Beautiful Empty

It was a Saturday, 8:30 in the morning. I was humming down Orange Grove Boulevard on one of those rare, glorious Los Angeles overcast days. A gray fog hung around lazily while the landscape seemed to be collectively exhaling, on account of the sunless sky, which normally burns and glares and sears until this desert landscape is charred brown. Trees drooped in thanks, flowers lay still, doing their part to not jinx the unfamiliar sky. Even the sidewalks and streets were near empty, as if work and play and errands and coffee were traded in for longer sleep in darker rooms.

I was alone. My mind seemed to match the stillness with one of those rare states of near nothingness, where thoughts and ideas and people and conversations and to-do lists and worry are replaced with what is only visible to the immediate eye. Red light. Green light. Trees, houses, fence. Turn left. I relished the unusual clearness of mind.

It was in this peaceful state, this nothingness, when Margot suddenly rushed up to the surface. Her being, her name, the idea of her seems to have taken up residence in my pores and under my skin and in all of the recesses of my mind that I never knew existed. Out of all these places, she rose up, speaking to me in this nothingness. But this particular morning, it was just her.

Her. Margot. Without everything else.

There weren’t any questions about the future state of our emotions. Will we be happy again? How happy? Will our grief continue to evolve? Will the sadness ever really feel lighter?  What happens if she starts slipping away? There weren’t any thoughts about friends who have let us down or those who have been there. There wasn’t any anger. There weren’t any concerns about impending situations of social anxiety. There weren’t any dark thoughts about her death and cremation. Or frightened memories of the hospital and almost losing another life. There wasn’t any confusion over the philosophical questions of life that have resurfaced. There wasn’t any anxiety over the possibility of future children or losing the living one we still have. There wasn’t any jealousy over the happy and innocent families that took their babies home. There wasn’t any hurt over insensitive comments or those who diminish or ignore our heartache. I was free of disappointment and depression and regret.  In this moment, it was just my Margot, in the purest form of missing, without all the baggage that usually clouds up her absence. It was, perhaps, the first time the missing held me completely captured since the first time I held her in a darkened hospital room.

I pulled over and cried out for her as I did in the hospital. I screamed her name. I spoke to her as a Father speaks to his children. The brokenness was as raw as ever, yet it left me hanging delicately in a state of calm. The missing felt real, felt good even.

How nice would it be if grief were this tangible, this straightforward? How convenient to simply miss our kids off and on through the days and years, not having to face the other elements that come with grief?

Because so much of the time it’s not just her anymore. Somewhere along this lonely path, the worries and jealousy and concerns and confusion and hurt and anxiety and over analyzing and constant evaluating have ganged up, in an organized mob attempt to distract from the very core of what matters.

My daughter, my second child, the one who should be pulling ornaments off the tree, is missing. And, well, I simply miss her.

Are you able to simply miss your own children, or do you feel the weight of other elements of your grief? Does the simplicity of the missing grow over time, or do all of the other elements to grief get stronger?

la llorona

photo by A30_Tsitika.

I paint my face like a calavera. I don't know what I am trying to achieve, making myself look dead, but I do it. I am alone. It feels like I am doing something wrong, and in that way, I am excited. I put a base of white onto my face. It reminds me of high school and listening to the Cure and being a punk rocker. Then I pull out the black face paint crayon and draw a joy there, a swirl here. Some flowers and decorations. I am more beautiful with the mask of death.

I want to feel close to her.  I want her to be amongst my posse in the afterlife, the otherworldly gang of ancestors that come when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, guiding me into good real estate decisions and warning me of enemies. I beckon her to come this day, the next and one after that. To rest in my arms while I dress like a calavera. We are but a whisper away from the other side. Maybe we are a coat of white face paint away.

I straddle cultures. I straddle existences. Half-white. Half-Latina. Half-mother. Half-La Llorona. I am an erstwhile Catholic and a half-assed Buddhist. I spent years living on the Mexican border in Arizona, speaking Spanish like a Chicana, and come home to a house full of Panamanians. I married a Southerner and live in New Jersey. I have attended midnight masses in four continents. I put each image of death, each candle burned, into a steaming cauldron, stew them for decades. I take some dark ideas out, adding liturgy and spells, until it is a soothing, warming bowl of ritual. Because above all else, I am a ritualist. I like rites. I like routine. I like customs. I like ceremony. I like something to do over and over because it is. What. We. Do. So I paint my face. I paint my face and I build an altar across my dining room. And I pull out the pictures of the dead.

I line up their photographs on my ofrenda. This time of year feels sacred and frightening. The leaves fall. My people fall. My grandmother. My aunt. My great-grandmother. My grandfather. My father-in-law. My daughter. So, I take a bit of them and add it to my Día de los Muertos altar. I decorate it with their funeral prayer cards, the Irish blessing written on the back. I put little bibles and prayer books. There is a rosary created by a blind nun and a bowl of fruit. I make sugar skulls. I paint a large painting of a woman crying and holding a stillborn baby. I hang it in the middle of the wall, papier-mâché skeletons flanking each side, flower lights hanging around the wooden frame.

Ssssshhhh. Don't tell anyone, but the painting is me and Lucy. It is a 16 inch by 20 inch secret done in bright acrylic. I tried to paint the Virgin Mary, but I always paint me holding Lucia and crying. It is pathological. It makes others uncomfortable. There is this show of competing artists. One of them could take pictures of nothing but clay and red dye that looked like bloody  internal organs. She suffered from colitis her whole life. She tried to create other work, but she always ended up painting organs hanging from a box. I keep painting my dead daughter. I paint death because I do not show her picture in my house, except on Day of the Dead. I put her picture in this little brightly colored frame that betrays the gray of our heartbreak. I can close it up with an orange ribbon when neighbors come by. Does anyone notice our Lucy there, lips red as the sacred heart? The lips are strange and mesmerizing to me, and I have kissed them. The dead wear makeup too.

+++

Is it okay to tell you a ghost story? It is Halloween after all. Sometimes I feel like La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, who walks the edges of ponds, arroyos, the rivers, the places where water runs and her children might wash up. See, the legend goes that her children were swept away by a flash flood, carried off dead, and she, driven insane by the grief, wanders the rivers of the world looking for them. She screams and keens into the night. In another land, the legend is that she killed her children herself, threw them in the river. But the end is the same--they are gone, and she is condemned to wander the earth. But the scream is one we all know. She screams into the night, "Dios Mio! Mi hijos! Mi hijos!" or "My God! My babies! My babies!"

She is beautiful and terrifying. Every old man and woman in Mexico has a La Llorona story, even my mother. It is a ghost story, a nightmare, to lose your children. Everyone knows that. La Llorona is a warning told to children who become young adults. Do not venture out at night or La Llorona will snatch you. Do not go meet your boyfriend by the riverbed, under that beautiful weeping willow, La Llorona will steal you from us. I am both comforted that child loss is acknowledged, even in ghost stories, as something to drive you mad, condemn you for eternity, and also sad that we have such bad PR. I get La Llorona, I do. I feel condemned some days. Like La Llorona, wild hair, wild eyes, wandering the babylost rivers of the internet, wailing, "Dios Mio! Mi hija! Mija! My daughter. My daughter. Oh  my God, my daughter."

This time seems wrought with ghosts and visions and the other world. Today is Halloween and Samhain, the Witches New Year. Tomorrow and the next day, the Days of the Dead. Tomorrow is Día de los Inocentes ("Day of the Innocents") also known as Día de los Angelitos ("Day of the Little Angels").  November 1st is a day set aside to honor children and babies who have died. We who wander the internet wailing have created our own culture around death, our own rituals of mourning. An angel writes our baby's name in the sand across the world. We write poetry. We light candles together. We trade skulls and hearts and ornaments.

I paint my face white, turn myself into a skull. I commune with the dead. I create elaborate altars for her. I summon her, conjure her baby form in the arms of my grandmothers and aunts. I stare into a bowl of water, scrying and crying. There is something comforting in the desperation of these motions. It is something other than wailing.

What ways do you honor the dead during Halloween, Samhain or Days of the Dead? Or if you don't, why not? What rituals have you created for yourself? For your family?  Are these rituals different for your baby(ies) than for your older ancestors? Do you connect with the community of parents who have lost children during October? What rituals feel most comforting to you?

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?