Coming up

As my very busy December freight-trained on, once in a while I would pause, briefly (very briefly), to note that this fourth time around it didn't seem bad. In fact, it seemed downright ordinary. The first snow didn't put me in the hole, the cold didn't chill beyond the bone. It was just winter, a season that I used to love, and that, it seemed, I could love again. As I did my little jig for being all kinds of functional, I did wonder, in that whispered way you sometimes wonder to yourself, whether it wasn't just because I was so busy. End of term is never a time for tea and scones (except if said scones are eaten out of a paper bag in the car as you drive from one place you had to be to the next... um, but if you find yourself in such a position in my city, I can tell you where to get the scones), but the end of your first semester of solo teaching? Definitely not. And yet, it seemed more than suppression. It really seamed my grief season hadn't started, as it had been doing, at the very cusp of the first winter month.

It's not that I wasn't missing A. I was. I am. All the time. It's just that I wasn't knocked back on my ass, the way I usually am this time of year. That is, until I was. New Year's Eve, the day that has been especially hard in past years, tapped me on the shoulder but otherwise kept its distance. And then January 2nd gut punched me, dropped me to the ground, and sat on top of me for a while, apparently thinking deep thoughts. "Four weeks and counting, beyotch," it said, strolling away.

It's grey out. That's more a statement of mood than of actual observation. These days when I venture outside and encounter sunshine, I am surprised. I shouldn't be-- it's winter, not polar twilight. In the meantime, things are happening, most of them even good. I have classes to teach for this semester, and even in the area that doesn't require a lot of prep, so there's hope for family time. Monkey is making progress in some important ways. The Cub is speaking, and turning out to have as wicked a sense of humor as we sort of expected based on his pantomime gags back from the mostly-nonverbal near past. And maybe that's what it's all about-- as always, as in the early days, time stands still for no-one. No matter how much I may want it to pause, to stay, to let me catch my breath, it marches on.

And then there are the new twists. Despite my own firm beliefs and repeated statements to the effect of grief being something that changes with us, something that doesn't really get that much better, but something that we can learn to live with better, despite all that once in a while I surprise myself when I realize that this, whatever this happens to be at the moment, this I did not expect. That is, I keep stepping on the same rake-- the one where it turns out that I do have expectations, even as I tell myself and the world that I do not.

This year, this seems to be the reading of tea-leaves that is momentary and fleeting imagining of what he would've been like now. That's not exactly it-- I can't imagine it, I know I can't. Because, and this thought is not in any way new either, that's what is particularly sucky about our kind of loss-- we know jack squat about these children of ours. But usually, and by that I mean vast majority of the time over the last almost 4 years, I haven't been able to or even tempted to go down that road. He's dead, you see, and so he can't be alive, and he can't be one, or two, or three.

But suddenly now, suddenly I am straining for a glimpse of what he could've been at four. I catch myself straining when the Cub is interacting with older boys, especially the youngest son of our friends, the kid who was supposed to be A's best friend. I catch myself straining when Monkey and the Cub are raising a ruckus inside or laughing like maniacs sledding down the little hill in front of our house. It's only for a second, less than that-- a fraction of a second. But it's there, and as I swat it away, I also wonder why now? Is it because the Cub is speaking? Is it because Monkey was four the year I was pregnant with A? I don't know. All I know is that this is new and newly painful. But also reassuring in that way where the hurt is too real for him to have been a dream.

I am also changing. On January 2nd, as I sat in front of my laptop with tears welling up for no particular reason, I chatted a friend to ask for help. This is not something I usually do, especially not something I do when the reason for needing help is grief. But I took a deep breath and jumped. Not today, I said, but sometime this month, can we have coffee? I am going to need some TLC. She's a good friend, and there's a coffee in my future. One I am looking forward to very much.

How far into this are you? How have your significant dates been for you so far? How have the periods coming up on these dates been? How has all of this changed for you with time? Are there new facets of grief that you are discovering? What are they?

the back nine

When Brian and I were engaged, we used to joke about “the back nine.” Lilly, his daughter who lives with us, was nine years old when we met. Since she would (in theory) leave for college at 18 that gave us nine years of raising her. He called it playing the back nine together.

The back nine also meant the second half of our lives. We were ridiculously, giddily in love, like teenagers in the movies, but aware of our middle-agedness. When we married, the question of more children was on the table, but not well discussed. It was possible that we would simply make a family of three. Later we could launch Lilly into the world and ride off into the sunset—still healthy, only in our 50s, just the two of us.

Little did we know that when I walked down the aisle, I was already knocked up. And then we were so happy at this new plan for our future. And then we were broken.

Over this Christmas break, Lilly went to her mom’s for a week, and Brian and I took a mini-honeymoon at home. We cooked grown-up food, read books in front of the fire, and watched football naked under fleece blankets. We ate on no particular schedule, drove no one to soccer practice, and attended no parent-teacher conferences. For a few days, we looked like a carefree couple with no responsibilities. We looked almost like that original vision of our back nine.

I let myself try it on: the relaxed schedule, the freedom. It was nice. What if we stopped trying for another baby? What if we walked away from the whole IVF project? What if we looked at each other and said, Okay, it’s just you and me? We could do it, you know, we could pull the plug.

Photo by katerha

But I am afraid of becoming a bitter, childless old woman, mired in grief, ruining my husband’s golden years. I almost ruined our little vacation this week. One moment I was saying, “The sun is out, let’s go for a walk!” And three breaths later I said, “The pain of missing her is so bad that I wish someone would hit me with a two-by-four.” How romantic.

Our baby’s death has cheated us out of so many things, including the ability to dream our own future. If we hotly pursue interventions or adoption, I want to do it with my whole heart, not because we got screwed. If we choose to raise no more children, I want to embrace that path fully, and appreciate the time and freedom we would have, instead of always mourning for what could have been. But inevitably that road will be second-best too.

We could have had such a wonderful goddamn life, if she had never come to us (terrible mother!), or if she had never died. I am turning 39 in a few days and feel no peace about the second-best life we’ve been handed. Instead, I feel my advanced maternal age.

I remember a few years back, when I was single, sobbing in my mom’s car outside the Rochester airport. It was a pent-up cry that I’d been holding in for days. My flight was leaving in 45 minutes, and I was holding us hostage, wiping my snotty fingers on her lambskin seat coverings.

I wish I were 45 instead of 35, I wailed. I just want to know already if I’m going to have a family or not. And if not, then I just want to be an old woman. I hate this middle part.

Skip ahead. I now have a wonderful little family, but I still hate the middle part. I want to peek ahead ten years, to find Brian and I deep in that back nine, and to see, is there a new little grade-schooler out there on the greens with us? Or just the two of us holding hands, with a baby in our hearts?

The future doesn’t feel like a choice anymore, only a mystery. There’s nothing for us to do but wait.

* * * * * * *

As we enter this new year, what does your future hold? Have any of your dreams and plans for your future remained the intact through your loss(es)? Where does family-building figure in your future plans? If you could magically jump ahead in time to gain perspective on your life, would you do it and to when?

should old acquaintance be forgot

I just thought of something: in a few days, last year won’t be last year anymore.

Good, some people might think. The more road between us and Then, the better. 

Not me.

When I hear M.—or myself, but especially M.—say, “when we had our loss last year…” it is a welcome jolt. In that moment, Zoey and Gus sound so much more recent than they often seem. It has been a whole twenty-one months since they died. And as if that fact were not enough, these months have not been the regular kind. Sorrow, infertility, the second pregnancy, the twins, new friends, their grief, our memory, and more have stretched these months sideways. Their new shapes eclipse and defy the simple, boxy, snapshot image of the calendar page.

I’m glad to think of it as not that long ago. I’m glad when I feel like we haven’t really journeyed that far.  When I feel that M. and I, and Gus and Zoey not at opposite ends of a country. When they seem nearer—even if it means that for a moment, my sadness is, too.

This is why the words “last year” are so loaded to me now. Sometimes, when I hear M. use them—or myself, but especially M.—I see them capitalized with a little ^TM sign at the end.  Or I see them as little gravity wells, tugging on all the other words, warping the fabric of the sentence. Last year infuses whatever we are saying with the thing we are not. We are saying, “We remember.” We are saying, “Don’t you forget that we have lost.”  We are saying, “It’s not as far away as we know you think it is.” We are screaming in code.

And that’s the thing, really. Even more than a way to keep Gus and Zoey close, invoking last year feels like a way to jab everyone else. To provoke not only our sadness, but also theirs. Or their guilt. I don’t care which. As long as we keep our claim on their compassion, then frankly, either is fine.

Maybe this is weak. Maybe this is hostile. Maybe this is natural. I do not know what it is—except only that it is.

Maybe it is simply that I will seize any bridge to Gus and Zoey that I can. Any way to keep their shape—or the outline their absence—definite.

Last year sounds close enough to do that. Last year sounds so close, why, you could land there just by hopping a few steps to one side. But with “two years ago,” or anything beyond, the bridge dissolves to just a few beams. It is an extension of an extension, and where is the gravity in that? The solidity? Last year is familiar; it is land. Everything from there is uncharted. What is this thing supposed to be when it is no longer as nearby as last year?  What are we?

So, it turns out, we traveled across a country after all.  And now we are at the shore.

How does the new year (or any milestone) make you feel about your loss?  How has your loss affected your experience of time?  Please know that I'm wishing you and yours a gentle holiday season and much health and healing in the year ahead.



Shhhh...

I live a secret life with my dead son Silas.

It's nothing freaky, no crazy eyes and too-loud whispers to someone that isn't there while everyone else moves away awkwardly in a crowded bar on a cold winter night.  Nothing like that.  Our secret life is subtle and private.

When I can't handle life without him I just sigh and look around.  I take a deep sigh, from the gut, from where the Pit used to live all the time.  I look around and sometimes I make an effort to be slow because the speed of his death still terrifies me.

Everything was crazy and amazing, and then everything was worse than crazy and more wrong than human tolerable limits allow.  Moments became dense with fear and my world collapsed.

Now I hate the feel of time pressing on my skin and shoulders.  I hate its weight on the back of my hands when I'm moving fast and time's breathless vapor is in my lungs as I'm trying to catch up to what is getting away from me, quickly, right now, now gone.

He's gone and that is everything, but that basic truth is hidden in my skin and folded into my heart.  The hole in my soul is utterly unspeakable.

I can't tell most people about this secret life but you know it already, from the way yours looks and feels.  You know the aching absence in my arms.

The torrent of humanity flows from the vaginas of women all around me and I'm drowning in other people's babies.

There is a particular type of future for the vast majority of families and I am shocked by how distant that life feels.  I expected nothing less and nothing more than the chaos of kids running through my home.

To this day I can be ambushed by a bulging belly or new wide eyes blinking at their fresh take on life.  I thought I would be better by now, but I'm not.  It's as simple as that.  I'm not.

My secret life with my dead son is mine alone.  It is the whispers in my head in the night when even I'm not awake.  It is crying in the car because of beauty from the radio or the light of the trees.  My secret life with my dead son is the absence of memory. He and I share the shadows of all those living kids and I cannot tell you about it because I can barely believe it is still so fucking true.

The Earth cast its shadow on the Moon last night.  Like a secret passing through the Universe, like the whisper of Silas's brief life, like the piece of his soul that orbits the ventricles of my heart, this spectacle is dark, subtle and private.  The shadow of his death dims the light in every room I enter, even if it is the big one with the giant furnace hanging in the sky, and everyone is there, and we are having fun.  Even when I'm having fun, I'm having fun for him, too, and I need to turn the lights down.  The world is too bright without him and not nearly bright enough.

No one else but Lu knows, though.  He's our little secret.  We smile to each other in a way that means everything and it is just barely enough.  Silas is my son and I will always feel the light of his life even though we live in the shadow of his death.  Last night was the longest night of all I'm looking forward to longer days and brighter light and the possibility of hope somewhere down the line.



smoke and mirrors.

My daughter is dead two years.

Time is like a funhouse hall of mirrors. Some memories stretch your worst parts, and shrink your best. Your boobs are all but eradicated and those thighs feel wider than possible. In the next step, you look tall and lean and impossibly good. “I want to live in this mirror,” you whisper to no one in particular. Your daughter is alive in this mirror, and you are happier than you thought possible. The next reflection, the straight, unchanged view of the present may be the most horrifying of all.

I like the funhouse mirror analogy. Because the moment Grief sneaked into the room, and breathed his hot, sour breath on my neck, it felt like a carnival ride—it was nauseating and smelled funny. I recognized the puddles of sick around me from my earlier rides. I glimpsed the freak show catatonic slip out the back leaning against the wagon, smoking a cigarette, laughing at the bearded lady. Other people’s lives of contentment are all smoke and mirrors too, I realized it back then like it was some kind of secret.

I’m not there anymore, but it makes me miss the immediacy of that early grief. All these mirrors together in one place are confusing me. They are distorting the truth. I don’t want to return to the worst moments of my life, even if the mirror makes that moment so present and exacting in its goal that it feels attractive. The rawness of grief put everything into perspective. I had no other goal than mourn, weep, survive. At two years out, I miss the surety of that perspective.  I wanted to outrun grief then. I am in some other mirror now, the one that looks normal, except that it distorts my forehead to a large teardrop shape of grief.

No, wait, time is like time. It moves forward. And you heal in spite of yourself. You heal even when you absolutely don't want to heal because the wound is the only thing tying you to your dead baby. You end up in a place that looks like healing. Or you don't. But you end up. You get two years from the moment of death and you shake your head and you wonder if you really remember anything about the early grief except that you are absolutely sure it was the worst feeling in the world. And that holding her dead body was absolutely the best of the worst moments of your life.

I try to bend time with my mind, twist it like a Mobius strip, until the beginning and end are one. On that two year strip of time, I can touch her again while simultaneously realizing what it means two years later to have only two hours with my daughter. Even if I can't change her death, I still want This Me to tell That Me to breath her in little bit longer. I would shake me. “Savor these two hours,” I would tell me. “Study her like the most important test of your life. Undress her. Look at her bum and her little tootsies. Sing her the song in Spanish that puts all your babies to sleep. This is the only two hours you get her for your whole fucking life. Get out of your pity party and kiss every part of her.”

I dreamed her once. It was winter at my grandmother’s house, and she clung to my midsection. And I, thinking she was still inside, reached down, surprised to feel her body on the outside and to see her eyes open. Lucia smiled at me. I lifted her and looked into her violet eyes. She was lovely and peaceful. It was the only time I saw her alive, and it was wholly in my subconscious. Sometimes I miss the dream as much as I miss the daughter. It was a time and moment when I believed that I knew her. She was mine. And I was hers.

I never knew her. She never belonged to me. Two years later, I don’t even have her scent in my memory anymore. I don’t remember her face exactly. I cried to our grief therapist two weeks out. “I am afraid to forget her,” I cried. And the therapist said, “You will never forget her. She’s your daughter.” I didn’t mean that I would forget that she existed. I meant I would forget what her face looks like in real life. And even then, I was forgetting. It was drifting away like the funhouse analogy. I knew it and that is why I cried. I forget her.

Pictures flatten her, stretch her out, cover her with death. I can't bear to look at them anymore. They are not her. They are like Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images. Ce n'est pas ma fille. This is not my daughter. This is a picture of my daughter, but it is not her. When she was born, her nose had life, even though it didn't. This nose, this nose is bruised and covered in dense vernix. This nose is dead and two-dimensional and doesn't look kissed at all. My daughter was three-dimensional, like my love for her. I have nothing of her now but the flatness of grief. When solstice comes, I will walk out into the darkness, bundle up and remember her with the light. It is the contradiction that I feel in me--warm and loving at the same time as her death has left me cold and alone.

The winter cradles me in its icy arms, kisses my forehead, reminds me that I am alone, but warmed by the absolute cold of grief. It is a riddle, a kind of zen koan of grief. When you have the cold, I will give you the winter. When you are burning with the heat, I will give you the sun. When you are the loneliest, you feel part of the universal tribe of lonely people. I meditate on it. If grief were a season, it would be winter--barren, empty, yet silent. The air holds no moisture, no kisses of dew. I am in Grief’s cold clutches, and the cold is somehow fitting now. In that, I take a comfort. Everything around me feels empty and cold and has lost life too. 

My daughter is dead two years. Lucia is dead two years. She is so impossibly dead. I get it now. I get it, but I still don’t like it.

When you reach the anniversary dates of your child(ren)'s death or birth, do you reflect on your grief? How has your grief changed? What is distorted about your sense of early grief? What is distorted about where you think you will be in your grief five years, ten years, twenty years from now? What would the you of right now tell yourself in the moments right after your child(ren) died, or in the moments when after you found out your child(ren) would die? 

something old, something new

I'm sure somewhere -- here, there, in a comment -- during the past three plus years I wrote something to the effect:  "If I could just fit into those old jeans.  It would be like getting the old me back."

As if a smaller ass would magically mend my heart.

:::

When I moved to this house I was pregnant with Maddy, so I packed up all the old clothes -- the ones that fit a few months earlier, and the really nice tiny ones that fit before Bella -- thinking someday, certainly someday, soon, I will slink back into these.  (Clearly I wasn't taking the timeliness of fashion into count, which I suppose says a lot about me and the way I dress and is subject for another much more hilarious post.)  As it was, I gained almost 20 lbs more with Maddy than I did with Bella, in large part because I couldn't exercise during the pregnancy, and in no small part, because I didn't eat nearly as well.  In retrospect I'm pretty sure I was stressed out and likely depressed during that pregnancy.

Anyway, you're all familiar with the rest:  Baby is born, baby dies, can't breastfeed the pounds off, and don't feel like subjecting myself to fresh air.  Flab stays.  About four months after Maddy died I went into a running frenzy thinking I would just blow the pounds off in a matter of weeks, and wound up blowing up my plantar fascia.  The pounds stayed.  

By the time I got pregnant again last year, two plus years later, I was still 20 pounds over where I wanted to be.  In some fit of nonsense, I went on a closet cleaning purge last March (while almost eight months pregnant), and tossed out everything.  I was tired of opening the closet and seeing the old clothes mocking me.  That was the old me.  The really old me.  If I ever got down to that size again, I'd buy new clothes.  (Hell, you should buy new clothes anyway for the love of mike -- who wears those anymore?)

With three exceptions:  Three pairs of pants.  Two jeans, one pair of cords.  All designer labels, all bought after losing the Bella weight and feeling good about my bod again.  Maybe, I thought, maybe.  I hid them in the back behind all the loose fitting skirts and blouses I had purchased to hide the fact that I had another baby that wasn't around to help legitimize my midsection.

Right now, as I'm writing this, I'm wearing a pair of those jeans.  They're a wee bit tight, especially the top button that hits uncomfortably right in my three-baby pooch.

Does that make me feel better?  Yes.

It is not, however, Nirvana.

Huh.

I put them on, stood back and looked in the mirror, and waited.  For what, I don't know -- lights?  Peels of electric guitars?  Suddenly clear skin and shiny hair? (wouldn't that be cool?)  Would my brain melt into a pile of lilac scented goo,  would I crave positive thinking and trot downstairs to announce, "Christmas has arrived, y'all!  Joy to the World!"

I sat and stared at the person in the mirror wearing five-year-old jeans and realized:  I am never going to be the old me.  Which is stupid, I suddenly realized, of course I'm not.  I mean, forget tragedies for a second:  I'm never going to be the old girl I was in High School again (thank goodness), or the young woman I was in grad school.  You can't go back.  You can't be the person you were before you had kids, before you met X, Y, or Z, before a certain job, or place or event or music album.   Even seemingly trivial things can shift your worldview.  How on earth I ever thought I could somehow morph into the person I was before Maddy sounds a bit wacky to me now, almost four years later.  I'm a bit stunned, to tell you the truth, that I spent so much time and verbage yearning to get back to a place and mindspace that I obviously would never return to again.  I like to say I didn't experience the station of "denial" in my grief, but today touching this denim again I think I realized I've been living in it rather heavily.  Jeans are not going to transport me back in time any more than they're going to raise the dead. 

The new me is old.  The new me is almost four years older than the old me, and that's four people years which are measured not quite as badly as dog years in grief time, but close.  There are a few gray hairs, bags and wrinkles around the eyes, extra skin around my neck.  My skin now shows the blotchiness of not two, but three pregnancies.  There's the pooch, that I'm sure some people can work off (Heidi Klum!  Call me!), but even for those of us half-way in shape, is hard to budge -- muscles have moved and atrophied, and skin has buckled around them.  I'm not sure a million sit-ups would conquer that mound.  

And then there's the inside, the stuff my fancy jeans can't possibly hope to distract me or anyone else from:  I'm more cynical (hard to believe that's possible), less trusting, less trusting of medical technology.   I'm occasionally sad, which I never can remember being.  My psyche still feels as though it's a bit bruised and achy -- no longer bedridden or uncontrollably bleeding certainly, but not one-hundred percent either.  It approaches corners cautiously, and peers around them before putting a foot forward.  I still clutch my family.  If Bella were asked what her mother says most often, after "shit" it would be "Be Careful."  I still love my friends who stood by me and think of Maddy and speak her name, and still resent the people who were silent, or worse.  Although the anger is less a hammer and more an itch.  

I still love her, I still miss her.

I realized today  this incredible seismic shift followed by modest improvement since that horrible February has nothing to do with weight loss, or the subsequent baby who helped with said weight loss.  It has to do with the simple, uncontrollable passage of time.  I'm going through my fourth Christmas without Maddy in a few weeks, I'm attending my fourth candlelight memorial service for her this Sunday.  In two short months, I will be walking through her week for the fourth time.  

I'm still changing, it turns out -- not backwards really, but forwards.  Not all great as my hair will attest, but not all bad either.  

It happens less often, it hurts less.  It has nothing to do with my body and everything to do with distance.  But it will always be there, I am firmly on this side, and I can't go back.  Despite my hemline.

I know a lot of us talk about being that person we once were -- what would you most want back?  What do you think would help get you back to that place?  Have you managed to get anything of the "old you" back?  How does it feel on this side of things?   Is there anyone else far enough out that they can see how time is helping somewhat?  Or is something else helping you move forward?  Are the ways you changed after the death of your baby/ies changing yet again as you move farther away from the event?