hard hearted

I am grown hard hearted you might say.

Grief - which might have softened me and uncovered my humanity - turned my core to stone, you might say.

If you did not know.

Sometimes I do not know.

I think of him, wait for grief to rise up and bubble to the surface, tears to come, grief to reassemble, manifest in the centre of my soul - but nothing comes. I wait to be strangled by the loss of him, for my arms to lift themselves up, shocked and empty from the lack of the weight of him. Nothing comes.

I try to write, show the world that still I miss him, that my whole self is changed and nothing will ever be the same without him but the words seem bland and empty now.

I miss that pain. I hanker for it. I ache, in a way I never thought I would for a bottle of grief to take out and tip up on my sleeve to sniff the scent of loss and feel it fill my nostrils, freeze my brain. I want to huddle, struck to stone by the loss of him, the utter total disappearance of my boy. I want to stare at photos and feel tears stream down my face, flicking away from them as child or husband strays to my side. I want to remember when there was no way to make it through a day without saying his name. I want to be back in the supermarket, telling a horror struck assistant over frozen peas that my baby died and so I can't cook a proper meal just now. I want to be folding baby clothes and finding places to hide them, cramming crates into a cupboard and forcing coats and blankets over them, tears of rage and hollow pain pouring down my face. I want to be in sunlight, the world dark around me, furious the world is spinning, wind is blowing, sea crashes and days continue. I want to hear his loss in every song on the radio, pick up every book to read and find a Freddie in the pages. I want to flinch away from baby aisle and pushchair, avert my eyes from bump and newborn, shut the computer in despair as another pregnancy is announced, another baby born.

But time has moved on. The days that sparkled with over bright reality, harsh and glaring and scraping the surface of my skin till I was raw and broken are gone. I felt everything then - and I hated it. Longed for it to end.

My life has grown to hold this pain, pushed it small, forced the grief and disbelief to a tiny molten core inside me, encased and covered by a crust I cooled and grew to cover it.

I can ignore the core. I exist around it, function, smile, talk of my children and skip a beat as I describe them, choose to keep him private. I have learned to slide my tectonic plates over the places where the fault lines are, pushing the broken, ragged places beneath a smoother surface. What was once a brutal landscape has softened, moulded, eroded away, grassed over, become old and gentle.

And if you saw me, you might think me heart hearted.

You might think I do not care. You might think I learned to live without him. You might think I had recovered.

***

I watched one night a story of savannah; the dusty landscape, parched and bare and half dead itself with bare branched trees, empty river, devoid of food or greenery. The smallest elephant in the pack gave up, lay down, stayed down. His bewildered mother, on her knees, tugging at him, lifting at him, trying to pull him back to life and her desperate moan, her grief, her utter helpless disbelief to lose him broke through all the defences I had built.

It was her moan that broke me. It could hardly have been more human. I do not think there could have been an ounce more pain contained in it, not if she had had words to say to us.

I cried for her. Gasping, wrenching, sobbing tears.

That's how recovered I am.

In the early days I had a million triggers; it seemed as if the world was determined to bring me down at every turn. The triggers are more subtle now and often unexpected and in a strange way I welcome them at times. What triggers your grief? Do you have ways to manage them, have you learned to accommodate them in your life or have you had to change to avoid them? Do you, like me, ever welcome them?

The never-ending story

The month after I got pregnant with A, I started a new job, New post-doc, same institution, different emphasis. My friend from the post-doc before this one started a new job that same summer. This semester now is the second of her seventh year at that job. Next fall she will be on sabbatical.

Perhaps it's the oddity of the academic culture in which I stew that seven year increments mean so much to me. Sabbatical, the time to not do what you are normally doing at the institution, but to still be paid your regular salary for the time is not a uniquely academic phenomenon anymore, but it is still mostly academic. It's a nice incentive and a chance to do something you don't usually get a chance to do-- learn something new, experiment with a new approach, or just catch up on everything you normally don't get to do.

In my religion too, though I don't very often participate in its formal rituals, 7 is a big deal. After all, we're the ones who started the whole day of rest thing, as God rested on the seventh day, having done all the heavy lifting in the first six. The idea for sabbatical itself comes from the Torah (Old Testament) rules about letting one's fields and one's people rest on the seventh year. 

Seven. Seven. Seven. It rings in my head with a strange wistfulness. He's not more gone over the precipice of seven than he was before it. So why does it gnaw on me so very much this snowy-snowy winter? Why do I find myself coming over to the fireplace mantle more often these days, just to glance at the little stuffed puppy we have that is sort of our A avatar, just to flick it on its nose, or to gently kiss the same? I miss him insanely, voraciously. I am sad, anew, maybe more now than before, that we didn't get to know him. Is this me missing him as a seven year old boy? I don't think I've felt this way about other ages before. Why now? I was remembering Monkey at seven the other day. She started competing in gymnastics that year. She seemed so very big to me then. The current crop of first year gymnasts seem so little.  

The Cub, the boy who came after A, he's five and a half now. He's grasping at the enormity of our collective loss, of his personal loss. This year, after asking for the upteenth time how and why A died, he got to the very edge of it-- "but we didn't even get to see him when he was big," he said, his voice ringing with indignation at the unfairness he just discovered. Yeah, kid, it's like that. And man, don't we all wish we would've gotten to see him when he was big.  

When we first started Glow, some of our readers were five years or even more out from the death of their children. I was a year and change. Five seemed so far removed, a lifetime or more. I thought that somehow it would be different at five. Or maybe I didn't. I sensed from the beginning that this is a lifetime commitment kind of a gig, at least for me. I remember saying and writing, even in that first year, that I expected to learn to live with this, but never expected to get over it. And I certainly have learned to live with A's absence a lot more now. These days I can get through a whole morning of classes without thinking about him. But then, to be fair, I also don't usually think about the rest of the clan during class.

So is this winter's intense longing just a part of ebb and flow, or was the thought of my friend's sabbatical also messing with my head? I know and I knew that grief can't be scheduled, that it does what it does when it must. But did a small strange part of me expect a grief sabbatical to roll in with the first day of February? I suppose it doesn't much matter except as another instance of proof that my son and my grief for him is, really and forever, a part of who I am.

What milestones have you crossed so far? Have they held any surprises for you?

Would you want a sabbatical from your grief, one that you could schedule or one that would come up on a predetermined schedule?   

inside the broken

There are things which broke on that day which will never be repaired.

My ability to give a toss, for one thing. I walked out of the hospital wearing pyjamas, clutching a yoghurt. Less than an hour after watching my 11 day old son die, I left the building having forgotten to dress but feeling it was important to not waste the money spent on a breakfast yoghurt that my throat had been too constricted to eat.

A million times I have reconstructed that morning, imagined that I screamed and howled and refused to be parted from him, imagined myself cradling him - illegally outside a car seat - on the journey home. Imagined his breathless body in our home, loved by us all, for a few hours. Just a few. Long enough for all of us to hold him.

A piece of me broke when I laid the body of my child upon the bed, turned my back, walked away, left him forever. I went quietly. I walked with measured steps, climbed inside my car, composed myself for breaking the news at home.

I stared at the car in front of us, proclaiming in a jolly yellow sign "baby on board" from the back window.

I didn't cry, or snarl, or instruct my husband to ram their smug, unknowing selves off the road with their sneering, crowing, baby sign.

I don't miss the drama queen, nor the woman who put her own needs and wants first and had a baby to suit herself. She broke. She is long gone.

The mother who arrived labouring and optimistic was not the one who walked out empty armed and brokenhearted. I wonder at what became of her on those haunted corridor days, the long nights hovering above a SCBU crib. I wonder at the mother who left, grief already put to one side, able to turn her back to a beloved but dead son and focus on the living.

I would not have believed that I had that in me. I would not have believed that my soft soul, so often such a shaken and shifting thing, would have hardened, frozen, stiffened and done the deed.

I am not sure if I want to be the mother who walked away. It does not feel honourable nor does the walking illustrate the love, or the desire to stay forever, suck him inside of me, curl up upon that bed with him inside my arms and keep him warm with my warmth until we both grew cold.

But the one who arrived home. Broken, yes, but strong. So very, very much stronger than anyone believed. Least of all me.

There are things that broke inside of me that day; faith, trust, patience and tolerance. Energy for the small worries, some measure of mercy for human foibles are long gone. I do not wish to be troubled by the minutiae of petty irritations. I do not suffer them gladly.

What was left, when all that cracked and fell away, was new, pressured hardened, solid, changed.

I survived.

My son died, in my arms, under my gaze.

But I survived. I changed, changed deeply to my core, but I have survived. Sometimes, I rather resent that it is possible to do so.

Can you identify parts of your personality that have changed since the loss of your child? Are there changes you welcome in some way or do you resent them utterly? People talk about 'becoming a better person' as an aspiration after experiencing loss; is it possible for that to happen? Is it damaging to even try? In what ways has grief been a journey for your 'self', your character and how do you feel about it if it has?

the scbu legacy

There is a boy on my lap, ten months old, and he's been gasping for breath all evening and the antibiotics that should be helping are making a red rash creep up his cheeks. It's getting harder to breathe now and I'm looking at him and I know what the doctor - kind, understanding - is going to say next.

"I think we need to admit him."

I'm all on my own with a million screaming voices in my head and I don't know how to help him - or me - and a tear splashes down on his face.

I'm always raining tears on my boys.

And then she says:

"He will be okay."

Beat. Follows Beat. Follows Beat.

I look up and I can feel the look that I give her.

"I've been told that before."

Flatly.

Don't tell me this will be okay. You know nothing. You people can't save my boys. I don't believe you.

***

There is a boy on his lap, ten days old, and he's arching and gasping and the room has stilled to a horror struck silence. He's been stable - doing better -  but suddenly the world has dissolved and a hiccuping gulp for air has become a desperate grapple for life and he's suddenly all ours, our responsibility and I can see that he's dying and it's going to be unbearable, painful, the cruelest and worst possible ending.

The antibiotics that should be saving him are doing nothing and no one knows why.

I know what she's going to say next. Kind, understanding.

"I think it's time to make a decision. If you wait, there won't be a decision to make."

Beep. Follows Beep. Follows Beep.

Damn monitors. Damn wires. Damn tubes that came between us and didn't save him. I don't know what to do to help him. Or me.

And then I do.

I look up and I can feel the look that I give her.

"Do it. One last chance. Only one. Give him till tomorrow to try to live."

Don't tell me this will be okay. I've been telling you for ten days that this won't be okay. And you can't save him. You don't know why, but you can't save him.

And I'm all alone, all night, with a boy who said no to his one last chance and who chose to give up on breathing and chose to reject the help that all the medics who wanted to save him offered and who left me, with a million voices screaming in my head, with the knowledge that I let him go because that was all the mothering I could give him. That was all the kindness I could offer. That was for the best, for him, for all of us.

***

We don't talk about the SCBU days. We don't talk about how the rhythmic beep of a monitor still sends us into silent meltdown. We don't talk about how each illness, erroneous blood test, each new health problem for our girls and rainbow boy forces us to silently confront the reality that our child died and when we needed them, the doctors couldn't save him. Didn't know. Can do so many brilliant things but couldn't save a little boy who lacked the fight to live. We don't talk about how one doctor said he would do well, that 24 hours later we crashed as another spelt out what 'do well' might mean for a boy who didn't want to suck. We don't talk about the peak as he opened his eyes and began to respond or the pit of despair that hauled us down as something inexplicable tore him away from us again. When our subsequent child is - repeatedly - admitted to hospital with breathing problems (and lives, I grant you) I go alone to care for him. Alone beats the companionship in terror of the SCBU parent bedside journey.

Just waiting for the balloon to go up. Just waiting for the hammer to fall.

Three years on, we do not let ourselves look at Freddie's 11 days and acknowledge how easily it could all happen again. And that means we do not look at his life at all.

***

They couldn't save him. They didn't know. And so how can we ever believe  in "it will be okay" ever again?

How has the loss of your child changed your feelings to illness since? How has it altered your parenting to subsequent or other children? Are you stronger or weaker in crisis since? Do you see death lurking around every corner or do you thumb your nose at it? And if you experienced a SCBU (NICU) journey, what is it's legacy in your life since?

felled

The most extraordinary life grows out of dead trees.

 

photo by reassaure. 

Ferns and orchids. Lichen and fungi the color of absurdist paintings. Small toads find refuge under the decay. The forest bed swallows death into a loamy mound of old and new growth. A birch bark lies just beyond. It tells the tale of circles, births and deaths, the years unfurl. I hold it up, that shell of stability, the center falls out like rich soil. I whisper my story to the bark scroll. These words, masquerading as scratches on its old skin, appear on its shell.

My daughter died. I wrote the story out long after it served any usefulness. I wrote about how the grief was gone. No one read about my not-grief anymore. It didn't hurt to have people turn away. I would have turned away in my early months, but I kept writing through it. I would let go of the grief, and then pick it up again. Because since she died, it has always been about her death. Maybe before her death, it was about her death.

There were others who came before me, who reached back. A simple gesture, but monumental, I see now. They revisited their grief while abiding mine. They kept silent and listened to my story and so I did the same, until reaching back no longer served any one. My hands are empty now as my story unfurls. There is new life here. And my story must become part of the fertilizer of others.

I wrote longer than I should have. The reaching was for me, pulling my unforgiveness along, leaving bits of it on the forest to become something beautiful. For when I listened to the other stories, I became more forgiving of my own story, of my own culpability. I didn't kill her, yet I have spent nearly five years forgiving myself for her death. Only you understand that.

Nothing. Nothing can ever make Lucia's death okay. And nothing, not one thing, can ever bring her back. A paradox that no longer confounds me.

Grief is as changeable as the forest. You never trek in the same woods twice. And grief is the same. You never write about the same grief twice. There is awe and emptiness and a void of her that is unique and different in every moment. Yet what I write sounds the same, over and over, because I began looking back at my grief, rather than writing of the present grief. The present grief became the fabric of the forest, the greens in everything. It is still there, the grief, that is. It is my mistake to say that it is gone. It is just different. It is a gratitude, and a comfortability in this life, despite her death. In the early years, the writing became a way to not feel grief. I could explicate a sentence, diagram it, break it down. The words meant nothing but grammatical math. I felt something, but did not, or rather, could not feel the true weight of her absence. I made it pretty, wrote moss around it, wove nature into the story, but make no mistake, it was still daughter-death. Ashes and dead babies. Sterile hospital rooms and calls to funeral homes. Sisters never played with. Babies never cooed after. Three broken people trying to remake a family. Over and over again.

But then it would catch up with me, and I would feel that grief with the weight of a redwood, leaning on my back. 

When a woman grieves alone in the forest, does she make a sound?

I made it a point to be heard when I was felled. I started forest fires, and shot off shitty emails and wrote angry blog posts indicted everyone for my solitary grief. I entangled the hearing with the reaching. My heart burst open, broken, bleeding, raw. And I keened. 

THIS TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE THING HAPPENED TO MY FAMILY!

I screamed it. I would not be silenced so others could feel better about dead babies and grieving women and communities of people who spring up in the dark corners of the internet grieving their children that never lived. I would not be shamed because I painted it, or felt sad about never knowing my daughter, or wore my heart on my sleeve, or for starting a literary arts journal around the art of grief. Maybe all that happened for way too long, but it happened just the way it needed to happen. 

Today, my grief is grown over. The Now of Angie exists, absent of raw grief and anger, simply because I wrote about it and cried in public and arted and complained and felt sorry for myself and felt gratitude and made people uncomfortable and only talked to grieving people for a while and lived moment to moment and created rituals around my grief and made thousands of mistakes. It happened because I grieved out loud, in front of God and everyone. When I fell in the forest, I made a sound. It was a terrible, beautiful, righteous sound only the bereaved understand.

I am walking away from the writing about Lucia's death, not because I couldn't keep writing or because I no longer grieve, but because my writing serves no one anymore. Least of all me. Felled by her death, the forest floor crept over me. Overtook me. And small writhing insects made a home in me, something flew away from the forest floor, others stayed. New life grew in me, out of her DNA which still lives in me.

She is dead. We are alive. This is the great noble truth of our family.

With immense gratitude, I share my last post with the Glow community. Thank you for abiding with me on this grief journey through the last almost five years, for loving me when I could not love myself, and for sharing your stories and babies with me. Through the next few months, I will be transitioning out of the role as editor as well. I am passing the reigns to Burning Eye. Her creative fire and inspiring words will carry this space for new parents walking this dark road, and as always, Merry will continue guiding the discussion boards with aplomb and compassion. Together, I know they will continue to stoke the fires of Glow in the Woods' warm welcoming circle of parents.

Tell me, then, about your grief. How have you been making noises about your grief? Are you feeling heard? Are any parts of your grief are grown over? And what still flourishes?