quietly forward

I don't want to share her anymore.

Initials traced on sidewalks, birth date carved into wood.

MARGOT WAS HERE, inked on my forehead.

Dropping her name like rain, sprinkled over the city, in grocery stores and preschool and dinners with acquaintances.

Neighbors. Bartender. Old friends.

I have another daughter, I'd lament, with downward eyes, searching for a remedy.

It was like this in the beginning. Shouting, screaming, knees in the mud, heart on my sleeve, anything to feel some sort of connection to her.

For months and a year and more months, I wore her story around me like a cloak, heavy and tattered from the daily grind, dark material, drenched in sadness and anxiety. I didn't care how messy it all appeared. There was no choice to put on the cloak, or to share her, to sprinkle her around the city. Grief doesn't give you a choice. I woke up to life without her every day and that reality felt like all there was.

Somewhere along the ticker I’ve gone quiet. The pulse of my sorrow still beats, steadily, methodically, but sharing her so freely feels uncomfortable now, like it’s a violation of our intimacy.  

Shhhhhhh Daddy, I imagine her whispering, they don't need to know.

Suddenly I’m overcome with this urge for privacy, for things left unsaid, for the cloak to whither and fall, for the sidewalks to wash away, for the wood to rot. I want her all to myself. I want the ways she has changed me to be something that I alone know the extent of. I want my thoughts about her kept only for us, sacred secrets between a father and daughter. I want her ashes, the rocks from her river, the remnants from her brief existence to be tucked away, hidden from bystanders, hallowed ground reserved only for a few.

It’s now in the quiet where I find closeness with her, in the whisper of her name, in the privacy of my own thoughts, in the ways in which she has changed me.

 

 

Do you ever feel quiet? Do you feel like not sharing your children so much? If so, what brought that on for you? I wonder if some of you might feel somewhat off by the idea of being quiet, of not sharing your chlldren so freely?

 

 



the space between

We chose life for me, you see? We are mothers, remember. In all spaces we are mothers even before we are and so our weapons are like limbs, our movements our stories. My scars are horrendous and beautiful because they are thresholds. What kind of goddess or god lives in you? What do you think of the space in between life and death? How long does it last? How deep is it? Are you still in it? Can you ever escape it?

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Youngest Kind of Pain

Since this is Valentine’s Day, I figured it would be appropriate to introduce a song I wrote about the most depressing date ever: the first one Terra and I went on after our first daughter, Roxy Jean, had died.

I honestly can’t even remember exactly what we did, except that we found ourselves walking along the same sycamore and maple-lined campus avenue where we’d first begun dating, some 16 years prior, as two gutter punks trying to find a way to get drunk outside of Spaceport Arcade (yes, we are that old). We’d fill our Styrofoam gas station cups up with such a strong ratio of vodka to red kool-aid (hey it was 1991, and we were broke) that we had to drink it quickly in order to keep the alcohol from disintegrating the cup from the inside out. We’d run wild through the night in a pack like wolves. Sometimes between the buildings, sometimes through the woods by the lake, and sometimes we’d lie around on the dirty floor of someone’s smoke-filled apartment, listening to The Misfits or The Violent Femmes. I smoked Winston cigarettes. She never did.

But I digress. This song is not exactly about those days.

It’s about the night that we walked like ghosts through a past that seemed to belong to other people now. We didn’t want to drink vodka out of Styrofoam cups while running through the night air looking for adventure. We wanted something stronger. We wanted to go home. It was too quiet without our 4-year-old son to distract us and especially without out the baby we should have been losing sleep caring for. We just walked, and the silence surrounded us. We were paralyzed by our shared pain and we did not want to be alone with it.

Oh my God, Oh my God, this is the place we used to walk
When the darkness had yet to leave it's darkest kind of mark
And we were strange
We were borderline deranged
And you had eyes that held the water like saucers full of rain

Through the lotus went the light and I saw something new revealed
I saw the scars from the fight
I saw the wounds that never heal
So strike the stage, I guess nothing can remain
All this running, fucking running, and we're no farther from this place
We're in the youngest kind of pain

We save the softest words for strangers
Because we don't know how to say it
And we don't know what the name is
No baby sleeping in the manger

And there's no one here to save us
There's no one here to save us
There's no one here to save us 

What was your first date like after the loss of your baby? What was it like to try to be romantic? 

 

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.