Home

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Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of confidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts. It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule.~Frederick W. Robertson

My husband and I recently agreed to stay in London for one more year. It will be our third. Taking into consideration how swiftly time seems to pass despite the pain or pleasures life hands us, I’ve been thinking about what this place means to me, and what it will mean to return to Canada.

In the weeks following Sadie’s death we flew back to hold her funeral and to spend time with our family. Angry and desperately sad, I vowed to return permanently as soon as possible. I listened and believed those around us who said it was time, all things considered, to be closer to our friends and loved ones. It was all well intentioned; something to offer when there was no other way to help: Come back, and while you don’t have her, at least you’ll have us. We are both so loved.

I was emotionally chaotic; I viewed our return as the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Yet after months passed and I did what was the right thing for me – getting a job – I started to doubt my hasty proclamation. Despite it being the polar opposite of what I wanted to be doing, I believed that distracting myself with work challenges and making new friends was the healthy, responsible way to channel my grief.

I began to experience this home from a different perspective. I was extraordinarily sad, and still am. But I was forging a path as a new person. Everything I looked at was at once starkly different, as though through the eyes of someone else. It has taken many months to understand how deeply losing Sadie has changed my very essence. And now, ten months later, I can see how London has been a integral part of this transformation.

I’ve always told my husband that I am an adaptable person by nature, and he knows all too well how much I enjoy change. In the years before we bought our Toronto home, I moved both on my own and with him no less than once a year over the span of six years. Needless to say, the idea of moving overseas and making a life for ourselves in a new country was particularly appealing.

I believe that being here throughout this time has taught me what I’m made of.

Now, faced with the reality of our time here coming to an end, the thought of leaving saddens me more than I ever expected it to. I know how quickly this year will fly by. This is the place where my husband and I chose to strike out independently of everything we knew and make a life distinctly our own. It’s where our daughter was conceived, and where we came to terms with what becoming parents meant to us. It is where we were fortunate enough to experience the barely describable love and joy that was being her mom and dad.

It is where we shared both the most glorious and the most heartbreaking moments of our lives.

How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life. ~Katherine Mansfield

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Do you associate a certain place with your lost child, be it a city, home, or otherwise? How has that relationship changed since your loss?

 

that which reshapes the shoreline

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Today's post comes to us from Loribeth of The Road Less Travelled. After trying to conceive for more than two years, Loribeth and her husband rejoiced in pregnancy only to deliver their daughter Kathleen Maria (Katie) at 26 weeks gestation. Two more years of infertility testing & treatment followed Katie's stillbirth before the couple made the difficult decision to remain childless/free, and inspired by the pregnancy loss support group they discovered after their loss of Katie, Loribeth and her husband now volunteer with the group as facilitators.

"January 12 was my 48th birthday," Loribeth explains. "In 2008 I relived, in sometimes agonizing detail, the events of ten years earlier when Katie was born still. I'm a loyal Glow in the Woods reader, and it made sense to me this month -- just over a decade from the start of our journey -- to write about the passage of time and infant loss."

 photo by s~revenge

The popular misconception, of course, is that time heals all wounds -- and outwardly, at least, that would appear to be the case.

I get up and go to work every morning. I attend meetings, send e-mails, have lunch with friends, laugh at colleagues' stories about their kids, do the banking and run errands. I clean house and cook. I call my mother every Sunday night.

For the most part, I function normally in the world.

Anyone who sees me would never guess how very different things were ten years ago, or even seven years ago when we made the extremely difficult decision to abandon infertility treatment and continue our life without children.

With the passage of time, our friends, families and co-workers seem to have forgotten our daughter, or shoved the memory of what happened into the recesses of their minds. Most of the people we've met over the past decade -- with the exception of those we’ve met through our volunteer work as pregnancy loss support group facilitators -- have no idea that I was pregnant, that we had a child, that the tragedy of stillbirth and the pain of infertility has so profoundly touched our lives. It's like I have this secret identity, this other life that I only feel safe revealing when I'm at home with my husband, or online, or with other bereaved parents -- people who have been there, done that, and understand in a way that few others can.

So outwardly, life has gone on, much the same as before. Inwardly, of course, it's another story.

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My favourite line from Elizabeth McCracken's fabulous stillbirth memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is Closure is bullshit. For me, there has never been any 'closure' following my daughter's stillbirth.

It's not that I still feel that my grip on sanity is tenuous... most days. But I freely admit that, after more than 10 years, there is not a single day -- sometimes not an hour -- in which I don't find myself thinking about my pregnancy, my daughter, my infertility, my involuntary childlessness.

It is with me -- she is with me -- always. Sometimes it's just a fleeting thought, sometimes obsession. There are days when it nudges around the outer edges of my consciousness, and days when I sit in my cubicle with work piling up around me and all I can do is read stillbirth and infertility websites, articles and blogs. Even after ten years, I still crave the validation they provide -- the certain knowledge that somebody else out there has been through this too and understands exactly how I feel.

There are obvious triggers -- babies, pregnant women, the window displays at Baby Gap. Some moments take me by surprise like a sucker-punch in the gut. The thing is, I never know exactly how I'm going to react until I'm in the moment. There are days -- and certainly many, many more than there were 10 years ago -- when I can admire a colleague's baby and take genuine pleasure in holding her. And there are other days when I have to duck out the side door at the first faint wail drifting down the hallway toward my cubicle. I've sat at baby showers where I could barely stand to see the adorable little outfits emerge from their boxes and gift bags, and at others where, if not exactly enthralled by the proceedings, I've managed to chat with the other women around me and have a reasonably pleasant time.

Parents whose children have died often hear the cliche, time heals all wounds. I wouldn't say this is true. Yet I can't deny, as another stillbirth mother once said to me: Time doesn’t exactly heal... but it does help.

: : :

Yes, I still think of my daughter all the time. Yes, grief can still rise up and strike me, leaving me gasping and reeling. I sometimes think of grief as ebbing and flowing, like the tide -- with a big wave rolling in every now and then to shake things up and reshape the shoreline.

But most of the time, I'm okay. Anyone who sees me would never guess that I'm not. And most of the time, I really am. Despite the baby I will always miss and the things I will never get to experience with her, my life is still, on the whole, a pretty good one. With a wonderful husband, a comfortable home, a job that's never boring with colleagues I like, a loving extended family and good friends both online and in real life. And I have a daughter who is still very much an important part of that life, even though she never drew a breath on this earth.

I would have preferred a life that included actively parenting my daughter. Nothing will ever compensate for her absence but since I can’t change it, I can focus on the good things I have around me. One of my favourite quotes, from Joseph Campbell, is this:

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

: : :

Another bereaved mother and real-life friend recently asked me if I still think of Katie as a baby or as a 10-year-old and my reply was that it’s probably somewhere in between. I can picture the toddler or preschooler she would have been very clearly -- the 10-year-old, I'm having more trouble with, and don't even ask me about the teenager or the college graduate. My mother recently said to me I can't believe you're almost 50 -- neither can I, Mom! Like any mother, I think, I find it hard to believe my daughter would be as old as she would be, were she here -- that she'd be growing up and getting older as I get older too.

No matter how old both my mother and I get, I will always be her little girl.

And Katie will forever be mine.

a voyager landed

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photo by camera shy momma

Nothing discernable to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidible, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), Les Miserables

Yet more cause for joy -- sweet Janis has safely given birth to her daughter this morning. There's no announcement post up yet but go here for more news and to pass on best wishes. At the very least, read her last post prior to labour -- the words of a babylost mother surrendering to the infinite mystery of a purposeful soul.

rubbernecking

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I'm not sure why it's always such a shock. It shouldn't be...part of me knows that all of us out here - fingers touching in the dark, keeping company - are just a tiny statistical measure of some great silent rift of sorrow and scars that runs through the Happy Here and Now of our society.

And yet each time we multiply I'm floored, gobsmacked, as if my own personal secret hiding place were suddenly drawn out into the light; a cockroach discovering we are truly legion. The news comes by email or by way of a blog post and it makes impact and I am instantly utterly naked in the face of fears normal people presume are too lurid to happen to them.

Each time, I think oh, little one, oh child. Each time, I think oh jesus, those parents. Each time, I think, please not again.  not me. 

And then it is on CNN. Their son, Jett, 16, died Friday in the Bahamas, reads the announcer. John Travolta and Kelly Preston Grieve Son, blares the headline.

And I sit surprised, hot tears running down my face. Them too? Clearly, I don't know them. Nor what it's like to have a sixteen-year-old, lose a sixteen-year-old. But the chasm that yawns between the words of that headline, I know its outline. The shock of it. The empty, whether a crib or a chair at the table or a first car or what. The waking up and then remembering and everything is just wrong, upside down like a bad dream except...it's true. And you know it's true by the way everybody else's eyes turn down after and the way nobody quite knows what to say, and they watch you to judge whether you're grieving healthily, even if what that might actually mean to them is nothing more than hollow words in their Harlequin romance acquaintance with the ugly, confusing work of grief.

And if you're famous, they is the whole world, no sanctuary.  No private, anonymous blog to work it out on, no respite from the grinning and the bearing. Everybody sees you're blown apart...everybody feels the wind blow. In every grocery aisle across the tabloid-reading world, you are going to Graceland.

The news is full these days of How Parents Cope with Losing a Child and The Death of a Child: A Parent's Greatest Fear, the scabs and scars and snakes we wear here suddenly the flavour of the week courtesy of those poor fucking Travoltas. And I scan the pieces and realize those objects of curiosity described like museum exhibits are us, and my naked cockroach-self wants to skitter away safely back into my secret lair and hopes against hope that no one I know has seen those articles and read them and thought of me. I do not want to be a Poster Child.  I want to pretend I am not exposed.

Maybe I wanted to believe all I needed was a private jet and I'd never be vulnerable again. I get that this is ludicrous, that vulnerability is as simple as the price of love. I still want to go on believing I paid at the door.

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What goes through your mind and heart when you hear of another family losing a child?

7 x 7 january 2009: The Medusas on Seasons, Holidays, -versaries

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Peanuts

Used to be I loved trying to catch the turn -- and between autumn and winter, that's no small feat.  Somewhere between the leaves falling and the sky darkening lay a change in my mindset.  I loved scarves, the smell of fires, and fluffy robes.  I joyfully brought the evergreen into my home, baked, and wrapped the presents just so.  I gleefully sacked out with beer and chips for 12 hours of football.  And after presenting myself with a new calendar, I continued to revel in the frost, sledding, ice skating.  Watching cardinals and jays snipe in the frost-covered trees. Eating comfort food.  Poo-poo'ing my way through Valentine's Day, but certainly using the excuse to make something chocolate for dessert.  And after using the excuse of my birthday in the waning hours of winter to try out a new cake recipe, I'd start to look for the next turn:  the first crocus, the emergent bud, the lone daffodil.

I hate the turn now.  The darkness descends so early, I think of nothing but sleep all day long.  The trees look ugly and naked, it seems as if it only rains ice, sideways.  Decorating is exhausting, my favorite sweaters no longer fit.  Melted cheese is no longer comforting, but a nutritional staple.  And after the bowl games are recorded, I know damn well what comes next, what awaits me in the dead center of winter:  February.  A week of remembering and trying to forget.  Followed by a hollowed-out sense of misery, as the salt and last remaining patches of snow turn dirty on the street corners.  Winter is cold and brutal and hard, the holidays empty.  

All because Maddy died when she did.

Lost in my winter shuffle is another turn, that of a New Year. Lucy's right, you know -- why the Happy?  It's a new year, certainly, but "new" is rather neutral, is it not?  A "new experience,"  or "a new normal" doesn't mean it's a happy one, as we all well know. And for that matter, why does a Holiday or a Birthday need to be Happy?  Maybe this is just my cynicism regarding New Year's, lost in the morass of the winter blues.  My year now rotates on another axis entirely.

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Join us for a Winter/Holiday/New Year's 7x7, won't you? Here are the questions:

1 | Welcome to 2009. What have you left behind in the year just past? What do you hope to find in the year to come?

2 | We've just come through the season in which our culture touts cheer and peace and family togetherness rather relentlessly. How did your child's death impact your experience of the "holiday" season, personally or culturally?

3 | If you celebrate in any way through December, are there ways you include or acknowledge your lost baby/babies?

4 | Through the year are there any holidays, seasons, or parts of what were once cherished rituals that have changed for you because of your child's death?

5 | Do you do anything to remember your baby/babies' birth and/or death day? Or will you?

6 | Is there anything about the winter season (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere right now) that lifts your spirits? Is there anything that especially brings them down?

7 | During your hardest times, how have you found your way forward?

Read our answers, and then we'd love to read yours.  If you have a blog, share the link to your answers in the comments here, and link back to us here on your blog -- if you don't have a blog, please answer in the comments directly. (Comments turned off at the end of this post; please go to 7x7 page.)

Your answers may not be naively happy, iced in royal frosting, and curled up in cashmere, but perhaps there is relief, or hope, or simply a comforting shared sense of despair in knowing how the holidays and special events in life pass for others.