smoke and mirrors.

My daughter is dead two years.

Time is like a funhouse hall of mirrors. Some memories stretch your worst parts, and shrink your best. Your boobs are all but eradicated and those thighs feel wider than possible. In the next step, you look tall and lean and impossibly good. “I want to live in this mirror,” you whisper to no one in particular. Your daughter is alive in this mirror, and you are happier than you thought possible. The next reflection, the straight, unchanged view of the present may be the most horrifying of all.

I like the funhouse mirror analogy. Because the moment Grief sneaked into the room, and breathed his hot, sour breath on my neck, it felt like a carnival ride—it was nauseating and smelled funny. I recognized the puddles of sick around me from my earlier rides. I glimpsed the freak show catatonic slip out the back leaning against the wagon, smoking a cigarette, laughing at the bearded lady. Other people’s lives of contentment are all smoke and mirrors too, I realized it back then like it was some kind of secret.

I’m not there anymore, but it makes me miss the immediacy of that early grief. All these mirrors together in one place are confusing me. They are distorting the truth. I don’t want to return to the worst moments of my life, even if the mirror makes that moment so present and exacting in its goal that it feels attractive. The rawness of grief put everything into perspective. I had no other goal than mourn, weep, survive. At two years out, I miss the surety of that perspective.  I wanted to outrun grief then. I am in some other mirror now, the one that looks normal, except that it distorts my forehead to a large teardrop shape of grief.

No, wait, time is like time. It moves forward. And you heal in spite of yourself. You heal even when you absolutely don't want to heal because the wound is the only thing tying you to your dead baby. You end up in a place that looks like healing. Or you don't. But you end up. You get two years from the moment of death and you shake your head and you wonder if you really remember anything about the early grief except that you are absolutely sure it was the worst feeling in the world. And that holding her dead body was absolutely the best of the worst moments of your life.

I try to bend time with my mind, twist it like a Mobius strip, until the beginning and end are one. On that two year strip of time, I can touch her again while simultaneously realizing what it means two years later to have only two hours with my daughter. Even if I can't change her death, I still want This Me to tell That Me to breath her in little bit longer. I would shake me. “Savor these two hours,” I would tell me. “Study her like the most important test of your life. Undress her. Look at her bum and her little tootsies. Sing her the song in Spanish that puts all your babies to sleep. This is the only two hours you get her for your whole fucking life. Get out of your pity party and kiss every part of her.”

I dreamed her once. It was winter at my grandmother’s house, and she clung to my midsection. And I, thinking she was still inside, reached down, surprised to feel her body on the outside and to see her eyes open. Lucia smiled at me. I lifted her and looked into her violet eyes. She was lovely and peaceful. It was the only time I saw her alive, and it was wholly in my subconscious. Sometimes I miss the dream as much as I miss the daughter. It was a time and moment when I believed that I knew her. She was mine. And I was hers.

I never knew her. She never belonged to me. Two years later, I don’t even have her scent in my memory anymore. I don’t remember her face exactly. I cried to our grief therapist two weeks out. “I am afraid to forget her,” I cried. And the therapist said, “You will never forget her. She’s your daughter.” I didn’t mean that I would forget that she existed. I meant I would forget what her face looks like in real life. And even then, I was forgetting. It was drifting away like the funhouse analogy. I knew it and that is why I cried. I forget her.

Pictures flatten her, stretch her out, cover her with death. I can't bear to look at them anymore. They are not her. They are like Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images. Ce n'est pas ma fille. This is not my daughter. This is a picture of my daughter, but it is not her. When she was born, her nose had life, even though it didn't. This nose, this nose is bruised and covered in dense vernix. This nose is dead and two-dimensional and doesn't look kissed at all. My daughter was three-dimensional, like my love for her. I have nothing of her now but the flatness of grief. When solstice comes, I will walk out into the darkness, bundle up and remember her with the light. It is the contradiction that I feel in me--warm and loving at the same time as her death has left me cold and alone.

The winter cradles me in its icy arms, kisses my forehead, reminds me that I am alone, but warmed by the absolute cold of grief. It is a riddle, a kind of zen koan of grief. When you have the cold, I will give you the winter. When you are burning with the heat, I will give you the sun. When you are the loneliest, you feel part of the universal tribe of lonely people. I meditate on it. If grief were a season, it would be winter--barren, empty, yet silent. The air holds no moisture, no kisses of dew. I am in Grief’s cold clutches, and the cold is somehow fitting now. In that, I take a comfort. Everything around me feels empty and cold and has lost life too. 

My daughter is dead two years. Lucia is dead two years. She is so impossibly dead. I get it now. I get it, but I still don’t like it.

 

When you reach the anniversary dates of your child(ren)'s death or birth, do you reflect on your grief? How has your grief changed? What is distorted about your sense of early grief? What is distorted about where you think you will be in your grief five years, ten years, twenty years from now? What would the you of right now tell yourself in the moments right after your child(ren) died, or in the moments when after you found out your child(ren) would die? 

Dates and time

I've been thinking about dates lately. And time.

This past weekend it occurred to me that, give or take a few days, the Cub is now as old as how much time had passed between A’s birth and his. That length of time, which while lived through seemed torturously, treacherously long, personified. In such a small person.

Looking at him, I know it wasn’t that much time. Eighteen and a half months, that’s all. The Cub’s needs are no longer entirely physical, and no longer dependent on me almost exclusively to satisfy, but they are still a hell of a lot physical, and still a hell of a lot dependent on me. Which is to say, since this weekend, I have been thinking on and off about the time in between, about my grief in that in between time.

I’d had a baby, but I no longer had A, that baby, with me. I’d had a baby, but I didn’t have him. But I think looking back, that the grief then was surprisingly a lot like having a baby (only with booze allowed). All consuming, physical, exhausting at first. Ever so slightly less demanding as time went on. But oh boy, it could demand attention at oddest of moments with the best of them. In my imperfect analogy, a cold perhaps, a stomach bug, teething.

And then, separately, there was the terror of the new pregnancy, the complications, the bed rest, monitoring, pre-term labor. Through all that I didn’t physically have a baby, a toddler to take care of. But, looking at how small the Cub is now, damn it, grief that young still needed, and deserved a whole lot of attention.

When A first died, six months out seemed like a lot of time, time enough that I’d expected myself to at least reach some sort of a plateau by then, to have my shit together. When six months actually came, it whacked me good and strong. In a comment on my blog someone told me that my grief was still so very fresh—a revelation and a relief. By the time a year rolled around, I got enough of a clue to have realized myself that it wasn’t so much time either. And now, looking at eighteen and a half months in the flesh, I am relearning that lesson.

Holy shit. I’d had two babies in eighteen and a half months. Looking back, a feat not made significantly easier by the fact that the older of them wasn’t around to demand a diaper change. And wow—A has now been gone for two of the Cub’s lifetimes. Only two now.

My brain does that—sees numbers and patterns, and patterns in the numbers. And it makes it not so very easy to forget a date, to miss one. Monday is Monkey’s birthday. Coincidentally also her former due date. Tuesday is A’s due date. Because Monkey was born on hers, it’s been tough for me to relieve the date of its import in my head. This will be the fourth time it has rolled around since he died. The first three were tough, each in a slightly different way. I wonder how this one will play. I wonder who else will remember.

 

How have you percieved time since your baby's death? Have there been periods when it felt different than most? What are your significant dates? Have they changed over time? Do you think they might?

 

Still

Just before the turn on the year Angie asked for one word. One word from each, to make a community poem, to kick off the year of still life 365, the art blog by and for the community. I didn't have my word until it was too late, until the submission deadline was past. I had two, actually, but they were connected and I even knew which I would pick if I had to pick just the one. But deadline was past, and so the choosing was academic. Except that my next thought was that surely both of my words must've made it in by someone else's hand, being so obvious and all.

The poem came out beautiful and stunning, and heartbreaking. Just like you would hope it would. However, and this was a bit of a shock to me, my first choice word? It wasn't there.

The word was still. I meant it in terms of time, as in ongoing, continuous, in progress. Although, of course, the other meaning, the one the describes state of being, defined as "calm, motionless, quiet," didn't escape me either. I kinda liked the double meaning.

I miss him, still. I am not the same, still. It hurts, still. I am sad, still, at times. Of some things, I am less forgiving, still. Of others things-- more, now. I love him, always.

 

The week building up to A's third anniversary days was busy. And mostly normal. That was ok, comforting even. I thought, at times, that the busy was preventing me from getting ready in some sense I didn't fully understand myself and couldn't really articulate. At other times, though, I've thought that the busy was protecting me from really looking at what it was we were moving towards.

Three years gone. In its approach, it felt to me like an anniversary significant in a whole new way. It's not the first, the towering marker at end of that first overwhelming year, last of the firsts when you don't begin to know what to expect. It's not the second, the first after the first, when maybe you are starting to recognize the outlines of the thing. The third felt, if this makes sense, like the first of many. Like maybe I should have this figured out by now. And for most of the weekend it seemed like maybe I did. Until last night.

What took hold of me as I climed into bed last night wasn't gentle. It wasn't the missing, to which I cop freely any day of the week. It wasn't the sadness-- I know sadness and this wasn't it. No, the thing that made me cry the full-bodied cry like I haven't in long-long time, the thing that made me howl, the realization that felt physically like what I imagine getting kicked in the chest by a horse might feel, was unexpected and it was brutal. I realized, suddenly and inescapably, that I don't just love A, and I don't just miss him.

I realized that I want him, still.

It's not that I thought of him as unwanted until then. He was certainly wanted. It's just that in a universe governed by laws of physics continuing to want him now doesn't do one a whole lot of good. And it's not that I was suppressing this wanting, at least not in any way that I was aware of. I just didn't know that the wanting was in the picture, you know, still.

The realization did nothing to my perception of reality, by the way. That internalized understanding of the futility of my wanting is exactly what made me wail with impotent sorrow. Time is still unidirectional. And A is still gone, and always will be.

 

I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and it still took me the whole damn day to write this post. Processing, integrating, thinking, feeling. I woke up this morning feeling tender, like I went a couple of rounds with something much bigger than me. I guess I did.

 

How long has it been for you? What, if anything, has been surprising so far? If you've been at this for a while, how have the anniversaries treated you?  

the rising stars

I'm not sure how to do this, what to call it or how to get through it.  The anniversary of Silas' birth and death is on Friday which means I am a year deep into this nightmare and still mostly lost.

Our plan is to spend time away with my brother's family, up in New Hampshire.  Their house is cozy and safe, tucked onto a hillside in the midst of trees and trails, the canopy of stars endless above.

Orion NebulaIt's those fucking stars I'm worried about.  It was right around this time when we picked Orion as his middle name.  I've always loved constellations and the way that one in particular is special for the winter nights.  If you are out in northeast America and can see Orion, it is certainly crisp and cold.

Missing Silas chills my soul.  Each of those stars are huge, hot suns, but I cannot feel any of their massive warmth.  Very soon now that piercing and familiar constellation will begin to peek over the horizon, and I don't know how I'm going to handle that.  They were supposed to be his special connection to the world, and now it is ours to him.

I'm worried about Friday, but not too much.  I'm sure it will be painful to recognize that a full year has passed without our son, and I am a little terrified of the fact that this is only the first of many, many years we will not have him.  I am certain it will hurt less than what I experienced a year ago but I should know better than to be certain of anything.

I looked for Orion last night, but I didn't see it.  Maybe this year it won't appear, and then that will prove I am in a whole other Universe than the one I thought I was inhabiting.  That would be proof of the disbelief I still feel for this World around me.  It wouldn't even surprise me, really.  Just another part of all of this I cannot trust to be correct and true.

Instead of celebrating, we continue to mourn but I'm so good at it now, you can't even tell I'm doing it every day, all the time.  So then Friday is just another day without Silas, unless, of course,  his rising constellation coincides with our drive north into solitude.  How can it not?

Is it faith or belief or religion for me to assume that the Universe will fuck with me any chance it gets?  I always thought we were on pretty good terms.  Healthy respect for the Vast Ineffability of it all mixed with wonder and love and appreciation for Its endless beauty and mystery, but I guess I missed how dark and deep the Mystery part goes.  Because I am very fucking mystified by how much this sucks.

I have to hold back anger when I have to let people know exactly what I am not celebrating, but then I remember there's nothing they can do for me anyway, so why bother?  I'm surprised by the number of people that seem to have forgotten.  But then I have also been surprised with unexpected cards and gifts and kind words from so many people who do remember him, and do understand how sad we remain.

The people that remember and acknowledge Silas, the people that hold him and us in their hearts, they are carrying us along, and we thank you all for your love and support.  We need it so much, especially this week as his stars slip into the night sky and his day passes us by.

~~~~

So then what of it?  Please tell me, how did you do this?  Where can we find solace?  What possible actions or words or thoughts can make Friday bearable?  Or is Unbearable the only way through? 

after the transformation

Oh, ppphhhhhh… 

What do I do now?

She’s been gone longer than she was here, even counting the time she was inside me.

I’ve passed all of the first anniversaries: her ultrasound, the day she was born, the day she died on both the Jewish and Gregorian calendars.

We’ve anticipated her arrival.

Hoped deeply.

Said hello, welcomed our second child to the big world.

Loved unconditionally.

Taken her outside to breathe fresh real air.

Said goodbye.

Buried her fragile little body in a tiny coffin in the ground.

Her box of memories is full, her photo album is made. Her special soft things in jars, still smelling a little bit like her. Everything put away in the trunk that sits next to me in the sunroom, keeping me company.

Her quilt is coming along, something I am not in a hurry to finish… When I work on it, I feel close to her.

I still haven’t framed and hung her photos, but I will… soon.

Her headstone has been made, set and unveiled. Flowers planted with her placenta. Her DNA and ours stored at the hospital for research. Her birth and death certificate are in a safe place with other family documents, confirming that she really did exist, always a part of our family.

We’ve moved away and settled into our new home across the country.

Our new chapter has begun.

Now what?

*****

Today I watched as two cicadas completely left their exoskeletons and began a new chapter in their new skins, so bright green they were almost turquoise. They hung there from the branches of a tree, clinging still to their old shells, transparent wings spread, contemplating new destinations, new purpose.

It was stunning… I’ve never seen anything like it. For three weeks now I’ve been listening to them singing their songs outside, surrounding me with constant tropical melodies. I’ve just never seen a cicada before, not even in a photo.

Everything changes, nothing stays the same.

Impermanence... I see it when I look in the mirror. I look different than I did last summer. I look different than I did two summers ago. I think I look different than I did a few months ago. I’ve reluctantly left my exoskeleton, sometimes hesitating to leave it completely behind. Longing for it, for simpler times.

My old shell consists of all the mes I’ve left behind, said goodbye to, willingly or not.

It’s this next place I’m not so sure about. This after the transformation place. I can so easily tell you how changed I am from the person I was before I knew Tikva. I can describe in vivid detail how she transformed me, and for the better. But I’m not exactly sure what that means for me now… now that I’ve been transformed by knowing, loving and losing my child. Now that I’ve undergone a change I never in a million years would have chosen. Now that I’ve gotten kind of used to this new person that I am.

*****

How many children did you bring with you to Cincinnati? he asks my husband.

We have two children, but only one living. We’re here after a year off, since we lost our second child last summer, my husband answers.

I say nothing, look away even, let my husband tell him. Then I look at this new acquaintance and see the sadness and searching in his eyes as he looks at me then quickly looks down. I know what he wants to say. After a year, I am so aware of the sadness I’ve held in other people when they look at me after learning about Tikva. Some days I can take it better than others. This time I just notice it, allow the compassion to flow in silence. Nothing needs to be said.

*****

I hoped to be carrying another child by now, but I’m not yet. Still, I can feel that child’s spirit close, waiting. Sometimes I can’t distinguish it from Tikva’s spirit. I don’t think that matters. Baby spirit energy is one and the same. I think it comes from one big well.

I watch my older daughter and feel how powerful is her desire to be a big sister to a living sibling.

I wish I had a sister to play with who wasn’t a spirit, she says.

Me too, I answer. Me too.

She would have a sibling who would be almost two right now, if I hadn’t miscarried in between her and Tikva. Then there would never have been a Tikva… Strange.

Tikva would be 14 months now, would probably be walking. She would be so beautiful, that I just know for sure.

For two and a half years we have wanted to give Dahlia a sibling… One who can play with her.

We still do.

*****

It’s almost the new year on the Jewish calendar. The biggest time of the year. This is supposed to be a time of reflection, of going inwards, of making amends, making peace. I always find this time tumultuous inside, unsettling, unsettled. I guess that’s the point. I don’t know if I’m ready for a big time right now. I’m feeling especially un-Jewish right now, which is ironic as the wife of a future rabbi. Really, I just feel like climbing under the covers and not coming out until October. Until the new year, a new season.

Last year at High Holy Day services, less than two months after Tikva died, I alternated between sitting next to Dave in the sanctuary, crying, and running outside to cry alone. I resented everyone dancing in the aisles all around me. I felt no joy, no peace, no serenity. I felt isolated, empty, lost. Dave wrote angry messages to God in his journal. I did not fast on Yom Kippur. Dave and I got into a fight about something, I can’t even remember what. Afterwards I went with a friend to a candlelight vigil for babies who had died. It was one of the saddest days of those first few months after losing my Baby Girl.

I don’t feel especially compelled to fast this year either. I don’t feel especially inspired to do much that is Jewish, to be honest. Keeping kosher – in the limited way we’ve been doing so for several years – feels kind of trivial after what I’ve lived the past almost two years. That is not how I connect to something bigger, by eating my meat and my dairy separately… by fasting on Yom Kippur.

*****

There is a new layer of sadness churning deeply in me right now, a layer I’m not quite ready to shed. A space I just need to exist in for a while. I’m not entirely sure what it’s all about, but I do know that it’s less tidy, more raw than I’ve felt in many months.

It’s not the part of me that wondered how I would ever survive losing my child, terrified at the thought of forever having to hold that experience. I’ve survived, relatively intact. But I’m not settled. In fact, I’m feeling rather unsettled right now. In a new kind of limbo, an in between place.

Now what?

Now life goes on. Now life continues.

That’s it? It just continues? Just goes on, business as usual, except that I’m completely transformed in the middle of a world that hasn’t really changed much at all?

Yup.

How come I have to adjust to the same old world around me, and no one has to adjust to me?

Because you’re not the majority.

I’m not? I know and know of so many parents who have lost babies, our numbers grow every day, and we’re still just a minority? But this is all I know. What am I supposed to do with the transformation I just went through? With this new self I am sort of used to and still getting acquainted with?

*****

Tikva? Are you there? Are you still close? Is that you in the giant yellow and black butterfly I saw yesterday? In the turquoise under the transparent wings of the cicada? In the tiny bird eating an Oreo cookie outside the ice cream store yesterday?

What do I do now… still without you?

I will let myself cry for as long as I need. There are no rules around how long is enough before being done with the sorrow. You are never really done, are you? Here in this place, we know better than to create those kinds of boundaries. Here we feel what we need, when we need, how we need to.

I miss you, Tikva. I miss you differently now. But oh how I miss you still, my Tiny Love.

.::.

Where do you find yourself now? Are you comfortable here? Is it still new for you? Unsettling? Do you feel like an old hat? Transformed, for better or worse? What do things look like now, here, for you?

Handling the shattered nutcase

I'm not there yet. Still got a ways to go before the World can pass through me without pain.

Julia talked of toes mashed and unreasonable expectations of accommodating thoughtless acquaintances. Tash spoke of awful, awkward silences and evasions within her own family. It broke my heart to read their words. I've experienced shades of each in various circumstances. Facebook is a series of landmines of super-happy-family-ness I can barely handle. Farmer's markets bombard me with babies and moms and dads with kids on shoulders.

There is no way for them to know what it does when they tell me that he's ten months old, and he's keeping her up every night. I look the toddler in the eye and shatter, but you'd never know it by looking at me.

I'm shattered all the time. I don't have to hide it here.

Thankfully, family and friends have been extremely supportive and understanding. I don't feel rushed in my grief. I don't feel like a total nutcase that must be gently handled. They take us face front and let us tell them--as well as we can-- exactly how we feel and what we need.

Often what we need is space and compassion. But not too much space. If I don't get enough attention I start to freak out. Sometimes I feel the disappearing act I'm trying to pull on my grief is working too well.

And not too much compassion, cause seriously, what the fuck? I can handle it, whatever it is. Obviously I can handle anything because otherwise I'd be long gone by now.

Of course, I'm terrified of what else is out there that needs to be Handled, so be careful with me, okay?

Email, instant messages, txts, posts on messages boards, comments to our blogs, they give me strength. They give me a web of words and understanding that transcends time and space.

We Skyped into a birthday party for our friend out in SF. It was mesmerizing to see the faces of our friends that I can usually only hear in my mind as I read their various written missives or enjoy as their disembodied voices over the phone. This was their presence in a powerful, almost magical way.

Through the digital transformations and subtle human cues I was able to pick up that they loved us so much, and missed us a million times over. We toasted beers through the cameras, but the hugs didn't quite connect. Too many square edges on the MacBook.

It was amazing to be with our friends clear across the country, for even a few minutes. And to know how much they wanted us to be well and happy, it was heartfelt and true.

Should I feel lucky for that? There must be a better word. There should be a word for good-feelings-in-the-middle-of-disaster. Because it is that, still, every day in one way or another. The wrenching wrongness of everything we are not doing with Silas is a brutal and confusing burden to bear. We aim for grace, but like Kate said, sometimes fuck grace.

I just want to get by without breaking anything else.

My heart breaks easily. I feel it as a slice from my breastbone to the deep reaches of my gut where everything falls into nothing.

Baby carriage. Pregnant belly. Offhand baby-talk.

Slice, slip, drop.

I attempt to fall through the vacuum of his absence into a calm acceptance of whatever comes next.

The everyday awful, the sliced gut and bottomless stomach, sometimes it makes the good parts feel especially rare and fragile. When I feel happy I'm often doubly amazed. What's the word for that one? The knowing-it's-good-because-you've-had-it-so-bad?

I also know this post doesn't make much sense. But how am I supposed to make sense of the fact that it has been almost a year and... and... everything? All of this. Every word from here to a year before. Every day we've half-lived wondering what the fuck just happened to us?

But I'm not trying to understand why. What I am trying to understand is what his life and death means to me and to Lu, and how I will navigate the rest of my life with his absence in my heart.

So far, this year, all of the World has passed through that hole. There is no other way into me anymore. He is the lens through which my everything is sharpened and transformed.

I wonder if that will ever change. I wonder if there is a way to ever feel whole and true. I wonder if I want to.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Do you?