opening windows

David Spinrad of The Unorthodox Rabbi is a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, the seminary for the Reform (progressive) Jewish movement, and a personal trainer living in San Francisco. He is the husband of Gal of Growing Inside, whom we've honoured here at Glow. In the words of big sister Dahlia, Dave and Gal have one 'princess daughter' and one 'angel daughter'. Their youngest, Tikva, passed away in August 2008 of a diaphragmatic hernia diagnosed during Gal's pregnancy.

Dave joins our Are You There, God? It's Me, Medusa gathering with this caveat: "Even though I am a rabbinical student, I cannot promise that my perspective will be entirely Jewish. And even though I am a man, I cannot promise you my voice will be male. I will promise you that whatever I contribute will be a reflection of me, uncompromisingly honest and from the heart."

Do I really want to be a part of the Dead Babies Club? Can't I just do this myself, keep my feelings and perspective away from anyone or anything that I feel like I have to defend against?

I could be in the park right now. Sun, shining down. Me, dreaming up. Blue sky, above. Green grass, below. Is not this the purest connection to God? A clear head, feeling no differentiation between me and God and no distance from Source?

Sounds great.

Who are you kidding?

I hear You. It actually sounds boring.

I do like this ride, although I don't know about the DBC.

Afraid? Why make life experience conditional? Why not dive into all of life?

This is the Jewish way.

I did come here to mix it up. I came for experience and expression. I am alive to explore. I live to be here, desire there, find peace in the here and enjoy the journey to there.

But where I am is no longer here and not quite there. A liminal state of being. Can I enjoy being neither here nor there? Can I trust where I am even if I don't understand it?

You can, if you let yourself be where you are.

Does this lead me to becoming a better rabbi, too? More questions than answers. My response to a person saying, "This will make you a better rabbi," is "I would settle for becoming eighty percent of the rabbi losing Tikva will make me," is a lie.

I will settle for nothing less than the fullness of life's experience. Tikva's passing is, on a feeling level, exactly the depth of life I desire. I wouldn't have asked for the conditions in a million years, but the 'why' of it isn't for me to answer. I can give that question over to God simply because there is absolutely no way for me come to a satisfactory answer. I'm totally off the hook for that one, and making myself crazy or miserable isn't my way.

It unsettles me to admit this, but when I take the labels of 'desired' and 'undesired' off the piles of life, I have so much more freedom in my life.

In the Torah, upon sending Abram upon the adventure of his life, God says to him, 'Lech lecha'. In English, it translates to, 'Go for yourself'. Or, we can translate it as, 'Go to yourself'. Every journey to ourselves is for ourselves. And Tikva's life gives me gifts for my journey to self that I am only beginning to understand.

Whether I want to be or not, I have a lifetime membership to the Dead Babies Club. Since I'm stuck here, would you mind if we open up a few windows? And while we grieve, I'm going to throw out a few thoughts.

Losing a child is not my whole life. Do you know how uncomfortable I am that there are all these people out there who only know me from this experience, only know me as Tikva's dad? I am so much more, way, way more than just her dad. I am made of the same stuff as sunshine between tree branches and nothing less than the moon rising above the Red Sea.

I am a part of God. Without me, there could be no You. The Sh'ma, whose words carve the foundation stone of Judaism, demands my particpation in comprising God, declaring: "Listen, you who wrestle with God, the Unity that is our God, God is One." You need us. And we, as a part of You, are eternal.

So why so much attention on this one little soul, this little piece of God consciousness who projected herself into a body that gave her exactly the experience she, and our collective consciousness, desired? Because if we're going to give her all this attention, let's look at the glory of the life she lived.

How many people do in eighty years what Tikva did in eight weeks? How many of us inspire hope, real hope, real oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God hope in our lives? Tikva doesn't only mean ‘hope' in Hebrew, Tikva is hope. That's what she was and that's what she is. And I got to be the parent of the physical manifestation of the feeling of hope. I got to hold Hope in my arms.

And you want me to mourn that? Are you kidding me?!

And yet, I grieve. And that makes me feel so mortal. So ordinary. So. There is no escaping it. There is no winning in life and no losing in death, only love and our capacity to give and receive it.

Tikva's middle name is Ahava, ‘love' in Hebrew. And the only love worth a damn is unconditional love. It's a real thing and Tikva gave me the chance to feel it. I'd heard all about unconditional love in the past, but I was never able to separate the message from the messenger. I always suspected that deep down inside the person yammering on about unconditional love was really trying to set himself up to get a piece of ass. Nothing wrong with that, but don't kid yourself about unconditional love. Until you've lived it, you can't know it. And the separation between those who can grasp the concept and those who have held the feeling is a yawning chasm that nothing but experience can bridge.

Until you love your child without ever knowing whether or not you'll ever get to hold her, you don't know unconditional love.

Until your love for your child is greater than your need for her to live even one more day with anything less than the dignity she deserves, you don't know unconditional love.

I grieve the loss of Tikva, but can't and wouldn't change a thing. It doesn't all make sense to me and it feels like it never will, but in Man's Search of Meaning, Victor Frankel wrote this from the concentration camp in which he was held:

The last freedom is ours - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

of magic and faith

Kara L.C. Jones joins the Are You There, God? It's Me, Medusa blogolympics as a Wiccan practitioner who was raised Roman Catholic and spent 18 years exploring world religions. These days, she is not part of a coven or formal community, but follows an eclectic path of honoring holy days like Solstices and full moons, holding sacred the 'green' view of air, fire, water, earth, and spirit. Early influences of Virgin Mary still reach across, though often in the form of varied Goddess iconography like Kali, Venus, She-la-nagig and others.

Kara is interested in bereavement rituals like Day of the Dead and memorial henna painting, which came after the death of her son Dakota. As part of her grief path, she has written extensively about her life as a different kind of parent. She and her partner Hawk co-founded KotaPress to publish a grief blog and website, and to distribute her books Flash Of Life as well as Mrs. Duck & The Woman. Her art lives at The 1,000 Faces of Mother Henna.

Dakota's entire being was made up of faith and magic.

I first visioned this child as a young girl, showing up randomly in my dreams and meditation. She gave her father and I the same night time dream one night. We were both floored to discover we'd had the exact same dream, down to the details.

We went up to Paradise at Mount Rainier, and there in the snow, in all capital letters: DAKOTA. We drove up to Neah Bay, stopping at an overlook along the way, and there on a boulder, in all capital letters, spray-painted in blue: DAKOTA.

We weren't going to get married at first. Instead we tried for two years to just get pregnant. Nothing. Then we decided that our love, our partnership was worthy of commitment. The day after our wedding ceremony, we got pregnant. Summer Solstice pregnancy. Spring equinox birth predicted for our child who turned out to be a son. Every moment seemed like magic. I had faith in the magic.

And then I heard the words this baby is dead.

To say I shut down is an understatement. I was so angry at the Goddess. First for taking my child from me. And then extraordinarily angry at Her because I realized the grief was overwhelming, and I would need Her help to make it through this. The last thing I wanted was any help or renewed sense of belief in a Being who betrayed my dreams so deeply. How could She do this to us? How could she take my devotion to beauty and leave me transformed into a mad woman with a head full of snakes that seemed to turn people into stone?

People would ask how I was doing, and I would scream. They stood dumbfounded, staring at me.

Stone.

People would ask when are you going to try again? and I would scream that another child would not fix anything. They stood dumbfounded, staring.

Stone.

People would say Okay Kara, it's been three years, now it is time to move on and I would scream.

Stone.

I became incapable of maintaining or forming relationships because others would look at me, especially others who were happy or pregnant or had living children, and...

Stone.

Ultimately, I did not just lose my son. I lost myself. We lost relationships. We lost everything. We found ourselves homeless in our car on the infamous September 11th. There was nothing left to lose now except my mind.

At that point, we found our way to this magic little island in Puget Sound where I met a few other mothers of the Earth. Friends who understood what it meant to make ritual a part of every single day. Magicians who led the way to everyday miracles, Reiki, retreats, re-engagement in a sense of being part of the air, water, earth, fire, and spirit.

The Internet also had been a continuous blessing as bereaved parents from all over the world began contacting us about our books, offering to contribute writings to our site, to the Dictionary of Loss, and to the Different Kind of Parenting zine we'd created. It was through the MISS Foundation that I reconnected with my ability to create relationship. Dr. Jo from MISS reached out to us and her model of living life in the presence of grief changed everything for me. I began writing with her and Dr. DeFrain. Hawk and I began offering creative arts sessions at the annual MISS conferences. My online relationships were becoming flesh and blood.

++++

It was probably the gift of my good friend Lisa that brought me the whole way back to magic and faith. She simply asked me this:

What if we behave
make choices exactly where we are
given the options open to us in this moment
as if we are living our most cherished dream?

This little tool was the first that didn't try to fix what happened. It didn't require that I give up my different kind of parenthood. It acknowledged the grief and at the same time explored life after the death of a child, rather than make grief and life mutually exclusive.

It simply said This is where you are. This is what has happened. Given exactly where you are, with exactly what you have at hand, how do you cherish your dreams again? How do you dream again?

And so I found myself back in the present moment. If there is a Goddess, She could take care of the past and the future. All I have is right now. And if I think of NOW as my most cherished dream - always as my most cherished dream, then anything is possible again. Even happiness and play.

My son cannot be brought back. I can never be my pre-grief self again. The dreams of that previous self do not hold meaning here now.

++++

In this moment, I have a sink full of dirty dishes. So in my most cherished dream, I take the time to play with the soap bubbles. In this moment, we have a house full of hungry people. So in my most cherished dream, I take the time to make pancakes with our grandchildren. In this moment, I miss my son. So in my most cherished dream, I take the time to play with sugar, beads, foil, and icing and make sugar skulls for his altar.

The energy and experience of my different kind of parenthood has come back around to being part of everyday sacredness. And though Dakota is not here in the ways I originally visioned, he is still here - in all capital letters - he is still a being made up entirely of faith and magic.

DAKOTA.

you keep on walking

Natalie of Lunardreams is mother to Devin, her first child conceived through IVF who died after 35 weeks due to a rare case of amniotic bands constricting the umbilical cord. Natalie has become a passionate infertility and stillbirth awareness advocate, among other things, and joins the 'Are You There, God? It's Me, Medusa' blogolympics table as a lifelong Atheist.

Natalie has a love of all things facts and figures—computer programming, physics, astronomy and math. “I see beauty in the world around me in these numbers and random patterns,” she explains. “There may not be a purpose or a guiding hand, but there is still beauty. I feel like I'm walking away from this tragic loss a wholly different person than I walked in. And yet, underneath it all, the foundation remains the same. I just have a different perspective now. Life seem a little more gritty, a little more real.”

I have always been an Atheist. I had some brief introductions to religion, but on the whole I was raised on science and facts.  That is how I lived my life.

So when my son died I had no spiritual anchor to latch on to. There were times when I contemplated a deity, a plan—times when I tried out these ideas that others told me would bring peace and enlightenment. I understood then why people cling to their religion. I know too well now that in times of great grief you hold onto any bit of sanity you have... any thought that makes you feel even a little bit better, you hold on for fear that you will lose your mind. I understand why. But they all seemed disingenuous to me, the lifelong Atheist... like I was trying on someone else’s clothes.

Instead, I enveloped myself in the data: information about stillbirth, amniotic band syndrome, loss. I calculated percentages and risks. I took comfort in the numbers, as if understanding the calculations brought me closer to understanding the situation, closer to coming to terms with this horrible, unspeakable thing.

Some days I feel like the grief that overwhelms me is unique to the Atheist.

My son is not in heaven, I will not see him again, he is not in a better place. He is simply gone, erased from our lives leaving behind small physical scars and gaping emotional ones. Frequently I felt overlooked when people came offering their condolences. I know they came from a kind place, a caring place, and I tried to take that for what it’s worth, but how do I react when someone says my son is in heaven? Or that god had a plan? I don’t believe in heaven or god. Instead of feeling comforted I would find myself fighting the urge to explain my religion. To say No, you don’t understand.

We were uncomfortable with the idea of a funeral or wake—uncomfortable beyond the fact that we didn't really know what was acceptable for a baby who had been born dead. Our families had never dealt with this before. There was no path for us to follow.

So we made our own.

We invited family to our house on his due date. I framed his photos, a poem, I set up a table with the little baby items that meant the most to me. I wanted people to understand him. Above all, I wanted them to know who he was. Then at 7 PM—the time of his birth that day he was born so quietly—we gathered outside in our yard to plant a tree. This was our service, this was our acknowledgement of the cycle of life.

I wept as the tree roots were covered with soil, wept for my son who would be buried in the ground soon enough.

::

One thing became very clear to me when Devin died: it’s the people left behind who suffer. I do not worry about Devin, his flickering conciousness extinguished before he really gained a sense of self. He lived and died whole, cradled in my womb.

It is me who is broken. It is me that I weep for, and my husband and our families.

We will never get to see our child smile. We will never get to hear his first words. But more than that, we will never know what kind of person he would have grown up to be. It is us left holding the empty bag of promises, us who carry around the questions that will never be answered.

Over the past seven months I’ve often asked myself what keeps me going. Why wake up in the morning when there really are no guarantees? Bad things happen to good people for no reason, when you least expect it. The loss of my son feels like a huge, gaping hole that will never close—and there is nothing, no one, that can close it. There have been many times when I thought about how it would be a relief to stop feeling anything. A relief to go to sleep and not wake up. Not to be with my son, but simply to stop the pain.

But every time I start thinking like that I realize that what seems like a choice really isn’t.

This is my life, my only one—this is all I get. I do not get to pick and choose what I get to experience. I know that one day I will experience joy again—not the same type of unfettered, naive joy that I did before, but joy nonetheless—and the only way to get there is through this hell. Just as I know that bad things can strike out of the blue, so too I know that it can’t always be all bad. The dice will come up both evens and odds—sometimes more evens, sometimes more odds.

::

I understand grief now. You must rant and cry and turn it over in your hands, throw it against the wall. You’re always stuck with it in your pocket, but after a while you start to become more familiar with it. You mould it like clay. You poke holes in it, stretch it out, roll it out flat. And then you keep on walking.

After all, no matter what our faith (or lack thereof), no matter what we believe is the why or how, that is all any of us really do.

the wave of light

When a baby dies, things tend to go dark.

October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day in the US. The Wave of Light that marks the day is an international affair, something everyone can be part of. At seven pm local time, across every time zone, all are invited to join in lighting a candle in remembrance and honour of little ones loved and missed.

A wave of light around the world may only go a small way to brightening the darkness and silence of babyloss... both as an individual experience and as a taboo subject. But it is a beginning. May the light illuminate and honour, and if it is bright enough, foster discussion, research and prevention, empathy, and support for those who grieve.

Join us. And spread the word. We may be medusas, turning polite conversation to stone, but only while our stories and our losses remain in darkness.

photo by ul marga

no two are alike

Lori of Losses and Gains is a mother of five, as she says: 'three on earth, two in heaven'. Prior to her struggle with infertility, the loss of two children and the unexpected death of her father, she describes her Christian faith as '...bright, shiny and built on a sincere pursuit of knowledge and understanding' that was rooted in her Protestant upbringing and developed by her earnest study of religion in college. It felt solid, as she describes: impressive from the outside, but untested.

"It's not nearly so shiny now," she says.  "All I can say is that I hope my words will only be read for what they are, my personal experience of faith, and that anyone reading this will intuitively understand there has been nothing easy about any of this. For those who are new to this journey of babyloss, and for those who have traveled this road for some time, please know that my heart is with you."

photo by captpiper

It was January and it was snowing. Great big fat flakes were floating down and, even more exciting, they were sticking to the ground. It was enough to make two young boys nearly hysterical.

I helped them piece together whatever suitable outdoor clothing we could find and sent them out the door in ill-fitting snow boots from last year and adult sized stocking caps that kept falling down over their eyes. They whooped and hollered and started scraping together snowballs from the wafer-thin blanket of snow that had accumulated on the grass.

I retreated upstairs to my bedroom, my sanctuary, and leaned on the windowsill watching them from above. It had been less than three months since I had birthed, held, loved and said good bye to my other two - the two that now existed only in my dreams. Silent tears slipped down my cheeks as I struggled yet again with my inability to find joy in a scene that was nothing less than joy-filled. Two glorious, living, breathing, sturdy boys. Mine. But my thoughts were consumed by the two that were missing.

During those long three days in the hospital prior to Joseph and Molly’s birth, and then death, I felt held. I prayed only for God’s presence and He was there.

He was there in the nurses who ministered to us with such tenderness and mercy. He was there in the family members who waited with us in silent support even when we refused to see anyone. He was there in our friend, an ordained minister, who abandoned all of the duties of her own life to come to us in our time of need. He was there in the remarkable peace that surrounded us during the hours we held our babies, loving them, memorizing them, struggling to figure out how to let them go. I felt sustained by the prayers and rituals of our faith that were offered up on our behalf. Tears were everywhere, but so was grace.

I thought that presence that had been so easy to recognize in the hospital would follow me home. It didn’t.

I thought the peace I had felt when my babies were here would continue in their absence. Again, no. Life moved on so quickly, it had to.  Boys at the ages of five and eight don’t understand periods of mourning, or a mother who can’t find the energy to help them with their homework or to volunteer in their classroom. Guilt heaped on top of grief and I found myself drowning.  

Through it all I tried to pray. I tried to cling to all that I had always known to be true in the hopes that it would bring some kind of comfort. I tried. But most of the time my prayers didn’t get any further than, God, please help me...

Help me what? Help me heal? Help me still be a mother to the children who are here with me? Help me stop torturing myself with all of the things I believe I should have done differently? Help me stop doubting my babies value, and my right to grieve their absence? Yes, all of that. That, and so much more.  

I gave into many demons during those days. I agonized myself with all that I had done wrong, and shut myself off from everyone who cared. But the one voice I never gave credence to was the one that tried to claim this was God’s will. The devil didn’t win that one. I had reconciled long before this tragedy that I was a part of a larger story; a story of a broken world and a broken relationship with God. Accidents, illness, disease, all evidence of a creation gone wrong. Death is not the work of God. As a Christian, I believe the Incarnation and the Resurrection restored our relationship to God, but Creation is still in need of repair. The Kingdom has not yet come. The world is still broken and we see that brokenness in a thousand different ways every day.

Leaning on my windowsill that snowy afternoon, I felt myself slipping into doubt, into despair. Over and over I thought of the cry of that anguished father in the Gospel of Mark: Lord, I believe; please help my unbelief. And in that moment I felt something. It wasn’t peace. It didn’t erase the sorrow in my heart. It was more like awareness, a window opening to a place that I hadn’t seen before.

In that space, for just a moment, I heard His voice.

I’m here. They mattered. They matter to me. They were my beloved. You are my beloved. They are with me and they are perfect. You will be okay, I promise. I am here... I am always here.

In the quiet of that blessed assurance I looked out the window and saw my boys working together to try and gather every ounce of snow they could find to build a miniature snowman. From the depths of my soul, I smiled.

It’s been almost five years now and I still hold onto that moment of clarity.

It is the voice that tells me it is okay that I am still here, still writing about them, still remembering them, still missing them. It is also the voice that tells me it is okay that I am happy again, that joy returned. It is the voice of love in all its forms. The love that weeps over those we miss, and the love that rejoices in the blessings of today.

I believe in love.  I believe that God is the source of that love. I believe we are called to love and that in doing so we assist God in repairing the world. And I believe that my babies, my son and daughter, are wrapped forever in eternal love - both mine and God’s.

I believe.

gone is the ultimate goal

In July 2006, Rosepetal’s first son V was stillborn at full term—one day before her scheduled induction and three days after a check-up with heart rate monitoring and ultrasound showing that all was well. She discovered the world of baby loss blogs shortly afterwards and began her own—Moksha—and joins us for Glow's Are You There, God? It's Me, Medusa blogolympics.

Although Rosepetal’s family is Hindu, she was not brought up in a particularly spiritual way. There were no daily prayers within her household, no shrine in a corner of her childhood home and, at the time, no local Hindu temple in her hometown.

"I spent a lot of my childhood rejecting all things Indian, not being interested in Hinduism and just trying not to be different," she explains. "I have no spiritual leader, and patchy beliefs and understanding. When I was approached by Glow in the Woods to write a piece, I felt a little bit fraudulent being put forth as a Hindu voice. But this gathering is all about context and not credentials, and so here I am."

Rosepetal was born to Indian immigrants in 1973 in England, and lives now wih her husband and living son in Europe.

It is in our hands to plan and do everything to the best of our capabilities but the results are in the hands of God. The way in which every living being comes to earth depends on accumulated karma. The better our deeds, the better the opportunities we get in this life to perform better deeds. In the end some pious souls get freed from this cycle of rebirth.

I believe that your young son was one such Divine Soul who only needed a short time before being freed forever from this cycle and will now become one with God. It is called moksha, the salvation. You [and your husband] were both the chosen ones for this to happen.

So wrote my cousin in India after the unexplained death of my son at full term.

Comfort was in very short supply and this was one of the only letters I found comforting at the time. It presented V as having his own thing to do, his own destiny, one which I could not—and maybe even should not—have prevented.

There are two main views on what moksha, the ultimate goal for Hindus, is like. One states that the soul retains its own identity upon attaining moksha and continues to exisit in an enlightened state of perfection. The other states that the soul loses all individuality and becomes at one with the whole—you might call the whole God—and is indistinguishable from it. A useful analogy is that it is like an individual drop of water falling and merging into the ocean. It is the latter which I believe makes most sense.

When my father died suddenly less than a year after V's death, I sobbed to a friend that I must have done something really awful in a previous life. But the truth is I don't really understand how the paths of different souls intersect in this way. How come V attained moksha and I became the mother of a dead child?

Today I find the idea that V attained moksha both comforting and distressing. Comforting because that is the ultimate goal for any soul. Distressing because it means he no longer has any attachments to me and no longer even exists as individual entity. Whereas once I felt sure that I would find him again after death, that the mother-child bond was that strong, now I fear that it is in fact impossible. Maybe that explains why these days I feel so very far away from him.

But there is a small beginning of a grain of understanding of what it must take to attain moksha. As I cling to my individual self, I see that I am nowhere near.