the relentless pursuit of living

I'm used to the lies by now.  They are common and easy to say.  I say them for the sake of other people, but also for myself.  I have to lie so that I'm not always the guy that sucks the air out of a room, even if that room is the entire outdoors on a glorious fall day at the farmer's market and someone has questions about me, about my life, about how I'm doing.  There is no point in ruining every idle conversation and friendly chatter with truth about my dead son Silas.

You're welcome everyone I spared the honest recounting of my recent life.  It isthe absolute least I can do, and it cuts me with a slice of sadness every time I do it.  Three years since he died and it is still recent to me.  Because it is not so much that time has healed my wounds as much as it is that the wounds themselves are the very nature, the very fabric, of my everyday existence.  I miss Silas as a matter of course, just like breathing, just like moving my body, like blinking, like the beat of my heart.

I am still amazed to have learned that a heart can remain beating when it feels like only dust and awful and the endless void inside.  I am compelled to go forward, no matter the pain of my past.  If anything, his lost life is a fuel for me to live twice as hard, twice as present, twice as calm as I ever would have before.  Not enough, of course, it will never be enough.

Things don't always happen for a reason, and it is always better with Silas sleeping in a room just beyond the wall.  That is a lie I usually don't let people tell me.  That's one I have to correct whenever that awful platitude is thrown in my face. I try to be nice about it, but I can't help but say that no I don't think everything happens for a reason.

I think each of us are a living force to make reason and sanity and beauty and love out of absolute chaos and despair.  We lie to ourselves about feeling okay until one day it sticks a little bit.  We pretend that it is fine to not demolish everything we see out of rage and loss.  We answer the questions.  We smile through the pain, feeling the smile our son or daughter might have shared through glorious living genes.  We breathe their lost thoughts.  We dream their silent fears and inchoate hopes and live a tiny shadow life sometimes of what should be.  What could have been.  What isn't.

I have to remind myself that I'm not crazy sometimes.  When I wake up from the dream where I've missed the flight again, but I don't really care, but I do because I should but I really don't.  I have to lay there for a moment and chill, hoping there are still hours before the appointed time of get the fuck out of bed or else.  And I lay there and wonder how I'm not crazy, with a dead son and lost future and all.  It feels good, then, in the cool autumn morning, when I feel dream-crazy and life-crazy and sleepy-person-lazy-crazy and realize that everyone feels this way.  Everyone lies about how okay they seem to be going down the road feeling fine.

But look at the art. Look at the movies and books and paintings and poets.  Read the headlines.  Walk the streets.  There are endless crazy universes inside everyone's head.  A precise and compelling recounting of life and death and love and loss inside the brain of everyone around you.  Some are people of this community that don't even know we exist.   Babylost medusa crazed father parents that don't have their kids are out there in the towns and cities and hamlets where all of you live.  Not to mention families that are victims of car accidents, cancer, embolisms, old age, and on and on.

The people around us tell us lies to help themselves, to save us, to get by.

I always wanted to crush every moment of time that I have into a succulent nectar of life itself that I could wallow in and enjoy.  I thought that raising my son Silas was going to be the way I could do that.  I anticipated a rich life remembering my childhood as I stood there amazed at his development.  I thought I was going to be the best dad of all time.  I couldn't wait to learn everything I couldn't even begin to comprehend as I watched my son live his amazing life.

September 25, 2008 was supposed to be the start of an incredible chapter of life and growth and offspring and hope in my life and instead it was the complete opposite.  And when he died I had a choice.  I could give up or I could go forward.  For a moment the choice was absolutely clear.  When I was told that he was dead in that moment I could have followed him along directly.  A leap off the building.  A scalpel.  The wall and my head. But then right away thoughts of Lu and family and friends flooded my brain.  I had to be strong because this situation was already going to fuck everything up forever and I couldn't also double down and make it worse.

So for many, many months, not killing myself was the baseline I had established as "doing pretty good."   Plus, when you start there, getting out of bed is like successfully ascending Mt. Everest.  I gave myself accolades for simply going outside for a little while.  But those impulses kept growing, kept beating in my heart, kept pushing me forward.  I learned to lie and love it.  I learned to breathe again.  And yet I'm still not sure I can reconcile what my life should be vs what it is today, right here, one month out from Lu's c-section and the start of everything that comes next.

Everything is always coming next, and it is the incredible human spirit, our very nature, that allows us to face the day and tell the lies and forge the hope we have no right to expect and yet we do, and we do and we do.

Make your lies wishes.  Live extra bright and do not let the lies you have to tell stop you from living your life as honestly as you can.  We will always have a special armor, a veneer of experience that is too awful to wish on anyone but also incredibly, terribly, powerfully true.

Go easy through your day and let the simple, innocent grace of your lost child guide you toward patience and serenity.  Oh and also, don't go any more crazy than you are.  We're all crazy enough as it is, and that's the truth.

What are your lies?  What are your truths?  Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?  How do you fit the truth of your lost child or children into your sense of the how the world works?  Do you feel crazy and okay like me?

ESCAPE!

We lost Margot on March 24, around 6pm, just as the normally chipper blue sky turned to gray and started raining. For the next two weeks, my partner fought for her life and then for her failed kidneys, as we grieved for our daughter in a cold, sterile hospital room.

Then, finally, our kidney specialist sauntered into our room with some better test results and casually stated that we could leave the hospital the next day. That was April 6. And on April 12, one day after Kari’s gloriously pathetic 30th birthday and six days after we left the hospital without a newborn and nineteen days after the worst day of our lives, we bought a ginormous twenty-eight foot 1980 Dodge Jamboree motorhome.

Really? Really.

We followed up our baby’s death by buying a fucking motorhome.

It was pretty sweet too. Off white in color, with vintage orange and gold lines streaking down the side of it and a silver ladder running up it’s back. The inside featured orange shag carpet, big cushy chairs that swiveled and a classic faux wood steering wheel. Add a kitchen, bathroom and two full size beds to the package and we were all set to go.  The day we went to buy it, after trying to learn all it’s quirks from the RV salesman, Kari turned to me and said, “I didn’t picture Margot’s face every moment when we were in there.”  And we both secretly hoped that maybe this RV would save us for the time being. It felt kind of good, this motorhome distraction.

Except Margot was still dead. And nothing about owning the camper, even with the shag carpet, felt satisfying.

So we sold it. But before we knew it, more timely distractions came along, even though we weren’t looking for anything in particular. Suddenly, it sounded good to download all of the past seasons of Survivor and watch them over vodka every night. And then little vacations to Palm Springs and the coast popped up. And then it sounded like a good idea to completely renovate our bedroom and other parts of our little dwelling, so we spent this summer building beds and tables and desks and frames, and endlessly shopping on Craigslist for everything else. When we finally found our perfect little used couch, with it’s carmel colored leather and shiny gold beads, it was nearing October.

I’m not exactly sure why these distractions keep popping up. It’s not as if any of these escapes have brought any long term satisfaction to our lives, or that they are somehow preventing us from facing our grief. And yet, I’m constantly amazed by my ability to get somewhat excited about something, even when I know it’s temporary and unfulfilling in the end.

In the very beginning, I came to loathe the distractions, the motorhome especially, for how it left me feeling like a cheap trick. So much promise followed by zero payoff.  But now I see these distractions as a little gift from grief, as if it’s grief’s way of letting our heads above water, a short breath of air before we are pulled back under. Like earlier this week when I cried for an hour over pictures of Margot, and then promptly opened my web browser and searched for a “vintage chair” for our living room.

Recently, a woman from our support group described the nightmare of losing two babies in the same year. She wept and squeezed her partners hand and shared her losses with a beautiful blend of courage and despondency. And then, towards the end of her story, after a few moments of quiet, her face suddenly changed into a smile as she said, “We have been redecorating our house, so that is nice.”

Yes, that is nice.

Have you used distractions to cope with your losses? Have they been helpful?  Have the distractions lessoned as time marched forward?

Silas' Season

It creeps up on me like the shadow of his absence.
I feel him first as a whisper breeze that cools a hot late summer day.
When a leaf leaves the tree, I fall with it
into piles of grief on the curb.
The suddenly incessant crickets every single night:
Exactly like his name in my head,
every single night.
The days tighten, losing light
as my heart constricts in anti-anticipation.
That moon, that September night, her labor and pain.
One by one, the leaves arrange into place.
The moon eases in its orbit.
The Universe rings my soul like a broken bell
when that perfect autumn eve
exactly captures the essence of the day he was born.
I cannot stand it once again
and once again I cannot move aside from the
drenching, gusting, cold fall storm
that is my face and heart and soul and hands
when his birthday is here
and he is not.

I have to settle for the fall.  For the piles I drive through.  For the crickets that sing their vigil.  For the cleansing rains.  For the chill of our loss on the last bits of summer heat, and the cold nights ahead where we have to hold each other close and let the spark of our souls keep his memory warm in our beautiful and broken hearts.

What does the season of your loss look and feel like?  Has it changed the way you view that time of year entirely?  Or are there other non-seasonal triggers that remind you of the day you lost your child?  And please feel free to offer a poem of your own, if you like.

Searching

When I first became acquainted with Josh's writing at his blog Jack at Random, I became immediately enchanted with the beauty and honesty in which he articulated his deep heartbreak. I grieved with him for his daughter Margot, who died March 24, 2011, after his wife fell and suffered a full placental abruption. In a blink, he lost his second daughter, almost lost his wife. The raw love, jagged and stunning, expressed in each sentence resonated so deeply with me. I found myself crying before I knew I was grieving for another. We are just so honored that Josh has agreed to join us here, as a regular contributor, sharing his journey as father and husband with us. Please help me welcome Josh to this space. --Angie

She was there for a time, in my arms, her cool cheek against my wet cheek, her pale forehead touching my forehead, her limp body held tightly against my chest.

Then she was off, in the care of impassive strangers, having open heart surgery to remove her valves for donation, taking little joyrides around Los Angeles between the hospital and coroner and crematorium.

She arrived back to me in a little white canister, her name neatly typed in courier font on a small strip of paper: Margot June Jackson. Number 4-2389.  Cremated 03/31/2011.

And then she was in my sock drawer. She was partly there to protect us all from the possible awkwardness of others seeing her, and partly to protect us from the harsh reality that our daughter was suddenly reduced to ashes. For those few days before the memorial, I saw nothing in my house but the canister. I’d walk past mourning grandparents, step over my two year olds toys, eat dinner around a table and it was all just a blur. My daughter was in my house, in a canister, and I saw nothing else.

And then we took her into the woods and poured her into the river.

And then I couldn’t find her.

For if we find the deceased in our collective memories, where they still live on, cemented in photos and stories, how can we possibly find our babies? When memories barely exist, a few hours here, a few days there, how can they remain present? And when there are so few collective stories, passed on by those who knew and loved and touched the deceased, how will anyone else remember or find our babies?

Heaven would be nice, if I believed in such a possibility. It’s a comforting thought to think I could meet her one day again. Reincarnation would be nice too, the thought that she might resurface somewhere in the world, another chance at the tricky elusiveness of life.  But instead, my mind only allows what I can know without doubt. She died. We had her cremated. And we placed her ashes into the river.

Even still, I search and search, looking around every river bend, under every mountain rock and desert plant, on the metro and freeway, in the few pictures we have, in my fleeting memories, in my letters to her. But she is rarely there, always just out of my grasp, always still dead.

And yet.

As the months trudge on without her, as my search turns up empty, as the solitary moments I had with her slowly scatter to the far reaches of my memory, I’m starting to notice that as my grief evolves, I can find her from time to time.

Sometimes I find her in this new life that has suddenly emerged, one filled with desperate sorrow over her loss and sadness over a life that has become different than I always imagined. And in carrying these losses from day to day, I carry my daughter along with them. 

Sometimes I find her in the water, in the river where we said goodbye, in the ocean where she eventually ended up.

Sometimes I find her in this new company I’m now apart of, the society of the suffering. We have joined those who know and experience loss, whether close to home or far away. I find intimacy with them, with you, and in those moments, I feel close to her.

Sometimes I find her in new friendships, which have only formed because of her absence.

Sometimes I find her in my broken heart, the fragmented pieces that drip with sadness but also hold her very existence. Since I can never have her back, what’s better - a whole heart without her ever existing, or a broken heart with her dead? No matter how short her life, no matter how little time we had together, she is my second child. And I choose her.



Where do you find your kids? Do you find them in different places as your grief has evolved over the months and years? Do you find them at the grave, in your home or the spot where the ashes were scattered? Do you find your baby in a symbol?






short story

I have this idea for a short story.

Okay, this woman is sitting in the Perinatal Evaluation and Treatment Unit (PETU). Her husband is holding her hand. She keeps holding her belly and talking to it.

Be alive. She thinks, or maybe she says it out loud. She doesn't remember.

The couple trembles. They are on the verge of giggles. It embarrasses them both that anxiety reacts in them in this similar way. The nurse just listened to her belly with a heartbeat monitor and couldn't detect the heartbeat. She said, "This machine must be broken. I will get an ultrasound machine." The couple want to believe her, but something gnaws at them. It seems an unlikely coincidence that they would come in to find out if their baby died and the heartbeat monitor died instead, especially since they could hear the mother's fast, desperate heartbeat reverberating through the room.

The parents overhear the nurse ushering out the pregnant lady in the other bed. They tell her she will go to another room. The other pregnant lady had been arguing in Spanish on a cellular phone, but even she is quiet now. In the quiet without the woman and nurses, they both realize that the baby is dead, perhaps, or maybe their thoughts aren't quite that developed. But they both have the same impulse to protect the other, so they say nothing just yet about how the baby died and wait for a doctor. The mother's insides get all agitated, empty, nauseated. All turned upside down. Something is happening, her body tells her. It is something bad. It is something scary. Let's run. Let's go back home. They seem to think at the same time. Let's forget this ever happened. Let's yell at someone. Let's hit something. Let's scream.

The ultrasound machine is rolled in followed by a doctor, a midwife and two other doctors. It could still be alright, they seem to want to believe. Usually they don't need a team to hear a heartbeat, but when her baby's small form is shown to her on the small screen, curled in position, she can see there is nothing happening in her chest. It is still. So fucking still.

The mother says, "There is no heartbeat."

And the doctor says, "Yes. I'm sorry your baby passed away." And the mother will think later that is not a phrase that should be used on a baby. Babies die. Old men pass away. In their sleep. Because they are old and lived a good life. The life of this baby was ripped away from her body too early, too heart-fucking-breakingly early. She should have said your daughter has been murdered by Fate.

The medical team leaves them to process this information.

I know you know this story already, but hear me out. It is different this time. This short story I want to write. It is different.

They keen and howl and hold each other. The mother grabs her husband by the shoulders and says, "I'm sorry, but I am never having another baby again."  Then a nurse walks in to take them to the labor and delivery floor. The woman wonders if she can die now.

Can I just let go and die? I don't want to birth a dead baby. That is about the worst thing I can imagine. I never should have to go through this much physical and emotional pain at the same time. Just kill me, God, please just kill me.

"You cannot die right now, mama," the nurse whispers into her ear. It startles the mother to have her thoughts read so easily. She wonder if she has been speaking out loud, though she knows she would never speak those words aloud. The nurse is older, kindly, has a long salt and pepper braid running down her back. She looks familiar. So familiar. Then she realizes that the nurse is her. The nurse is the mother many years later, decades perhaps. She takes in this fact calmly. Clearly, she is in a nightmare. Or she is dead. Both of which is preferable to what is actually going down in the PETU. She turns forward again in the wheelchair.

Yep, that is me pushing me in a wheelchair about to give birth to my dead fucking daughter. It is so fucking cruel.

It is cruel, mother. All of this is cruel. It doesn't get easier, but it will become bearable.

Will it?

Yes. But like a bruise, it will always be tender, and it can easily become unbearable if you push on the hurt long enough, if you focus on the pain. But for the first eighteen months, you can do nothing but focus on the pain. That is right and good. Your daughter died. It deserves all your attention. Just don't try to die. Your family needs you. And you won't. You won't try to die. Just don't drink so dang much.

Yes, I know you are right. I don't want to kill myself, I just want to stop living.

That's normal. You won't feel like that forever. I promise.

The nurse rolls her into the room. The nurse is her, so technically, she is rolling herself into the labor and delivery room. It is like all L&D rooms.  The mother wonders how on earth she will bear to hear other women labor.

"We have you separated. You won't hear anyone else. All new mothers are taken to the other wing. Unless we fill up. But we do fill up tonight. You hear a baby being born at 5 in the morning. You actually feel joy the one time you hear a mother birth a screaming baby. You are happy for them. Don't worry. We have marked your door with a lily. It is so others will know that there is to be quiet in this room, solemnity, respect. We are all mourning with you here."

"I just wondered what happened with that."

"I know. I know everything that is going to occur to you. What you are thinking, what you are feeling, what will happen. I am here to guide you through this birth. To help you know what the future looks like under your own devices. I am the Ghost of Birthing Dead Baby Past."

"I think you need a new name."

"You will think it is funny in a couple of years."

And through the night and next day of delivery, the nurse tells her about what her life will be like. She says, "Have your mother come to hospital. Ask her to bring your daughter. It is important. It seems like too much right now to deal with a twenty-one month old, but it keeps you up at night that you denied your daughter the privilege of meeting her sister. It is too much to bear that they never met."

Later, the nurse rubs her feet  through fleece hospital footies during the earliest pangs of pitocin-induced contractions. "Don't be afraid of seeing your daughter. You are so terribly afraid of that through all of your labor and you forget about those fears the second you see her. She is beautiful. You see her bruises and it disturbs you, but you also see only her beauty, your nose, your hair. Take off all her clothes, kiss her feet. Take many more pictures than you think. Call Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. I will find the number."

When the mother begins reading the grief packet, the nurse walks in with ice chips. "When you write the email entitled "Some Sad News," you ask people not to send flowers, or call for a week because a grief therapist told you to write that. Don't. Just tell your news. Don't tell people how to honor your loss. Because people read that as you never want them to call or give you any meals, or send any flowers, and they don't. Not ever again."

Later, after the mother rings for another pillow, the nurse leans in and whispers, "Don't tell anyone in real life about your blog. Ever." She fluffs the pillow and kisses her forehead.

As she is reaching the point of being fully dilated, when her husband and sister go out for some food, and leave her with the television, the nurse walks in. She sits on the edge of the bed and grabs her hand. "You are much more vulnerable than you admit or than anyone thinks. But you are also as strong as everyone believes, and so I must be honest right now. In the next year, you will feel abandoned. Your friends will walk away. You will feel righteous indignation at the injustice of it and you won't call them. Be the bigger person. I'm sorry to tell you that your daughter's death entitled you nothing, not even space to be an asshole. Some people, people you like, will never forgive you for not reaching out to them. You will miss them."

When the baby is born, the nurse cries with the mother. She holds the baby and kisses her again and again. She weeps and screams. More than the mother who is staid and uncrying. The nurse baptizes the baby and the mother in tears. But the nurse is also full of joy. The mother watches in amazement and silent admiration at how she can so easily move between these emotions. The mother feels absolutely numb, just numb.

"Lucia," the nurse says to the mother, "is always missed, mama. Smell her up. Hold her. Talk to her. Be her mama in the next few hours. This is all you get. You can't fully process that right now, but mother this baby." She hands the baby back to the woman. Solemnly, the nurse leaves the room.

The mother holds her baby for a few more hours, doing all the things the nurse advised. Some time later, the woman walks out of the hospital without ever seeing herself again. Not ever.

Okay, maybe it is a novel.

If you were rewriting your story after finding out your child died, what would you change? What advice would you give yourself? What kind of peace do you think that would bring? Would you even want a future you to advise past you on your own grief experience? Would it be easier to hear it from a future you or a stranger?

Make 'em laugh, Make 'em laugh...

My daughter had a tiny little coffin. It was small and white. It was also free. They don’t charge for baby coffins in England. How do you put a price on honouring the memory of your child? They don’t charge for baby funerals at all, unless you want something out-of-the-ordinary.

We wanted ordinary. We wanted the ordinary alive baby that other people took home. Instead we had an ordinary little coffin.

We discussed our wishes with the funeral director. She showed us a death catalogue: the caskets, the urns, the cars. She said ‘you can have any car you want, even a Limo.’ We turned away, our shoulders shaking. She left the room, respectful of our grief.

But we weren’t crying.

She offered us the limo and our eyes met. We knew we were thinking the same thing. We were thinking of driving up and down the main drag of our city hanging out the windows of the limo like kids on their way to prom; whooping it up with our little tiny corpse.

We laughed. Because what the fuck else would we do?

The day after we’d been to see Iris for the last time, I was gathering the hot, fresh laundry from our dryer. I held it in my arms and breathed deeply. David said ‘isn’t it nice, having something warm to hold?’ Loaded silence. Hysterical laughter.

We laughed. Because what the fuck else would we do?

We overheard our living daughter and her little friend. They were playing a crying game. They were sobbing huge, fake sobs. ‘Oh boo hoo. Oh boo hoo hoo. We are so sad. Boo hoo hoo hoo. We are so sad that baby Iris is dead. Boo hoo.’

We laughed.

A relative brought a gift for me. A lovely, well-meaning, slightly misguided gift. Iris scented soap-on-a-rope. Because who wouldn’t wash their armpits with sweet babylost memories?

We laughed.

A former colleague bemoaned the lack of sympathy extended to her when her cat had an operation: ‘when Jess’ baby died, everyone was so supportive, but no one seems to care as much about my cat.’ 

We laughed.

When I was pregnant with my son, we'd high-five after every sonogram: 'Woohoo! Let's give it up for an evident HEARTBEAT!'

We laughed

Today my husband had a bad day. A very bad day. He said 'well... no one died... No, wait, actually she did!'

We laughed.

We laughed.

We laughed.

Because what the fuck else would we do?

What makes you laugh now, following the loss of your baby or babies? Do you find humour in the darkest of places, or are some things Just Not Funny?