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?   

Community Voices: Grief is...

Today we are honored to present the writing of two more Glow readers.

Anne is a dancer, teacher, writer and non-profit arts administrator. Anne and her wife Burning Eye's first child Joseph was stillborn at 35 weeks in December, 2012. Some of her poetry is being published in the upcoming anthology "To Linger on Hot Coals" edited by Stephanie Page Cole and Catherine Bayly.

35/35

My poet’s brain never had much use for numbers and formulas—

preferring the symbolism, the metaphor,

of mass, gravity, planetary orbits, chemistry, heredity,

the tiny organs in that poor frog.

But now, in the aftermath of your short life,

I turn to science for solace, trying to find sense and reason,

or make it. 

I write poems about logic, Newton’s laws, math—

the equation never adds up. 

Still, I can’t stop measuring, comparing, weighing—

searching for meaning among misremembered facts,

proving your life with whatever symbols I can find.

Today, the days of your life rest delicately on one side of the scale,

balanced perfectly by the days of your absence. 

Tomorrow, the scale will start to tilt,

listing as the days keep piling up. 

You will always be more gone than here from now on, forever.

But maybe that perfectly balanced scale is an illusion,

an incomplete equation.

Surely, the scale tipped toward loss long ago—

as heavy as these days have been.

Or maybe your realness, the weight of you in our hearts,

still outweighs the loss of you—

the nothing that can never balance your substance.

This next piece is by Carolyn. Carolyn blogs at hangyourhopesfromtrees.wordpress.com. She writes: Lost my first baby to a miscarriage at 17 weeks. I find solace, as I've always done, in writing, art, and thick, wordy books. Finding hope, now, but still burdened often by my loss.

I dig my toes into the rocky incline. Looking down, I can see clouds hovering underneath me. I am high enough that the place where I began isn’t visible, grey and swirling storm. Up here, as I pull myself further, the sun shines upon my shoulders. The sky is a brilliant blue, hopeful, vibrant. I keep climbing, distancing myself from the stormy ground. I don’t know what the plateau above looks like, but I long for flat ground and stable footing. I reach up and grasp at a root emerging from the rock.

It snaps.

Suddenly, I am scrambling, rocks and dirt begin to funnel down around me, I slide, scraping my skin, dust grinding into my wounds. I am falling, slipping down this slope, wind howls in my ears and I plummet below the cloud cover, into the cold, torrential rain 

I came home from work today on shaky legs. I had a sense of panic. I was on edge. Everything seemed too bright, too real, too harsh. My eyes couldn’t adjust. I squirmed uncomfortably, I felt restless.

I caved. And I cried. 

It’s been months since I’ve broken like this. I can hardly recall the last time I sobbed under the weight of the world. I buckled in the grass, hot tears on my face. I pressed my head to the earth and wept.

I clutched at my firefly necklace and I begged God not to take anything more from me.

I composed myself, wandered inside and climbed into my bed.

I slept, shutting out my mind, retreating into a world of quiet.

I find myself halfway down that steep incline, wedged into the rock, covered in blood and gravel. I manage to crawl up onto my knees, rocks and grit piercing my wounded skin. My head reels, my vision weaves, distorted. I breathe deeply as the pouring rain pounds my soul. I breathe in this storm until my mind clears, my heart slows, I regain balance. I pull myself up to my feet, digging my hands into the dirt above. Slivers of blue sky are revealed to me, far above this tempest.

I reach up and begin the climb again.

These are the last two Community Voices posts for this round. We want to know what's on your mind, readers. We want to hear your voices. What questions are you asking yourself in the wake of your loss(es)? What questions are you asking of others?

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?