The Chill

I love this time of year, right up until the moment
when I feel the chill in the summer eve.

The back of my arms legs neck, the slight scent of decay.

We're bright and beautiful in the summer sun
and then nightfall
and night breeze
and the darkness spreads around me.

We fucked up last year.  We didn't prepare.
Too consumed by the stunning child in our haunted lives
the rage and sadness and death and madness
snuck up, as only memories can do.

Five years without Silas.
A blazing son on his way to his amazing birthday
that instead is merely anniversary.

That first chill of late summer orients my soul.
Distracted by the wild life and breathing love
I suddenly feel exactly like the night we collected the birthing tub.
The indigo evening, the creaking crickets, the harbingers of doom;
they are now his silent calls made mine, made into
the broken sounds of hope stilled, that future killed.

I love this time of year,
but I cannot breathe in the gorgeous evening summer breeze
as my love for Silas falls from my wet, silent eyes,
and I die a little more inside, again,
wanting him quietly, deeply, desperately as dusk settles.
Waiting for his breath I sit still,
chilled to my bones in the sweet summer eve.

~~~~~

Please post a poem or prose rant to your lost child.  My son would have been five years old on Sept. 25, and instead I just get Fall.  What do you get?  What have you found?  What can any of us do about being part of this tribe?

This time, again

Those five weeks between when we found out he was sick and when he died exist outside of time.  They accordion out behind me as one infinitely long moment and then compress back to simply Before George and After George, the contents reduced to the width of a single piece of paper.  I alternate between being surrounded by memories, smells, tastes which bring me back to those weeks and real disbelief that The Horrible Thing actually happened at all.  

The more time that passes the more I seem to have difficulty grasping the core of what his death has really meant.  I tell myself that I can't regret what happened in the past because my present is filled with love for my daughter, who in a very honest sense only exists because her brother doesn't.  I fortify myself against the reality of his death rationalization by rationalization.   I am a master at trying to soften the edges of his death.
Then March comes around the corner, always unexpectedly, to knock the breath out of me.  The ether of emotions that normally fog my brain crystalize and it is all suddenly so simple again.  I gave birth to a baby in the cold sterility of a surgical suite.  I held his small sick and dying body, kissed his head, whispering to him I loved him and that I wished he could stay.  Then I simply waited for his tired heart to stop its battle to keep beating.  In March I can distill all the regrets and justifications and apologetics that I conjure up during the other eleven months of the year into a simple elixer of love and heartbreak.  
I am a mother to two children.  One who lives and thrives: a marvel in front of my eyes.  The other dead and gone: a shadow in the periphery of my vision.  But for a few weeks in March, when the world around me is waking up from its wintry slumber, that shadow feels a bit more substantive.  Almost as if I can reach out and hold him again, kiss his head, whisper him I love him, and that I wish he could have stayed.  
 
Do you rationalize the death of your baby to ease your pain?  When the anniversary of the death of your child approaches does it change your perspective on the past or make you feel closer to the one you lost?  How do you feel (or think you will feel) about milestones or anniversaries?  Are they intensely personal events or do you feel the need to share those important dates with people in your life?

Scars of the Heart

Take my heart out and you will see the scar.  From top to bottom, jagged across the middle, the scar is still raw and pink.

But against all odds, my heart is nearly whole.  Lu and I took the time to stitch the other's back together with words and love and patience and time.

Pass by pass, stitch by stitch she sealed and healed my rendered soul, my tattered heart, and helped me learn how to walk and speak and think again.

I thought I was going to die in the days after he did.  I thought we would be demolished by the unfathomable grief and lacerating sadness.

Yet somehow, now, eight years out from the day I married Lu, I can somehow still think that I am lucky to have her in my life.  Lucky that we have our amazing son Zephyr.  Lucky that we found a way to rediscover laughter, to allow light to re-enter our darkened world.  We are lucky to be together despite our terrible loss.

I married her because she was beautiful and sweet, patient and spontaneous, because she was steadfast, honest, brilliant and true.  What I didn't know then is that she was one of the strongest and most determined people I would ever know.  Her strength of will and incredible outlook on life were absolutely pivotal in our ability to stay together and stay in love when everything around us shattered and disintegrated on the day he died.

She healed my heart with her gorgeous, liquid eyes, and I held her tight through terrible days when not one single thing in the world made a speck of sense.

But the scar remains and always will, and if you look closely enough you will see that it is only nearly whole.  There is still and always a space, a void, an endless abyss in the shape of my son Silas.  It looks minuscule from a distance, but don't be fooled.

That fleck of darkness on the surface of my pulsing heart expands wider and wider the closer you get until the obsidian midnight rift is all-encompassing, swallowing the field of vision until we pass within, into the endless shadow of my limitless grief.

I don't want that hole closed.

I don't want to give away the pain of his absence.

I don't want to ever be so healed that I cannot feel him in me, in us, in our sense of the world.

When Silas died I had no idea what it was like to have a son.  I was hurled into a shadow world of counter-factuals, of impossible ignorance.  I thought Silas was going to teach me how to be a dad, but instead I learned how to grieve and not die from it.  With Zephyr so vivid and alive right before my very eyes, everything I was denied is being revealed, but the weight of losing Silas makes me ballistic with fear sometimes.  I panic at the slightest thought of anything happening to Zephyr, ever, for any reason at all.  Yet just as I refused to let grief define and destroy me, so too do I deny the power of fear to stop me from reveling in Zeph's every breath.

Lu is an amazing mom, and I am thrilled to share this life with her.  I cannot believe to this day that I can feel this good, after so many years of terrible sadness.  The strangest part, though, is how that still-present sadness mixes with the happiness I feel when I spend the day with Zeph, or watch him curled up and nursing in Lu's lap, or hearing him shouting "Dada!" when I get home from work.

The echo of his shout is the silence from Silas and the  knowing look in Lu's eyes.  She hears what I don't either.

I love them all fiercely, the two here with me, and the one we can only share in our sewn-up and scarred hearts.  This is our family and it will always be so: drenched in light and love and happiness and shadowed by our loss that we can never fully comprehend.

~~~~~~~~~~~

What do your metaphysical scars look and feel like?  How have you and your partner navigated the treacherous landscape of your life together after losing your child or children?  How do your living children affect the memory of what you have lost?

pomegranate

I open my mouth. The scream escapes. It is a primal, ancient scream. The Banshee wail that precedes death and mourning. It has been building inside of me through all of my tragedies, humiliations, fears. But the death of my daughters propel it forward, out of me. It is also the scream of Demeter. It comes from deep inside of all women. The goddess roars through me. It is hardly a noise one knows before a child dies, it is something entirely different. A different cry, an animal sound, a wild rage that tears through normal ears. It is the hurricane. The volcano. The typhoon. It is in the Ancient Greeks, the Druids, the Celtic gods, the old Norse and Inuit tales where I find my story into the underworld. We babylost are no longer of this era and we should stop trying to be. We come from the distant past. The grief goddesses inhabit us to retell their stories. We channel their woe, their anger, their cries. We are transported to a place halfway between heaven and hell, the blessed and the cursed, the living and the dead.

+++

I can only really muster worship to the goddesses of grief--Demeter and Hecate, the Norse goddess Frigga, the Aztec goddess Coatlicue. There is a distinguished lineage of goddess grieving. She rarely behaves well. I learn the lessons of grief from mythology. I starve the world. I punish others. But the earth people will be restored. It is me who withers again when Summer leaves, every year, when I am reminded of my daughter's death. It is me who curses the most human parts of myself.

The chill moves through me. I nod to Autumn, bow to her, make elaborate arm gestures to welcome her through my life again. Autumn equinox marks Persephone's descent--her return to Hades, the god who abducted her all those millennia ago, raped her, held her captive in the underworld, fed her pomegranate to seal her fate. Her mother Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, begins her long walk around the world weeping, mourning, taking the life from the crops. Autumn equinox marks my descent too. I walk into my grief season, seizing the harvest, choking the life from everything around me, falling into a deep darkness. It is a welcome turn, when the earth and sky match my insides. It is my slow trudge until my daughter's death day on Winter Solstice.

This veil is thin now in October. Do not underestimate its power. The ancestors step just out of view, like through a gauzy film, whispering: Be better than you think possible.

I shake my head and rub mud into my skin. I light bonfires and bring them forward. "Oh, no, I mourn now, grandmothers. I am my shadow and myself. Two people mourning. Weep with me. Share half a tear, half a cry with your half-daughter."

On the first year, when the earth opened and swallowed Persephone, Demeter walked the earth for nine days searching for her daughter. She ate nothing. She drank no ambrosia. She refused to bathe. She just hunted her only daughter, desperate and possessed with the finding. There are rumors that Persephone screamed before she was taken. Hecate heard it, in fact. And they ask Helios, the sun god, who tells them it is Hades who stole the virgin, raped her. When she was told what happened, she enlists the help of her friends Famine and Petulance to punish the humans until she can see her daughter once more. They are the withered old hags of goddesses, but powerful nonetheless. They delight in cauldrons of poison and starvation and cackle to themselves. And Demeter, a compassionate goddess, felt justified in her actions.

Persephone is allowed to return home only if she has eaten nothing. But she could not resist the allure of the blood red pomegranate, sexy and furtive. The juice drips down her chin, and Hades licks it off her, sealing her fate to return for six months every year.

photo by zenobia_joy.

I find myself jealous of Demeter, seeing her daughter for six months, exacting her grief in such a global way.  And the jealousy reads like a sweet nectar of what could be. I drink in the hope. Lucia ate pomegranate in my womb. Or rather, I did. I pulled the seeds from the membranes one by one until my hands were sticky and stained. I didn't know better. The seeds shone like garnets in my hand. And I, gluttonous and greedy, ate more of the underworld. I couldn't stop at six. I ate the entire fruit and then more. I ate resentment and anger, grudges and hurt egos, swallowed them whole. They were still alive and writhing when they hit my stomach, inches from where Lucia slept.

When she died, I walked this liminal land, the space between the dead and the living. The land running alongside the river Styx. I barely heed the warnings of those who came before me:

Do not pay the ferryman if you see him. Do not approach him. But wave across to the others, vacant and plodding through the dark. Ask for your child. Wail, if you must, the shriek of Demeter will be recognized here. But do not get on the boat. And for the love of everything holy, do not eat any pomegranate seeds yourself any longer. They mean something different now, love. Even though they taste like Lucia. They mean something different.

I have existed in liminal spaces for a long time. The borderlands are my patria. My homeland. I am half white and half-Latina. Half-American and Half-Panamanian. I am half a believer, half a skeptic. I am half straight and have AB positive blood. The creatures drawn to me wear horns, and tall boots with twenty-seven buckles, and white make-up, wooly vests and listen to songs about vampires, but work in a corporate office during the day. I live in a suburb, a small town that feels like mid-town. Halfway between city and country. We have a farmer's market and tattooed vendors who smile at your bike trailer and say, "Right on."

After the first snow without her, I became half a mother. Half a breeder. Half of my children are dead. I have half a song. It is about winter, and the triple goddess, and pomegranate seeds which I suck just enough to be allowed visitation rights. She is gone and my summer never comes. Just space and time until I grieve again.

It is half a myth without an ending.

 

Do you feel between worlds? Which ones? Do you feel close to certain myths or stories now? Has that changed since the death of your baby(ies)?

4 years gone

Tomorrow is Silas's birthday.  He would be four years old.  Imagining our four year old son cavorting through this house, the yard, our lives, is painfully impossible.  I can imagine what that Universe would look like from the outside, but not how it would feel in there.

It would have the same hint of crimson in the leaves and the same gorgeous fall breeze alight on a brilliant blue day.  There would be the same cool and colder nights and suddenly hot September afternoons.  But maybe I would not notice the touch of decay creeping into the shadows.  Certainly the first falling, orange leaf I witnessed would not carry the weight of death and despair like it always does now.   With my amazing son's fourth birthday helping to usher in autumn, I probably would not hate this time of year.

September makes me cringe.  With the flip of the calendar I know what is coming, but I have no idea how to deal with it.  I doubt I ever will.

Taking a quick inventory it appears that this year's emotions are: helplessness, fear, anger, disbelief, confusion and a deep and abiding despair.  In other words, same as it ever was.  In detail: I can't change the past.  I'm afraid of anything happening to Zeph, ever.  I'm still quite upset with the midwives, and at my foolish, naive trust in them.  That this is my life and that my firstborn son is dead remains impossible.  Four years now I still don't know how to properly prepare for and honor his birth/death day.  And of course, still, always and forever, I am profoundly sad I don't get to share my life with him and see what kind of man he would have grown into, and how he would have changed me.

I always feel all of that on some level, but this month and week and final days compress and tighten in my veins like my blood is being replaced with liquid concrete as my memory unfolds the events of that long night and longer day.

Growing up my mother would always recount the events leading up to my birth.  I loved hearing her tell me our beautiful, shared history.  But Silas's day is made of silence.  No one wants to hear that story and I can barely stand my own mind as it ticks off each milestone and moment.

The outpouring of love and support from friends and family as Sept 25 approaches yet again has been... nonexistent.  I'm shocked that is the case, frankly.  Maybe they are planning a surprise grief party, but I doubt it.

Our families had been incredibly supportive and understanding as Lu and I thrashed in agony in the first years after he was gone, and then they continued to handle us gently and kindly as time passed.  But maybe four years is enough for them.  They did their best, and now that's pretty much it.  New son in our life and new babies all around means new beginnings and big happiness for everyone and it's time to move on and let Silas drift into our past, as if his life was just something that happened, instead of something that is.

There will be a few friends that are conscious enough to make a call or send a text or email.  And I almost wish I could steal all knowledge of Silas from my amazing mother debilitated from MS and my incredible father taking care of her, if only just to save them from any more hardship and sadness, but I know they are crippled with despair over the loss of their grandson, and I know they know what is about to happen once again.  I wish I felt that same conscious understanding from others, but the fact is people are mostly wrapped up in themselves, and if you want anything from them you need to tell them clearly and loudly exactly what you want.

But that's the problem.  I can't say, "Hey it's going to be Silas's birthday in a few days and it is still really really tough, so I need you all to just say his name to me and tell me you miss him and show me that you remember."  Because if you have to remind someone to remember something, they're not really remembering at all, are they?  They are just responding to your clearly spoken need without any of the actual remembering or forethought.  And that fucking hurts.  It's that same expectation game all over again, but I don't really give a shit.  They should remember.  They should tell me that.  They should reach out and grab me as the calendar winds up to Sept 25 and launches me to the edge of the Abyss once again.

Instead we'll do it ourselves, and take care of each other as we always have.  We are going to Silas's tree tomorrow. This will be the first year we have a living, breathing child in our lives and it definitely makes it far better than it has ever been before. Of course as we sit there around his older brother's memorial tree I am not going to be able to stop thinking about the fact that someday I will have to share this deep sadness with this gorgeous, innocent child.  And that, of course, is awful.  I don't have any idea how I'm going to handle that or how his understanding of this awful history will affect him as he grows up.  I already feel terrible that we will have to break his heart someday.

Me, Lu and Zeph are going to Silas's tree tomorrow, and we're going to plant tulips and have a little lunch picnic and cry our fucking eyes out and laugh at our amazing son who loves to play with sticks more than toys and enjoys eating rocks as much as fruit.  He loves both of us so vividly he almost can't handle it sometimes.  He's a wonderfully wild and alive little child and I wish with every cell of my being he had an older brother to torment and grab and run with and learn from and squeeze just as hard as he yanks on us.

I'm not working at all tomorrow.  I'm just spending the day with Zephyr, as I always do on Tuesdays.  It should be his older brother's birthday party.  Instead it is something else I wish no one would ever have to endure.  With silence all around and everyone consumed by their own lives, we will embrace each other hard and make this awful day slightly less unbearable just by doing it together.

The concrete fills my veins drop by drop as this day approaches, until I am immobilized by sadness, and my soul shatters with every step I take through his birthday, his deathday, his impossibly brief life.  I will settle into bed as dust tomorrow night and I will dream of his stars and wish his younger brother had Silas in his life.

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

How has the day of your child's birth and death changed over the years?  How many years have gone by since you lost them?  What has changed about how you deal with that day?  How have the people around your responded (or not) to that anniversary?

The Older Sister

Sometime this weekend, while she is playing, or reading, or sleeping, or eating, or attending that second live concert in one weekend, or having tea with a real live writer (her aunt knows the coolest people), or working hard at improving her full turn or her free hip or her tuck, sometime in this weekend packed with so.much.fun she will cross a threshold she is not aware of, but I am. Sometime this weekend my daughter will have lived more than half of her life as a bereaved sister. I could calculate it exactly, down to the minute, really. But I don't let myself. I don't want to know that precisely.

This is a kind of thing my mind gets hung up on. I remember coming up on living (then) half my life in this country, and it seemed a big deal. My sister, who's eight years younger than me, and so reached the same point that much earlier just sort of shrugged-- she was so far past that place herself that it was no longer a thing for her at all. Thinking about that I wonder whether this will ever seem like a big deal to Monkey. I know she is not thinking about it now, and I don't know whether she ever will. She is, by nature, a storyteller, not a mathematician or scientist. And so it is not clear to me that even looking back from any place in her hopefully long and eventful life this invisible line will matter a diddly to her. She was so very marked by her brother's death itself that it might never matter to her that there was a time before it, or how much time that was.

She grieved. Oh, she grieved. Out loud and quietly. In her first language, the one we speak at home, and then, as she started school and her English improved and they started learning Hebrew, in two more. Like all of us, she is no longer in that acute all-encompassing phase of early grief. But neither has she dispensed with it. Which is, of course, as it should be. And, at the same time, as everything about this, it's too fucked up for words-- the kid's not yet ten, and she's lived with grief for half her life.

There are things about her that are undoubtedly shaped by her experience as a bereaved sister. It's not that she is somehow an expert at other's grief. But she has a fine sense of what is and isn't about her. She understands the shades of sad. When a beloved teacher in the school died suddenly and unexpectedly in December, she was sad, but she also understood with piercing clarity that hers was a sadness from a distance. She and a couple of classmates spent some time that afternoon writing letters to dead people, including the teacher. She let me read her letters.

She wrote four letters total-- one to the teacher who died, one to her brother, one to my grandfather who died before she was born and in whose honor she is named, and one to my grandmother who died in May and whose funeral was the very first Monkey ever attended. There is no sentimentality in any of these. There is no cuteness. There is no mixing of her issues in with the sadness of others. And that is why these letters (I kept them) get me still. She is not even ten, and she has this understanding that we all wish more adults around us had.

To her brother she says that she misses him still and loves him. She notes the age he would've been, and how she thinks her younger brother would've liked to have an older brother too. And, still, still, still, she says she wishes she could see him. Me too, kid, me too.

To my grandmother she says that she didn't really know her (true-- dementia is a horrible thing, and by the time Monkey could remember things well, my grandmother wasn't herself anymore; they did have a lot of fun earlier in Monkey's life, though, and for that I am glad), but that she knows how much her daughters miss her.

To my grandfather, and I must say that it surprised me that she wrote this one, she says that she is named after him and tells him that though it is very sad, his wife has died recently, and also that he is still very missed.

To the teacher she says that she is now very sorry she never really knew her. She was a middle school teacher, but she also had been involved in many things at the school. It was remarkable to me that Monkey understood the difference between how she knew the teacher and how the teacher's students knew the teacher. Monkey says that she is sure her daughters miss her (of course), but then she doesn't say that about the students. She describes, instead, what is happening near the teacher's room in the school-- there is a bathroom across the hall, and Monkey writes that the lower school kids are not allowed to use it because her students are in there-- they are crying and washing their faces, and crying, and washing, and on and on. I cried when I read that. I have tears coming up now as I write about reading that.

The mindfuck of this is that it's not that she is naturally fearless in the face of pain. She is sweet and she's always been kind, and she has a good deal of empathy. But she is not, and I know it is strange to say about a kid who hurls herself at the vault table and flies to execute her bar dismount, she is not naturally the most courageous person you've ever met. She is cautious and risk averse. And as we all know, death is a scary thing, and raw pain of a grieving person is perhaps scarier still. So the fact that Monkey is better than most at handling other people's grief is mostly about her own biography, her own story. It sucks. I am glad she is the way she is. I hate that she is that way because her brother died.

I heard it said about the senior rabbi of our congregation that because his father died when he was very young, he is drawn to comfort the grieving. Like a proverbial firefighter, he runs towards the grieving family when others are tempted to run away. Monkey is not like that. She doesn't run towards the grief. She might even hesitate, as she did about whether to attend my grandmother's funeral or about whether to visit her kindergarten teacher recently as she mourned the loss of her own elderly mother. (This was the teacher who helped Monkey find her voice in both English and Hebrew, the latter because at the time she was saying kaddish, Jewish mourning prayer, in the classroom every school day for her father, and entirely without prompting and without telling us Monkey joined the ritual.) But even in those cases, it takes but a short conversation, a few sentences really, for her to change her mind and be there for the grieving.

On the way back from the visit with the kindergarten teacher Monkey asked why the teacher'd said that visiting the grieving was one of the most important and difficult mitzvot (good deeds). As I think about the conversation that followed now, we focused mostly on the "important" part, discussing how visiting with the grieving lets them tell you about the person they are missing and about how that itself brings comfort. We kinda skipped the whole "difficult" part of the statement. I guess we both know there are harder things than that.

 

If you were lucky enough to have older children when your baby died, have you marked any significant grief-related milestones in their lives since? Do you see them as bereaved siblings? Do they see themselves that way? If you have younger children, are there things about them that you see as grief-marked? Are there other children in your life that are connected to your baby who died for you? How do you see their milestones?