After The Bear Hunt

The discussion boards for Glow in the Woods are truly that warm, welcoming campfire to so many of those who find us in the darkest of journeys. Throughout Glow's five years, the boards have grown tremendously. We are so grateful to how graciously our community continues to abide, listen, and support one another. Through our growth and feedback from our community, we felt it was time to expand and add another board--Parenting after Loss. Whether you were parenting children before your loss, or parenting a child born subsequently, Glow felt it was time to create a space to talk about the specific issues around parenting and grief.  We hope this space will be welcoming to those in all stages of grief and parenting. As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback on the community section of Glow in the Woods (the general board or the ttc/pregnancy/birth after loss board or our new board parenting after loss), please contact us here. We'd love to hear your thoughts. 

Today, we are thrilled to introduce Merry of Patches of Puddles as our new Board Moderator and a regular contributor. Merry's support and love permeates all the nooks and crannies of this community.  Merry's fifth child Freddie lived for eleven days in SCBU before dying of pneumonia. She is parenting Freddie's little brother and four older sisters in the UK. We are so lucky to have her keen eye, compassionate heart, and eloquent voice among ours. --Angie

“You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it…Oh no, you have to go through it.”

So say the words of a rhyme my children sing; lines that have played in my head since I stepped upon this grief path. The Bear Hunt; the long, difficult, fearsome journey.

I tried to find a way to scramble over grief, glide upon its surface and slither down over the other side of a glass dome that reached skyward, holding my baby and my pain inside it. I pledged to write him out of my mind and memory, believing I could escape the trite truisms of the steps of grief. With no intention of reaching acceptance, I relished denial. Busy, stretched beyond measure by the damaged children surviving Freddie alongside me, I pushed my tears to the quietest moments, the dead of night, the bathroom, lonely car journeys of the parent taxi trail. In the daylight, fear and pain on the faces of his sisters when I cried was too awful to behold. Keep it together, put on a brave smile, hold them when they cried. Just keep swimming. Just keep gliding.

Just keep scrabbling desperately to hold on to the life that had been ours, when we could count our children without confusion. When we could hold them all in our arms. When there was no space on the sofa, no space in our hearts, no empty spot between us all.

And then came despair. Choking, horrifying, utterly consuming and black as night and twice as bitter, despair. And I tried to go under it. I told the world and all her wives of my lost son, just to see the shock, see the horror, see the recoil from all the checkout women and frightened postmen who wished the crazy lady away. Begone, with your foul, mud soaked, horrifying grief. Get over it. Move on. Be on your way with your inappropriate love for a boy made of ashes. His loss rose up between us all, the husband and girls who went on and relearned a smile and the mother, woman, wife and now barren and broken part-human who tunnelled through days and wondered how to make another life. Month after month, I sunk beneath blood and anger and disbelief as a never birthday loomed and a life mourning a baby stretched impossibly - broken - in front of me.

You can’t go over it.

You can’t go under it.

Oh, no… you have to go through it.

Through the mud. Through the tears. Through the river that takes the feet from under you. Through the grass that sways above your head, disorientating, blocking the view, all you can see. And all the time dragging my broken children along with me, committed to the path I had chosen - the hunt I had wanted - which was punishing them so utterly.

The work and effort of grief, a journey, a slog, all to find a big black cave and a big black bear and turn tail and run for home, retracing steps, trying to find the place where once you were, trying to keep my other children safe as they bumped and scurried alongside.

And then… and then… lying on the bed, chest heaving from the chase, bones exhausted, tears all cried out and heart hammering. A memory of horror and fear and the jawed yaw of utter destruction, of unimaginable pain, right there, in your mind’s eye.

Slipping… sliding away.

A memory.

He was here. One of us. I do remember him. We did love him. I do love him. He was a person and he is – always - my boy. He was also a journey, one that broke me on every step and which brought me home, but not to the same place.

And, having gone through it, I tell you a truth now. Life goes on. Not the same life. Not the same person. Not scarred exactly but somewhat brutally reshaped.

The journey, now part of me, has the air of a badge of honour to it. I would not be without it. Here, in the unasked for afterglow of grief, I find myself, us, a family, with every decision we make infinitesimally altered by the knowledge that one of us can die.

The lens is different. Everything I do is tinted by the grief lens. My girls go out and I hope to see them safely back. The telephone rings and I hope to not hear of death. A baby is born and my head reels that people ask for weight and gender, not first breath safely taken. My child, admitted to hospital, makes it safely home. I am stunned by survival. The car breaks down, expensively. Nobody died. Our livelihood is precarious. Nobody died. The toddler ballpoint pens the expensive sofa. It’s just a thing. Nobody died.

This is my story, 3 years on. Mine is a journey complicated by my travelling companions; the living children I brought with me, guilt that they know grief, regret that they see fear in my face when illness strikes, sadness that they fumble answers to simple questions about brothers and sisters. Nothing has been the same for them since Freddie died. They do not have the same mother, or father, or family. Everything is a fight to weigh the knowledge of loss against the right to independence. They trod the terror of the subsequent baby path with us and their life is changed because of that.  And his life, the precious princeling who came after, is a kaleidoscope of the fragments of loss, love, longing and fear and joy and wonder that he has as yet no knowledge of and cannot change.

I am not the mother I was. I am twice the mother and half the mother, a patchwork of unwanted experience. I am surviving the hunt and the fear, but I will never be home, not quite.

Where are you on your grief journey? Have you tried to move under it? Over it? Tell us what it is like to move through it.

Advanced previews

Our dog, the world's best dog, is a touch over 19 months old now. We got him when he was two and a half months old, four days before A's fifth anniversary. He was tiny, and mostly black. He has probably reached his adult size and weight-- north of 50 lbs-- by now. He's black and tan, a proper and gorgeous Airedale coloring. He is playful and sneaky and gentle and social. He lets little kids, even kids who don't live here, pull his tail and stick their hands in his mouth. I mean literally elbow deep. A one year old's elbow deep, but still. He even lets selfsame shameless shorties take his most prized possessions, his tasty-tasty cleanly polished bones, straight out of his mouth. 

Monkey says he's a relaxation aid, because it is impossible, according to her, to sit next to that dog, one arm over him, the other hand petting him, and remain tense. Especially after he twists his head up to declare his appreciation. The dog is a saint. 

He is also a damned crazy rat bastard who takes nearly every opportunity to run off for a mad dash around the neighborhood. The woods behind the houses across the street, the back yards of the houses on our side, back and front yards of the houses one and two streets down. As far as we can tell, he never crosses that second street down and never goes farther than one over on the right. He stops by the houses of his doggie friends in the neighborhood for loud and urgent conversations. But mostly he runs, like the wind.

When he's done, he peaceably surrenders to one of us. Next to last time he did this, he actually came to the front door and waited while the search party returned. Oh, did I forget to mention that he's smart? Last year, he dug under the fence so carefully and masterfully that it took us weeks to figure out how he was getting out. Now that we've used that knowledge to close off his escape route, he is reduced to taking advantage of momentary lapses of judgement or inexperienced operation of the front door. But he doesn't run where the cars are (anymore) and he always comes back. 

He bounces when he walks, and his tags jiggle. It's a mood-elevating sound, a reassuring one. I remember the first time I caught him after he escaped, I didn't bring the leash with me as I ran out. So walking back to the house, I had him by the collar. I had to bend a bit to keep a good handle on it. I was supposed to've been mad. But the rhythm of his steps next to me, echoed by the rhythm of the tags, and his whole pleased with himself air-- somehow all of that made me feel mostly amusement mixed with tender gratitude that he exists, that he's ours. 

Mostly, because there was, also, a familiar ping of anxiety. Not, mind you, anxiety that the crazy puppy could've gotten lost or killed by a car just then. No, anxiety about the fact that someday, hopefully a good decade or more on, someday he will die. This doom-preview is better now, though not entirely absent. I think I just got used to it, acknowledged it into background, if that makes sense. Back at the height of its head-messing reign, this thought would loom the largest during the walking of the dog. Possibly due to the limited multitasking potential of the dog walk, the anxiety would expand to fill most of my headspace. One moment I'd be walking this lovely creature, enjoying the sounds of tag jiggle and his happy little bounce, view from behind, and the next I'd get slammed with the complete certainty that one day he won't be here.

It's not that he is the only creature in the household whose existence causes me anxiety. I am, if we are being honest here, a much more anxious person now than I was before. But with the humans, the anxiety tends to ebb and flow depending on what's on life's menu. And with most of them, rational thought is that they will, most likely, outlive me. The dog, on the other hand, is the only one whose death preceding mine is baked in the cake, barring any catastrophic event or illness on my part. With humans, anxiety is about modicum of control, or maybe just an illusion of it. It's about holding on, hoping not to lose them. With the dog, it's about knowing that I can't. 

It's not going to be the same kind of sadness or the same kind of missing. But in getting a dog, we did sign up for an extra dose of that, eventually. I sort of think that living with missing A makes me know that when it happens, I will be ok, terribly sad for a while, but ok. And in the meantime, there's the sound of clinking tags and the consistently high entertainment value of the dog sliding on hardwood as he chases a ball inside the house. And, and, and... 

Do you have pets? What do they mean to you? Has your view of your pets shifted at all after the death of your child(ren)? Did you decide to get a pet after? Or has it made you decide not to get one? 

Are you more anxious now? Or have you found zen of not sweating most things? 

strength.

I refuse to become a seeker for cures.
Everything that has ever
helped me has come through what already
lay store in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong
across my heart.
This is from where
my strength comes, even when I miss my strength
even when it turns on me
like a violent master.
--Adrienne Rich

The early days, my tenderness scared me more than the realization of my mortality. Death never scared me, rather the desperate need I felt to be comforted; to have someone fix my grief; the desperation to have my daughter's death and life acknowledged; to be held, cooked for, and tended to; the pure vulnerability; my inability to control my emotions; my hyper sensitivity; the pure, raw, screeching insomniac grief--that frightened me. It meant the pain would continue, perhaps indefinitely, because of the unchangeable fact that my daughter died, and I could do nothing to prevent it, change it, or make it right. This strong, capable, forgiving person had been permanently transformed into an angry, bitter, grief-stricken beldam without kindness in her heart. That scared the crap out of me.

I thought I knew what grief was before Lucia died. Extreme sadness, longing perhaps. I had no idea that grief is forgetfulness, self-centeredness, anger, moodiness, wanting to be alone when in a group and in a group when alone. Grief was hungry and desperate and pulling hair out from discomfort. It was fear. Times ten thousand. It is the feeling of shrinking and starving. Grief is obsession and living in the past. Grief, unadulterated and unwieldy, seeks a cure. I sought a cure.

I never admitted this to anyone except for in my writing on the internet, where I edited and pruned and plucked out phrases that sounded poetic and raw, but never managed to make my grief sound nearly as ugly as it felt. In person, I remained relatively staid, at times, even gracious. When asked how I was, I said, "As well as can be expected." When people saw me with my two year old, they saw an involved, present mother. Perhaps I forgot that they couldn't hear my inner voice saying over and over again, the mantra of grief, "My God, the baby died. I can't believe the baby died. The baby is dead." Over and over and over. I was so tired of my own voice, and yet could hear nothing else.

I waited for words of comfort to come, but there were none. I waited for someone to see through that veneer, but they didn't. An exposed nerve, I buzzed with irritation. I reached beyond my skin for something to protect that vulnerability. I drank too much, wrote too much, cried too much, complained too much, self-pitied and directed all the kindness I couldn't extend to myself to other grieving mothers, but it still wouldn't change. And because that vulnerability is so cold and uncomfortable, and the grief is so demanding and relentless, I shifted and adjusted. I shoved that tenderness deep down. I thought the ability to hide my vulnerability kept me alive for many years. Maybe that is true, or another in a series of lies I told myself, but nevertheless, I shut down. Shut out. I found something that was much more comfortable than vulnerability. I wrapped myself in unforgiveness, another layer of anger, marked it with the stamp:

JUSTIFIABLE ANGER.
DO NOT REMOVE.

That tenacity, roots tangled in the craggy sides of an uninhabitable place, desperate to find measly drops of water, just enough to survive, became the illusion of strength.

"You are so strong," Random, well-meaning person would say.

 "I don't know how else to be." I would look away.

Not you too.

You have mistaken my anger for strength.

I am a hurt animal.

A wild thing, baring her teeth at everything, waiting to heal, trying not to get eaten.

I need you.

Think like an animal.

Bite the scruff of my neck.

Make me cry.

I am dying of loneliness and grief.

I am dying of vulnerability.

Strength, I had nothing of it. I wanted nothing of it. It was another way for me to be Other. A noble, grieving mother-angel, not a person filled with rage and self-loathing. People said, "Stillbirth, it's the worst thing I can imagine." It isn't the worst thing I can imagine, and the truth is they truly don't even know the worst of it--the shitty, horrible mess in my brain. That the best of it was that I spent time with my dead baby, the worst is leaving her in the hospital to live the rest of my life. They cannot imagine how ugly I was inside, how dark I became, though I thought they could smell it coming off me. I behaved badly after all. I was dying of my own poison. It must have seeped out my pores. I kept going, but nothing I did was strong, noble or sacred. I just kept going. That did not seem like strength to me. It seemed like stupid stubborn obstinance.

"Oh, but that is strength," the wind whispers. "It is knowing you have nothing left and still going on."

The wasteland that lies between what I feel and what is true is frozen and dark, and at night, the ice weasels come. When I traversed that land, I saw that my anger froze all my landscapes, fear killed the plants and overreaction drove away all the people, I grieved all over again. Like it was the first day she died, and I had to live with the reality of my own creation. When I reached out, I could not mend the fences tore down, the bridges I had burned, the wrongly placed words I rejected. I lost my daughter, and gave away all my friends, simply because I was not brave or strong enough to trust them with grief. But when grief came again, it broke open the hard shell that encased everything I had ever believed. Something humble, damaged, but beautiful emerged. Even as it was happening, I saw it emerge, leaving the guilt of who I was behind. I did the best I could with what I knew. That is perhaps the saddest part, that that person was absolutely the best I could be with the knowledge I had. But this new, delicate being emerging searches for meaning again in the trees, the moss, the full moons, the rocks of a thousand shades of healing. My walk through the tundra of anger saved me nothing. It gave me nothing. It served me not at all. Except that it happened, and from it, I emerged. 

Was grief what you expected? How was it different? Did you embrace your vulnerability or your strength? How do you feel when someone calls you strong? In what ways has strength helped you? How has it turned against you like a violent master? 

Not Gonna Panic (Part 1)

Something happened to me, physically, in the wake of holding my dead daughter, Roxy. I felt it happen that day, walking from the room where she was born back to our private hospital room where our family waited, wailing. See, one of the perks of having your baby die is that you get your own private room for a few days. They mark the door with a purple flower, which I assume is to warn nurses not to be cheery and congratulatory. I have wanted to stomp the life out of every purple flower since.

Where was I? Oh yes, the hallway walk. It may have been 20 feet, but in my memory it’s 3 football fields. I remember every zombie step, knowing that there was more horror fighting to get into me than could fit, so my veins felt crowded and noisy with electric, terrible blood. A time-release panic valve was installing itself, and I could feel it. A panic payment plan was set up inside of me. I think I know now, 5 plus years later, that I will not live long enough to pay the debt.

I fell through that day without completely dying of it, but I was different. Not just emotionally. Not just psychologically. I was different, physically. I started having panic attacks within the week. I assumed I was having heart attacks. I was certain I was dying. I went to the ER. I went to the clinic. I went through a battery of tests, wore a heart monitor for a month, etc. “No,” the doctor said, “your heart is fine. It may be post traumatic stress.” I’ve been on anti-anxiety meds for half a decade now. The panic attacks are fewer, but they still come. They can be triggered by adrenaline of any kind (roller coasters, sick kids, playing basketball, etc.) I’m a lifer, most likely. This song is about having one of these attacks. It is the self-talk. It is the darting, random thoughts as I try to keep it together long enough to escape my place of work before I collapse.

Whatever is wrong with you goes all the way
Through your awful last name in the dark
I wonder where that dog will run to?
I wonder how long that dog will run?
You can keep your hand to your chest
You can worship by the elevator, leaving
Calm down
Beating beating beating beating
A mannequin in a dress, an overpass
I hope I never get used to losing you
The sound of a car on a bridge
And the things you can’t take back
No matter how long you live
Calm down
Beating beating beating beating
I’m not gonna panic
I’m not gonna panic
I’m not gonna panic

Since your loss, does anxiety overwhelm you? How do you handle it?

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?