I'm So Happy For You

Babies are appearing everywhere, and the afternoon light is such that I expect for us to be expecting, too. The late-setting sun blasts through the windshield as I turn off the exit to my house. The angle of those rays are filled with meaning.

This is the season of my almost-fatherhood. This is the time last year when all I could think about was everything that I thought was to come.

There were so many plans and hopes in the works. Spring and summer were full of boundless potential and imminent adventures. The full bellies and multi-strollers all around foretold our amazing future, and I was thrilled to be on the cusp of fatherhood.

Fulfillment, success, perfection, they were within my grasp and now all I hold is dust and desolation.

Since it is impossible to grasp dust, and because desolation rots the soul, I have stopped trying to hold anything.

This has become my summer of the willing suspension of disbelief. I'm working hard at accepting the World as it is, and dealing with whatever is exactly in front of me.

I learned that from my parents. My mother has had MS since before I was born, and over the years they have shown me how to handle the impossible trials of their everyday life. Do the next thing first and then deal with whatever comes after that.

Do it right, do it with humor, don't stop until it's done. Don't rely on anyone else. Don't be surprised when it doesn't go at all the way you think it will. Don't give up and don't stop loving the people around you. Those are the lessons they taught me, and I'm working hard at most of them.

I'm stuck at Don't Give Up, though. I know there are people around me ready and willing to support me with their love, if only I would return an email or make a call. The ball is definitely in my court at this point. For phone-tag I am IT a thousand times over.

It is beyond me right now, though.

Reading through the interview below I was struck by how clearly I identified with all of those Phases, but I was surprised in that I seemed to be experiencing them completely out of order.

I feel like I've been through Confrontation and even a little Accomodation, but that Avoidance is where I stew these days.

It is a nuanced Avoidance. I don't stop thinking about Silas all day. I don't pretend that my life is anything that it is not. I know to the core of my being the depth of our loss. Or at least, I know how deep it seems to go from here. I have few illusions left at this point. I'm not avoiding his name, or the pain of losing him.

I am always ready to talk about Silas but I attempt to avoid all external reminders of what we should have.

That list includes: newborns, babies, people that just had babies or are pregnant, talk of the trials of having kids, strollers, carseats, first birthdays, the Internet, driving, walking and being awake. As long as I keep all of that out of mind & sight, I should be just fine. Ha!

Another part of the problem is that I'm starting to feel bad about how bad I still feel. I don't want to talk to friends because it's the same goddam fucking sob story every fucking time. I'm sick of hearing myself sometimes. I'm sick of hearing my soul's lament, sick of my mind devising strategies to fix our broken lives, sick of my heart oozing despair and ichor whenever another scar is peeled back, or a new, surprising wound pierces my defenses.

July was brutal. Three of my closest friends had babies this month and essentially all I could do was ignore them. Didn't stay in bed moping. Didn't drive off to the wilderness and leave everyone behind. Didn't stop working or playing or living. But when it came to those three, they were mostly out of my life.

I kept in contact until the day of birth, but after they each went perfectly, I had to cut them off for the moment. I feel like an asshole of the highest order, but I had to do it in order to save myself.

The idea of even talking to them on the phone to congratulate them, knowing they were holding their perfect new child in their arms, it took the push out of my fingers for every digit of their phone number. These are people I love and care about and all I can do is nothing.

I'm active and alert and fully engaged in most of my life, but the new babies are impossible right now. Once I start thinking about my friends, I think about everything they are doing with their new child and those thoughts completely immobilize me.

I know babies. I love babies. I don't mind the cheesy puke or the weird, wide alien eyes or the tears of hunger or confusion. I used to love babies.

But there is a period of time between birth and 'baby' that I really don't know anything about. By the time I've met most children they were at least a few weeks old, if not months, and I've never had that true newborn experience. I thought it was going to be a special, beautiful time with my son and first-born, but that was not the way it happened. So now, when I hear about a new child in the World, it fills me with a mix of hope and dread and joy and fear that is impossible to parse.

I'm thrilled for the parents. I'm thrilled the child is alive and healthy. I'm jealous beyond words that they have that child to cherish and nuture. I'm terrified by how close they came to living in my World without ever considering how bad it can get, and I'm enraged at myself for my inablity to do anything but look away.

All I can do is say how HAPPY I AM FOR YOU and look away, look away. I look away and try to feel Silas and hate how much his name sounds like Silence.

~~~~~~~~

What is your collateral damage? Where do you feel stuck? Are there certain aspects or phases of grief that you find particularly daunting? What do you avoid? What do you seek out?

In Your Head: An Interview with Dr. Sara Corse, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist

Seeking help from a therapist in the aftermath of babyloss often raises conflicting emotions within the bereaved based on their preconception of grief, and of the psych-profession in general. "I'm not depressed, I'm grieving!" babyloss parents scream from their blogs, in defense of their decision to not seek outside help.

Maybe.

Do we really know the difference between the two sets of emotions? And why are we all worked up about seeing a therapist anyway? Does it signal that we're weak? Can't handle it? Need to take our ugly emotions inside, out of public, into an office with a shut door? Or (gulp) maybe we're even a wee bit crazy?

What about those of you who sought help and were confronted with professionals who told you to buck up? Who didn't understand what infertility and babyloss had to do with each other? Who glossed over the loss and focused on something else -- or vice versa, assumed the loss was the be-all-and-end-all to your problems? And you were left wondering: was it them, or me?

In order to try and clarify some of these issues I went directly to the source. Dr. Sara Corse is a psychologist who specializes in grief counseling and the author of Cradled all the While, a memoir of her experience in dealing with her mother's terminal illness. Dr. Corse sees individuals, couples and families at Council for Relationships in Philadelphia. (Disclosure: I, Tash, interviewer, saw a grief therapist regularly, until recently. I consider it on the whole, a positive experience.)

Tash:  Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. How does one become "a psychologist who specializes in Grief Counseling?" That is, are there special courses or training that you do?

Dr. Corse: There are several professional pathways to working with people who are grieving. A grief counselor may have training as a psychologist, social worker, couple and family therapist or nurse. Grief is a normal life process, and as such is covered in courses on lifespan development. Therapists learn to work with both normal and complicated grieving in courses and supervised experience in counseling. Some programs offer semester-long courses in grief and there are many opportunities to specialize through self-guided readings, advanced supervision, workshops and conferences.

Why did you decide to go into this particular avenue of psychology?

I developed an expertise in grief counseling several years into my career, motivated by my own experience of loss. When I was 36, I cared for my mother as she was dying of cancer. I’d lost my father to a heart attack when I was 18, and I was struck by how different the two losses were for me emotionally. I have always been one to read everything I can get my hands on when I’m trying to process something distressing, so I read widely on death and grief. I also began writing what became “Cradled all the while” a few months after my mother’s death, and found the process of writing to be helpful, both in terms of my own grief and in terms of opening my interest in grief counseling. It is more than a decade since my mother’s death, and I now have a wide and varied clinical practice. About 20% of my clients come specifically for grief counseling and many others have had losses in their life that they have not fully grieved, and this becomes part of their therapeutic work.

I know I felt this early on (I no longer do) and I've seen it expressed by others: how do you answer the grieving parent who responds, "Well what do you know! Have you ever been through this?" What is it exactly that you can offer someone regardless of whether you've been through that particular situation or not?

It is common for people who are grieving to feel very alone with their experience. There is often a deep desire for connection with others who’ve been through the same thing, and at the same time, a wish for acknowledgement or appreciation that their loss is unique. I openly share with clients whether or not I have experienced a loss like theirs personally. In fact it is sometimes more difficult to work with someone who is grieving a loss similar to my own, because I have more of my own experiences to filter out in order to be responsive to the client’s emotions. What I try to offer all clients, however, is an open-minded curiosity and interest in their unique story of loss and a commitment to accompany them in their grieving process.

I know you don't want to start analyzing people who you don't even know, but are there any ground rules for how someone would know perhaps it's time to seek out this particular kind of help? I know a common refrain around here is, "Of course I'm depressed! My baby died!" and some people are just reluctant to seek out this kind of help due to monetary constraints, preconceptions regarding psychotherapy that were in place before their loss, or just not understanding the profession and what it can offer.

To understand when it’s time to seek grief counseling, it might be helpful to first have an idea of what normal grieving looks like. I like Theresa Rando’s model of mourning (grief refers to emotional, behavioral, physical and social reactions to loss; mourning refers to the work of processing and integrating the experience of loss).

She calls the first phase of mourning the Avoidance Phase, during which time the person in grief comes to recognize the loss. This includes acknowledging the death and working to understand the death.

The second phase is the Confrontation Phase, in which the grieving individual experiences the deep emotional pain of the loss. The work of mourning during this phase is reacting to the separation from the loved one through feeling, identifying, accepting, and expressing one’s emotions. It also involves identifying and mourning secondary losses that coincide with or develop as a consequence of the initial loss, such as the loss of the role relationship one had or would have had with that individual. During this phase, mourners recollect and reexperience the deceased and the relationship—reviewing and remembering their life, and reviving and reexperiencing the feelings engendered by that relationship. The person in mourning relinquishes old attachments to the deceased and to previous beliefs about how the world works.

The final phase of mourning is the Accommodation Phase. A new relationship is developed with the deceased, new ways of being in the world are adopted and a new identity is formed…one that incorporates the experience of grief and loss but is not wholly defined by it. And finally there is a reinvestment in life. The process of mourning a specific death can take place over many months and years, and may be revisited and reworked at different points throughout life.

This model of “normal” mourning serves as a backdrop for addressing complicated mourning. (I use quotes because the word normal seems to trivialize the pain of grief. I know that when I have been in mourning, nothing felt normal about it, and I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to suggest that it was). Complicated mourning is associated with several risk factors. These include specific circumstances of the death, such as a sudden, unexpected loss, death from an overly lengthy illness, the loss of a child, or the perception that the death was preventable. Other risk factors are related to the griever’s prior or concurrent condition, such as previous losses that were not fully mourned, high levels of life stress, depression and anxiety or a perceived lack of social support.

Grief counseling can help with both types of mourning, but is particularly useful in complicated mourning (or during complicated periods of normal mourning). So how does one know if it’s time to seek counseling?

One indicator that counseling might be helpful is feeling stuck—as with struggling to move from the Avoidance Phase of mourning into the Confrontation Phase. Denial is sometimes a cause of that feeling of stuckness. It is often a feature of the Avoidance Phase, manifesting either as not acknowledging the reality of the death or not acknowledging the feelings associated with it. Denial is not something we do, but something that happens—a natural psychological reaction which provides us with a time-out—a temporary delay of grief until we can gather the psychological resources necessary for experiencing the devastating pain associated with the loss. Although initially adaptive, if denial continues for too long, it becomes maladaptive and delays us coming to terms with the loss. Counseling can offer support in coming to acknowledge and confront the grief.

Another indicator is a persistence of depression or anxiety. Grief and depression share common symptoms, such as sadness, difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite and loss of energy. But in grief, our moods, such as sadness, anger, despair, or hopelessness, are triggered by sights, sounds, memories and thoughts about the loss. In depression, the symptoms are more persistent and pervasive. In grief, moods and symptoms change over time—from acute grief, which may be debilitating and immobilizing, to later stages of mourning when feelings can be bracketed—at least enough to function at work or at home. The feelings may not be any less strong and may still hit powerfully and unexpectedly, but they can be felt and expressed without interfering with overall functioning. In depression, bracketing is far more difficult. Mood and energy are more consistently down.

In terms of how long is too long for feeling depressed during normal grieving, some professionals use two months as a marker. On the one hand, I think 2 months is too short a time to diagnose depression in someone who is grieving the death of a child. On the other hand, if someone is struggling with feeling depressed, and having trouble resuming normal activities two months after the death, therapy can be such a helpful tool that I encourage it even if it is a part of grieving and not depression.

We've all been told at least from within this community that grief is a normal life process, and there is no wrong way to grieve. What benefits are there then to seeing a therapist as opposed to, say, duking it out on your own?

Here are some things clients have shared with me about how therapy has been helpful for them:

* feeling validated, feeling heard, feeling listened to

* feeling not alone: being able to reflect on and express their feelings with another person rather than keeping them inside

* not feeling blamed or judged

* appreciating that they don't have to reciprocate with the therapist--they don't have to take care of or listen to the therapist's feelings. They don't have to prove to the therapist that they will be okay. They don't have to take any responsibility for making the therapist feel like he or she is being helpful.

* being able to talk about the experience as many times in as many ways as they want or need without worrying about being a burden.

* being able to ask questions and get feedback and learn a framework for understanding their experiences that can support them through the phases of mourning.

* being encouraged to explore feelings that they may shy away from with the support of the therapist, and thus learning how to tolerate these emotions as they come and go during mourning.

* having a space to grieve that feels safe and where time and expectations don't (or shouldn't) matter.

* being able to talk about their feelings about or worries about other family members confidentially, and explore in therapy ways to address them.

* with couples, helping partners understand and appreciate the different ways people have of mourning, and learn to support each other and stay connect through the grieving process.

* having a place to explore other issues that are kicked up by the loss and may be important to address at this point in life.

Do you have any suggestions on "finding a good fit?" I feel as though I rather lucked out, although I did look for someone who specialized in "grief." Others in these parts have not been very fortunate in finding doctors that they feel are helpful (some sound downright oblivious to the basic issues surrounding infant death). What should we look for when we go in the first time (or few times)?

* someone who makes you feel comfortable telling your story and sharing your feelings.

* someone who has some experience with working with grief.

* someone who communicates an interest and curiosity in you.

* someone who will answer your questions, even if they come across as challenging, without being defensive or dismissive.

* someone who will engage with you around questions of fit, and doesn't suggest that he or she is the only person who can help you.

* someone you respect.

* someone who respects your boundaries—not imposing their beliefs or experiences on you and not pushing you before you have developed trust.

Along the lines of "there is no wrong way to grieve": It seems to me that, sadly, for some members of society at large there are indeed "right ways." It's not uncommon for us to occasionally get comments to the effect of "hurry it up already," or, strangely, "You need Grief Counseling!" One of our contributors (Bon) recently wrote a hospital to ask them to change the language on their fund-raising literature as she found it offensive to someone who had lost a family member at this institution. The campaign went public, a newspaper picked a line out of Bon's argument, built a story around it, gave it a controversial title, and then posted it on the internet -- and opened the comments. The public comments were stunningly offensive in my mind, one of them though told Bon to "Get Grief Counseling."

I thought that was a rather strange insult; it seemed to be indicating that the commenter was uncomfortable with Bon's emotions and that Bon was better off dealing with these feelings privately (preferably in an office with a doctor present, apparently) -- not publicly. But it also really tiptoes the line as to how the public at large views therapy, and it's worth.

Our society does communicate a strong message of intolerance for the wide range of feelings that grief entails. Tears and sadness, maybe. Anger and advocacy, not so much. And our society follows up the intolerance for the full range of emotions with intolerance for any of those emotions that last longer than a few days or weeks. Bon handled the whole situation, from beginning to end, with grace and balance. She was attuned to the impact the hospital’s fundraising letter had, not just on her but on any parent who’s baby did not survive, and took action to raise the level of awareness and sensitivity of the fund-raising world to this point of view. The public comments suggesting that Bon get grief counseling miss the mark. In fact, a healthy processing of grief often leads to an action such as Bon's. When we have done (or are doing) the work of mourning, we are able to speak out regarding the universal truths of grieving and loss and can advocate for societal change. When we embrace the full range of feelings that loss brings to our lives, and integrate our most painful experiences into a new way of being in the world, we find energy for transforming our experience of loss into something positive for others.

What do you see as the biggest hindrance to grieving?

I don’t think there is one big single hindrance, but there are several roadblocks, some internal to the person who is grieving and some external. Earlier I mentioned denial. It is the persistence of denial, not its early existence, which proves problematic. If we cannot sustain knowledge of the fact of the death and the irreversibility of the death, we cannot mourn. Another hindrance to grieving is the inability to gain necessary information to answer questions about how and why the death occurred. We often hold off on feelings of loss until there is greater understanding.

External hindrances include the impact of commonly held myths about mourning, such as the notion that grief follows a set path or sequence of stages, resolves in a matter of months or comes to complete resolution. Another external hindrance for parents grieving the loss of a baby is society’s tendency to minimize the loss. In fact, grieving the death of a child means not only experiencing the loss of the brief relationship, but also the loss of potential, about which they are continually reminded. The perpetuation of societal attitudes about grief makes it hard for people in mourning to acknowledge their feelings, both to themselves and to others, to be patient with themselves and to seek and gain support from others.

What then do you see as the most helpful thing (or things!) one can do to process grief?

In terms of denial, there are various experiences early on that can help grievers acknowledge the death and begin to experience and express their feelings. These include having the opportunity to hold or touch or view the body of the deceased, and to participate in rituals that acknowledge the death, such as a funeral.

As the process of grieving continues, it helps to talk about the death and any feelings, and to find people who are willing to listen and ask questions.

Participating in a support group with people who are experiencing or have experienced a similar loss can be helpful for exploring and validating feelings. This includes on-line support groups.

It helps to create rituals or memorials that are meaningful. Some people plant a tree or garden, donate to a cause, or launch an initiative in their loved one’s memory, enacting love and the pain of loss in a way that benefits others.

And as we’ve discussed, grief counseling is helpful, particularly when we feel stuck or alone, when we are experiencing a complicated period of grieving or when we have an inner sense that in processing this loss, we are provided an opportunity for making other important life changes in therapy.

How do you feel about online support -- like this site -- or blogging as a means of self-help?

I think it is a fantastic medium for several important processes of grieving: The work that people do in writing about their experiences, whether blogging or commenting on other people’s posts, is transformative. The writer must engage her or his emotions in the crafting of a post, which then offers both an expressive outlet and a mode of working through the experience that deepens personal understanding and connection to the experience. In posting on the internet, writers have an immediate outlet for sharing their experiences with others. Because there is an intended audience, the emotional, intellectual and creative work of blogging is different from personal journal writing—in considering what one wants to share publicly, the writer’s perspective is lifted to the universal (or at least in that direction). This process of moving from the personal to the universal is something that gradually happens during the process of mourning, and writing for an audience facilitates it.

Blogging also offers a wonderful way to network with others who have experienced something similar. Particularly for those who are new to grief, being able to read and comment on posts by people who are further along in their mourning can be very validating. For parents grieving the loss of an infant, being part of a blogging community is a way to create a set of loving relationships around oneself and one’s lost baby. Sharing grief this way brings meaning to the baby’s short life, and when others in the blogging community respond to or even anticipate one’s own grief reaction, the grieving parent feels far less lonely.

The one caveat I would mention about on-line communication is that it is different from face to face communication in terms of how people filter emotions, opinions and reactions. On the one hand, people may hide certain reactions and reveal other reactions in order to gain social acceptance or approval. On the other hand, sometimes people are inappropriately unfiltered in their reactions, such that they say things and say them in certain ways that they never would if they were face to face (internet bullying, perpetuating conflict and misunderstanding, etc.). So I would encourage people to continue to nurture supportive face-to-face relationships for grieving as well.

Have you sought out therapy in the aftermath of your babyloss?  Why or why not?  Did you find it useful/helpful?  

 

tough as nails

Two weeks after we lost Sadie we were dealt another blow that at the time was inconceivable in the cruelty of its timing. Out of respect for my husband's privacy I won't go into detail here, but the short story involves a sudden and intense health scare that led us to believe that he had a potentially terminal illness.

I am not totally sure how I got through those weeks considering my fragile state to begin with. Actually, that's a bit of a lie. My baby was dead and some wackjob doctor had just told us my husband would be next. The truth is I was higher than a kite, 99% of the time. Between Ativan and red wine, my memories are fuzzy around the edges where they're not altogether black.

During one of our initial hospital visits I broke down in front of a specialist, hysterical with fear and anger at the overwhelming unfairness of it all. It was humiliating and painful beyond words. Soon after that episode something in me clicked, and I realized that letting him see my despair was no longer an option. I proceeded to try my ass off to calm him with some sort of physical osmosis, somehow via my hand intertwined with his, or wrapped up in a tight bear hug.

Six weeks after the nightmare began it was suddenly over. At the root of it all was a misconstrued x-ray and an American emergency room physician whom I will never forgive. We were given the go ahead to return to England, empty handed and shocked, wary shells of the people we once were.

The reason I'm telling this story is because of the intimate way the experience has permeated our lives since. It broke a little something in us both that is difficult to describe, mostly because I don't believe either of us fully understands it. My doctor has her opinion of course, at least for me. A curious infliction she likes to refer to as chronic anxiety.

On a bad day, a chest cold is lung cancer. A bump on my arm is inevitably a tumour. Everyday aches and pains must be underlying signs of something dire to come.

Now, before you conjure up images of my morning commute involving a padded helmet and gas mask, understand that I am not a certified freakshow. But I worry. A lot. About myself, my husband, my loved ones. And more often than not about the health of our future children. Provided, of course, I survive another pregnancy without suffering a stroke at the ripe old age of 32.

I have read that the incidence of depression in parents after babyloss is roughly 69%. I do not believe I'm depressed. However guilty it may make me feel on occasion, I still enjoy the pursuit of life's pleasures. I can take care of myself and get out of bed in the morning and am not at risk of hurting myself. But I'm definitely, one thousand per cent terrified of what the future may hold. What else we may have to endure. On a particularly bad day I wonder why I would even try again when the odds are I'm just going to get sick and die in the end anyway. Horrible, I know. But try as I might to think it away, it still lingers.

As life has sped up these past few months and our time is seemingly endlessly booked with work and social functions, there are days when there is nothing I want to do more than sit at home alone in our safe little house, locked away from the outside world.

I look at my husband in a new light these days as a result of everything we've been through together. The concept of losing him was unfathomable - yet so was the idea of Sadie being so sick. So what exactly we can rely on I'm really not sure. There is nothing I would not do for him. There's nothing I want to do without him. And I want to be a parent with him more than I could ever properly articulate on this page.

If I could just get past all of this damn fear.

.::.

Did you suffer from any form of anxiety after the loss of your child? If so, did it wane with the passage of time? Did it affect your decision to try again?

social quotient

Reaching Out by jmtimages

 

If there is such a thing as social quotient, I score rather low on that. I am probably in the 5th percentile or something like that.

Back in school, on the last day of the final examinations, hordes of students would surge to town, pouring into theatres to watch a movie, or combing the malls for retail therapy after weeks of study (and performance) stress.

I went to the second-hand bookstore, lugged home a pile of novels, curled up and read. I have always been the rather (in)famous anti-social bird.

After Ferdinand died, my social quotient plunged. Crashed. Failed to register on the scale, because I totally dug a tunnel southwards and went into hiding.

The only way to know that I had not wiped my neck with a sharp blade was that I was writing, spewing all thoughts and emotions out into cyberspace, emptying my grief unbridled.

And, it took me a long time to crawl out of my little dark hole.

At one point, I felt I better be out. My girls need the sunlight, they need a social life, in some form of guise.

But being social was so hard. Talking to other people, I keep making mental footnotes like--

I can't believe I am standing here talking, my son died.

I can't believe I had a stillbirth.

But, you know, my son died.

How can babies die?!

I am not normal, even if I can stand and talk, do you understand?

::

I've never ever been the life of any party, even though for years my horoscope kept insisting that if you would just invite me to your party, I'm gonna kick it up a few notches at least.

Still, I do not consider myself a difficult person to be with. I am usually civil and pleasant, and don't bite too often. (Really!) I do enjoy being social, and (dare I say it) can be fun to be with.

I know for some, keeping with the social life they once had helps with the grieving/healing. It allows the support network to be available, it makes one feel alive and still be part of the fabric of society.

For me, I just want to rip the thread that is me right out of that fabric that is society and announce, with a wave of a black lacy handkerchief, "Forget I ever exist." I feel like I wanna turn my back upon society, upon life, and just be a vagabond, traveling to the farthest corners of the world, dragging my tattered heart in a quaint and worn leather bag. I no longer wished to participate in life.

But, how is that possible?!

It just is not, unless I check myself into some remote mental institute and spend the rest of my days forgetting my name, drooling strained spinach out of the corners of my mouth, rubbing dirt into my hair, and basically just waste away until my body decides it is time.

So, slowly, somehow I became "social" again. And I will admit, sometimes it helps. To just participate in life, be useful from time to time (when I first held a door for someone, I felt... alive), interact with strangers. Instead of just mumbling to the cashiers or pretending to be busy and not want to talk, I reached into the space that contains my heart and give it a squeeze and focus on being attentive to people I talk to. I mean, I really wanted to know about their day. And if they went beyond the usual "Great!" or "Wonderful!" and complain about a leaky toilet or having to be on their feet all day, I listened, I empathized and that made me feel more alive. Even though none of that had direct relation to my grief, it made me feel less disconnected and my heart became enlivened, even if only for a little bit.

I am curious about how others are doing and what excites and bothers them. I like to be able to interact and share my thoughts. But being a bereaved sometimes handicaps that. I still keep making mental foodnotes of My son died, I had a stillbirth and sometimes the mental footnote keeps ringing in my head as I proceed with my social life. There seems to be always this tension between wanting a sense of normalcy and desiring an acknowledgement that one is not exactly normal.

I know my social quotient will slowly go up, by virtue of the primal need to be social, by virtue of my children's needs, and I hope, that this scar in my heart that had made me raw in social situations will one day become a glowing light that shines compassion and deep empathy when I one day become a more normal social animal again.

 

In our deepest moments of struggle, frustration, fear, and confusion, we are being called upon to reach in and touch our hearts. Then, we will know what to do, what to say, how to be. What is right is always in our deepest heart of hearts. It is from the deepest part of our hearts that we are capable of reaching out and touching another human being. It is, after all, one heart touching another heart.
~ Roberta Sage Hamilton ~

 

And you? How do you do? What's your social quotent, were you a social maniac before, or were you more of a hermit? How did babylosthood affect your social life? What was hard about being social again? How did being social help? What was the first social event you chose to participate in, and why, and how did it go?

when mama cries

www.flamingpear.com

I do remember my mother crying. I don’t know whether she cried more than most women. She just seemed more comfortable doing it, less reserved, unapologetic. I do remember her crying, and I never really thought there was anything wrong with it. I think it is my mother I have to thank for the ease I have always had releasing my own tears.

I do remember worrying, though, especially when her melancholy would carry on for a while. When she felt blue. When she would spend quiet time with herself, caring for the plants in our garden, rather than engaging with my sister and me as we played nearby. In those moments, I wanted her to cheer up. I wanted to be able to make her feel better. Sometimes I could, but not always.

One day, maybe it just got to be too much for her. And she left, to take care of just herself.

Have you ever read the book or seen the movie, The Hours? About how women throughout time have carried their sorrows? That story just gets me from such a knowing place. After watching it in the theater, my sister and I clung to each other, cathartic tears streaming down our cheeks until the credits had unwound and the lights had come back up in the theater. I looked at my sister stunned and eventually got up to wobble home on spaghetti legs.

Melancholia

The blues

Feeling down

Depression

Mental illness

We are so frightened of these, aren’t we? So stunned by them. I find it irritating when depression is referred to as something surprising…

You’re depressed?! How baffling! How mysterious! How could you possibly be depressed when your life is so good? Look at all the blessings around you! Cheer up! You can do it if you just choose to!

As something that has to be cured, overcome...

We must address this right away! You can feel better with the right help. You have to feel better! We must absolutely help you to feel happy again!

As something that has to be medicated, conquered, eradicated…

There is just so much depression in our society today. But now we know how to treat it! Now we know how to beat it! Now we can free you from its hold with the right combination of science and counseling.

 

Trust me, I am a big fan of therapy… It has saved me many times from sinking to a place from which I might never return. Zoloft helped me once too, when I just couldn't get my head above water no matter how hard I tried.

But can we look at depression, maybe, in a different way? See it. Recognize it. Say hello to it rather than shoving it down?

Hello melancholy feelings! Hello unexplainable sorrow that won’t go away in an appropriate amount of time! Here you are again! Welcome. I see you. I hear you. I feel you. I befriend you. Tell me what you need to share with me.

As someone who comes from a long line of people who – egads! – have experienced great depression (they called it melancholia back then) for a number of reasons (they were Holocaust survivors, they lost everything and saw horrible things), and some who have felt it without any apparent cause, it just annoys me the way we approach it in our larger culture.

As a woman who has struggled with my own depression, my own melancholia, my own sorrow and loss and grief and misery – several times, even before losing my child – I have a bone to pick with the way we approach our difficult emotions, how we hold them… or rather how intensely we try to shake them off and as far away from us as possible.

.::.

Shortly after Tikva died, an old friend sent me Miriam Greenspan’s book, Healing Through the Dark EmotionsFinally, I thought after reading the introduction, somebody who gets it! Somebody who understands that the way to get through the hard stuff is to go through it. To be with it. To listen to what it has to teach.

Greenspan lost her own first child, who died just weeks after he was born. Her second child was born healthy. Her third child was born with a serious physical disability. It is clear that her children have been her greatest teachers. But it is not a book about losing a child, nor one about parenting a child with special needs.

As a mother, as a human being, and as a psychotherapist with years of experience in private practice, Greenspan writes about three primary emotions, which she calls the dark emotions – grief, fear and despair. She writes about the alchemy possible when we can really feel them, really experience them, go deeply into the darkness that usually scares us away. And she writes of coming through to the other side, the “transformational process by which grief becomes gratitude, fear turns to joy, and despair opens a doorway to a more resilient faith in life.”

Greenspan writes about compassion, about how it is almost impossible to live in our time, in our day, in our society, with so much sorrow and struggle all around us – and not feel dark emotions. Why, then, do we feel there is something wrong with us when we feel depressed? Why are we told so automatically that it is something that should and can be fixed?

I had so many ah-hah! moments when reading her book. Not because it was something I didn’t already know, but because it just resonated with me as truth, and it was a reminder that came at just the right time…

That there is no way I am going to truly survive – and by survive here, I really mean to thrive after (because we are allowed to thrive again, we are!) – the death of my child if I don’t go first to those dark places in my soul, look them in the eye, and ask them what they have to teach me.

It’s that hindsight is 20-20 thing: I have learned enough from my less successful attempts at pushing down my grief in the past to know that this won’t get me far for very long. I have learned that I certainly won’t get anywhere remotely close to growth by ignoring what needs attention in the dark places in my soul. I tried that in high school, shortly after my mother left, and I found myself two years later with 65 extra pounds of weight on my body and an anger shoved so deep inside that I found myself too depressed to get out of bed.

.::.

Here I am now, ten and a half months since my sweet girl died. More than a year since she was born so fragile. Almost a year and a half since her ultrasound, when my world as I knew it imploded and my life changed forever in ways I am only now beginning to understand.

“Grief becomes gratitude, fear turns to joy, and despair opens a doorway to a more resilient faith in life.”

I’ll tell you something that isn’t easy to admit, especially here…

I do feel gratitude.

I do feel joy.

I do still have faith.

Something is being transformed deep inside me since – because – I lost my Tikva. I don’t think it would have happened if she hadn’t been who she was. If she hadn’t come and gone so quickly. I consider it her gift, what I get instead of my second child here in my arms, healthy and well. It is a gift of compassion. True compassion, which starts with compassion towards myself. Begins with patience and understanding towards myself as I go through the messiness of the ups and downs of each day.

When I read about the possibility for gratitude, joy and faith months ago, I opened up to the possibility that I could get there as I went through this dark passage. It’s true. They’re there – the gratitude for Tikva, the joy I feel when I see a hawk flying above or feel Dahlia climbing my body as if I were a jungle gym, the faith I have in good things ahead. They’re there – even when I only feel them in glimmers every once in a while, balanced by their darker counterparts.

I’ll keep going there, through the darkness, towards the light. And as I do, I’ll continue to cry as much as I need. Cry at the sorrow and at the joy. These days I wonder if one can truly exist without the other. Maybe that’s what Tikva came through to teach me.

.::.

How do you experience your dark and your light emotions? What are the ways in which you go there, deep into the shadows or leaping towards joy? Do you sometimes avoid your more difficult emotions? What works for you in navigating all the places in your soul?

from our side

Late for work, late to bed, dishes in the sink, beer bottles strewn through the house like a breadcrumb trail to my evening flameout is how I roll. How about you?

I was ready to start complaining about how tough it was to work after being up all night with that little bugger screaming my sleep away. I was ready to become a machine calibrated only for the mom/baby show to shine.

Instead, now, I'm part therapist, part rock, part disaster, part ogre.

But in the end I can only do so much. No matter what, I'm still something of a spectator to the deep well of grief that my wife inhabits. She can't help but feel this more profoundly because of the specific physicality of her experience. Our emotional trauma is roughly equivalent, but my physical self is essentially unchanged. Sure, my shit is liquid on those mornings when I wake up devastated and insane. Yes, my neck and shoulders are crimped and twisted by this invisible, relentless weight of sadness. There is no question that I have grown fat and lazy on a diet of avoidance and lassitude.

Frankly, I'm psyched when I can get up and do anything at all. The laze comes easy to me. Stayed in bed until noon the other day. Noon. By the time I had breakfast and finished coffee it was time to start thinking about dinner. Lunch didn't even make it into the rotation. Poised on the brink of parenthood, I've been tossed back into a life where sleeping until noon is actually an option. And I choose that option only because facing the day is more difficult than feeling bad about wasting it.

For those of you that already had children, this all must be completely different. I'm sure it is easier to focus on the living children than the one that didn't survive. But for those of us whom our lost offspring is our first, the wrenching denial of everything that was to come is nearly overpowering. I've never been one to descend to the depths of "Fuck Everything" that I now sometimes swim through. Sure I touched on it here and there. Perhaps dipped a toe into that boggy morass of nihilism and disregard during a rough patch, but I never submerged into that particular muck. Wasn't my style at all.

Now, somehow, I have to make this muck into a home. Losing your child is a lesson in how to make Shit Houses. Here's a pile of crap, live in it.

And not only live in it, but you have to share this Feces Condominium with someone else who is probably in many ways even worse off than you.

Are you a patient person? Can you listen well and respond without anger? How do you fare when you see someone that has everything you want, but complains about how tough it is? Are you capable of letting go of expectations and accepting the World at face value? If so, a career in having your child die just might be for you. Everyone else need not apply.

There is no one set of rules and instructions to help us deal with the loss of our child. For each person, this path through grief and despair is utterly solitary and painfully unique. And even though we get it more than anyone else our wives know, we still don't get it like they do. And that pisses me off, too.

I am the necessary, vital partner, but secondary to the vessel that carried my son. Without me she would crumble, but I am a hot breeze away from disintegration myself. She wants me to be there, to help her, to discuss the steaming pile of shit that is our shared life, but all I have been doing all day is fighting back the relentless demons that plague my every thought. By the time I get home I've finally won, and there suddenly is a new battle for me to fight. It's not me against her, it's us against her own horde of demons, but sometimes I've got nothing left.

There is no easy way to say "I've spent the last 10 waking hours thinking about our dead son and I simply cannot hear any words pertaining to said awfulness. Everything you say I have already thought, and I've chosen to keep silent. When you speak these words, they rip me open doubly, once because I know, I know I know, and another time because I know how destroyed you are too."

Can't we just watch TV? Can't we just sigh together and let that be enough? Can't you see how I move slow through the world and lash out at every obstacle? Would it be easier if I showed my true emotions and dismantled this entire reality with my own bare hands? I can destroy everything, you know. I can do it. There's nothing left anyway, so it would be easy to take that next step and show everyone how nothing everything has become by destroying everything in sight.

It wouldn't even be a rage thing. I wouldn't hurt anyone at all. I'd just start with this keyboard, move to the desk and then piece by piece sledgehammer this house into rubble. Sidewalk and street would be next but it would be the car that would really take some time. Those things are built to last. It wouldn't though. Not in the path of my focused pain. Helpless to help my son be alive, I could demonstrate to everyone the futile emptiness of this life. At least it would be action with an end result.

Look, I could say. Look what I've done for us. Now everyone knows what the World looks like from our side. Our desolation is now obvious and clear and we don't have to talk about any of it anymore.

I don't do that, though, and by not I am showing you how much I love you and want this World to work out somehow. The containment of my rage is an act of love. The daily denial of vomit and insanity is proof of my commitment. I can keep standing up and moving forward with you, but every millimeter of motion and attention takes the entire focus of my will.

The big picture of this pain is impossible to comprehend all at once. All I can manage to figure out is the very next thing in front of me. So each next thing that comes my way, I try to make it as good as I can. I know what makes me happy. Simple things I can control like sleeping until noon or steak grilled to perfection gives me pleasure in a world where joy is rare and fleeting.

I don't aim for joy anymore. I aim for contentment, I aim for an absence of pain. The problem is, to get there I sometimes have to shut down so many systems and thoughts that I can barely speak. If I am quiet and distant it is because I have spent the day raging against my pain. When I am brusque and bitter it is because of how much I hate what we have been denied. I know she is not my enemy, but there is no one to battle against to right this terrible wrong. Caresses and communication are sometimes collateral damage to the trauma of this experience.

I cannot take away her pain, so it feels like I can't do anything worthwhile at all. I couldn't stop what happened to our son. I could not fix him before he was gone. I cannot go back and get him and bring him to her, and I cannot alter the awful truth of every single day.

But excuses suck and I can always do better. I can share the simple pleasures with her, and listen even when the words shred me to pieces. I've been shredded so thoroughly by now, another tear doesn't hurt much at all. I can hold her and touch her skin and say nothing at all and be certain it was exactly what she wanted and needed right then and there.

We are not enemies here. One or the other is never to blame. All the tools and methods we had for working together have been tested to the limit or thrown out the window along with our hopes and dreams, everything except for one thing. That One Thing is that there is no one in the world except for her, my wife, and I would do anything and everything to take away all the pain of these last nine months.

I'll do the dishes. I'll sweep this Shit House. I'll drive to the store and buy organic strawberries and fair trade dark chocolate and I'll feed it to her piece by piece and listen quietly while she rages with tears against her internal, implacable demons. I know she'll hold me when I can't fight them either, and she won't make a racket cleaning up my detritus when I'm sleeping till noon.

She knows that in my dreams I just might find our son. It's one of the only place left I have to look. The other place is in her eyes, and I always find Silas there. Sometimes, though I cannot handle that either. The pain I see inside her breaks me to pieces, too.

~~~~~~~~~~

What do you and your partner fight about? How do you each handle stress and pain? What do you need most? What is the worst part of your every day? How do you help each other deal with grief? What could both of you do better? What are you awesome at together?