The Answer

The intersection of grief, creativity, and writing remains a place of such deep beauty and personal horror, I stand in awe of people getting their hands and souls dirty in it, exploring it with art, music, and writing. Kenny is a songwriter and musician from Bloomington, IN, whose band Gentleman Caller, has just released their fourth record, Wake (Mariel Recording Company). This record meditates on the loss of his daughter, Roxy Jean, who was stillborn at thirty-eight weeks on August 1, 2007. His music breaks me wide open in such an important way. I learn more about my own grief. Kenny agreed to join us at Glow as a regular contributor where he will be exploring his grief with his wise insights, brutal honesty, and dark humor, and of course through his music and words.  —Angie

In the year following Roxy’s death, I was just hunched, squinting and holding on.  I tried to outrun my thoughts, but they were in every hiding place I ran to.  I self-medicated with booze for a few weeks.  Became an expert on panic attacks. Sometimes I just waited, counting days away from the day she died. There was more comfort in math than hugs. I held on and flailed, as quietly as possible, inside my hollowed-out flesh-cage. I went to therapy, took anxiety meds and tried to get to know and understand my new, messed up self. 

During that god-forsaken year, 3 friends also died early, tragic deaths.  One by house fire.  One by drowning.  One by aneurysm.  All three under the age of 40. It seemed unreal and impossible at first… then, inevitable.  Remember, in The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo snaps “NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS!” before successfully flying through an asteroid field?  My life, the lives of my friends and family… ours had become the exact opposite of that.  We weren’t beating the odds, but being destroyed by them, and those odds were giggling.  

Hollowed out by losing my beautiful, dark-haired daughter, and managing my anxiety with medication (prescription and other), I was sliding down and increasingly absent of hope. I started recognizing patterns in the memorial services I was attending. The hollow, crying eyes of the mother, the trembling, shaking hand of the father, all while speakers talked about what the deceased loved, how they loved and who they were… and there was always a song. I was so embittered by all the loss, and death just seemed right around the corner for everyone I loved. I was certain I would not live to be an old man. I felt that no one I knew would. 

So, I decided to write my own funeral song.

I wanted a song that would just tell the bleak truths of my life… a song that wouldn’t put a bow on the end of my life, but a thudding and appropriate period. Somehow, it felt like the bravest thing I could do.

It happened immediately upon returning home after the last memorial service I would attend that year. It took literally the amount of time to write that it does to sing it. It remains, easily, the quickest I’ve ever written a song. It also remains the most cathartic:

THE ANSWER

I did not find the answer in church
I did not find the answer in church
I did not want a god that would not spare the rod
I did not find the answer in church
I did not find the answer in my home
I did not find the answer in my home
I was a stranger to my kin
I was a stranger to them
I did not find the answer in my home
I did not find the answer in school
I did not find the answer in school
I was sucker-punched and thin
I was not like the other kids
I did not find the answer in school
I did not find the answer at the bar
I did not find the answer at the bar
Beneath the stale embrace
I was always out of place
I did not find the answer at the bar
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I took every pill they make
But I was still awake
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I did not find the answer in your eyes
I did not find the answer in your eyes
Not your hands and not your lips
We were always passing ships
I did not find the answer in your eyes

 What songs, if any, have been a comfort to you since your loss?  What songs can you no longer listen to? What would be your funeral song?

comfort

There are the nightmares. It had been so long. I almost forgot them. My children kidnapped, shot. I stand in front of the masked men, offer myself up, belly first, like a fertility sacrifice. I wake in a start. I tap into the collective consciousness, the collective anxiety. I tap into the anxiety that is always there. That anxiety resides right in my chest in the place where, when Lucia died, a dragon woke. He coughs little impotent puffs of smoke. 

You can never protect your babies. Not really, his raspy voice whispers. I will wake in you, breathe fire, swoop in low, carry them off. I will fight until your death for them, but only if I can see. So much I cannot see.

Vulnerability seeps out my pores. I dampen shirts with it. The dragon thinks there is real danger, so I dampen him too. I wrap my children in bubble wrap, place them on a low shelf. They tear through my packing tape, giggling and stir-crazy.

WE CAN'T SIT STILL, MAMAAAAAAAAAAA! WE WANT TO RUN!

They run wild, climb walls, jump and twirl and become trapeze artists, skydivers, lion tamers, lumberjacks. And they want to go to school. And I can only see them sitting there while madmen shoot into locked doors. They will always seek freedom and independence the more I seek isolation and protection. I know because I was once them.

Twenty children died on Friday in Connecticut. Another twenty-two children were attacked in China by a knife-wielding man. It happened in a primary school as well. None were killed. As the news came in on Friday, I sat in my daughter's elementary school auditorium, my cell phone video recorder pointed at the stage, watching class after class of children walk onto stage singing holiday songs. It was terrible knowing the news, but I hadn't heard any of the details. I could only think of how small each of them looked, even the big ones. So much smaller than I remember being. When I arrived home, I read that one full class at Sandy Hook had been massacred. I shudder. I visualize one whole class from my town. I just sat in front of six classes of students ages 5-10--their parents hopeful, proud, delighted, enchanted, trusting. It is too much to think about. I turn away, ashamed that I cannot stare at the grief, not completely at first. It takes me a few hours to turn fully toward the young lives, to read the names of the dead, to see their faces. And when I do, the grief steamrolls me, the anxiety overtakes me, the dragon wants blood.

photo by pirindao.

I face east, like Maoi, waiting for answers. The spring moves in, damp and alive, reminding me of tomorrow. I ask the dragon, but he's reeling too. "Nothing to be done," he grumbles. Then south, the deserts offer me a dry breeze, thorns and poison and the elements of survival. The west offers me a damp cloth, and a sip of tea. "Catch your breath, child. I have no answers either." Finally north. I plant my feet firmly on earth, bellow a guttural, throaty noise, more animal than human. The earth opens, slowly I sink until just my eyes stand above ground. No more questions. There are no answers in the snow and frost. Not in the cold. Not in the desert. Not in the sea. Not in the quarters, not in the elements. They understand nothing of humans. The murders are senseless.  I grapple with my footing again. Four years later. The silence cruel and unnerving.

You must look within, the wind creaks. You must look within. You must look for the place that weeps, the place that hides, and ask it to release you. You must answer the question yourself. You must face that grief, because it is another expression of love. There is great beauty in this world. Look at it longer than the murders. Look at the people holding one another. Look at them longer than the murderer.

I weep for the mothers and fathers, the siblings, the grandparents, for the humans who miss everything now, who have to rebuild themselves, who have to find a reason to get out of bed, who have to go through a first year, who have to come to December, like me, and mourn their children. I tear up thinking of the journey they will lead, the peace that will never come. My own loss seems so small, so meaningless. And that is okay. It is. But it was seismic to me, catastrophic even. 

Lucia is dead four years on Friday. All of these losses coexist and don't battle for dominance. My grief and their grief and the grief of a nation, the world. I have to sit with undeniable truths. In this world, babies die. Twenty innocent children die together in the place that everyone considered safest for them. All this mingles together, jumbles up, and I forget for whom I am mourning. And it doesn't matter. Perhaps I should have always been mourning for all the children who die before they've lived, who die by the hands of violence, who die by the random placement of umbilical cords in wombs, who die by knives on the other side of the world. And I was.

My husband and I held each other and cried. Blubbered, even. It has been a long time since we have done that. We talked about the school shootings. "I can't imagine losing a five year old. I couldn't handle it, Angie. I couldn't." 

I know. I couldn't either, except I would have to, and so would you. Because before she died, we said the same, and then we did.

There is nothing left of comfort. It is meaningless, and besides, we need something more than comfort. We need hope, a sheer idiotic belief in something. I take Mr. Roger's advice to look for the helpers, the assistants, the compassion, the grief, the expressions of love, the people throwing themselves in front of bullets, so children don't die. And I think of this babylost community, who holds each other in the face of grief, lights candles, abides when people no longer will. Compassion is all that is left of good.

Please use this space to share the ways in which the news of the murders in Connecticut have affected you, your family, and your grief. 

glass castle

Jessica is a mom to five, four in her arms and one in her heart.  After the loss of her infant daughter in 2007, she left the corporate world behind, vowed to soak up every living moment and found her writing roots again. I've been reading Jessica's beautiful blog for many years as she has grappled with life after the death of one of her triplets. You can find her wearing her heart on her sleeve at her personal blog Four Plus an Angel. —Angie

photo by Ayrcan

You have played that game, on the computer, the phone, in life, where the water is rushing through pipes and you have to turn the pipes in the right direction so they fit and the water can continue to flow.

You find a straight one, then one that turns to the right, then to the left, some that cross over each other and some that turn back the way they came and then you ultimately get to the end. Finding a piece that will connect it all, you realize that once it is placed, once you slide it into the correct position the flood will come. A path will have been sealed and the pressure that began at the start will find its way through your maze and seep out. It may trickle or gush or pour in buckets but once you have chosen to open gates so carefully guarded you will drown, you are sure of it.

So you don't complete the path, you leave that last piece tilted a bit to the right or jutting back to the left or you just keep picking up pieces and putting them back, knowing they are not where they should be and the pressure you have never released continues to pulse in the maze of your mind.

Life keeps rushing past even though yours stopped. You lost a child and with her went your optimism, your faith. You move and walk and breathe but not fully in or out or forward. Sometimes you want to scream at the world for continuing to spin and sometimes you want to whisper a question of how exactly they all manage to do it.

You are never fully anchored to the ground, your mind and your heart are divided between the earth and the sky and while you wish for a day to just cry, you are pretty certain that a day or a month or a year would not be enough.

Continuing to walk on ground left shaken, you tiptoe around cracks or stomp at the injustice and squelch the desire to pound your fists, because the walls might just come crashing down this time.

Grief and loss have become your glass castle, buried feelings and put off tears your pipeline that may never find land. You are suspended yet buried, trapped in a world of living without someone who should be. 

Does life after the death of your child or children feel like water rushing past you? Or rather, do you feel swept away with life? Do you feel untethered, or grounded? Jessica refers to grief and loss as a glass castle, do you see your grief as a building, and if so, what kind? 

She's In California Somewhere

I was supposed to call him back months ago. He had left a simple message:

Hi, this is Eric from One Legacy. I’m calling in regard to a question you had. Again, this is Eric at One Legacy. Thank you so much.

It was a message we had spent a year waiting for. And it was there for the taking, for calling back, and I sat idle on it, pressing mute, or pause, or whatever it took to buy myself some emotional strength.

They had made it clear from the beginning of the donation process: after one year we could find out if our daughter’s heart valves could be used to help another baby.

One year. I remember wishing the time away, as if knowing what happened to her valves was all that mattered, as if I could skip facing grief and living in sorrow and missing the most important year of my life.

And then the moment was suddenly upon me.

I yearned for good news. I begged for science and circumstances to align in such perfect harmony for there be some life that was made easier, or saved, by the freak accident that took my darling Margot. I desperately wanted there to be a child crawling around somewhere with a part of Margot inside of them. The constant thought of this miracle materializing, of her valves fusing together with ventricles and atriums of another human being, seemed like concrete evidence that something beautiful came from her.

I have taken gifts from her absence, things I have deemed beautiful only because I don’t seem to have a choice to think about them any other way. I have taken the experience and carved out lessons and wisdom from it, become more fully human, more content, more thoughtful. But even all of the gifts in the world seem so trivial in comparison to what Margot got out of the deal, the one who didn’t even get a breath.

But these heart valves. This felt like something real. A gift directly from her to another, not a gift that was painfully extracted by her parents, but entirely, physically, from her.

+++

The nurse told us that if we wanted to donate, we only had a few hours left with her. They needed to keep her cold, she said. They needed to take her in for open heart surgery.

I opened her delicate eyelids and unwrapped the swaddle around her body. I studied every solitary fragment of her flesh, memorizing the shape of her elbow and the curl of her lip, tracing the outline of her sizable hands. I helplessly pleaded with her to miraculously wake up, even though I knew it to be in vain, and then pleaded and begged none the less. Rain cascaded down the window of our third floor ICU room, and I watched the dark ominous sky hovering over Los Angeles, as if nature and the state of my brokenness were in some mysterious union.

When it was time to say goodbye, we were sleeping together on a fold out bed, my arm wrapped around her chest, my nose pressed up against her hair. I placed her body in a clear plastic basin and watched her disappear around the corner.

Almost all of her returned to me a few days later in the form of ashes. Everything but those valves.

+++

Fear has me in a noose. What if there isn’t good news? What if her valves weren’t right? What if they sat idle for too long and were terminated somewhere, thrown into a bin, or saved in a jar.

I’m locked in my bedroom, phone in hand.

Hi, Eric. My name is Josh Jackson and I’m calling you back in regards to my daughter Margot. She died in March of last year and we donated her heart valves and I wondered if you had any information on those valves.

The words come out like one continuous sentence, sputtered out shaky and broken. I feel exposed, laid bare by a year of grief that has slowly eroded the confidence and security and strength that once filled my being.

Yes, hello Josh. I am so sorry for your loss. Let me see what I can find out for you.

There is a kindness in his voice that makes me want to weep.

Thanks for waiting. It seems that we haven’t yet found a match for them, but her valves have recently passed a follow up test that allows them to still be used. Usually our donations get used within the first year, so I would expect them to go to someone soon.

I don’t know what to ask next, even though the questions are streaming through my mind like flashcards.  How do they test usability? What happens if they find a match? Can we find out the name of the recipient if there is a match? Should I call back later?

Silence.

Where are her valves right now? The one question I hadn’t thought of, the one question that matters.

Silence.

They are somewhere in California.

Suddenly I’m thrust into this primal act of fatherhood, still looking for my missing child, as if I somehow forgot that her valves, still workable and life giving, were my daughter.

WHERE? WHERE EXACTLY IS SHE? WHAT IS THE ADDRESS? WHERE ARE THEY KEPT? I HAVE TO SEE HER.

I want to shout and scream, but the words never make it out of my mind. It’s all I can do to hold myself together, to keep myself from running out the door and into the drivers seat and to every lab and hospital in California, in search of what is left of her.

I thank him for his time and effort and grace and vow to call back in a few months, as if I’ll somehow forget.

Eighteen months later and I’m still searching.


-----


How far out from your loss are you? In what ways are you still tangibly confronted with your child’s death?

a girl on the train

I am going to tell you this story. I don't think I ever told it before.

 photo by .aditya.

This was a few years ago, and I was less than a year from Lucia's death, and I was pregnant again and coming home from a midwife appointment in the city. I was on the train. I was listening to Stereolab, holding onto a pole, staring out the window at graffiti and darkness passing underneath the city.

Then I saw her waiting for the train. I couldn't believe it. She walked onto the car, brushed past me. I smelled her without being weird. And she even smelled like I thought she would. She had dark hair and eyes like my husband. I couldn't stop staring at her. She was Lucia grown up. I mean, I thought Lucia could look like her. Then I guess I thought she was Lucia. She must have been twenty-two, or so. She looked athletic with wide shoulders. She wore orange and red, and carried a small purse crossed over her chest, nothing ostentatious. She checked her iPhone and listened to music and tapped her toes. She wore cool, sensible shoes. Clogs. Just like me. And a scarf around her neck.

I whispered Lucia's name, but she didn't budge. I turned away now and again for the sake of convention. But I situated myself so I could mostly stare at her while pretending to look through her, like she was a specter, which of course, she was. And when the train pulled into my stop, I stayed on. I stayed on the train to see her longer. To look at her face. Praying she would smile, or talk. She was my baby, but she didn't know it. I wanted to see the way her neck eased into her shoulder. It was a very adult part of the body, and Lucia was never adult.

My God. Lucia will never be an adult.

The fact hits me like I fell in front of the train instead of rode in it. Lucia will never kiss a boy. She will never go to college, or eat a peach or dance in a rainstorm. I will never run into her randomly on the train where we can ride home together. I sometimes forget the details of all she will miss in my missing. She will not wear sensible shoes on a Tuesday, or crazy heels on a dark New Year's Eve. She will not hate basketball, or love it, even. Lucia is missing everything too. This body, this youth, this sexiness, this life we lead when we are young and death is something conquered, not an inevitable destination. Lucia never left the station.

I have nothing left of her. A wisp of hair, and grief. If there was a tea to take away grief, I wouldn't drink it. It is all I have of her--grief. An astrologer said I ride the train through two worlds--the living and the dead. I will never fit in either place. It is my destiny, he said. By the alignment of the stars, and my birth time, and this life, he said, Remember,  you made this soul contract. You picked your suffering. To me, he said, it looks like you picked the express train to spiritual growth, which means this is going to be a hard life.

I want this grief, this dis-ease of the heart. The grief is love, I think. It is the aching part of love. It is the sad part of love. But it is still love. Grief ties me to her. Aching. Pain. Suffering. They are her calls to me, and in that way, the pain is sweet and beautiful. She is just a name now. To my children. They stopped asking me about her weight, and what age she would be. She is Lucy, the very sad story I told them one afternoon. She is a butterfly now, and maybe a ladybug. She is the dedication of a song, or a picture, but not a real girl. She doesn't ride the train, and listen to music. She doesn't wear her hair down. Not like the other sisters.

This ride home felt like a journey between two worlds. I am Orpheus, walking again with a lyre into the underworld, and it invigorates me. It is not unlike going into 8th Street station. It smells of piss and cigarette smoke. There is a darkness in me. One I finally see. If I embrace it, the astrologer says, I will be happier. Even way back then, before I knew about the darkness in me, I paid the conductor, and followed the girl that could have been my daughter. My Lucia is dead. Her ashes are lumpy (so is my soul.) I probably wouldn't recognize my little girl walking and talking like a twenty year old. After all, I never saw her live. But that girl on the train was her for twelve minutes. And I loved her like my baby. The girl gets off the train and runs down the stairs. I watch her disappear behind a wall. Lucia is dead again.

I cross the platform to the train going back to my home. It's only two stops. The car is empty. It is hard not to cry, so I don't fight it.

Have you ever seen a stranger who reminds you of your child? Is there any adult in your life that reminds you of what your child could have been? Who is it? Do you want to be close to them, or far away? What parts of your child's adulthood do you miss most?