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?

Who was that?

When Catherine W. came into this community, I found her comments here and there, nestled amongst the others. Her insight and the haunting beauty of her words blew me away, and I wanted to know more of her story. It unfurled, moment by moment, through the months. Then, as though my prayers were answered, she began writing her blog Between the Snow and the Huge Roses. I think I speak for many of us when I say that it was as though her words were always here within us and around us, like the Poet Laureate of the Heartbroken. Her girls were born so early at just over 23 weeks, given impossible odds. One survived. One did not. She writes about that liminal place between lucky and unlucky, grieving and rejoicing and the intersection of all those emotions at the same time. I hope you join me in welcoming Catherine, as a regular contributor to Glow in the Woods. --Angie

One thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality.

From Swann’s Way -  Proust

I have to confess that I have not read any of the seven volumes of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ I don’t expect I will ever read anything that comes in seven volumes; life is short and time’s a-wasting. But my eye caught upon this quote in an interview with the novelist Francisco Goldman about his most recent book, Say Her Name. It is a semi-fictionalised account of the unexpected death of his young wife, Aura, in a freak surfing accident.

He summarised. The fundamental questions in death are: who was that person? Where did that person go? Who was that? And in love, it is the same: why does this one person, out of all the millions on the planet, suddenly merge with me so I effectively want to be her all the time? Why does this one person so enthral me? What is it? What was that? Who was that?

My mind, as it tends to when questions of love and death arise these days, immediately jumps to my daughter. Whose personality was, perhaps, more of a mystery than most.

When I have mourned the death of an adult, I have felt the tug of the specific. The particularness, the peculiarities of that person. And, when they have left, the question hangs in the air: who was that? I mull over characteristics and search through memories. With time, I have often gained some degree of resolution to that pivotal question, at least a partial answer.

But three years after my daughter’s death, this question is still keeping me up at night. Scratching my head in bewilderment. Wondering. Who was that?

photo by quinn.anya

My daughter. My half made girl. Whose brief life was so tentative and flickering.  Supported by whirling, whispering machines that gasped and kept time for her. This person who I am so in love with that I have tried over and over to inhabit her body, to live her short life. Imagined myself into that plastic box. Sometimes I even feel that it was me lying there, our identities have become so confounded.

Who was that? This person for whom I have been in mourning for nearly seven times as long as she ever lived. Already disproportionate according to some. But I suspect that multiplier is only going to increase. 

My husband and I were the only mourners at our daughter’s funeral and we were early.  We walked around the outside of the crematorium before the service. There were labelled spaces around the pathway, for the flowers that we hadn’t thought to bring. A space had been laid out for ‘Baby Georgina W.’ I couldn’t help wondering why she needed a qualifier.  Nobody else being cremated there that day had a preface. No middle aged man Joe Bloggs, no teenage girl Jane Doe. Only their names. But the babies, they all had that descriptor, a capitalised Baby, pinned to their fronts.

This type of loss has a nomenclature all of its own. It has qualifiers. Not just simple death. Miscarriage. Stillbirth. Neonatal death.  A different brand of death.  I still can’t decide if these terms are dismissive, diminishing, acting as a kind of Death Lite, or if they indicate that a death so very terrible has occurred that it needs to be somehow singled out. Death Ultra Ultra Heavy – handle with caution and step away as quickly as you can, thankful that this one isn’t yours to deal with.

Because the mystery of personality, the question ‘who was that?’ has a slightly sharper edge to it when a person whose life was very brief is under consideration. Sometimes I think the world at large cannot decide whether the loss of a baby is rendered insignificant by the brevity of their lives. Or made even more tragic, rendering the whole topic taboo.

That sigh, the exhalation that often comes when I add the qualifier ‘at three days old’ to the opening statement ‘my daughter died.’ That sound of relief that always seems to say to me, “oh phew, three days old, well that’s ok then. That is not as bad as the death of a three year old. Or of a thirty year old.”

Those words that so many of us have heard, “it’s not as though you knew her.” From the mouth of my doctor, a few weeks on, “It’s not as though you lost your husband. It could have been so much worse.” But he neglected to mention how to quantify the difference between husband death and daughter death and I was too sad to ask.

I ask, who was that? They say, why do you even ask that question, you couldn’t possibly know the answer.

My daughter’s life was very short and brutal, existing between the hazy ground of late miscarriage and the shadowy life sustained by maximal intensive care. A few short months in my womb, where I had barely started to feel her movements, followed by three days in the desperate world of the NICU.  My husband and I sat, craning forward over the desk, foolishly eager and optimistic, opposite the hospital consultant. He gently explained that there was nothing more that they could do, it was time to stop.

As she was dying, I felt I knew her in a way that I have never known anyone else. Perhaps because her entire life was spooling out in front of me, nearing its completion.  But I felt that she was not only the premature infant, dying in my arms. Her corporeal form shed away and she was simply . . . herself. At all ages and at no age at all. Looking back, I’m not sure how much of this experience was fuelled by post partum hormones and shock. But, at the time, I felt we had met. In a way that I have still not met either of my living children and, perhaps, never will. I hope that I will not see their lives complete, come full circle, as I did their sister’s. Time stretches their limbs and works on them, changing them inexorably and mercilessly. But not on her. The child who is, simultaneously, both the eldest and the youngest in the family.

In other circumstances where I have felt determined to get things right, to respond correctly, to inhabit the moment, weddings, birthdays, surprises, I have felt a veritable agony of self consciousness. And death is one situation where there is no ripping up and starting again. I was going to hold my daughter, just once. She was going to die, just once. And everything I had to say to her, everything I could hope to glean about her, everything I would ever know about her, well, that was the hour. It should have felt terribly pressurised. But, as my daughter slowly died, observed by strangers, I held her. And, amidst that strange calm, I felt that I knew her.

Do you ever ask, 'Who was that?' How do you answer that question? In what ways did you feel like you knew your baby(ies)? Or do you cringe even thinking about that question? Does it feel impossible to truly know a baby? How has that affected your grief and the ways you see your baby? 

Searching

When I first became acquainted with Josh's writing at his blog Jack at Random, I became immediately enchanted with the beauty and honesty in which he articulated his deep heartbreak. I grieved with him for his daughter Margot, who died March 24, 2011, after his wife fell and suffered a full placental abruption. In a blink, he lost his second daughter, almost lost his wife. The raw love, jagged and stunning, expressed in each sentence resonated so deeply with me. I found myself crying before I knew I was grieving for another. We are just so honored that Josh has agreed to join us here, as a regular contributor, sharing his journey as father and husband with us. Please help me welcome Josh to this space. --Angie

She was there for a time, in my arms, her cool cheek against my wet cheek, her pale forehead touching my forehead, her limp body held tightly against my chest.

Then she was off, in the care of impassive strangers, having open heart surgery to remove her valves for donation, taking little joyrides around Los Angeles between the hospital and coroner and crematorium.

She arrived back to me in a little white canister, her name neatly typed in courier font on a small strip of paper: Margot June Jackson. Number 4-2389.  Cremated 03/31/2011.

And then she was in my sock drawer. She was partly there to protect us all from the possible awkwardness of others seeing her, and partly to protect us from the harsh reality that our daughter was suddenly reduced to ashes. For those few days before the memorial, I saw nothing in my house but the canister. I’d walk past mourning grandparents, step over my two year olds toys, eat dinner around a table and it was all just a blur. My daughter was in my house, in a canister, and I saw nothing else.

And then we took her into the woods and poured her into the river.

And then I couldn’t find her.

For if we find the deceased in our collective memories, where they still live on, cemented in photos and stories, how can we possibly find our babies? When memories barely exist, a few hours here, a few days there, how can they remain present? And when there are so few collective stories, passed on by those who knew and loved and touched the deceased, how will anyone else remember or find our babies?

Heaven would be nice, if I believed in such a possibility. It’s a comforting thought to think I could meet her one day again. Reincarnation would be nice too, the thought that she might resurface somewhere in the world, another chance at the tricky elusiveness of life.  But instead, my mind only allows what I can know without doubt. She died. We had her cremated. And we placed her ashes into the river.

Even still, I search and search, looking around every river bend, under every mountain rock and desert plant, on the metro and freeway, in the few pictures we have, in my fleeting memories, in my letters to her. But she is rarely there, always just out of my grasp, always still dead.

And yet.

As the months trudge on without her, as my search turns up empty, as the solitary moments I had with her slowly scatter to the far reaches of my memory, I’m starting to notice that as my grief evolves, I can find her from time to time.

Sometimes I find her in this new life that has suddenly emerged, one filled with desperate sorrow over her loss and sadness over a life that has become different than I always imagined. And in carrying these losses from day to day, I carry my daughter along with them. 

Sometimes I find her in the water, in the river where we said goodbye, in the ocean where she eventually ended up.

Sometimes I find her in this new company I’m now apart of, the society of the suffering. We have joined those who know and experience loss, whether close to home or far away. I find intimacy with them, with you, and in those moments, I feel close to her.

Sometimes I find her in new friendships, which have only formed because of her absence.

Sometimes I find her in my broken heart, the fragmented pieces that drip with sadness but also hold her very existence. Since I can never have her back, what’s better - a whole heart without her ever existing, or a broken heart with her dead? No matter how short her life, no matter how little time we had together, she is my second child. And I choose her.



Where do you find your kids? Do you find them in different places as your grief has evolved over the months and years? Do you find them at the grave, in your home or the spot where the ashes were scattered? Do you find your baby in a symbol?






mute

Today we welcome a guest writer who is familiar to most of us in this community. If there is such a thing as an champion commenter and support person, Australian writer Sally from Tuesday's Hope would win the gold. She is often the first other babylost mama women meet when they begin blogging, and she offers equal support to people years out from their loss. Sally's first child, Hope Angel, was stillborn in August of 2008 after 41 weeks of pregnancy. In the almost three years since Hope's death, Sally has gone on to birth Angus, her twenty-one month old son, and is about to give birth to her third child. We are so honored to have Sally share her words and insight here at Glow in the Woods. -Angie

What to say, what to say? What on earth to say? What, in fact, is left to say?

Each time I’ve gone to put fingers to laptop, I’ve drawn blank. Mute. The loss of my baby, the safe arrival of my next one 15 months later and the pending arrival of number three has left me in a stunned silence. I feel I’m simply all out of words.

photo by garrettc.

When life chewed me up and spat me out one chilly August day three years ago, on the other side of the equator, where August equals cold, the first place I found myself in the land of dead babies was here, at Glow. A dear friend sent me a link about how to dry up your milk and I read the post, then every single other post on the site, given Glow was still relatively new then.

I didn’t have a space of my own to write. For the time being, all I wanted to do was listen, and observe. So that’s what I did. And this was the first place I found solace, the first place I felt less alone.

A few weeks later, finally realising there was no way out of this heinous club, I found the courage to comment. Then start a blog of my own. And the words spilled forth, each and every day for months on end. They would keep me up at night, whirring around in my head like a washing machine on spin cycle, and the only way I felt better about things the next day was if I got them out, coherently or otherwise, on to my blog. And the love and support I got back in those early days via comments, literally saved me. They kept me going.

Through the first six months of my grief, and the next nine months of my next pregnancy, I was a slave to the laptop. But since that pregnancy ended happily in November 2009, then raising my son and now growing the baby I carry within on this very day, I’ve struggled to know what to say or how to say it.

So it may come as a surprise to some that I’m a journalist by trade. I studied journalism at university and got a job in the field where I worked for the next 10 years or so before trying my hand at the baby making game. Initially, that was pretty unsuccessful, which is why I ended up here. Stillbirth, you bitch.

During my journalism training, my shorthand told me I was perfect for the profession because I was a “compulsive communicator”. I loved to talk, write, meet people, learn things and expand myself. I was a people person, through and through and making connections was what I did best.

But throughout my career, I never felt fully satisfied with anything I was doing. Or writing about. My journalism job ended due to the limited opportunity and abysmal financial reward and I moved in to the world of corporate communications, writing crap for big companies I cared little about. It sapped me of my drive and left me feeling empty about the career I had built and hoped to fall back on once baby making and child rearing was complete. I wanted to be able to write but about something I was passionate about, and make money at the same time. A pipedream, perhaps, but that’s ultimately what I was striving for. I just hadn’t quite figured out how to make it happen.

Enter the stillbirth of my first child at 40 weeks and five days after a perfectly boring pregnancy and bam, I finally had something I was passionate about and wanted to write about. And write I did.

My Hope was born on August 19, 2008 and I hadn’t yet turned the calendar over to September when I realised I’d spewed out, like hot lava, nearly 40,000 words of her story.

My house was buzzing with family, flowers kept arriving on my door step, but I sat on my couch, laptop at the ready and just poured it all out. People would bring me food and drinks and I just kept on typing.

I also began connecting. Commenting more. Reading more. Writing on my own blog more. Participating in this community more. And my inbox was full because of it. I made friends. Real life friends I’d never met, but we shared a common pain, and we bonded none the less.

The words, both written, spoken and read were what kept me afloat. I also purchased every single babyloss/stillbirth book I could get my hands on to sooth my soul with the more tangible style of words and filled journal after journal with the darker thoughts not really suitable for blog or email fodder. I threw myself in to the language of babyloss wholeheartedly. I was living and breathing it. Your words in, my words out, like a calming yoga breath. And that’s the main way I survived. I honestly don’t know how the women of generations before ours did it.

But now, three years on and just weeks (days?) away from the birth of my third child, my second pregnancy post loss, and I feel I’ve run out. My milk quickly dried up after my daughter died and my words have dried up now.

I’m sad. I miss her. I want her back. I still get angry. I still sometimes play the why me game, when I know I shouldn’t. I get jealous, but not as much. I feel tired. I hate that this is my life, but I do make the best of the life I have now. I still can’t believe this happened to me and I think part of me will always be in shock. But that’s really it. Round and round. Rinse and repeat. What really is there left to say?

Is it simply healing? Time? The birth of a subsequent live child, reinstating my role as an active parent? The due date of another, just 10 days after the third birthday of the big sister he or she will never meet? A combination of all of those things, or something else?

Even when talking about her to those in my real life, I struggle to get her name out. I get so choked up just thinking about her, thinking about what we went through that I worry if I let those tears out again, I might simply never stop crying. I have been referring to her birthday this week as “Friday” and not as “Hope’s birthday”, which is the more accurate description of what the day actually is. On “Friday” I don’t know what I’m doing. On “Friday” I think we’ll visit the cemetery. On “Friday” I’m not sure I’ll feel like catching up with you. It is no wonder people don’t know what to say or how to act around me anymore, when I struggle to get those simple words out myself, even to my nearest and dearest who know how much I still hurt from the inside out and who wouldn’t care if I cried an ocean of tears at their feet.

I update my own blog when I can, but I feel it is mostly out of obligation now, to let my readers know where I’m at. But the words don’t flow as freely now, and none of the thoughts seem as organic and pure as they once did.

I still read and comment every day but that’s about it. I’ve posted just six times this year. Yet I still have that desire to write and write about what I’m most passionate about. And that still is my daughter. But really, what else is there to say? She died and at least for now, my words might just have died with her.

Do you sometimes feel mute when it comes to talking or writing about the death of your baby? Did you reach a point where you felt there was simply nothing left to say? If you have a blog, how often do you post and how long do you think you’ll be able to keep it up for? Do you find it easier to talk than write, or vice versa?

the smallest jar

About ten months after Lucy died, Sam's uncle visited our home. I never met this particular uncle, but I had heard many stories about him from many different perspectives. He is the wrestling uncle, the basketball uncle, the chummy kid-at-heart uncle. Sam was very fond of him.

I had just kicked off my shoes for nap time when the bell rang. It was an hour before they were due to arrive, but there they stood on our doorstep. Sam hadn't quite made it home from work in time for formal introductions. I welcomed them into our home. Offered them drinks and kept my voice low. "There is a sleeping child in the house," my demeanor whispered. And so we retired to the lounge with some sparkling water. We sat back for a moment in the uncomfortable silence of not knowing how to break the ice after questions of travel and traffic.

"So, Angie," the uncle looks at me very intensely, "how did you bounce back from your stillbirth?"

I breath in and think.

She fits into the smallest jar I have ever seen, Uncle. One that only three years ago I would wondered aloud what possible use it could have. When it arrived, filled with Lucia, I couldn't believe they fit all my baby into such a small container. I don't know if you ever bounce back from holding a baby one day and then fitting her into the smallest jar the next.

There is her jar, Uncle. It is silver and inlaid with turquoise and has a pattern of the dove. It was too much to think about the day before Christmas when the funeral director came to our home with a catalogue of urns. Big ones next to little ones. I didn't know which one seemed appropriate, or right for my daughter.  I asked the funeral director to put the catalogue in a manila folder, and leave it on my desk. He was very accommodating and gracious. He walked around our house blindly trying to find the office, the desk, the manila folders.

I hate the choice I made, but I also can't imagine transferring her ashes to earthenware or something more like us. People ash is so much more human than I ever thought it would be. It is lumpy and full of pieces of things that make your brain wander dark halls. I am content accepting her urn as part of her.

I don't want to leave her jar some days. I don't want her to be alone in a big house when we go on vacation, or run to the mall. It seems insane, I know, but I want to tuck the smallest jar into my pocket and pretend it has emotion or heart. Instead of treating the jar like a person, I used to speak her name to conjure her. Maybe I can feel her in that name.

Lucia Paz.

After a few months, Uncle, I stopped wanting to hear her name, even though her name is the most beautiful thing I could imagine. It is God whispering. It is the wind through chimes and trees when no one is listening. It is Nature crying. Her name is Light and Peace and all things too beautiful to hold. When it comes out of someone's mouth, it is like a sacred prayer mispronounced and cut short. She is mine. My moment of horror. My connection to the Divine. Only I know her. Only I whisper her. Only I miss her.

That is what not bouncing back is like for me, Uncle. I think it is only me who misses her, thinking her death was only about me. Lucia does not reside in a small jar. Lucia is not her name. She is our tears, and laughter. She is the trees and the flowers and the wind. She is kneeling and standing again. Lucia exists in the air between us that feels electric and powerful and alive, but it is just the weight and height of love.

In the end, Uncle, your question is refreshing and difficult. I am grateful that you have acknowledged my daughter's death. I am grateful you recognize my trip to Hell. But written in the lines of your question is the answer you want. That mothers come back after walking into the underworld, like Demeter. Persephone is restored, but I am not. I have not rescued my daughter from Hades. I have not been granted six months of her. She is gone. My crops have withered. And spring is no where in sight.

But, still, Uncle, I think I am bouncing somewhere, but not back to where I was. I am bouncing upwards, off-kilter. I am bouncing out of bounds, but still playable, if I get to me fast enough. I am bouncing to a place that resembles peace. I am bouncing with the smallest jar in my pocket. I am bouncing with new vigor and compassion. I am bouncing somewhere, but it is not anywhere close to back.

The question hangs there in the seconds I have took to breathe in, think all this and clear my throat.

"So, Angie, how did you bounce back from your stillbirth?"

"I haven't quite."

He nodded and asked me about the Embran and Woonan baskets from Panama displayed on a floating shelf six inches above my head.

+++

What difficult questions have you had to answer? Do you find it refreshing when someone is blunt about your loss or do you find it upsetting? In what ways do you like to be engaged about your loss and the time after?

wild is the wind

photo by KevinGrahame

On the west coast of New Zealand overlooking the fierceness of the Tasman Sea, the trees growing in the rocky crags of the shoreline jut sideways. The branches on the sea side are barren, twisted. The force of the wind changes their structure, the way their nature demands to grow beaten into submission. The limbs bend permanently off to the side pointing towards the land. "Go this way," they point. "Go away from the brutal sea." They morph from the relentlessness of the coastal wind. Their shape is the shape of the wind. It is the shape of abuse. Sometimes when I think back on how captivating those trees were, how haunting, how few pictures I took of them, yet how often I think of them, sometimes I think that shape is the shape of love.

Let the wind blow through your heart, for wild is the wind.

All the love songs are written about Lucia. All the heartbreak songs. All the songs about loss and want and ache. All of the songs. I want to write about her too, but I can't seem to find the words. I know nothing about Lucy except that she isn't here. And the cadence of her not being here is like the wind beating on me, changing me. I relent. My branches bend over, growing uncomfortably sideways, damaged, impossible. I bend from the love. The love disguised as sadness and grief. Sometimes I get confused by that, thinking that I am bending from the hurt, but it is love that bends me, that points me away from everything else. I look debilitated. I feel debilitated. Until, suddenly, I realize that it has become so much a part of who I am, I am not uncomfortable anymore. And until it became so much a part of who I am, the way I was, unbending and sure of the world, makes no sense anymore.

You're Spring to me, all things to me.

I never thought I’d survive the death of one of my children. That is what I used to say when I would hear a horror story about stillbirth, or infant death. "Oh, I would never survive," I would muse. I thought I would turn into dust and ash and be carried off, a bit of me left everywhere until I was nowhere at all. I'd close my eyes to banish the thought of it. Cross myself. Throw salt over my left shoulder.  Touch wood.  Hold my breath.  Make a wish. Knock on wood.  Throw salt over my shoulder. Whisper on the wind.

Let me fly away with you.

Maybe I really thought I would never survive it, or that is simply all the further I could think of such a scenario. It seemed so horrid, I wouldn't dignify imagining how it would really be. Maybe I said things like that because I thought I was not the kind of person that babies die inside of. I remember that feeling of talking myself out of the anxiety of the stillness. I felt silly for being afraid. I felt silly. I used to think I was a humble person. Confident, perhaps, but humble. Humility, in fact, was my religion. That seemed the key to a spiritual existence. Humility and compassion. Hand in hand. Then I thought I was humble because I lost so much. Before that, I thought I was humble because I didn't think I was the prettiest, smartest or most talented person and that realization didn't floor me. My philosophy of life was simple: "I am not anyone special. And neither are you."

I suppose now I see humility differently. Humility to me is accepting that I am not capable of transcending my humanness. My child died in me not because I am bad, or good, or humble, or arrogant, or I deserved it or didn't deserve it. She died because I am human. I am not a terrible person, just a person. And I am changed by the grief. My branches own the hurt perhaps further are the hurt of simply being human and loving so much.  

Wild is the wind. So wild.

Though I thought I'd never survive my child's death, I survived it. What did I think I would do? Kill myself? Expire from lack of wanting to survive? After living through the death of my child, I realized that surviving isn't the hard part. You can live despite yourself and in spite of yourself. You can punish, abuse, disengage with you, you can cut yourself off from everything. You can try to will life to stop, but it won't. You wake up everyday and remember what happened again. And your arms bend a little more.

It is the thriving that feels impossible. It is the hope that gets choked, the loneliness that settles onto your bones like an old wet wool coat, useless and bulky in its wetness, and uncomfortably heavy. It is the juxtaposition of the old, wet, wool coat, and the wind that blows through your heart. And the wind that blows through the holes in you. Your arms tire. Everything is tired. But you still live.

My love is like the wind.

There is a hole in me that seems bigger than any one person could have ever filled, especially someone so little and dead. The wind blows through her tree this morning, moving the tiny Buddhist bell and the flags that send a prayer off to the corner of the globe. That prayer can never be answered. And still I pray for the impossible--a moment with Lucia again. A moment. One tiny wisp of her. The grief that whirled in me after she died touched all the other grief in me. I can see that now. That is why I am defined by grief now, because we are all defined by grief. I am not special because of that. And neither are you.

I am more beautiful, though, because of Lucia. More beautiful because grief debilitated me until I grew into the shape of grief and into the shape of love. I am sideways and ugly and in that way, I suppose I am beautiful.

For we're creatures of the wind and wild is the wind.

What ways has grief shaped you? What parts of you feel leafless and empty? What parts of you are heartier? What ways have you grown more beautiful because of your grief? In what ways have you thrived? In what ways have you merely survived?