gone

Four years. On Sunday it will be four years since I held Freddie in my arms while he breathed slower and slower until I could gently feel his wrist, that tiny, purple-cold hand already turning white and know that I could feel no pulse, that he was gone. That eleven days of fraught love, fierce hope, fluttering joy and brutal instinct had subsided into a quiet room, still bed, arms that held.

I've tried to remember how to summon the tearing pain I felt back then, honour him in some way with eleven days of memories, quiet time, thoughtful words. Tried to find some way to make meaningful the loss of him, the hole of him, the whole sorry mess of death and destruction and all the ribbons of grief that have tied themselves around the feet and limbs of our family.

I could find gratitude. Friends have surrounded me in community this year, making daffodils for him, posting pictures of them from all around the world as they dance and shine and call a little baby boy to memory. Gratitude I can do. I can be grateful for finding gratitude.

I could find rage. Rage that when one of my children changes school next month I will have to find the words to explain that yes, it was four years ago, but she is still affected by her brother's death and that everything they learn about her must be tempered with the understanding that she has this loss in her soul. Rage that when people can't find their way into the mind of my youngest daughter, they have to remember that she locked up sadness and hid it inside herself and learned to be impassive when she was just five years old. Rage to see my false jollity hurting my biggest girls, old enough to know I'm faking, not worldly wise enough to understand why. And wondering if it means I'm okay in there, behind the jolly. I don't want that for them. Rage that all I can do on his birthday is try to smile for as long as the girls are looking at me, that we go the day without saying his name, that we laugh and make the best of it - so British are we - and then I look back at the photos in the evening and there is sorrow written across the face of the man I love. And he probably didn't even know it was there. Would probably say it wasn't there. But I know his face and I know it was.

I could find regret. Regret and resentment for a boy who had dark eyebrows and who never got to hold my face and utter the words his brother does - 'More! No! Here! Go! Again!' - that Freddie looked for me in need just once, when he crashed and they jerked him back and I saw him eyes wide and alarmed at the fuss and I was behind the mess of nurses and thoughtless registrar and couldn't ease him. Wasn't the person for the moment. I can find regret that four years have passed and family life is busy and sometimes the candles for each of his eleven days are not lit till late at night, resentment that his brother broke my thoughts of him by getting ill during those days and I had to wrestle my focus, look at now - not then - and I was angry at that. Angry at them both. At both my boys. Together.

I should be angry at them both for colluding to eat all the biscuits or for drawing on the wall, not because one is dead and stopping me from dealing with the others asthma and the other has asthma and is stopping me concentrating on the other being dead.

That's not how it should be.

But I couldn't quite find the babylost mother in all of that. She was missing.

Then the news arrived. A beautiful young woman lost. A daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife. Someone with it all before her, a family who had already suffered enough, a family broken to pieces from out of the blue.

And it all came back. I left the house one day and when I came back our world had shattered. A parent should not have to tell the world a child has died. Sisters should not sit, shell-shocked, asking again if this is true - how can it be true? How can life become death? No one who loved should have to pick up the pieces, carry on, make the best of it, fill the gaps, learn to smile again. Keep going because there is no choice and you cannot simply die along with them.

I can see them, in my mind's eye, just like I see every family who pitches into grief. The sofa still feels the same when sat on. Meals must still be cooked for hungry children. Deeds must be done, from the extra-ordinary horror of arranging a funeral, to the mundane of putting out the bin. Life stops and carries on and your head feels a million miles wide, light as air, deranged by the ordinariness of the bizarre.

One minute you are just a family and the next minute nothing will ever be the same again. Beyond pain, that other father said. And yes, I see the sense and madness in that. Losing a child is a place beyond pain and you learn to live there.

Four years. My boy should be four years old on Sunday. I've had long enough to know this happened to us, long enough to be back to happy days and a healed(ish) heart.

But he's gone - and I still do not really believe in it. Do not believe these four years have happened, that we've lived them and survived them.

Just... gone... just like that. Gone.

People talk about the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Is it a lineal experience for you or a cycle that repeats? How do you cope with your changing emotions? How do you cope with hearing about loss in the wider world since losing your child? Does it affect your emotions in anyway?

lost boy

"I carry you in my heart."

It's not a poem I enjoy hearing. I cannot find love or joy or hope or romance in it.

I find a dead baby, not in my arms, breathing slower, not breathing, carried away by gentle arms and leaving a torn and bloodied hole through my chest.

I don't know what it means, anyway, this platitude. I don't carry anything, not even love, in a pumping mass of artery and muscle.

My baby died and he took my romantic side with him. I can say that and twist my mouth bitterly.

"I carry you in my brain," perhaps?

Less romantic, far less palatable and hardly picturesque. I carry him in my seething mass of mysterious grey tissue, the very stuff that in him, sweet boy of the dark eyebrows and chubby limbs, was so apparently ineffectual.

Brains equal memories and memories are few and far between. Eleven days is not enough at best to make a pitcher full of memories and the pictures... oh the pictures... they stole all the others, superimposing themselves on the feel and smell and joy of you. My precious, blessed pictures, the handful I took, treasured, adored, that robbed me of everything else I might recall.

"I carry you in my stomach," might work?

Perhaps. I did carry him there, in my belly; there he was safe, mine, loved. There he moved, swished, grew, kicked, hiccuped and dwelt neither poked nor pinched nor jabbed or stabbed.

When the pain comes, it is my midriff I pull in; it swoops and clenches and cramps with grief that has nowhere else to go. I wrap my arms across it, fists clenched, tense, fuming. Grief lies leaden there, taking all the space that once was yours.

I do not carry him in my arms. This I know. I do not keep him in my sight, running ahead with sisters' laughing, I do not carry him on my back, save when I feel bent beneath the weight of another year without him. I do not carry him forward.

I carry him in my silence. I carry him in the construction of a sentence that leaves a space for the unspoken child. I carry him in my grammar. I carry him in my tolerance as other people expect babies and do not fear death. I carry him in my wordless hiding of the spectre I am, not speaking the caveats that scream in my head at others careless surety. I carry him in my being, this woman who watches herself from corners, bemused - still bemused - at the person she has become. I carry him in my flat expression as song lyrics twinge my mind and recall my loss. I carry him in a brittle smile and tearless eyes.

I carry him in the sudden silence, the choked lost words that catch me unawares when I tell someone, unexpectedly, that I lost a child. 4 years on and still I can find myself blindsided that there are people in my world who do not know. That I carry him - my son - so hidden, that he is not written on my face.

So this now, is grief, 4 years on. Living with it. Still mystified by it. Bitter, accepting, tolerating, adept.

There are days when I think Freddie dug depths in my soul and mined me so deep that I found a shining beautiful part of myself I might never have met without him. And there are other days when I think the loss of him made me so shallow, so brittle, that it is almost as if I do not feel at all.

What has grief done to you? Would you be without the pieces of you that have been unearthed by it? What feelings are you experiencing now, as you journey on without your child? Are you bitter, accepting, angry, blank? Do you have a sense of carrying your child in some part of you or in a place? Are there words, songs or music that hold you to your child or repel you?

Community Voices: Grief is...

Today we are very pleased to present two more of Glow's community voices.

This first piece is by Ruby. Ruby writes: My second son Edgar died on the day he was born, 21 December 2012.

There is the ocean we went to to shake out baby ashes from a cliff-top. The ocean at the westernmost tip of Wales, a sublime spot, above a wide curving bay where his brother is digging in the sand and flying a little kite. The kite is up and down, trailing along the ground, bobbing up in the sky, hopping across the sand, tacking out above the line of the cliffs. Rising, falling, turning, falling, flapping, toddling. The boy running about is the only child visible to the eye. There’s no baby brother sleeping in our bright-blue beach tent either. His name is in the sand. I scratched it in with the child-size yellow spade meant for sandcastles. The sun is shining and the waves of the ocean are rushing onto the sands, rushing over and over, shushing my grief.

My grief is another ocean. A wilder ocean, an ocean of raging tears. So many tears left to cry, stretching out to the horizon. An ocean from which tsunamis crash over the established land and crush the buildings out of it, leaving in its wake a scene of devastation and no human in sight; there’s no-one left before that ocean. My grief is a vast, slate-grey ocean on which I’ll never come to shore.

There is the ocean we went to to shake out baby ashes from a cliff-top. And then there is the ocean of my grief.

The second piece is by Christina O'Flaherty. Christina is a psychologist and mother of two boys, with a third boy expected in April. She writes to share the experience of losing Finn, her first son, and the lessons loss has taught her.

Grief, during these last three years since I lost Finn, has been my teacher.  At first, I riled and raged against him, as I did most painful experiences in my life.  I fought the lessons and the process, outraged that my life had been so cruelly disrupted, but my patient teacher persisted.  Sometimes stern, often compassionate, my teacher continued to gently guide me to the lessons I needed to learn in order to move forward.  These were the hardest things I’d ever been asked to learn.

In fact, I confused them with punishment, which in some ways helped me to turn inward for an answer as to why this was happening to me.  But, I couldn’t really be sure the lessons would serve me until, a year and three miscarriages later, I felt I had nothing left to lose.  That’s when I learned to listen; to observe the lessons coming out of the chaos around me, like one of those pictures where a perfectly clear 3D image finally emerges from a mess of dots when you stare at it for long enough. 

Grief’s lessons transformed me and I think that was Finn’s purpose in this world.  I miss him desperately but I thank him for his legacy of lessons and love.

Where do you find yourself--right now--in this ebb and flow of grieving our children? Do you perceive a change in your grief from day to day? Month to month? Year to year? What kind of ocean are you in? What kinds of lessons are you learning?

the other way

Some scientists say there are parallel worlds, realities stacked side by side like books on a shelf, or piled high in an old, dusty attic.  That seems obvious to me now that I have a whole other life hidden in my head.

The day went smoothly, the birth long but ultimately raw and right and beautiful and true.  Those first insane and breathtaking days when Silas was in our arms and screaming in our ears and staring into our eyes seemed to pass instantly and slowly, all at once.  The uncertainty of new-parenthood was a knot of fear and hope and determination in the core of my being.  I was positive I was the happiest person in the entire world, but then I'd look at my wife Lu as she breast-fed him, and I wasn't quite so sure.  Maybe the happiest man on Earth, I thought, settling for that and into the couch next to their bonded bliss.

Weeks turned to months and already a big baby, he grew fast on mom's milk.  I learned to change diapers, to hear the language of his wailing cries in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the everything.  The middle of everything, that's exactly what he was whether he was awake or asleep, or whether I was, too. He slept well.  He was ahead of the curve.  Naps were long and pleasant.  He weaned easily and ate everything.  He learned to talk early and told us things I could never imagine.

On it goes, that impossible world, each day we didn't live that way seared into my mind as time pressed on.

The not-so-funny-part is that I had to make it all up before Zeph came along, but now I know exactly, specifically, precisely every single fucking detail of everything that we missed and everything we won't have. That parallel world I first inhabited wasn't just a figment of my imagination, it was the only salve to my damaged soul.  Simply accepting this world with all of its not-Silas-ness was a physical impossibility. I fantasized that whole other way as I cried and drove or lay stewing wide awake deep in the night, not hearing the wails of my dead son.

For years I was a shadow of myself, a projection of what I should be, even as half of me was gone within, wading into the deep deep deep waters of grief and anger, of loss and pain, of utter and complete rage that the midwives had failed us, that this is how the Universe rolls, and that it had just rolled right over us squashing us to nothingness and drowning us in tears.

But when Zeph was born, everything began to change in that parallel world.  Instead of feeling split in two, divided equally between the what-is and what-should, I had to focus strongly on the life in front of me.  Silas as his three year old older brother was harder to see than the baby we never had, and now the baby we did.  As Zeph grew day by day and the fantasy vision of Silas's life was shattered on the shrieks and laughter of an actual baby, I felt that other way slowly fade and dissolve, merging into the single path we now tread.

It is a relief to be whole, even with the hole.  Living halfway in a hope that could never be was maddening and exhausting.  Silas is gone.  Zeph is here.  In order for Zephyr to have the joyful life I want him to have, the only thing I can do is to be here with him, all the time.

But that other life is in me, still.  Still I grieve.  Still.

~~~~~~~~~~~

What do your parallel worlds look like?  How much time do you spend there?  Is there a certain time of day or part of your life where you feel the life you never had more strongly? How do you reconcile what you wanted with what you have?

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?