marked

When we found out Lu was pregnant last January it was one of those rare moments where we knew beyond any doubt that our lives had just changed forever, and that the transformation would be an ongoing process for years, forever, really. We were right about impending change, but wrong about the true nature of what was to come.

Now, over a year later we aren't even back to where we started. I am not back to any place that feels anything like the life I used to have. Everything appears exactly the same and that sameness feels utterly wrong. I look the same, my life rolls on the same way as always and yet within I have been transformed.

It is as though I have been enlarged by grief, and I'm still learning how to carry all this extra soul-weight on body that was used to moving lightly through the world. I had no proof of this, though. No son to show around that says "Now I Am a Dad." That expansion was supposed to be Silas and parenting and a whole new, challenging and invigorating way of life. Instead, that expansive, beautiful life was turned inward and invisible, into a black and dense weight that lives at the center of my being. My tattoo is a physical expression of that pain and loss, and it is helping me.

Lately I have felt less angry about people not remembering or not knowing about Silas. I can't just bring him up, but yet at the same time I cannot go through every day distant and angry, waiting for someone to acknowledge my loss, to speak to me about him. Oh the seething rage or sadness sometimes can't be denied, no doubt, but I work hard to face forward and get through it. In the end, other people can't help me if I can't help myself.

My tattoo in honor of Silas is a way to do that.

Since the tattoo is in a very visible place I know people see it. I am certain that they are aware of the mark and I like that. It is sort of like I'm sneaking Silas into the conversation. He's accounted for, whether they realize it or not. I'm surprised, though at how many people have not asked me about my ink. I figured it would be something people mentioned, but now that I think about it, I can't recall a single time I've asked someone what their tattoo meant.

I guess I just figured if I asked someone about their tattoo that at the least it would be a banal response about alcohol and spring break, or at the worst, well, me I suppose. Our story. And who wants to hear that? So I guess it makes sense that people don't ask me what it means. I'm not even sure how I would respond. I suppose some would get the truth while others I would be more gentle.

"It is to honor someone very close to me that has passed away," is probably the simplest way to put it, but the lack of specificity reduces that sentence to near-garbage. But on the other hand, "it's for my son, who died the day he was born," is so brutal and awful I can see people's souls short out when the words hit their ears. Their gaping, moving mouths and wide eyes make them look like a fish drowning in air. Which, incidentally, is how I always feel anyway. Welcome to my world. Here, have a sip of this. Cheers. To Death, that creepy, invisible intruder that rots the couch and bends the bed springs.

This tattoo is a talisman against the decay of memory and the reductive friction of time.

In a way it's a booby-trap, too. It is there to be seen and wondered about, but god help you if you ask. You just may get the truth. We're dangerous like that these days. There are a lot of things you don't want to ask us when you first meet us. And I worry about that now, in a way I never have before. I always looked forward to new friends and fun parties but now those situations are rife with potential disaster. Kid conversations are out whether it's about your new one or if we have any. Complaining is not an option as idle chit-chat with me. Can't handle it, don't care, will walk away if you keep it up. Plans for the future? Oh yeah we have one, but we had one last year and look where we are now. So we can do movies or music or better yet we can just talk about you because you don't want to know me. But if you do, if you really think you want to be my friend, go ahead and ask about my tattoo and I will tell you everything.

The tree is based on designs of the Tree of Life because Silas means "of the trees." This tree is dark though. It is black and gray and it swirls with an alien strangeness that I thoroughly enjoy. And although this Tree of my Son's Life appears dark and dead, tiny yellow fruit adorn several of the branches. Their pattern reveals the constellation of Orion--Silas' middle name--which rises in the autumn and rides high in the sky through those cold winter nights.

Silas was born on September 25th, so we were looking forward to teaching him about his stars as his birthday rolled around every year. Now that distinctive pattern of stars mocks me as the shape of a man he will never become. All winter those stars were brighter than the sun to me. I could barely look at them without the endless chasm of grief cracking open at my feet. I hate them and love them and drown in their cold starshine whenever my eyes capture their interstellar glow.

There is a heart hidden in my tattoo. That is because Silas is my heart. And because he is hidden, too. Around the edge is a pattern, a border. It is an S repeated over and over like the way I say his name to myself over and over, all the time, but it is also an Eternity symbol that is broken to reveal how he is lost to us.

This tattoo represents a private part of my soul that I demand to have revealed. I require this mark as a feature of who I am because without it, without a conjuring of Silas, I am not complete. It is a channel for my sadness. It is a badge despite how fucked up that sounds to me sometimes. It is a symbol for his life because that's all we have. We don't have his life, so a symbol is used as a poor, paltry placeholder. It is memory insurance.

So far, no stranger has asked me what my tattoo means and I was surprised by that, but it makes sense now. Yet, in the last week three people have out of the blue stopped me and told me that my tattoo was beautiful. I thanked them and smiled and they continued on their way. Inside I whispered over and over that it is, but you should have known my son. This is nothing compared to him.

Do you want people to ask you about your lost child? Do you initiate conversation about him or her? How do you commemorate your child? Necklace? Ink? Photographs? What objects or images link you to your child?

This post is a part of The Body Shop at Glow in the Woods -- a month of themed reflections and memes that explore what we do in an effort to occupy these physical selves with grace after babyloss.

Life's Leverage

It's a banner day at the new contributors page for Glow, and one that's been a very long time coming. It now features our first regular contributor who is a father -- please welcome Chris of Elm City Dad.

Chris, daddy to Silas Orion and husband to Lani, has a way of stating simply and beautifully how the world looks after babyloss. In doing so, he makes us all exhale a little and say Yes, yes. That's just how it is. And when we do that, we all feel a little more sane, a little more on-the-right-path. Which is exactly why we're all here. Please welcome Glow's first dad -- Chris, we're so honoured to have you here.

 

These days are brutal. They are less vividly awful than the first days and weeks and months after Silas Orion was born, but these days have a subtle ache and desperation that is deeper and more pervasive than the raw shock of his death. That experience was nearly impossible to comprehend and now, day by day, the specific truths of his absence are revealed in life-sized cascades of loss.

I don't just wake up anymore. I have to pry myself out of bed. I have to slit my eyes open with razors of truth and face the empty day as the pain bleeds away into the active motions of living. I manage to forget that I am wounded to my core sometimes. Sometimes I even have fun. Sometimes I just fake it real good.

Because that's what we do, right? We of this Terrible Tribe. We know things about the World that no one else understands. The depth of our pain is beyond fathoms or miles. Beyond lightyears. Our ache resonates in a space that is the size of an entire Universe.

It is the Universe that would have lived in each of our children's minds if they were here and we could hold them in our arms. If we could watch them grow and teach them about the beauty of the World, they, in turn, would show us everything we had forgotten about this amazing place.

There is a big difference between forgetting and learning, though. How do we hold on to the good that remains all around us while our guts trail behind us like a nauseous shadow? How did we come to this? This limbo? This World where everything is dangerous and uncertain and somehow still stunning? And how, while in this World, do we get up every fucking day and just go do shit that needs to get done?

I guess it's just more interesting to try to be strong and powerful than to just give in. At least it is for us, for now. We freak out and get pissed and cry and rage and then sometimes we laugh our asses off. An example would be sledding down the icy hill in New Hampshire this weekend where we zoomed into laughter and then nearly into the trees. Danger loomed, I felt it. At least we ran towards it knowing.

I see people all the time who don't believe that life can be terrible and I just want to shake them until they see. But that doesn't help anything. The only way to know this is to go through it, and it is nothing I would ever wish on anyone.

My wishes don't matter, though, that's obvious. Everyone will experience loss and pain and tragedy in their lives. We just happened to get shafted early and good. That is why it is so important to celebrate every joy and happiness and beauty that we can find in our daily lives and in our dreams.

Resentment and jealousy leave a stench on my soul that I loathe. I try to push those feelings into calm acceptance. This is the only life I get to lead, and I must do better now for Silas, too. I hold him in my heart every moment of the day, and when I see his stars above at night, I feel their distant heat on my cool winter skin.

I hold Lu's hand and we walk. We push nothing but we pull each other along and somehow have some fun on another brutal night. Today it was Guinness and a snowstorm. Tomorrow, who knows.

What do you do to get by? How do you live in this limbo of pain and hope and healing and rage?  What pries you out of bed?

glimpses

Today's post is the first from a new contributor to the Glow in the Woods family: Jen of There's a New Monarchy in Town.

Jen is a transplanted Canadian living in London, England, and a first-time mama in the first raw months of life without her daughter Sadie. She came on board as the 7th full-time medusa after writing to us to say 'thanks for being here', and 'I've completely lost my writing mojo' ...at which point we ambushed her to join our motley crew.

Please join us in giving Jen a glowing welcome--we're grateful to have her voice in our midst, and we hope you are, too.

I look back at photos from our four days in Vienna last month. Austria is damn nice, yes. And who knew it was so good at wine making? I loved the cathedral concert at dusk: Mozart and More. The end note of each song hanging in the air like it was up for grabs.

I like the tucked-away bar we stumble onto. The music is good here. The ceilings low, arched, stone. Peanut shells on the floor, wine savvy staff. We decide to sample the local stuff only.

Let’s have another.

.::.

We sit in a tiny room on tiny pastel sofas surrounded by four tiny white walls. Three, if you consider the one behind me is all windows. The view is the Thames and Big Ben. If you were in a restaurant you’d be pleased. Here, it’s nothing short of stifling. If you were me, across from the specialist who took care of her in those last hours, you’d want to scream back. He takes off his glasses to look at me squarely, Australian accent thick, and I wonder if he barely remembers. His words are clinical. I’ll bet the farm his own babies are alive and well.

“I don’t care if you believe it would have happened anyway. I would have taken however many more hours or days or weeks we’d have had with her if that nurse hadn’t moved her.”

It’s what I want to say.

Instead, I rock, shuddering through my sobs, conscious of the three sets of eyes fixed on me as I struggle to recover. I yank two, three more tissues from the box beside me angrily. I stay silent. I feel weak and my voice has forgotten how to work.

.::.

I am comfortable enough now that my confidence has grown as steadily as my indignation. I am here to work. Why are you looking at Facebook? Why are you complaining about someone else before you’ve even proven yourself? Why can’t someone give me the answer?

I smile. I put in 11 hour days on occasion. I think about the possibilities. I dream of what I was meant to be doing.

.::.

She would have been six months old on August 20th. I tried in vain to not imagine what she’d look like, what milestones she would have reached. I am okay, then I’m not, and then I am again. Okay being a different, different place these days. Grief, like an unwanted tagalong, saunters alongside me daily. She is vindictive in the way she chooses the most inopportune times to surface. I thought Sorrow was only a word used in love poems that include, ‘hither’ and ‘unrequited’.

Not so much.

If you have ever wanted to see what damaged goods look like, look no further.

.::.

We have been sitting in the garden for five hours or more, and the table is now a sea of glass, empty and full. I look from my brother to my friends and back to my husband. I laugh heartily and often, and realize in the back of my mind that this is where hope lies: among family and friends, new and old. I am grateful and then in the next breath I am homesick.

I am the luckiest unlucky girl.

.::.

While I took the four hour round trip to Luton and back to reclaim my passport, he went to our favourite place. Waited for me, had a beer in the pub that was once a jail. He is proud and a bit secretive of the contents of his shopping bag. I am always in awe at how much this process pleases him.

Later, he serves a stunning plate of monkfish wrapped in bacon. I fold my pajama’d legs under me and tuck in. Tastes like lobster. Baby squash, peppers, asparagus sauteed next to the sweetest new baby potatoes I’ve ever tasted. I wonder if there are two people in the room who have missed their calling. He raises his glass.

‘Cheers. To the future, whatever it may hold.'

.::.

Fleeting moments of "happiness" continue to catch me off guard. Do you remember the first time you laughed, or felt hope for the future, after your child's death? Did you feel guilty for allowing yourself to do so?

Hallmark Holidays

The male perspective in this particular flavor of grief is so often overlooked by what I'll call "society at large."  Husbands are often asked how their wives are doing, but the question is seldom posed to them directly.  Men walk a fine line between what is acceptable in grief, and what is acceptable emotionally to display as a man.  Today CDE, of Once in a Lifetime, contributes his thoughts on a difficult holiday.  CDE and his wife, STE of So Dear and Yet So Far, lost their twin sons  in December/January '07-08.

 
In the past, I'd never given Father's Day that much thought. It was a Hallmark holiday, like Valentine's Day, like Mother's Day. It was a day to call my father and shoot the breeze with him for a little bit. But not much else. I remember one especially amusing one, during a period when my life had sort of gone to shit, when some cable channel thought it'd be good to show Death of a Salesman for Father's Day. Nothing says "I love you, Dad" like infidelity, suicide, and the shabby, slow death of the American Dream. But Father's Day? No big deal. I spent most of my early adult life being spectacularly unsuited for fatherhood.

Eventually, I got to the point where I probably wasn't any less qualified for the job than most people. I'd matured, developed prospects, and most importantly, found someone who wanted to bear my children. When our lives reached the point that we could actually consider trying to have kids, the thought of being a father filled me with something resembling terror. That terror subsided once we realized that it wasn't going to be as simple as having unprotected sex at the right time of the month. It was hard to lose sleep over the impending upheaval of my life and identity as a person when repeated IUIs yielded nothing more than a lot of crushed hopes. Eventually, the fear of being a parent subsided, replaced by the fear of never being a parent. And in the process, I'd spent a lot of time thinking about the importance of fathers. What it means to be a man, and to be a father. What is expected of us, what isn't expected. The roles men do and don't play. I resolved to be a good father. To stand beside my wife and raise our children right, to be strong, smart, brave and kind.

Eventually, we got pregnant. And immediately, the terror came back, but shot through with elation. We found out that we were having twin boys. I was going to be a father to two boys, and immediately I began thinking about how I would talk to them, how I would explain the birds and the bees, how you shouldn't start fights, but should finish them, how being smart was nothing of which you should be ashamed. How I would tell a son who came out to me that he was loved just the way he was. I added the Dangerous Book for Boys to my Amazon wish list. Boys. Twin boys. I think it was at that point that it stopped being fatherhood and started being Fatherhood. And then we lost the boys, and it stopped being fatherhood, Fatherhood, or anything else.

And it's at this point, in the middle of my grief, my loss, my sadness and rage, that Father's Day finally means something. It is yet another reminder of who I could have been, but am not, and may never be. It is my empty arms, my days not spent shopping for onesies and strollers,  my evenings not spent cooking dinner for the family, my nights not spent with a baby asleep on my chest. I am mourning the absence of something I never actually had. No child grew inside me, nobody expected me to have the same connection to my boys that my wife did. But even though all I had was the idea, the potential, the love for what could have been, that emptiness, that lack of possibility, hurts so much that some days it drains me, empties me, robs me of the desire to do anything but sit on the couch and retreat into the shelter of fiction. I've been told that I'm not like the average man, and I strongly suspect that I wouldn't have been like the average father. But the role of father is one I had learned to take seriously, to respect, and one to which I aspired over the last two years. Father's Day would be a new chance for celebration, for recognition. Hallmark holiday? Sure. But "hallmark" has multiple meanings, and I'm spending this particular holiday acutely aware of falling short of one. 

two solitudes

In that last hour, our hello and goodbye, it was Dave who cried.

I'd never really seen tears well up for him, before.  I haven't since.  Watching him cradle our son as those few salt drops slid onto Finn's blanket was one of the tenderest things I've witnessed, a benediction of fatherhood more fitting, for us, than the baptism we'd rejected.

I didn't cry.  I was too fresh from birth, too present, too amazed by this firstborn boy I hadn't known I'd always wanted, too busy trying to fit a lifetime into the minutes we had.  I sang to him, raw-voiced, petted his dark hair, gazed in wonderment at his tidy, perfect ears, his finger gripping mine.  I told him he was wanted and loved.  I whispered and hushed and said, mama's here...it's okay, little one, don't be afraid.   I knew exactly what was happening, but in that moment - small mercies of shock - it was not happening to me.  It was happening to my child, and just to be present and with him was all the mothering I was ever going to get to do and all my mind could take in.  And so, somehow, I did not cry, me who weeps at car commercials and bristles with indignant tears when the least of my feelings is trod upon.

But later I filled buckets...tears of sorrow and of rage and hopelessness.  After his death was done happening to Finn, it happened to me a thousand times in replay, all the loss and brokenness that did not touch me in the moment crowding in tenfold.  The bright yellow walls of our kitchen, painted in the first days after we returned home, have my tears in their butter hue.  The backsplash of broken tile is a mosaic created of therapeutic sessions, me and a hammer and licensed destruction that kept me, I think, from the siren song of disappearance, of hurting myself.

Dave, though, did not cry again.  He held me, weathered me, all that long summer...and all these years since, in the moments where my bitterness and hurt and grief have burbled up to the surface and unleashed tears and wounded cries.  But this has not been how he has grieved.  His sorrow seems to have no questions, no self-pity.  He went back to work five days later, because he had to and I had already lost my job, and he came home lunchtimes in those early days...mostly, I think, to make sure I wasn't hanging from the rafters. And he answered a multitude of questions about how I was doing and he listened to a multitude of secret stories that came spilling out about others' losses long since unspoken and he came home at night and we sat on the deck and I tried desperately to think of something to say to him but came up silent because I had nothing to offer but lamentations...and sometimes he seemed like a stone that I could only break myself on.

I don't think anyone ever asked me how he was.

And yet even in the worst of it, I knew we were lucky...because there was trust between us, implicit and otherwise unscarred.  Because I knew he tried hard not to judge me for how I grieved, no matter how ugly and exposed our differences made me feel.  Because I knew and did not doubt that he, too, loved our son and missed him and thought of him...even if we weren't able to find ways of speaking that aloud to each other.

But we were still two solitudes, living separate lives for a very long time, hurting - and in ways hurting each other - even while trying to comfort and build.

There is a terrible intimacy in having to share grief with someone.  Even if you both feel it deeply, you almost inevitably will not experience it all in the same ways and at the same time.  And I wonder if there isn't something about grieving that makes some small part of all of us a little like a cat who crawls off to find a corner alone to die in.  The urge for solitude, sanctuary to lick our wounds in in some form or other, seems to be almost a categorical imperative...no matter how we may share ourselves on the internet and even long for commiseration...the reality of mourning in tandem is almost always messy.  Grief exposes too much of us, makes the intimacy of eyes searching ours overwhelming.

Dave and I have come out the other side, three years later.  I can hold his gaze now and look back without flinching, without hiding, without seeing pain there or pain reflected.   There are no other eyes in the world that have shared with me what his have, and we are both healed enough now, in our own separate ways, that the bond doesn't rub raw but honours, commemorates, cements us.  I am grateful for his having been there all along, for not having had to find my way alone.  And yet I know, if I am honest, that we were alone, in the core of ourselves, stumbling along harnessed together by good faith and nothing else for much of that time.  And I catch my breath and think, damn, no wonder divorce rates are so high in the aftermath of loss like this.  And I fear to look deeper than that, because I do not want to feast my eyes upon the scars any longer.