, their deaths, hospital admissions and operations, reducing them to numbers to be crunched. 

I treat them with more respect these days. Try to approach my computer with a bowed head and leave a little pause as a mark of respect before I attempt to weave these records into a palatable form. Because these documents, when viewed in their human context, tell some tragic stories. One of them is mine.

The strangest day of my life was comprehensively documented. Hospital records show my time of arrival in the accident and emergency department of the local hospital with back pain, the back pain that turned out to be premature labour. What should have been December instead one clear summer night in August.

The birth transcript from the next morning records the dates and times of my daughters' births. It looks like any other record, the hospital must spew out tens of these documents every day of the year. But the recorded birth weights cause something to catch in my throat.

There are a plethora of other documents, transfers to the NICU, treatments administered, the reactions of our daughters, our reactions. All meticulously noted down. Box files upon box files full of paperwork.

When I open my daughter's memory box, there seem to be two distinct categories amongst the contents. Little woollen hats, photographs of my hands stretched over her bruised little frame, photographs of her dead body cradled in the arms of my husband, her ashes. 

And formal documentation. Birth and death certificates, medical records, the paperwork that I must pass on should I ever have her ashes interred. 

Somewhere between these two imperfect, inadequate records sits my daughter's memory. All that is left of her is contained within that box. 

I have retained the slip of paper that informs the registrar that a death has occurred. Signed by the doctor who witnessed her death and decided what caused it. I quite like to think of that quiet, gentle man bringing the whole power of his considerable intellect to bear upon that question. That just for a few minutes, perhaps, she filled his mind as he disentangled the chain of events culminating in her death. A tiny, icy comfort. 

My husband and I had to take this small slip to the registry office. I remember driving there resentfully, sulkily, wishing that someone else could do this. Hardly believing that we were expected to. My introduction to the unrelenting world of parenthood a strange one but still one with an inescapable truth at its core, nobody else is going to do this for you, be your child living or dead. The buck stops here.

I sat in a chair over the desk from the registrar. I seemed to be able to view myself from the outside. I could see the registrar looking at a person who looked like me, who appeared to be holding things together but, in reality, I had been decanted somewhere to the right of myself, gibbering, trembling and translucent. I am certain that I was not the woman who sat in the chair and calmly handed over the slip of paper, the proof that her daughter had died.

Photo by Zach K

I remember that I wanted to sign for my dead daughter's birth certificate. But I couldn't bring myself to sign for her death certificate. My husband did that. He is listed as the informant on her death certificate. His qualifications for doing so listed as being her father and as being present at her death. Such dry little phrases concealing such a world of awfulness.

The registrar spelt one of the causes of her death incorrectly. I wanted to ask her to change it but I couldn't get the words out, they clotted in my mouth. Now the mis-spelling glares at me accusingly.

I left clutching those documents tightly in my hand, the only proof that I had not imagined her existence. Clinging to the sad, strange consolation that, should some great-great-grandchild go looking whilst researching their family tree, they would come across her.  

Seven months after my daughter had passed away, a receptionist in some far flung part of the hospital ‘phoned me. To ask if I would be bringing the twins in for their hearing tests. For a moment, the room swirled around me and I saw my thin, ghost girl alive somewhere. In a hospital filing system. Preserved there. Squashed between files like a pressed flower. And part of me didn't want to tell the woman on the other end of the phone that she was dead. Because I would have liked to maintain the pretence and she was my only co-conspirator.

When my son was born, nearly three years later, my husband and I went to register his birth.

"Only one?" asked the registrar, "Are you sure you aren't hiding a twin anywhere?"

She probably says this to every family that comes through her door. 

"No," I replied. "Just one."

But there is a hidden child in our family. She's been hiding for a long time now.

Did you have to complete any paperwork relating to the death of your child? Did it bring you any comfort or cause you further pain? Or did an absence of paperwork cause you hurt? Did you find any kind souls amidst all the bureaucracy? Or any callous ones? Have you had the disconcerting experience of someone in the 'system' contacting you assuming that your child was still alive? 

Curves

I teach biology. Which means that in an average workday I can be counted on to discuss properties of living things, ask students whether something we're talking about is alive, expound, as I frequently do, on why and how life requires energy input from outside the system, and generally utilize words rooted in the word "life" roughly bazillion times. I am good at this thing. And most of the time, I am good at staying with the immediate subject matter, even in my head. While I am talking of these things, my mind doesn't replay scenes or talk to me of how quickly alive can turn to not. Not that things like that don't happen to me anymore. They do, just not usually at work. Not, usually, triggered by work.

Except. Except every time I teach Intro, there is this one day, the Population Ecology day. The day I talk about survivorship curves. And the funny thing is, given that I just told you these things bring my life right into the classroom, funny thing is that I love survivorship curve day, and I love survivorship curves.

Even the whole tossed salad of personal and professional aside, I am sure such strong attachment to things inanimate is ever-so-slightly weird. It's ok, you can say it-- I can take it and I know you love me anyway. Yes, I fly my nerd flag at all times, but even I can appreciate that one might maybe, possibly, however unlikely that would be find it a bit out there to gush like that about a curve. You know, infinite number of points on a plane. But hear me out and see if you don't come to share my feelings, or at least appreciate them. So, without further ado, here they are, survivorship curves of Types I, II, and III.

They are also known as Late Loss, Constant Loss and Early Loss survivorship curves, respectively. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the word loss, right there in the title. Imagine that, in a science classroom. And sure-- it's not there for the emotional meaning of the word, but for the very cut and dried actuarial one, but still-- it's there.

So what do these actually depict? Glad you asked, 'cause I am bursting to tell you. First of all, these are three different curves, superimposed for easy comparison. So each curve tells a story of what tends to happen to the young of a group of species. On the graph, the horizontal, x axis is essentially passing of time, usually in increments of age heading towards the highest possible for a species. The vertical axis simply marks numbers of individuals surviving. In each case, the curve starts in the top left corner with a number of individuals, all born at approximately the same time. We call that bunch of individuals a cohort.

So we can think about these curves as stories of what happens to a cohort. Starting from that highest point, and moving to the right, the curve shows the number of individuals from that starting cohort decreasing as time goes by. In other words, dying. We call these graphs survivorship curves because for any time point, its corresponding point on the curve shows how many from the cohort are still alive. 

So why, you might ask, are there three kinds of curves? Because, see, different species reproduce in different ways, and their young have different likelihood of surviving. Type III curve, for example, the Early Loss curve, that one describes species like fish, and frogs, and bugs, and plants. Finding Nemo notwithstanding, all of these species produce a lot of young, but do not tend to invest heavily in raising these young. If you've ever seen fish runs and results thereof (and here I mean fertilized fish eggs covering all sorts of underwater surfaces, and not layers of leftover fish sperm on the surface of the water), you know what I am talking about. Type II, Constant Loss curve, is usually the province of birds-- the kind of species where whether a predator gets you or not doesn't seem to depend too much on how old you are, just that you were in a wrong place at a wrong time.

Which brings us to the curve of type I, the Late Loss curve, the one about us. Us as a species, not us an individuals. Mammals tend to be described by that curve, as the kinds of species that have relatively few offspring at a time, but invest heavily in the care of those few offspring. So we feed our young, and provide them shelter, and, in at least one species of mammal, electronic devices as well. And toys, and clothes, and books, and playdates. The curve is called Late Loss because see, most individuals die in old or at least older age. Fish eggs are food for whoever cares to scoop some up, and grown fishes do much better, being mobile and all. Our curve is the opposite of that-- our young, in general, are fairly well protected, and it is individuals past their prime who tend to go. But that's in general, not for every individual, and the gentle incline of the first part of our curve testifies to that.

So do you see it yet? The reason why I love this curve? It is because when relatives and friends and the whole damned world have forgotten, the curve remembers. The curve, unlike people, doesn't pretend our children were never here. They are there, right there, in the curve itself, in the bend of it, in the gentle slope. They are all there-- those who died before labor ever started, those who didn't make it through birth, those whose parents had to make that awful choice in the NICU, and those whose parents where spared the choice, but not the outcome. SIDS babies are there too, and heart babies, and cancer babies. And just to the right-- older babies and toddlers, the two year olds who died in freak accidents; and farther yet teenagers who were killed by a drunk driver or a stray bullet, and those who tragically made the choices that resulted in their own deaths-- the drunk drivers who met trees head on and kids who squeezed the triggers one day, and ended up on the wrong end of a gun another. They are still and forever part of their respective cohorts, and so, in the bend of the curve that reflects their being no longer alive, they are there.

I don't say any of this to my students. I talk to them about science, not about grief. But that is what I see in survivorship curve of Type I-- oceans of human grief behind every itty-bitty fraction of a degree of incline of the curve. But I also see commonality. I see understanding. I see fellowship. We, who remain to love and to grieve, we recognize and support each other. Because while the world prefers to forget, we know how sadly many of us are there, and how, sadly, more join our ranks every day. And the curve, it knows too.

Do you have a curve of your own-- something in your professional or personal life that doesn't mean much to many others, but speaks to you about your experience? Do you feel fellowship with bereaved parents whose children died when they were older? What about people grieving other losses?

ESCAPE!

We lost Margot on March 24, around 6pm, just as the normally chipper blue sky turned to gray and started raining. For the next two weeks, my partner fought for her life and then for her failed kidneys, as we grieved for our daughter in a cold, sterile hospital room.

Then, finally, our kidney specialist sauntered into our room with some better test results and casually stated that we could leave the hospital the next day. That was April 6. And on April 12, one day after Kari’s gloriously pathetic 30th birthday and six days after we left the hospital without a newborn and nineteen days after the worst day of our lives, we bought a ginormous twenty-eight foot 1980 Dodge Jamboree motorhome.

Really? Really.

We followed up our baby’s death by buying a fucking motorhome.

It was pretty sweet too. Off white in color, with vintage orange and gold lines streaking down the side of it and a silver ladder running up it’s back. The inside featured orange shag carpet, big cushy chairs that swiveled and a classic faux wood steering wheel. Add a kitchen, bathroom and two full size beds to the package and we were all set to go.  The day we went to buy it, after trying to learn all it’s quirks from the RV salesman, Kari turned to me and said, “I didn’t picture Margot’s face every moment when we were in there.”  And we both secretly hoped that maybe this RV would save us for the time being. It felt kind of good, this motorhome distraction.

Except Margot was still dead. And nothing about owning the camper, even with the shag carpet, felt satisfying.

So we sold it. But before we knew it, more timely distractions came along, even though we weren’t looking for anything in particular. Suddenly, it sounded good to download all of the past seasons of Survivor and watch them over vodka every night. And then little vacations to Palm Springs and the coast popped up. And then it sounded like a good idea to completely renovate our bedroom and other parts of our little dwelling, so we spent this summer building beds and tables and desks and frames, and endlessly shopping on Craigslist for everything else. When we finally found our perfect little used couch, with it’s carmel colored leather and shiny gold beads, it was nearing October.

I’m not exactly sure why these distractions keep popping up. It’s not as if any of these escapes have brought any long term satisfaction to our lives, or that they are somehow preventing us from facing our grief. And yet, I’m constantly amazed by my ability to get somewhat excited about something, even when I know it’s temporary and unfulfilling in the end.

In the very beginning, I came to loathe the distractions, the motorhome especially, for how it left me feeling like a cheap trick. So much promise followed by zero payoff.  But now I see these distractions as a little gift from grief, as if it’s grief’s way of letting our heads above water, a short breath of air before we are pulled back under. Like earlier this week when I cried for an hour over pictures of Margot, and then promptly opened my web browser and searched for a “vintage chair” for our living room.

Recently, a woman from our support group described the nightmare of losing two babies in the same year. She wept and squeezed her partners hand and shared her losses with a beautiful blend of courage and despondency. And then, towards the end of her story, after a few moments of quiet, her face suddenly changed into a smile as she said, “We have been redecorating our house, so that is nice.”

Yes, that is nice.

Have you used distractions to cope with your losses? Have they been helpful?  Have the distractions lessoned as time marched forward?

headless

photo by sherrattsam.

I have this itty bitty Buddha. It is made of some kind of soft white clay. My friend brought it back after a South Pacific tour in the Navy. His R&R involved visiting Thailand. He climbed the stairs to a Buddhist monastery one morning, he told me on his first night back. We stared at each other over bourbon and cigarettes. "The sun was coming up. I never meditated in my life," he said, "but I sat still and focused on my breath, like you said. Then I thought I could smell you there, across the world." Maybe we were a little bit in love back then, even though we strictly were not in love. That morning, he wanted to come home, he explained. Instead he bought the Buddha for me. He brought Thailand to me because I brought home to him, he said. It is three-fourths of an inch high. A wee thing. I used to put it on odd places, like the space between my television and my table, since it slide in right under the screen. Sometimes I would put it behind a book, or on my coffeepot, or in my medicine cabinet between the bandages and the hydrocortisone cream.

When he was first shipped off to Iraq, I thought that I understood impermanence. When he came back, I thought I understood karma. It wasn't until my daughter died that I realized I understood nothing.

The itty bitty Buddha is an intricate, beautiful, sacred thing to me. Full of contradictions and comforts. I protected it in the way we protect gifts from eras of our lives. A few years ago, when I had just become a parent, my one year old nephew came to visit, and bit the head off my little Buddha. I didn't watch him do it, but after he left, I found my decapitated bodhisattva knocked over, his head on the floor. And when I inspected the body, one tiny tooth marked the spot where his death writ. The boy, like a little Godzilla, snatched up the body of my guru. ROWR. He screeched in a little one year old way. Then he bit the head off, spat it on the floor, ROAR, I stomp your villag...ooo look, blocks.

Or at least, that is the scene in my head, like I said, I didn't witness it.

I keep the Buddha headless. An ironic reminder of impermanence and death and all those things I no longer need to be reminded of since my daughter died inside of me. The tooth mark is worn away, and the boy who gave it to me (he was really just a boy then too) also worn away. More people ask me about the headless Buddha now than before when it was just a miniature Buddha with its head. I wonder if a broken thing become more powerful by it brokenness.

I have been thinking of gluing the head back on the Buddha. I no longer want to make sweeping statements about the nature of impermanence, I just want everything to be whole again. I just want to be whole again.

+++

I have lain, looking into a basket, waiting for the blade to drop. They told me she was dead, and then pushed my head forward gently.

Now, wait until your head falls into the basket. You will birth her, then hold her, then give her to a stranger who will burn the body. The stranger won't wrap her in orange, nor bless her soul into another life. We won't throw dust on her and whisper, 'Ashes to ashes.' We won't set her in a kayak and set it ablaze out to sea with the other Vikings. We will take her to a sterile room, undress her. We will look for an answer and we won't find one. We will take her to a house, and they will burn her there. Her soul isn't here anymore, so you don't have to worry. We do this sort of thing all the time. She is taken delicately, cleanly away. We will baptize her head, then take yours, if you'd like.

Yes, please.

You won't notice it happening. You will be all heart. It will hurt that way--to feel and not think--but you will learn more than you can absorb with your head. Later, when you have had enough, we will glue your head back on your body. Your head may always face slightly east, or right, or just a little off-center.

I want my head to always face forward.

It is not possible. You were guillotined. You don't bounce back from such a thing. It is important to follow the protocol here of always being slightly crooked. All the cashmere turtlenecks, the expensive silken scarfs, the fox stoles--the fancy, delicate, dead things you wrap around the scar--may not make it any less noticeable. Perhaps that will make it even more so.

I think I want to keep my head.

Of course you do. You are attached to it. But it has not served you well. I can assure you that you were using it marginally at best. You won't miss it nearly as much as your daughter. Losing your head will seem rather inconsequential in the long run. Perhaps you should go headless for a while before we talk about sewing your head back on. Remember that is the true sense of impermanence--to lose a thing you didn't know you had to begin with. Now look down. This won't hurt a bit.

Does the concept of impermanence resonate with you more deeply now? Or did it always? How do you relate to others who seem attached to things that seem so impermanent? Do you feel more head or heart right now? What part of you did you lose with your child? Your head? Your heart? Your vocal cords? Your soul?