Hug Thyself

The other day in the car my preset was broadcasting a program which I sometimes find interesting, but this week according to the  host was about "loving yourself."  And woah, for me that screams touchy feely and sounds as enticing as root canal.  So I found some angry music to hum to instead, but on the way home grew weary of heavy bass lines and forgot about the lurve fest and clicked back through just as the host was asking the guest to explain the difference between self-pity and self-compassion.  She paused, had to figure out which definition to chew through first, landed on self-compassion, and finally blurted out something to the effect of:

Look, everyone hurts.  Everyone experiences hurt.  Everyone suffers.

(I'm paraphrasing pretty heavily, but some of these catch phrases are not mine.)

The words flitted out while my fingers twitched on the dial.  Self compassion respects a common humanity, and the idea that life is difficult for everyone . . .  It's not self-focused, it assumes we're interconnected. . .  Suffering is part of the human experience, this IS normal, everyone experiences suffering.

Ultimately this should feel better than self pity because it means we're not alone.

Huh.

I don't toe that line very often anymore, the pity party one, with the self-absorbed balloons and memememe cupcakes (hey, I'll cry if I want to), but if I get close it usually doesn't take much to pull me back far away from the line with a sharp slap to the face.

It's all but impossible to stay wrapped in my bitter cocoon during a week like this, with a disaster of one sort, followed quickly by one of another, followed immediately by yet a third uncontemplated -- all upon one population.  It makes me realize how lowly and small my place is, and how contained my problems.  The losses there are so massive as to be unbelievable, unfathomable.  How the earth could move and then the sea could rise and make so many disappear within minutes is the stuff of fiction and space ships, not here, not on earth, where we watch television and twitter and eat chocolate and drive to the grocery store listening to the radio chatter about giving yourself hugs.

Sometimes it's hard to watch this hurt, to listen to people talk about how within minutes life changed forever.  I realize I told a similar story once, but now I feel nothing but sympathy:  that control I thought I lost?  I had both hands on the wheel compared to this, not to mention afterwards I got to retreat to my nice warm home while they're talking from a tent without water or food or family.  With the threat of nuclear meltdown to boot.  I wonder if what I felt was really pain at all.

When I hear of a new babyloss blog I try and find the time to go and leave a comment, and 99 times out of 100 I say, "You're not alone."  It's not much, but I hope the message conveys.  I remember feeling so bereft, so completely alone, as if I was the only person living on earth to ever undergo the freakiest of freakshows that ever freaked.  But here this lady is saying what I now know to be true:  not freaky at all, not remotely.  If Japan had a blog, this week I'd say, "You're not alone."  None of us are.  I just hope they hear me and know how sincerely I mean it.

+++

Writers use simile, it's a fact of life like taxes and death.  And when writers are trying to describe something that's happened to them, but not to many others -- like say, the death of an infant -- that hurt like a motherfucker and changed their universe in the blink of an eye, they grasp at any metaphor, any simile, any analogy to try and explain their pain.  I know I'm guilty, I've compared Maddy dying to a car wreck, I've discussed being stabbed in the heart, I've described the earth shifting under my feet, I'm sure I've even spoken of feeling flooded or even waves.  Tidal waves.

And this week I feel like an idiot because it's abundantly clear just looking at the headlines that I know nothing of feeling the earth move or the rush of a wave as high as a building crashing over my head.

Perhaps I shouldn't make comparisons to things I don't know about; losing Maddy was like hell I write, but I know nothing of that other than what I picked up in Inferno. (Although, if it does exist, I am headed there.  And will let you know as soon as I adjust to the lighting.  Call me!)  Am I doing a disservice to excrement saying I felt like shit?  I do know that I will pause before I speak of the auto accidents and volcanic ash and post traumatic stress disorder because maybe . . .  maybe it wasn't like that at all.  

+++

The other thing the guest lady on this radio program said before I moved on down the dial for something more uptempo was that in order to even begin to understand something like what happened in Japan, you need to be compassionate with yourself.  You need to acknowledge that it will hurt, that it's difficult to read about and adjust to, be kind to yourself as you abide with other's pain.  And I wondered, as I clicked away, about all the people who failed to even attempt to understand us:  who just moved on, and ignored it, and forgot it, and refused to talk about it.  The people who thought they were insulating themselves against our deadbaby juju by stepping a good ten feet away and using hand sanitizer.  The people who thought our lives were "too negative!" and they were doing them-positivity-selves a favor by not reaching out into the morass.  

But maybe this woman is right, and these people couldn't muster up enough kindness for themselves to open the door to someone else's hurt.  I'm not sure I have enough self-compassion to feel sorry for them, but it did make me think about them, even for just a few minutes.  I realized we aren't the pity parties, they are.  They're the self-absorbed ones, who blather on about wallowing and moving on.  We're not the one's who are alone, they are.  We're the normal, the ones with suffering, they're in denial.  The people who can sit and be with us and our pain?  Are truly good to themselves and understand compassion and its interconnectedness -- probably to such an extent that it's interwoven and unconscious.  I should probably strive to be one of these people.  I owe them so much.

It also means, if this radio chick is right, that by reaching out to others in our situation, by stepping outside of ourselves for even a few minutes online, that we've done this first step of being good to ourselves.    It's funny to think that I may actually be more gentle on myself after my baby died; here I gained a ton of weight I couldn't lose, and now swear uncontrollably and grew more cynical, and bleed bitter out of my eyeballs  . . . . but maybe I did.  Maybe we all did.  Our interconnectedness -- if this radio chick is right -- proves it.

Good for us.  /pats cyber self on back

Do you ever trip over the line into self-pity?  (It's ok, I'm sure I did.)  How do you pull yourself back?  Do you experience self-compassion -- that is, do you feel some connection with others in your suffering?  How about in their suffering? Are you good to yourself?  Or does the whole "be good to you!" conversation give you the heeby jeebies?

enlightenment

I felt holy after she died.

What I mean to say is that I felt disemboweled, ripped open and gutted, my innards in a heap before me.  I, Prometheus, chained to a rock, punished for stealing a daughter for nine months. Grief swept down as I was chained to the cliff, feasting on my liver, or perhaps more like my sanity and sense of justice, as I watched desperate. But still, in that torture, not because of it, I felt holy. Holier than before her death.

It was a short-lived holiness. Anger unchained me from the rock, and became my closest companion in the days that followed. The expletives that came from me were inhuman and ungodly--a hymn of the self-pitying. But for a moment, maybe a week or two, I felt holy, and I have been riding its coattails, cursing it, making sense of it, meditating on it and writing about it since it happened.

Lucia was stillborn. I found out she was dead. And two beats later, I found out I had to birth her. Dead.  I wanted them to cut me open and pull her out. No, wait, I wanted them to knock me out, cut me open, then pull her out. I wanted them to do anything to prevent me from suffering more. I squirmed at the idea of having to push. I felt definitely entitled not to push. I wept for the injustice of having a dead daughter in me. I wept for me.

"Why us?" I shrieked. "What did we do?"  We have this common wisdom, or maybe it is a kind of whisper down the alley between women, that giving birth is the hardest, most profound pain you can endure. And then the other thing, losing a child, is the most profound psychic pain you can endure. I don't know. Giving birth to a dead child and then living with the fact for the rest of your life is the longest suffering experience I could imagine. I felt like I would enter into a stasis of labor. I would hold onto the pain and suffering like it will connect me with the brief time I had with Lucia.

During the time between finding out she was dead and birthing her, I was hooked up to wires, and sitting in a bed with contractions trying to make some fucking sense of what was happening. I opened the grief package they gave me. Front and center, in the middle of the page, there was a poem. I began reading it, and I recognized the words.

Where do I know this poem? I have read this before.

I skipped to the bottom of the page. I recognized the name immediately. It was written by one of my colleagues' husbands. I live in the sixth most populated city in the United States. I was birthing in a hospital that gives birth to over five thousand babies a year. And yet the first other person I encountered after finding out Lucy died was someone I already knew. Tears were streaming down my face before I realized I was crying. And I wept for her loss all over again, and for her husband.

As the waves of contractions pulsated through me, I realized that I was not the first person to go through the pain of labor, nor was I the first person to go through the pain of losing your child. I am not even the first person to go through them both at the same time. I was wrapped up in my suffering, feeling this narcissism of grief settle into my old bones. "Why did this happen to ME? What did I do? Why did MY baby die?" Me. Me. Me. And here was this person who also lost her baby. A person I knew. The fact that I knew her humanized her. I remember seeing her grief and her sorrow. It oozed into us all in the office. I remember running into her in the bathroom at work and crying with her.

Did I tell her enough how sorry I was? Did I tell her then that reading the email about her loss made me cry for the first time in my career in front of my colleagues? Did I tell her that every Mother’s Day I thought of her baby? Did I even say anything to her? Was I the person to her that I needed now?

No.

I am deeply flawed. It was humbling. I felt so completely human, and like such a complete fucking asshole too. But I felt so part of human suffering and the human experience. A wealth of compassion washed over me. And I suddenly remembered this Buddhist folktale called Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed. It is also about a babylost mother. I read it in many forms throughout the years, but about two weeks before Lucia died, I read it out loud to my daughter for bedtime. Back then, I read folktales and Greek mythology aloud as she fell asleep. They were more for me than her. I didn’t cry for Kisa Gotami when I read it. I didn’t cry. I didn’t see myself in her.

 

photo by quinn.anya

Kisa Gotami's only son died one night as there was a thunderstorm raging. Kisa knew something was wrong, because the thunder would have woke him. She ran to his bed and he was dead. Throughout the night, she prayed to all the gods, and then to all the Devils, it is written, but not one brought her baby back to life. And so she went to every doctor, chemist, snakecharmer, and charlatan in town. Everyone pitied Kisa Gotami because she was a good woman and she was losing her mind. Some told her that the boy was dead, others went along with the delusion that there was help. She finally made her way to the apothecary across the market. People told him she was headed his way, and so he was ready for her. He regretted that he didn't have a cure for her, but the Buddha, he said, who was once a physician, did. She ran to the temple and interrupted meditation. The monks grew impatient with her, as she was carrying her rotting dead son, covered with maggots, asking him to be cured. But the Buddha sat and considered her plea. He told her that he did have the cure she sought. And he said it was quite simple. She should leave her son with him, then she just needed to bring him one thing--a mustard seed. Not any mustard seed, though, it needed to be a mustard seed from a family who has not experienced death. As Kisa Gotami went door to door, each person said, "Of course, I have a mustard seed, but my father died this year." Or my wife, or my uncle, or my sister or even my son. When she returned to the Buddha, who had cremated her son in her absence, she came back humbled and enlightened. Death and suffering escapes no person. She became one of the Buddha's monks.

In my lowest moment, the poem, and moments later, that Buddhist story, took me out of my own suffering to feel compassion for another person's loss. When I left the hospital, I grieved for Lucia, but I also grieved for and with everyone in the world. I saw people as the embodiment of their suffering. Funeral homes on every corner felt illuminated, suddenly, with a kind of healing light. Every person grieved, like we grieved.  When someone would offer condolences in the first weeks, I would immediately tear up and say, “No, no, I’m sorry.”  Sam grew livid at that habit, as though I were apologizing for our baby dying, or apologizing for receiving condolences, but it wasn’t that. Even the anxiety and fear people had to approach me, I felt compassion for that. They were suffering. I could hear it in their voices. I could smell it emanating from their bodies. Some of those people felt genuine grief at my daughter’s death, and some had felt genuine fear at having to talk to me. I was sorry for them.

It is an incredibly healing way to imagine the world—compassionate, empathetic, vulnerable—but it was so disparate with what I had just experienced. I often thought about my sanity, and if I was sane or not. I thought of Kisa Gotami not being able to see the maggots, but only see her beautiful newborn son. I recognized that if I wanted to remain sane, I had to accept this world for what it is, not what I wanted it to be. People die. People we love die regardless of their goodness. Humans are fragile beings.  In the holy days, I understood this. I accepted it. I felt this amazing sense of connection with the universe and all sentient beings because of it. This calm emanated from me, and around me for two weeks. I sobbed often, yes, but for all of our suffering. Sometimes thinking about my husband’s suffering made me cry more than my own suffering. It was one of the most spiritually profound periods of my life.

And then it I felt it slip away from my body, the same way my daughter slipped from my body, growing colder and more distant. I am actually embarrassed to write this, because I lost this connectedness with everything and everyone. I squandered wisdom. Holiness was replaced with anger, bitterness and resentment. Rather than feel connectedness, I felt only alienation. I remember my Buddhist therapist saying to me, "So, you lost your daughter and then you lost your enlightenment?"

I hadn’t thought to call it enlightenment, but I suddenly grieved for my enlightenment. So many losses, I mused. I can't endure another. I felt enlightenment's absence more after I realized its preciousness. Then I doubted it I ever touched that place. Maybe holiness, I reasoned, was really the numb of early grief. Later I realized that wisdom, like Lucy, never belonged to me.

I sit cross-legged now, tap the gong and settle into my bones. I once touched a sense of everything by having nothing. It is the koan I meditate on now. When I had nothing, I held everything. The anger falls off me again in that moment. I can only ever borrow enlightenment and wisdom, because I will always wrestle with my human flaws. It is a true lesson in wretchedness.

Did your loss help you feel connected or alienated to other people? Did it connect you with a universal sense of suffering? How did you see your suffering in relation to other suffering? Did you gain any wisdom in your grief?  If so, what wisdom?  Or does the whole idea of wisdom and gain make you uncomfortable?



Correspondence

Back in your former life -- remember that? -- I bet this happened:  someone came to you with a problem,  or maybe you had one of your own that you dumped on someone else.  "Write a letter!" was the agreed upon solution, followed quickly by "but write a practice one first, you know, where you get it all out."

"But don't send that one."

And sometimes, just in the getting out, you find you don't need to send the letter after all.

Dear [Family member],

You have got to be the most self-centered, cold-hearted human being I have possibly ever encountered.  Who on earth could take a child's death -- someone else's child's death, I guess I should clarify -- and turn it into your own problem?  The gist of your martyrdom? Let me speak loudly so you might hear me:  It's not about you.  Check your shit at the door and support me in my grief, or just get the hell out and shut the fuck up.

/delete

It seems, unfortunately, that circumstances like ours lend themselves to a lot of letter writing.  Letters to doctors and lawyers and shrinks and RE's.  Letters to insensitive coworkers, bosses who just don't get it, friends who crawl away, neighbors who feign interest and do so poorly.  Letters to family -- especially the in-laws, to spouses, and even to dead children.  

Dear [Dr. X],

You know the day after my daughter died when you called to say how sorry you were and check on me?  That was really nice.  You know how you said "it was for the best?"  I agreed with you, because honestly I thought so too.  However, on further reflection, I don't think other people get to say that particular line in lieu of the grieving parent.  I think only parents get the right to say that, and frankly, we also have the right to change our minds about whether it really was for the best as much as we damn well please.  

(There's a lot of swearing in my draft letters.)

I happen to think writing angry letters is rather cathartic.  I prefer anger over sadness, because I find it easier to channel anger and actually do something with it -- like write a scathing diatribe.  Unfortunately, I had little to be angry about when it came to the facts surrounding my daughter's death itself -- no one did anything wrong or missed anything or really treated me poorly.  I would've loved to have released some of my steam on some poor unsuspecting L&D nurse or office assistant.

Dear [office assistant],

For the love of Mike, never, ever, EVER, ask the patient checking in at their six-week post-partum visit if they brought the baby.  UNLESS YOU ARE REALLY FUCKING SURE THERE'S A BABY TO BRING.  Because someone, someday, just might whip out a little box of ashes out of their handbag and say, "Why yes!  Yes I did!"  Which is what I wish I could've done when you asked me this very question instead of breaking down into tears.

Instead, my rage as it were took shape against people who didn't let me grieve appropriately, or who dismissed my child's wee life.  And instead of writing them letters -- even ones I never sent -- I started a blog.  I guess I viewed the entries as letters to some reader in cyberspace who could tell me if I was letting too much slide, going a bit bezerk over something trivial, or if I should clean it up and really send it.

Dear [fellow pre-school parent]:

Please please do not corner me and then go on any more about death in children's books and "how hard" it is to read and how you edit out those parts when you read aloud and how in fact you whispered the whole conversation to me like you were talking about the Karma Sutra and not Barbar's mother.  FOR THE THIRD TIME.  Because you know what?  Death in fiction is a fucking walk in the park -- it's goddamn "Ten Little Ladybugs."  Try explaining to your three year old why her sister died.  Death isn't dirty or something you should tiptoe around, you moron.

/delete, she was so nice to me at the potluck.  Sigh.

So as it turns out, my husband got a letter.  And it's addressed to him, and ergo not mine to blog about, but he let me read it and it has a lot to do with me.  (Apparently they think I'm the problem.  Which, if you were familiar with the problem, would blow your mind because I honestly think I'm the last person involved in this mess.)  And my husband, somewhat humorously, suggested that perhaps *I* should be the one to break the ice here, that *I* should make a phone call, that *I* should write a letter.

Dear [person who cut us out of your life totally six months after Maddy died, because I guess that was long enough to deal with us being depressed],

There is so much in this convoluted, loaded letter I don't even know where to begin unpacking it --  perhaps you might want to pay someone to start unravelling some of these thoughts.  It's called therapy.  Anyway, let's start in the middle where you mention your kids and how wonderful they are, and how you're sure we'd really love them if we could be around them more.  And how that went on for a few sentences.  And how nowhere in this letter do you once -- once -- mention my children, living . . . or dead.  Especially dead.  In fact, Maddy is the reason this letter is being written in the first place, you'd probably agree, and she doesn't come up once.  Talk about an Inconvenient Truth. But why guilt us about your kids?  Do you not want to see ours?  Or is this some one-way street kinda deal where we're supposed to feel guilty for this chasm that you sorta brought on? Then there's "Is Tash mad at us?"  Which makes me actually laugh out loud, because I sure as shit am now.  Although I honestly wasn't and never have been -- we've been under the assumption here that y'all were mad at *us*.  But thanks for transposing your assumptions onto me, because a grieving mother is, after all, batshit cray-cray, and obviously mad at just about everyone.  So blame me, that's fine, whatever helps you sleep at night.  And that part about lamenting that you happened to be nearby one day and couldn't call . . . why?  Why not?  Why is it incumbent upon us to call you?  Why can't you break the awkward silence?

/save.  Still drafting.  Not enough profanity.  Will never ever send.  Sadly, I am not nearly that brave, so I passive-aggressively sent a holiday card without a personal note.  

You don't have to reveal the addressee, but can you share a few lines from your letters?  Are they still drafts or did you actually send them?  (Did you clean them up much before you did?)  Anyone out there you need to sit down and write to?

roots

photo by George L. Smyth

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for a tree.
-- Rabindranath Tagore

I am roots and he is my soil. He nourishes me. If you pull me out of this marriage, I would choke on the dryness of his absence, writhe in the shadow of his turned head. And when he walked away, my roots would become little withered limbs curled from the sun.

I mourn my marriage some days. I mourn it right alongside my daughter. I mourn the marriage we should have if it weren't all knotted around grief and dead baby. I mourn the lovers we could have been without Grief as our demanding mistress, calling obsessively at all hours without saying anything into the phone, but simply breathing.

I am still here. That breath wordlessly says. I will still fuck you.

No matter how fast we hang up that phone, the ringing echoes around our marriage. A few months ago, I thought about this look my husband used to give me before daughter-death spirited our smiles away. Just pure love--all googly eyed and out of his right mind, his mouth in a kind of large wide grin that makes me feel like the only girl in the whole world. That smile is home. I wept those months ago, head in my hands, shoulders heaving. It took hold of me suddenly like a tempest and I cried for just my marriage, not for Lucy or any of the other things that come with our daughter's death, but for this one huge loss of a marriage without grief. It had been so long since I had seen him look at me this way. I felt suddenly bereft without the look. I felt suddenly uprooted.

Our marriage has never been hysterical or dramatic. There are no epic fights. There are no thrown dishes. No nasty words to stew on for days. There are no resentments built in the walls between us. We just forget some nights to say 'I love you' or truthfully, even "Good night." And months later, after having our third child, I looked at him unsure if I even really knew what he had been going through for the last six months. Our grief changed subtly, almost imperceptibly, and our reactions to it changed too. It wasn’t the constant meltdowns of the early months. It settled into a general malaise, a suffocating ennui and a survivable, yet altogether uninteresting melancholy.

I have read how men and women grieve differently, and I used to think that about us. I used to chalk our silence and awkwardness up to sweeping gender differences. But I have come to realize that it is the exact opposite of that--we grieve in much the same way. Our similarities prevent us from being the first to cross the gulf that separated us in grief. We are both proud, capable introverts trying to privately grieve our loss in a room full of the other person. We went into our corners and licked our wounds, and nodded as we passed each other on the way, unable or unwilling to articulate the obvious. My husband's father died three weeks before our daughter. So, he mourned his father, and then his daughter, and some days he would cry unsure of who exactly he was grieving. He was left in a month's time a fatherless father in an undaughtered land.

Marriages are a long negotiation in needs and wants. When your best friend needs you, it most often is not at a time when you are in need too. Until you are. Until both of you lose a child at the same time. Early in our grief, we were rocks for the other. Somehow balancing the rawness and the strength. We clung to each other. Sometimes being the trunk to lean upon, arms outstretched for shade, providing the strength, and other times taking it. But we often would say nothing, except an "I know." Finally we let go of each other, and walked backwards, staring at each other in silent accusation, "Why do you need to need me right now? I am reading something interesting on the internet."

My best friend's daughter died. In me. And my best friend's father died without me being able to give him the focused sympathy and love he deserved. I sometimes feel that I failed him. He doesn't begrudge me. His best friend's daughter died too, sometimes he feels he failed me as well.

Grief does such a number on all those little things that make a marriage great. Giddiness, laughter, sex, lightness, playfulness.  Rather than husband and wife, we became World Wrestling Federation partners, tag teaming each other out of parenting when one of us got too tired or caught up in grief. Impatience would echo in our house, and the other would come in the room, slap hands and take over. Parenting and discipline takes so much psychology, higher brain power, and patience some days, especially with a toddler mostly oblivious to Death's visit, I sometimes did not feel up to the task. Other days, he did not. All our emotional energy was spent keeping grief from engulfing our parenting.

Even though I often feel weak and sad, I am sure I would not be nearly as strong and happy as I am if he wasn't standing beside me. Even in our most stark distant times, I felt more alive in his soil--our roots coiling together making one important tree. We laugh a great deal in our home, which feels like rain after the dry season.  He can always draw a long chuckle out of me with his irreverence and constant flirting. Other days, he will stop and listen intently and mirror my indignation at life, thoughtless comments, other people and mortality. That is enough for me. Probably the uncoolest thing I can say about my husband is that I miss him when he goes to work.

At eighteen months from our daughter's death, when we sat together and quantified our grief and our marriage. I had read Tash's piece on marriage. I felt suddenly aware that our distance wasn't okay. And so, we sat together and expressed our fears. We ranked our marriage, at that time, squarely at fair to middling. We made the decision to go back to counseling to find the lighter side of our marriage buried in the ash of grief and death. It wasn't easy making that first call, but it was easy walking in there. We dropped our children off at my sister's house. We flirted in the waiting room, and laughed about our past and who we have become. We held hands and told our story, realizing as we talked that we have problems very similar to most married people with or without dead children. The mere act of seeking help made us feel okay, like trying was all we really needed. We asked the therapist if it would be okay to bring a bottle of wine, stinky cheese and a crusty loaf of bread to our sessions. Everything suddenly felt sexy, even in the least sexy of places.

Sometimes it surprises me that we have only been married for four years and together for five. I have jeans older than our marriage. We have been through the birth of three children and the death of a two grandparents, one parent and one child. We bought a house and traveled to a few third world countries. We have endured accidents, sickness, house renovation, fear, surgeries, biopsies, many bottles of wine, one movie, many corny jokes and a lake of tears. When people ask, we sometimes tell them we have been together 28 years, counted in grief years.

It wasn't long ago that I began taking photographs of my family again in earnest, no longer seeing only our grief. As I edited them, I was taken by surprise by the ones of my own husband. There was the look. I studied it. Definitely the look, I decided. And I began frantically searching through the folders, the months and years, of photographs. There it is again. And again. Since Lucy died, every picture I took of him, he stared at the camera, me on the other side of the lens, giving me the smile, his smile, of unconditional love. I couldn't see beyond my own long, grief-colored nose to see that his love has been there the whole time.



How long have you and your partner been together? How do the years prior to your loss or losses help you navigate grief? What does your relationship look like after the months or years of grief? What do you take for granted in your relationship? How much of your relationship issues do you attribute to grief and loss?


stepping back

Anyone who knows me well knows that an email containing the phrase, “I am pleased to say that I surpassed even my own expectations,” would immediately turn me off. 

I’m not a big fan of blatant self-promotion. A bloated ego makes me cringe in the same way executives who wink at women do. Both apply here, and it’s just… ugh.

This particular chap at the office intends to recreate a fundraiser he initiated last Christmas that culminated with a visit to the local children’s hospital to hand out presents and hand over a big cheque. All well and good (minus of course the percentage of intentions that are shamelessly selfish). Except this year it’s within my remit to oversee stuff like this. And I know the hospital far too intimately, particularly the cardiac ward and PICU.

.::.

My memories of the place certainly haven’t faded - far from it. Instead they’ve morphed from shocking flashbacks and taken the alternate, slinky form of dreams and nightmares both.  There are still frequently nights when I relive the hours before and after Sadie died down to the minute. I can’t help it; I don’t know if that ever stops. In a crazy way I’m sure I’d miss it if it did.

I remember the smallest detail, down to the round metal buzzer we would press to gain entry into the ward. I’d say the same thing each time, “Hello, it’s Sadie McKay’s mother,” before hearing the door click and squirting a generous dose of antibacterial cream onto my palm as the door closed behind me. How I felt protective and dizzy and absolutely incredulous on the day we arrived via a silent, steady ambulance.

I remember walking out for the last time, and in a scene straight out of a hundred movies we’ve all seen, I stared from the backseat window as a woman ran to the car trying to reach us before we left, waving her arms at a driver who failed to notice her.  Our counsellor from the ward.  Her eyes locked with mine and I didn’t flinch. I knew I would hate her for whatever came out of her sad mouth beneath her very sad eyes.

.::.

Back to this jackarse with his ambitious plans to surpass even himself. 

Managing this would mean regular contact with the hospital and attending the event itself.  If I’m honest with myself, I can’t imagine a purer form of torture than having to go back there.  And a little part of me is disappointed in myself for that. I would love to be one of those women who takes on a cause because it’s close to her heart and puts her philanthropic urges to good use in the place where she lost so much, helping herself to heal and helping give hope to others. I’m sure you know someone wonderful and strong like that.  As much as I’d like to be, I don’t think I’m that woman.

.::.

What about you? Have you been back to the place where you lost your child? How did it feel?

milagros.

photo by emdot

I search through the cases of milagros. Through silver hands, patina-ed trucks and copper lungs. Medals of disembodied legs and small praying men with hats held in hands. I settle on a sacred heart, flames rising from its fold, and, at the last minute, point to a pair of eyes for Santa Lucia, for my daughter. I seek ritual now. The repetition of the familiar helps me touch my childhood, reminding me of comfort. When I get home, I dig out my antique wooden Virgen de Guadalupe. I place her over a handwoven fabric, light a candle and pin the ex-voto to the cloth. I am trying to remember a roadside shrine I found once on the Ruta Puuc, the road that follows the Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

It was a decade ago that I followed the road with a rental car and a day pack. When I passed the unadorned shack on a road from the ruins of one Mayan temple to the next, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe caught my eye and I quickly pulled the car off the road. Lit and unlit candles dotted the ledges and floor of the little alcove in the middle of nowhere. Pictures, letters and thousands of milagros, little metal folk charms of body parts or saints, surrounded the statue of her. Each symbol imbued with its own individual and very personal meaning--some a prayer for healing, others a call for fortune, a change of luck, a dream of love or a need for strength. I hardened fast to the spot in front of the makeshift altar, enraptured with something primal within me, my indigenous roots suddenly alive to magic and the gods. There is a way Latin American culture, my culture, seamlessly ties together the ancient, Pre-Columbian with the  New World; the pagan and the Catholic; the profane and sacred.

A decade later, after Lucia was stillborn, I recreate the same shrine in my living room. I wanted all those things in my grief--a miracle, a prayer, a call for fortune and a dream of love. I set the Virgin up in the center. They call her the "Mother of the Apocalypse." Apocalypse, indeed. I add a sugar skull, a picture of St. Lucia, a rock, some water, a drippy candle, a Buddha and a mizuko jizo. A bit of heaven, of earth, of water and of fire, the altar seems to touch an ancient secret in me I have only just  remembered during the ritual. I whisper it to myself, "We have all grieved." Humans, that is. Humans have always grieved.

Humans have always pleaded with ancestors and visions of saints and demons and volcanoes to alleviate that which aches within us. We have invented religions around it. We have knelt in front of shrines to Coatlique, or the Virgin, or Demeter, and asked her to heal our broken hearts, to give us back our children. I feel connected to this sense of universality of babyloss. Maybe it is the only religion I have now, the only thing I really believe--that babies die and parents grieve. It has happened for so long and so often, in the first stories of the universe, that I bend my head in shame for being surprised that it happened to me.

:::

My mother reminds me again that I should have had a funeral for Lucia, so that she can have some closure. "It is different in my country. The whole town would come to help lead Lucy to heaven. She will be stuck here." And I instinctively look around my house.

Please let her be stuck here, I think. Maybe in that space between the couch and the wall. I could kneel on the cushion and peek into that spot, 'Hello, love,' I would say. 'I miss you.'

My mother says that in her country she would have the baby's body interned in the house. In the living room. They would set up chairs. The people would come, she says, the local village ladies who always pray rosary for the dead. They would coo about how beautiful Lucia looks, and everyone would see her as a baby instead of something unmentionable after a long pregnancy. For a week, every night, the women and her family would pray rosary over the dead. Light candles. Her sisters would sit. Every once in a while, a cousins would come before going out drinking that night.

"My sisters will cry when they are moved to cry. They will fix black coffee and plain soup. Her soul goes to heaven that way."

The silence of disappointment sits between us.

"You eat soup? At the equator?"
"It is tradition to not make anything spicy or interesting."
"Huh." My mother stares at me, as I stare at my chewed fingernails.
"It helps, Angel."
"But you don't even really believe in this stuff, Mama." I protest.
"What does believing matter? It helps. Those rituals are important. Maybe you just need a funeral for her for you to heal. Believe me, at the end of the week, after sitting and praying the rosary every night with those women all covered in lace, you accept the death. We all walk to the cemetary after the week is over. The vultures fly around and stare at you. You don't expect anyone to walk through the door after that. "

I never expected Lucy to walk through the door.

Though I have seven living aunts and three uncles, forty-seven first cousins and double that in the second cousin category, I have no aunts in this country anymore. Very few cousins, respectively. There are no village ladies. There is no way our baby can lay in our living room. I live in suburban New Jersey. My neighbors, while kind people, don't pray rosary at dusk for the souls of dead babies and grandmothers, or make huge vats of tasteless soup so we can mourn properly. My husband and I made decisions for our mental well-being, but I didn't quite think of my mother, or how American our decision seemed to be to my entire Panamanian family. It seemed right to have Lucy cremated. To fold her into the fabric of our daily grief.  To spare everyone a funeral the day before Christmas. I feel like I have always had my feet in two worlds. Panamanian and American. Brown and white. Joyful mothering and grief-stricken mothering. The living and the dead. And some days I feel like I fail both sides of each of those coins.

:::

After Lucy died, I ask my mother how to translate stillborn into Spanish. "We don't use that word 'stillborn' in my country. No one talks about it."  And I remind her that no one really talks about it here either, but we still have a word for it. She sighs and reminds me that she was eighteen when she came to the United States and she doesn't know all those adult words. The only thing she knows is nacido muerto, born dead. It is much more blunt than stillborn, which has the sort of poeticism to which I am drawn. But truly, Lucy was born dead. Beautiful and dead. Nacido muerto.

We have a long tradition of storytelling in my Panamanian family. Of hyperbole and tall tales over liquor and candlelight. Magical and wild tales of my grandparents and their parents are woven with both the vivid and proper. My family has stories of stabbings and sex. Music and cigarros. Affairs and guitarras. We even have stories of lost babies, found again decades later on the arm of a son, and affairs that end in our legacy. I weave my own tales, some days, about my daughter's afterlife. I tell them to no one in particular. I whisper the words, "Mi Lucia nació muerto." Then I set the story in a place of my invention, a dirt road cut through the jungle, pyramids rising in the distance and roadside shrines dot the way. The air is thick there with humidity and rainforest perfumes. And they sit, my Indian grandfather with his Seco and milk, his arm around his round wife, mi abuelita. My great-grandmother Isabel plays guitars and sings bawdy Catalan songs of death and sex. Lucia spins, her skirt flaring around her like a flame, as they clap for her young, beautiful spirit.

Did the cultural traditions of your family bring you comfort or conflict? Have you used rituals in your grief, and if so, how? Have you found yourself attracted to the traditions of another culture or religion? How have you adopted rituals into your grief and search for comfort? Have you integrated different cultural or religious rituals into your life?