Where I am right now
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When my daughter was stillborn nearly ten years ago, there was an active blogging community of bereaved parents. Angie, who also wrote for Glow In the Woods, was one of bloggers whose writing first helped me to feel less alone, to work through the shock of my daughter’s death, and to find my own voice in that community. One year, Angie started a project she called “Right Where I Am,” which was a prompt to babylost parents to write about where they were right now, in the present of their grief. With parents writing from all stages of grieving, from maybe just a few days out to years and years out, the project was “like a map on the road of grief.”
Importantly, the project also aimed to acknowledge that wherever you are right now in your grief, “it is right.” In the accumulation of writing about the right now of grief that rightness really became apparent: wherever you are right now is right for you because there is no other way to do grief but your own way and we are all moving in and around and through grief however we can and need to. I remember reading through the reflections of parents who were “ahead” of me, “behind” me, “beside” me, so many different experiences of grief, all of them right, and yes, all together, a kind of road map: where we’ve been, where we’re going.
As Angie said in describing the project, when she first came into the community of the babylost, she was confused and scared about what her life would be like, whether she would always be so angry, how she would keep her daughter present in her life and family, how she would keep going. Right Where I Am showed us how grief consumes us, how it changes, adapts, retreats and then roars back in again when we least expect, and how it does this all over and over again.
“The goal was not to read a bunch of posts where people say, ‘It gets better. Just wait.’ But rather posts where each person talks about where he or she is right now in grief, and the daily ways in which grief rears its head, the things she can do now that seemed impossible, the obstacles she or he is facing right at this point in grief.”
In this post, we reflect together on right where we are. We invite you, too, to share right where you are, to help create the roadmap of grief for our own babylost community.
Nori, two years and nine months
On this dreary late December day, it’s hard to know where to begin, so I look to the past for some frame of reference. How did I feel nine months out? Where was I one year ago today? Along with my daughter’s birthday in the spring, the winter holidays are a time when her memory is always close to the surface and grief at times seems to pull me under.
The first Christmas season without her, I refused to acknowledge the holiday. I didn’t put up a tree, didn’t travel to see family, felt affronted by the avalanche of smiling family photos that arrived in my mailbox. I hid away and cried, certain that Christmas could never again be anything but a cruel reminder of what should have been. Year two without her was the first Covid Christmas, so I had a ready-made excuse to continue to ignore the holiday. It wasn’t that I hated Christmas – I was just following public health directives.
This year marked the third Christmas since Olivia died. It also marked our first Christmas with our living son. He is a delight and our extended family wanted to meet him. In the face of this genuine love and excitement, I felt some of my anti-Christmas resolve melting away. But just like in years past, I spent the days leading up to Christmas in a familiar, weepy, moody, state. My greatest fear was that Olivia would be forgotten, so I tried to plan ways to weave acknowledgments of her into the celebration. But when I brought out her ornament at the tree-decorating party, I felt eyes averted from my tears as others tried to move on from my display of un-merry emotion as quickly as possible. The path of least resistance would be to just focus on my smiling, babbling son and stop crying and talking about my dead daughter at parties because it clearly makes everyone uncomfortable. Where I am now is trying to forge a life that includes both parts, the joy and the tears, even when the tears are not welcomed as easily.
Kathy, four years, one week, and three days
If next December is as hard as this December, then I quit. I'm not sure what I quit, but I just quit.
I have had three December babies in the last four years, born Dec 2nd, 4th, and 20th. This was the first December since Tinsley died that I'm not pregnant, trying to become pregnant, or holding a newborn. It was the first time I've experienced her birthday, December 4th, without the hope or joy of new life sitting right beside the grief. Trying to circumvent the intensity of undistracted grief had catastrophic emotional consequences for me, resulting in two back-to-back clawing at her picture, wailing into the wall, raging at God, moaning like a wounded animal grief episodes in the last week. The scary, uncontrollable kind where I almost suffocated myself into her pink hospital blanket, trying to inhale any leftover, imagined scent from her sweet blotchy three pound body. The kind where my husband had to take the boys out of the house so they weren’t frightened by my madness.
I wanted to go dig her out of her grave.
So where I am in my grief today is digesting the true danger of being able to control my grief – now that I can intentionally choose to avert, distract, and delay my feelings, or invite another emotion like anger to usurp grief. I can redirect the grief through more cerebral, administrative activities, like my stillbirth and baby loss volunteer work. I can organize walks and give interviews and fundraise and participate in ornament swaps and incorporate snowflakes on our Christmas card and do all the things to honor her, to make sure she is not forgotten. But none of that can replace the raw unraveling clanking of bones that is necessary for me to keep processing that she died. To keep fighting that she died, to keep accepting that she died. That has to happen in a dark, quiet room, alone with God. And it has to happen more regularly than I allowed it to this year.
Sitting here, gazing at the Willow Tree "Angel of Mine" figurine on my desk that I got just days after she died, I am actually somewhat in awe of the deep power of my love for her. Those terrifying manic grief episodes are remarkable evidence of the undeniable primal pain caused by the separation of mother and child.
Because even though I am four years out from her death, the agony of missing her has not lessened. Learning to temper it and manage it has come with time, and it’s fine to a degree. But if I do it too long, I eventually and quite literally erupt. I will rip off my own skin if I don’t continually acknowledge her and her death in the deepest crevices of my soul. It has become much easier to love her through action out in the world than it is to sit quietly alone and weep. I must do both.
I have a lot of respect for grief today.
It’s funny, throughout the years I’ve found myself asking, “Is this normal?” about different thoughts, feelings, and reactions I’ve experienced in my grief. Today I rest easy in the belief that wanting to dig her out of her grave is the most normal impulse I could ever have. Instead of pushing it away because I’m in a more “stable place,” I need to invite that impulse in and look it square in the eye. It is the impulse of pure love, and whether on day one, one hundred, one thousand, or one million, it is a love that cannot be organized, tempered, or neatly deferred to the corner to experience on a rainy day.
Emma, four years and three months
My son Jesse would be four years and three months old as of almost precisely today, a couple of days past Christmas. Where am I right now? The word I often use internally is “passing.” I am passing for a normal mom/ adult/ person in the world. I have a new job as of this year, a pandemic-era job where I am a floating head on a screen and no one knows I had a baby who died. When people ask (as they always do), “how many children do you have?” I carefully answer, “I have a 9-year-old and a 2-year-old” without doing the implied math that adds up to 2 and not 3 children, and this no longer feels like the gaping hole of a betrayal that it did two or three years ago. I live far away from the place of his birth now, so I no longer risk bumping into that rare acquaintance, maybe another mom from prenatal yoga, who knew I was pregnant but not what happened. Sometimes this partial truth I force myself to tell -the white lie that leaves out his whole existence- makes me feel like I am a ghost, floating through my own current life. Sometimes it makes me feel like the opposite of a ghost, like everyone’s gaze stops at my skin and at my deceptively whole body, when I know I have flown apart and only gradually, painstakingly, knit myself back together in a rough resemblance of who I used to be. I am passing, but only passing.
It does get better, after a year, or after two, or at least it did for me. The intense grief subsides, the aching rawness of loss makes way for the possibility of complaining when there is another school delay or when one kid gets sent home with a cough the day after her sister threw up. Where I am right now, it has been just another busy week of work and parenting and trying to have a moment to myself before collapsing at night, not to mention surviving the holidays. Everyone feels this exhaustion and loneliness during this season, right? This is just normal, especially in these abnormal times. Our living room is stuffed with new legos and a toy stove and homemade decorations and a line from Kate Inglis’s book comes back to me, “I should be tripping over his shoes.” He should be here too, my son, with his own toys and snotty nose and funny words like, “pomato” for “tomato” that I record carefully because I know how quickly time passes, how quickly we move from babyhood to toddlerhood to suddenly having a willful and verbal 4-year-old who will soon be in kindergarten and will pass through all the normal stages of a normal life. How I miss you, how I still can’t believe all I have is this absence and not all the years of your life to come, how I see you both as yourself and as you should have been, how I see it all passing, passing, passing.
Emily, eight years and eight months
Eight years and eight months…That’s how long it has been since Henry’s death. At this point, my grief is not the all-consuming, soul eating, brain fogging experience it once was. Most days, it’s a passing remembrance as I walk by his picture or a flicker of sadness when my son talks about wishing he had a living brother. Sometimes, I almost feel like I need to remind myself—Hey! This happened. Your baby died. Forcing myself to acknowledge him and his death, bringing him to the forefront of my mind.
Other times, it feels like a gut punch of grief. When I hear someone else called Henry, I suddenly feel the phantom weight of him in my arms. Occasionally, I still must practice breathing techniques to stave off a panic attack when I drive past the street that leads to his old daycare. Even now, I say no to a lot of large social events. The small talk question of ‘how many children do you have?’ can still send me reeling. I should know how to answer that by now, but I don’t. It can be hard to relate to people who haven’t experienced the loss of a child and I find myself shying away.
Right now, I am mostly solid with a few wobbly moments. Eight years and eight months….it feels like both a lifetime and a blink.
Samantha, eight years
Eight years ago this week, at the stroke of midnight, I collapsed to my knees in the middle of a crowded party, so overwhelmed with the despair of moving into a new year without my daughter that it literally took the legs out from under me. These many years later, the ache is no longer quite so acute, but it is of course always there, lingering just below the surface, punctuating every joy and every sorrow we've experienced since her death. Thankfully, it has been mostly joys, and with Alana's two glorious younger siblings rampaging gleefully through our home, our hearts and our lives are fuller now than I ever could have hoped for that first New Year's Eve without her.
Alana has continued to be a constant and welcome presence in our family through all these years, again in a way I never could have anticipated or thought I would find comfort in. It's certainly not what we ever pictured during our perfect, blissful pregnancy, and we would in a heartbeat take her here - vibrant, alive - over the alternative any day. But through my advocacy work for stillbirth awareness and prevention, we haven't "lost" her quite so completely as I once believed to be the only possible outcome. Despite her physical absence, she has brought innumerable blessings to our life in the form of dear friends, deeply meaningful work, and a bottomless well of empathy.
So now when I think of my eldest daughter, more often than not, it is not with stabbing emptiness and a sob, but with overflowing gratitude and a smile. Needless to say, I never saw any of this coming.
Jen, nine years and eleven months
3638 days. There’s an app you can use to figure out how many days have elapsed between now and a past event and when I type in your birthday, January 14, 2012, and today’s date, that’s the number I get. 3638. A once entirely unfathomable number, when I used to count in hours since I last held you. But the days now fly by. I’m up early on winter holidays to give this prompt - where am I at right now? - some thought because this will be the only time I’ll have today to sit at my computer. There’s snow on the ground, a rare occurrence in this city, though almost nothing feels ‘unprecedented’ anymore after two years of pandemic, forest fires that destroyed an entire town a couple hours away, and flooding that cut my city off from the rest of the country only a month ago. And of course there is our unique relationship to ‘rare’ occurrences as parents whose babies have died (“hush, don’t worry, the odds are so low,” they said…).
But snow! Snow means sledding with your sister and brother, hot chocolates after, and getting cozy with a pile of blankets and a movie. Your sister is thirteen now, almost beyond a day like this with me and your eight-year-old brother. Your tenth birthday is fast approaching and I’ve no clue how to mark it. It’s at a terrible time of year. The depressing downswing after the holidays, the start of a new term and new classes for me, the miserable, sodden darkness of January. If you were born alive you would have brought a much-needed joy to the worst month of the year. I feel a small anxiety building about this birthday. Ten is monumental. How have you been gone so long? How do I still not know how to do this? Will anyone but me remember?
It used to matter so much to me that others remembered you, and marked the day with me. I thought it was because I wanted everyone to love you as I did, but if I’m totally honest with myself, I also saw it as a test of their inherent goodness as a person. How utterly unfair of me. Time didn’t stop for any of them, and 3638 days later, time has not stopped for me, either. It hustles me along, from wakeup to bedtime, through a million small and not-so-small tasks, your sister and brother loud and needy and hilarious and wild, my students and their stress about deadlines and the future, the emails that pile up in my inbox and the messes of four people living in 1000 square feet piling up, well, everywhere.
I’m stretched thin, so thin, and you, my sweet, silent, invisible middle child, you need the least from me. It hurts to acknowledge how little of me you get these days. Moments here and there. Pink sunrise on snow, a small pause of reflection, time to wonder if your eyes would have been blue like your sister’s or brown like your brother’s. A hummingbird lands on the Japanese maple, waiting for me to put out the feeder I brought in so it wouldn’t freeze overnight. He has a bright pink throat and almost-iridescent green back. Anna’s Hummingbird, he’s called. Not quite Anja’s, but this tiny jewel in the snow is a small prompt, too, to a kind of wistfulness - wishfulness - the form in which grief most often seems to visit me now: a brief, hard tug of love and longing. Where did you go? Who were you? I miss you.
3638 days is a lot of days and so many of them were so, so terrible. On this day, in this hour, the sunrise fades to the palest blue, and I think, yes, blue, yours were blue eyes, my winter daughter, and turn back into the kitchen to steal fifteen minutes at my computer before I get some breakfast started and the 3689th day gets underway.
Where are you right now in your grief? We’d be honoured if you’d share in the comments and help us fill out this “map on the road of grief.” It’s all right, in its own wrong way.