perspective

I am so honored to be welcoming Erica from I Lost a World as a guest writer today. Erica's son Teddy was diagnosed with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia in utero. He was born August 15, 2008, and gone the next day. Erica has shared her beautiful writing and perspective at Glow before, and we are so glad she is back. --Angie

Perspective.

I hate it, I really do.

Something bad happens, something that would rock another person to their foundations, and my response, so often now, is the trite-sounding, “Well, at least no one is dead.” What a cliché.

And I mean it. I really do look at the world this way, and I think that the common perception is that this is a gift, to have your life events bar set so low, to be able to find comfort in a baseline of the people you love being alive. People, the people I think about as regular people, watch sad movies in order to glimpse this perspective for a few minutes, a couple of hours. They talk about remembering and recognizing their priorities.

I am jealous because I used to do that, too. Before I met this tiny little person, so alive and vital and perfect except for a small hole in his diaphragm that meant his lungs couldn’t develop. Before we tried everything we could think of to save him and before we saw that it hadn’t been enough. Before I held him in my arms and watched him try and fail to breathe.

And now, for the rest of my life, I have been cursed with this perspective.

photo by kalyan02.

My favorite Terry Pratchett quote, from his book The Truth, is this:

“There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half-full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half-empty. The world BELONGS, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: EXCUSE ME? THIS is my glass? I don't THINK so. MY glass was full! AND it was a bigger glass!”

I often wish I were better at living that way, at demanding more from others and from myself, at being the fearlessly squeaky wheel. Sometimes I fantasize about being braver and insisting on getting my share. But one of the things that can happen when your baby dies – your baby, that entire world’s worth of love and possibility – is that you go quiet. You try to fly under the radar of luck or fate or God or the devil or the Universe. You hold what you love extra tightly and wish you could borrow Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak as you worry about the next disaster, that other shoe, the next “character building” experience, that next test of faith or fortitude. I find it hard to squeak, even when I should.

A curse, I tell you.

And yet, not entirely. I wouldn’t have given up any of my time with Teddy, not even if it meant I could get rid of this perspective. Ever since Teddy’s death, I’ve been longing for my old stories – stories of home and safety and knowing my place in the world. I enjoyed living those stories, and my new stories are still uncomfortable and frightening. But I know that when I am afraid to look through the lenses of my new perspective, my stories are stale and trite and unsatisfying. Which is worse, somehow, than uncomfortable or frightening.

My perspective has changed and this has changed me. I see death around corners and feel ghosts in summer breezes and when bad things happen, I say, “At least we’re alive,” and mean it even though I will never be able to say “things work out for the best” again. I can say “I’ll miss you forever, Teddy,” instead, and “I’ll want you back forever,” too.  I can craft different stories from that place – a bleak place but an honest and sometimes strangely beautiful one.

How have your perspective and stories changed? Do you think that your life is different because you are afraid to draw attention to yourself by demanding more? Do you see your changed perspective as a gift or a curse, or both? How so?

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?

 

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?