And i, a gasping new-deliver'd mother

Gasp

I knew I’d be sad about death, when it came.

I knew grief meant crying and wistful storytelling; memories and missing things. The absence of something familiar.

I knew these things in the way I knew what the Prime Minister should do about the global economic crisis. In other words, I didn’t have a fucking clue. Just some opinions based on other people’s words.

Gasp.

It wasn’t like that for me, when it was time for me to grieve. Death was a womb, not a tomb. Her body was empty. She was a husk. My baby was a husk. So what’s to grieve?

There were no memories, no stories. There was only Everything. The infinite possibilities of her.

Gasp

Laundry was grief. It smelt like new. She never got to be new.

Fingernails were grief. They dug in to my palm. Feel this. Feel this. Feel for her.

Chicken dinners were grief. They could never fill me up

My laptop was grief. The ‘Home’ key came loose in my bag. I wept. I’d lost my home.

The 50 bus route was grief. I resented its normality.

A forgotten child’s glove ripped my soul from me on a January morning. It looked so lonely.

Gasp

Then I forgot to grieve.

 It made me sadder.

Does your grief surprise you?

Nine Days

The two of them met for a brief moment. One of them was alive, nine days old, seven pounds, four ounces, and still under the lethargic haze of infancy. One of them was dead, four hours old, seven pounds, twelve ounces, and still warm from the womb, from the closeness of working organs and a rapid heartbeat. The dead one was lifted in front of the live one, a surreal sight if there ever was such a thing. She was going to be your best friend, the mother whispered. It was hello and goodbye in the same minute.

They were meant for each other, our two girls, Lyla and Margot, born nine days apart to best friends who live on the same street.


Long before children were on the immediate radar, the four of us dreamed of a scenario where our kids grew up together, close in age and close in proximity. We imagined our babies crawling around together, our toddlers fighting over toys, our pre-schoolers trading sentences. It's only natural, of course, for two couples to wish the sort of closeness between their kids as they share themselves.

The mothers navigated the frightening waters of middle school together, and then high school and then University. The fathers own a business together. We have backpacked through three continents, riding crammed busses and jumping off bridges and sleeping in cars along the interstate. And somehow, despite living in different parts of the world for the better part of six years, our friendship remained steadfast.

And then one day they decided to move across the country, straight into our neighborhood. Then they fell pregnant. It was July when they told us, on a blisteringly hot afternoon.

Almost incredulously, ironically, we conceived Margot on the same blistering day we found out they were pregnant with Lyla. One tiny miracle created out of knowledge of the other. The women who became fast friends at the age of twelve, who have known each other for nearly two decades, were just five weeks apart. The stars were aligning.

In those early weeks, those early months after Margot died, it was hard to even imagine what we needed from our family and friends. It was shock and awe, the inability to focus, night time meltdowns, a mountain of anguish. Friends and family came and went, supporting and helping and listening in any way they can. But mostly we just tried to survive each day, one long minute at a time.

And then, suddenly, without notice, it felt like we were all alone in our grief, as if the veil of sadness had been lifted for all but us. It’s all fine and understandable, but the longing for wholeness became a desperation, to be able to share with someone our whole selves, both the anguish and the joy, however unbalanced these emotions were in our early grief. I found myself fracturing, turning into a splintered version of myself. I would smile and nod and deflect questions and give the world a sad, but more or less coping, version of myself. I longed to be my whole self, with more than just my partner. If we couldn’t share the aching burden of our missing child with friends, how on earth could we share any joy we found out of life?

But there is Brooke, mother to Lyla, friend since middle school, standing with us, kneeling with us, walking with us, crying with us, never afraid of our grief, never afraid to talk about Margot. She asks questions and then asks more questions, always wanting to share in our pain as deeply as she can. When a group of us are at a party, with babies everywhere, it is Brooke who talks about missing Margot, it is Brooke who asks what it feels like. Whenever I post a new vulnerable blog about our grief, it is Brooke who talks about it. She has abided with us, without a timeline, without expectations. And what is most astonishing, is that she has done all of this while in the midst of mothering a child for the first time. If there have been sleepless nights or breastfeeding issues or colds or exhaustion or hard days or figuring out the right bottle or any of those new parent realities, we never hear about them. And the love, the sheer perfect love of a child, that normally oozes out of a new parent, has been miraculously toned down around us. Her abiding grace, under such difficult circumstances, is perhaps the most selfless act I have encountered in my lifetime.


Nearly ten months have passed since our babies passed by one another. For a long time, it was hard to even look at Lyla, the most physical reminder of my Margot. The smiling, the giggles, the sitting up, the pure baby charm. Each little milestone was so acutely felt. But somehow through the months of abiding with Brooke and her husband, through the inevitable time that has passed, I can smile at Lyla now, hold her hand, watch her laugh. I can ask about her. She has become integrated into my pain, fused with it. She is part of the missing and she is part of the remembering.  But it is not too bitter. It is sweet. And somedays I wonder, when the rest of the world has forgotten my darling girl, when only her mother and I really miss her, will Lyla be like a marker in time, a beautiful reminder of our little girl, gone for so long?

Were there any children born around you when your child died? How does it feel to watch them grow up? How has your relationship with the parents changed? Are you able to be around the child, or is it too painful? Has this changed with time?

good grief

'Tis very true, my grief lies all within; 
And these external manners of laments 
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief 
That swells with silence in the tortured soul; 
There lies the substance: and I thank thee, king, 
For thy great bounty, that not only givest 
Me cause to wail but teachest me the way 
How to lament the cause.

A voice. It sounds as though it is coming from far away although its source is right next to my ear. "Stop it. You're embarrassing yourself," he hisses at me. I don't respond. I don't stop. "You're scaring that little boy." 

I can feel his muscles tensing, wanting to move away from me. But he doesn't.

I have fallen into parts. A dry, thin, Greek chorus of me hovers up close to the ceiling. Tutting and disapproving. Scathing. All this emotion. So very florid and unprepossessing. It idly ponders things like the upholstery on the chairs and the many layers of gloss paint on the hot water pipes, painted and repainted over and over again. Bored with the hysterical fit taking place beneath.

I note the frightened face of the young boy with distant horror. "Shut up, shut up, shut up," I whisper at the collection of other fragments of me gathered on the floor of the same hospital corridor.

They form a fleshy tube designed for howling through, with my physical features stretched and wrapped around its outside. They slump on the floor, melodramatically collapsed. They wail and leak. And continue to wail and leak. Blood, milk, water, phlegm. They are beyond being reasoned with. 

The distant pieces inform me that I should be embarrassed and mortified.  And I am sorry for scaring that passing little boy. Very sorry indeed. It seems to me that his mother has an accusatory glint in her eye. But I cannot stop.

He looks at me, my husband, with a look that has been repeated many times since. 

You are doing this all wrong, you are very strange and you are a stranger to me. You are, not to mince my words, completely and utterly batshit crazy. My wife, what on earth has happened to you?

***

This is not how I thought I would react. I had an idea, before I had experienced any such thing, that I would be elegant in grief. Graceful. Gracious. I imagined that I would retain my kindness. That I would be considerate. That I would be the tower of strength that others could lean against. 

But I never imagined that the first death I would contend with would be that of my child. My three day old daughter. It transpired that I simply couldn't grieve for her quietly or discretely. This experience knocked my small claims to calmness, stoicism and compassion over the head and carried them off. Leaving a space to be occupied by my inner banshee.

Death didn't barge in. Not yet.

I still wanted to pretend that I hadn't even seen Death come in at the door. Because, in my childish grief mind, if I didn't see Death, perhaps he wouldn't see me. Or them. Besides there was no room for Death. There was no room for anyone at all apart from me and my daughters. I barged in on myself and squashed my face into my own face so hard, that I could no longer see. There was only me. My grief. My pain. My own closed eye pressed up against my own closed eye. Forming a greedy trinity with my children that occupied my entire field of vision, relegating my husband, my sister, my mother, my father, manners, social conventions, simple human decency, all to the peripheries. 

I was not the ascetic grieving mother, dressed in black with a single tear welling in the corner of her eye. Grief didn't endow me with restraint or wisdom. I was a despairing, empty thing with a ravening maw. Cramming myself with sweet things, fussing like a toddler over being too warm, too cold or too tired. As though all the inhibitory circuits in my brain and the taboos ingrained therein had been abruptly switched off. I wanted to scream and drum my heels deep, deep into the ground. Eat twenty three packets of chocolate biscuits. Walk around all day wrapped in a duvet. Storm around in tears, unable to contain anything, sending it all spinning out into the ether. 

But a few weeks later, I woke up, showered, dressed, brushed my hair, applied my make up and drove to the hospital. I sat quietly by the remaining incubator. Tears moistened the corners of my eyes. When one of the nurses asked me why I looked so grumpy, I replied, "Oh, that's just the way I look. No need to worry. I'm fine."

An internal switch had been thrown and I can't go back. To that greedy, grasping, uninhibited sadness. Sometimes I almost regret it, almost miss it. I don't think I'll ever cry for my daughter on the floor of a supermarket again. No matter how much I might feel as though I want to.

***

I am not proud of my behaviour in the immediate aftermath of Georgina's death. I have had to apologise to many people. But I don't know how to find that little boy or the young man who rounded the corner of the supermarket aisle looking for a tasty snack only to be confronted by a wailing woman in amongst the crisps. 

At the time, it didn't feel anywhere near enough. Part of me wanted to make even more fuss, to scream louder, to tear my hair and rip my fingernails out and leave them in a pile in the corridor, to scare more passing children. Surely my daughter's death deserved to be marked by more than the scaring of one paltry little boy?

At other times, it feels like too much. How could I have done that? How could I have folded in on myself so weakly, so comprehensively? How could I have frightened that little boy and embarrassed my husband? How cruel and how selfish.

Nobody can teach you how to lament. You can only muddle through in your own fashion. 

And no matter how public the display, or how private the lamentation, it would have been only the merest shadow of that unseen grief, the substance of which is known only to me.

Do you feel that there is such a thing as 'good' grief? Some sort of standard (or polite) way of behaving in the event of a bereavement such as this? Do you feel other people might be holding you to this standard, judging your grief as a success or a failure? Are you even judging yourself? 

Do you feel you let everything out or kept everything in? Do you feel proud of how you grieved? Or do you, like me, look back slightly shamefacedly?

courtesy, common?

I drive to work about the same time every day. Most of the time the soundtrack for that is news. I drive home at all different times, depending on how many students came by that day, what else I have on my plate, where else I have to be, and how soon. And so the soundtrack for the drive home is a mish-mash. Some days, it's mp3s of the stuff I downloaded over the weekend, some days-- CDs. But some days, depending on what I stumble upon when the car comes back to life, it's radio again.

And this is how sometime last week I was introduced to Philip Galanes, who, as I found out that day, writes the advice column Social Qs for the Sunday edition of NYTimes, and now has a book out by the same name. I started driving part way through his conversation with the Fresh Air host Terry Gross, and stayed on the channel. There was something very human and kind about Mr. Galanes, and it made me think that the program wouldn't be a bad thing to listen to all the way home.

They spent some time on peculiarities of the modern, technology-enabled world, touched upon dinner party etiquette, but by the time I was flying down the highway, the conversation turned very personal. First, about Mr. Galanes's childhood as a family "fixer," and then, tragically, to the death of Mr. Galanes's father, by his own hand. Deep, personal pain. Feeling responsible, as many suicide survivors do, but in his case because he was, you know, the family fixer. And, for years, not something he could talk about honestly. Eventually, he could.

So what do you think happens when someone answers a question about, say what his parents do by saying actually, my father committed suicide when I was 23?

"One of the shocking things about suicide too is that people feel very entitled to start asking really wildly inappropriate questions. Like the first thing generally people will say to you after you say that your father killed himself, is that they'll go oh, how did he do it? They might say oh, I'm sorry or oh, that must be terrible for you. Then they'll go how, how did he do it? And I don't know if that's some macabre thing coming up or what it is."

I wish I could say I was shocked. But I am not. Not even a little. The thing is, I learned, people feel very entitled to start asking really wildly inappropriate questions and to start dispensing really wildly inappropriate advice in all sorts of situations. Like, to take a completely random example, when you answer a question about children in a way that does not leave out your dead one(s).

What I did find a little surprising, what I am still mulling over, and why I am writing this now, is Mr. Galanes's response to the follow up question on what makes for an appropriate answer to a wildly inappropriate question like this. Because his response, and, perhaps more importantly, the spirit of his response, is much-much kinder than I am inclined to be to the wildly inappropriate. His response is meant not just for suicide survivors, but also for those encountering other kinds of drive-bys. A common ones, in his own description, are the various incarnations of the fertility-presuming questions aimed at quietly and desperately infertile. But there are also the ones aimed at conspicuously single, and, I imagine, many other kinds of vulnerable.

So in his own words: "I think the best response that I have been able to come up with is "Why do you ask?" Because it delivers the question back to someone in a way that lets them see it, hopefully, for how inappropriate and - I don't want to judge the people. [...] Most people are just thoughtless. They didn't mean to hurt your feelings. So by saying why do you ask, you give them an opportunity to really consider, wow, that really was pretty inappropriate."

And later: "But no, but you're quite right. There are lots of ways. It's also entirely appropriate to say gosh, I'd rather not discuss that. But I find the less that my response is like a slap across their face, the more I feel the possibility is for the two of us to go on and have a nice conversation that isn't going to be about how my dad killed himself or why."

And I think it is this presumptive kindness that really gets me. Because I certainly see what he is saying, but I can't say that I am fully on board. Or maybe I am not fully on board in case of the kind of loss common to us here. Because here's how I look at this. The person doing the asking, the wildly inappropriate one, is not the one who needs kindness. Or not the one who needs it more. The person whose heart is, again, ripped open by the question, that's the person in need of tenderness and kindness.

What I think Mr. Galanes is doing by committing to this kind of a soft and gentle mirror-holding, is accepting onto himself the extra responsibility for the feelings of the offender. I find the kindness of such an impulse commendable, but more than that, I find the imposition of it unfair. That is, I rebel against accepting his advice as the norm for myself or anyone else. The fine line I am willing to walk here is that I am ok with any individual who voluntarily decides to go that way, but I am firmly against deciding as a society that this should be the norm of behavior for the offended party in the conversation. Because see, this imposition of self-restraint then normalizes the wildly inappropriate, makes it an ok thing to ask, and assumes that the burden of not letting the conversation escalate rests on the already vulnerable.

I've said from almost the very beginning that I do not so much mind the random questions as I mind the clueless and hurtful reactions to my answers. It is the truth of our society that people ask personal questions, some of them shrouded in wording that implies judgement about your choices, and some of them worded entirely neutrally. So people ask. But I find it cowardly and unacceptable to only be prepared for the shiny happy answers. Mr. Galanes says that people blurt out stupid stuff because they are unprepared, because you in your answer have "just laid something unexpected down." It may be unexpected, but it is not outside the range of human experience. And that is what upsets me about the wildly inappropriate-- they are ready to carry on a long and fluffy conversation when your responses fit their expected pattern, but God forbid you should bring in a real painful truth and you can almost hear the circuits in their brains frying, resistors popping like popcorn.

Angry? Who, me? Actually, I prefer to think of it as indignant. I think the difference is that Mr. Golanes wants to fix things, and I want things to be fair. Not, you know, in the cosmic sense-- I know that's impossible, as attested to by the very need for this site to exist, by the abundance of the RE offices, and by the suicide survivor networks, just to name a few,--  but in an everyday sense. In the sense where the courtesy Mr. Golanes wants to show the wildly inappropriate, the courtesy he feels obligated to show them, I want them to feel obligated to show it to us. If the courtesy is to be common, I want it to be well and truly common.

To give Mr. Galanes his very deserved due, he doesn't call for the vulnerable to always show the soft spot. He himself lied for years about how his father died, trying on this illness and that. He appreciates that the vulnerable's need for safety, as his was during those years, and as the woman in the midst of a serious cancer relapse whom he very recently provided with a dispensation to lie until she's ready, that this need is more important that the other's need or want to know. But maybe there are some soft spots that burn more painfully when hidden. After all, when Mr. Galanes lied about how his father died nobody around was presuming that he didn't have a father or that he didn't love his father. In contrast, a desperately infertile woman, years into treatment, might want to expose her needle-poked flesh to wipe that smug smile off the face of the presumptuous fool who is going on about how she must enjoy the opportunity she has to sleep in on weekends. And a bereaved parent might, just might, want to point out that the hardest decision a parent has to make is really not the one about whether to spend the money on that expensive toy your kid really wants. I am just saying.

The thing is, I have, on occasion, myself used the relatively gentle "why do you ask?" And at other times, I have been far less kind. As I say above, it is the mandate of always picking choice (a) that I shirk. And maybe, as Mr. Golanes suggests, the difference is in whether I want to have the conversation continue peacefully or whether I want to explode the biggest bomb in the middle of the room. I don't like scenes. I do not enjoy scenes. And for certain I do not want to use my son as a weapon. But there are ways to be quietly dignified and yet to deliver a memorable punch. I reserve those mostly for repeat offenders, but I have delivered those too. The way I see it, the wildly inappropriate has already hurt me. How I react to it will not make the hurt less. But maybe, if I am memorable, it will make it less likely that the person will go on in the same vein. Maybe, just maybe, I will help spare another bereaved parent down the road the tender mercies of this particular wildly inappropriate person. Maybe.

So what are you-- a fixer, a justice-seeker, something entirely different? And where do you come down on this? How should we respond? How have you responded?

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? 

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?