Pull up a chair

It's cold and rainy 60 degrees here. So far today I've had a big mug of homemade latte (long live my foam-making gadget) and two medium mugs of hot tea. I am planning to have at least one more of those.

I don't know whether it's because it's a rainy day, or because a fellow medusa and her family are staying with us for a couple of days, or because I'd nursed a general unease for half the day today before locating its source in it being a date of significance, the first of the "five years since..." ones, but whatever it is, I am suddenly feeling that it's been way too long since last we asked how you are doing.

So grab a mug of steaming with whatever you are in the mood for. Or, if you prefer, pretend it's actually nice and sunny outside and we are sitting in a sidewalk cafe, and umbrellas above us are reflecting in our drinks.

(Though if your drink is really reflecting an umbrella above you, I am jealous and I am not sure I want to know.)

Whichever way you go on the drink, though, do stay a bit and tell us how you are. What's been going on? What is on your mind? Let's talk.

When These Mountains Were the Seashore

Mrs. Spit's son Gabriel was born fifteen weeks too soon, in December 2007, as a result of severe pre-eclampsia. Catapulted into the swirling world of grief while trying to grow her family, Mrs. Spit lost four pregnancies after Gabriel. Earlier in the year, she made the decision to live child free. She blogs daily at Mrs. Spit . . . Still Spouting Off, writing with equal fierceness and love about her life as a wife, a friend, a knitting-gardener, boss and occasionally, as the mother to a dead child. Mrs. Spit is the kind of compassionate warrior that is not afraid to write about politics and religion and all the thoughts in between. And so here, she just fits perfectly. Please join us in welcoming her as a regular contributor and fellow Medusa. - Angie

My name is Mrs. Spit. It hasn't always been this, but to some - in a small corner of a particular universe - I am Mrs. Spit. I have many names: I am wife, I am friend, I am project manager, I am boss, I am employee, and oh, yes, I am sometimes mother.

Like all people, I didn't start out with these names. Like all people, these names started out as a title. A name is after all, a personal thing. I took on a new title in March, a title that I am trying to make a name. I am now perpetually childless. I am now "child free". After three years, a perinatal death as a result of pre-eclampsia, four miscarriages and more medical specialists than you can imagine, Mr. Spit and I decided to stop trying to have children. We decided to be done - forevermore.

So, here I am, trying to find my way in a new world once again. Here I am with a new title that I am trying to make into a name. This wasn't, I should tell you, where I planned to start this post. I planned to start with the title, which is the title of a song by a musician called Hawksley Workman. As inspiration or at least incentive, I planned to play that song when I started to write this blog. Instead, because I got a new keyboard for my iPad, I wound up starting ahead of myself.

Instead of being in my favourite coffee shop in Jasper, AB, in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, listening to one apple device while typing on another; I am in a hotel room typing away. I should tell you I'm like that. I think that I will go one way and then all of a sudden I find myself on another path entirely, not quite certain how I wound up there but knowing I'm heading in the right direction.

For point of reference this is exactly how it came to be that I conceived my son. I went to go and see my gynecologist to get an IUD and I came out of his office convinced I should conceive instead. I went to go and see the fertility specialist in February of 2011,  attempting pregnancy number six and I walked out of her office knowing that we were done having children, we were done getting pregnant. Indeed, we were just done.

The reason I thought I would begin with Hawkley's song is not just because it is the sort of song that is so achingly beautiful that you wonder at the ugliness of the world around you, but because it talks about what I am doing, turning from one thing into another. Metamorphosis.

That's what I will be writing about. I don't have all the answers. I probably don't have any of the answers. I am only starting to ask the questions. A good question, I would posit, is at least as important as anything else. You can't ever get to any sort of good answer without it.

So, I am asking questions. It would be easy enough, I suppose to just decide to invest in some sort of permanent birth control, empty the basement of baby things carefully stored and paint the nursery so that it becomes completely my office. I could do this. I am doing this. But I'm not sure it's wise to act without asking questions. I’m not sure reaching decisions without asking questions takes you anywhere.

In my scheduled posts at Glow in the Woods, I will be asking those questions. I’ll be asking about how you find meaning without children. I’ll be asking questions about how to live the rest of my life - deliberate questions about what is next.  

I know for some of you, this idea of living without children in the newness of your loss is impossible. It is a bridge too far and a cut too deep. I have been there. I can remember the days when I could not consider life without a living child. It has taken me three and a half years to reach this point. Where you are now is where you should be.

Some of you will never need to be on this path. Some of you might find yourself with me. Some of you might not be sure. Where you are now, is where you should be. Hawksley was right, mountains were once sea shores, and the desert was once the ocean floor.

right where I am project: 979 Days

The day after he died I thought Lu was next and me right behind her.  On days two through five I was certain of it.  At the time I talked a lot about how we couldn't let this loss destroy us and poison us and tear us apart but they were words mostly, words I spit out into the World hoping I could make them true.  I had no confidence at all but no one knew.

Days five through thirty-something were a brutal crawl back from the edge of the greatest Abyss I had ever encountered.  The sheer magnitude of what happened to us was impossible to to contain within my brain, my soul, my body.  I could only capture pieces of it.  The physical ache of no-child-in-my-arms was palpable.  Having no reason to sleep and nothing to wake up for was another.  The constant flow of people through our house distracted me at times, until I couldn't fake another conversation I didn't give a flying fuck about.

After that first month I managed to find my feet and started walking upright again.  It was all fake--all a facade--but it was necessary to go through the motions if I ever wanted to heal, that I knew for sure.  Besides, I had Lu to worry about and I needed to be strong.  Sometimes I think I'm still faking it 32+ months later.  Sometimes I think I always will be, that a vital of part of me vanished when Silas died.  Then I remember that blind innocence is no virtue and that this experience is as real and true as love and hope and friendship and fear.  It is always better if he lived but he didn't, so I had to, somehow.  That's where I stood then and still do today.

Three months out I started to accept that I was probably going to survive his death and that our marriage would, too.  Getting a tattoo on my arm that was visible to all was a big step forward for me.  The pain of the ink entering my skin permanently ensured that I would always have a piece of Silas as part of my physical being as well as my heart & soul.  To this day this tattoo is a balm and solace I treasure absolutely.  Along with my wedding ring that has his name etched within, it is my most valuable possession.  I love it when people ask about it and I get to decide how much to tell them.  If it is someone I'm just getting to know it is a powerful way to deepen our friendship.  If I'm in a conversation with someone who has recently experienced the loss of a loved one it is a mark of authenticity and truth, that I know their grief, I understand their pain, that despite everything they feel they are not alone.

Months three through twelve and beyond were eye-opening for me.  I was constantly surprised that I could navigate the day so effectively, even though I felt like a shell of a human.  Stressful moments were impossible and the pit that lived in my gut only expanded and contracted but never vanished completely.  Sadness descended in waves I couldn't expect and couldn't surf.  For the first time in my life I became a shitty, shitty sleeper.  That has gotten better but I still don't sleep through the night like I did before.  I guess I'm still listening for Silas' cries in the night, or his steady breath in the next room.  I'm certain I always will be.

I began to wonder how many other people went through their days that way: faking the okay-ness, pretending to be fine and normal and happy.  I was astounded to realize how deeply everyone held their pain.  Lost parents, dead pets, an impossible relationship with someone they thought loved them, over and over again I learned how pain and sadness and loss and death were as much a part of life as the gorgeous sunrise and the beauty of the infinite stars above.  Silas dying was terrible but everyone's story contained their own powerful losses in a thousand different ways.  And through it all, Lu and I held on to each other and somehow managed to keep each other upright, loved and true.

But by the time a year had passed since his death a new bit'o'awfulness began to become clear.  Getting Lu pregnant again was not happening.  And that is when I started to learn how much bullshit people could throw our way without even thinking about it.  "Oh you just need to relax!"  "Once you stop trying it'll happen right away!"  "She probably just needs a little wine and a vacation and it will be all good."  Best of all were the, "Everything happens for a reason" jackasses.  My son dying did not "happen for a reason."  Our inability to get pregnant wasn't some dumbass fucking cosmic plan.  Life is just fucked up and crazy shit happens and this was another example of that.  Every month when Lu got her period it was like the Universe taking the little seeds of hope we had scattered in our souls and grinding them into a powdery dust we could mix with our tears and consume as a thin, awful gruel.  IUI, IVF, hcg, acronyms I came to hate more than full words can describe.  STFU and GTFO and LMTFA is more like it.  I wanted nothing to do with any of it and it was all we had to hold on to.

Two years out and I was resigned to the fact that we just might not get to have kids.  It wasn't something Lu was able to think about or hear, but I was preparing.  I started to wonder how far she would want to go with all of this.  Donor eggs?  A surrogate?  Perhaps a vat for growing a baby, no human required.  I wondered how far I was willing to take this, as well.  As a guy, I can never have a baby.  I can have a child that has half my genes, but I can never create, gestate, grow and produce a living human being.  With so many other children destitute and discarded I began to prepare my brain, heart and soul that I would have to love and nurture a child that wasn't a half replica of me.  And quickly I realized that would be no problem at all.  At 2 years out I had not given up on the possibility of having our own kid but I was definitely preparing for that eventuality.  I had to in case I had to get Lu to that point, too.

Unending disappointment is a powerful force.  Consistent and repeated negative reinforcement is unstoppable.  I learned to make do with the fact that I was alive and often happy even though Silas had died, but that I could and should never expect anything more than that.

Now there is more than that for the first time since he died, and I have no idea how to feel.  Or rather I know exactly how I feel, but I don't know if it is safe or wise or terrible to feel this way.  I just know I feel all of it, all the time right now and so I try to go slow through the World and do everything right, everything I can.  Yet still, once again, all I can do I watch and help from the outside as Lu goes through growing this next new life within her.

So I will tell you right where I am 2.66666667 years after Silas died.  I'm in the same apartment where he was pulled from Lu, where the ambulances tore up to, where the EMTs stormed in.  I'm in love with my wife and the love of my life.  I'm sore and tired from a gorgeous weekend of camping and music with friends and fun and laughter.  I'm amazed by the bulge in Lu's belly and the ultrasounds that finally show another little life.  I'm terrified of what could happen, what we could lose, what we did lose without Silas here today asking questions.  I'm right here at home, hoping for hope, still perfecting the plummet that should end in flight.  Still waiting for a child in my arms.  Still alive. Still easy to cry.  Still angry, still sad.  Still okay.  And as often I as I can, just still.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This post is part of Angie's Right Where I Am Project.  I read hers and my wife Lu's and I felt a strong connection to the theme.  Angie gave me the go-ahead to post mine here at Glow but it would be great to continue her project over on her site as well.  I will post her instructions in the comments so we can keep this whole thing going.

wild is the wind

photo by KevinGrahame

On the west coast of New Zealand overlooking the fierceness of the Tasman Sea, the trees growing in the rocky crags of the shoreline jut sideways. The branches on the sea side are barren, twisted. The force of the wind changes their structure, the way their nature demands to grow beaten into submission. The limbs bend permanently off to the side pointing towards the land. "Go this way," they point. "Go away from the brutal sea." They morph from the relentlessness of the coastal wind. Their shape is the shape of the wind. It is the shape of abuse. Sometimes when I think back on how captivating those trees were, how haunting, how few pictures I took of them, yet how often I think of them, sometimes I think that shape is the shape of love.

Let the wind blow through your heart, for wild is the wind.

All the love songs are written about Lucia. All the heartbreak songs. All the songs about loss and want and ache. All of the songs. I want to write about her too, but I can't seem to find the words. I know nothing about Lucy except that she isn't here. And the cadence of her not being here is like the wind beating on me, changing me. I relent. My branches bend over, growing uncomfortably sideways, damaged, impossible. I bend from the love. The love disguised as sadness and grief. Sometimes I get confused by that, thinking that I am bending from the hurt, but it is love that bends me, that points me away from everything else. I look debilitated. I feel debilitated. Until, suddenly, I realize that it has become so much a part of who I am, I am not uncomfortable anymore. And until it became so much a part of who I am, the way I was, unbending and sure of the world, makes no sense anymore.

You're Spring to me, all things to me.

I never thought I’d survive the death of one of my children. That is what I used to say when I would hear a horror story about stillbirth, or infant death. "Oh, I would never survive," I would muse. I thought I would turn into dust and ash and be carried off, a bit of me left everywhere until I was nowhere at all. I'd close my eyes to banish the thought of it. Cross myself. Throw salt over my left shoulder.  Touch wood.  Hold my breath.  Make a wish. Knock on wood.  Throw salt over my shoulder. Whisper on the wind.

Let me fly away with you.

Maybe I really thought I would never survive it, or that is simply all the further I could think of such a scenario. It seemed so horrid, I wouldn't dignify imagining how it would really be. Maybe I said things like that because I thought I was not the kind of person that babies die inside of. I remember that feeling of talking myself out of the anxiety of the stillness. I felt silly for being afraid. I felt silly. I used to think I was a humble person. Confident, perhaps, but humble. Humility, in fact, was my religion. That seemed the key to a spiritual existence. Humility and compassion. Hand in hand. Then I thought I was humble because I lost so much. Before that, I thought I was humble because I didn't think I was the prettiest, smartest or most talented person and that realization didn't floor me. My philosophy of life was simple: "I am not anyone special. And neither are you."

I suppose now I see humility differently. Humility to me is accepting that I am not capable of transcending my humanness. My child died in me not because I am bad, or good, or humble, or arrogant, or I deserved it or didn't deserve it. She died because I am human. I am not a terrible person, just a person. And I am changed by the grief. My branches own the hurt perhaps further are the hurt of simply being human and loving so much.  

Wild is the wind. So wild.

Though I thought I'd never survive my child's death, I survived it. What did I think I would do? Kill myself? Expire from lack of wanting to survive? After living through the death of my child, I realized that surviving isn't the hard part. You can live despite yourself and in spite of yourself. You can punish, abuse, disengage with you, you can cut yourself off from everything. You can try to will life to stop, but it won't. You wake up everyday and remember what happened again. And your arms bend a little more.

It is the thriving that feels impossible. It is the hope that gets choked, the loneliness that settles onto your bones like an old wet wool coat, useless and bulky in its wetness, and uncomfortably heavy. It is the juxtaposition of the old, wet, wool coat, and the wind that blows through your heart. And the wind that blows through the holes in you. Your arms tire. Everything is tired. But you still live.

My love is like the wind.

There is a hole in me that seems bigger than any one person could have ever filled, especially someone so little and dead. The wind blows through her tree this morning, moving the tiny Buddhist bell and the flags that send a prayer off to the corner of the globe. That prayer can never be answered. And still I pray for the impossible--a moment with Lucia again. A moment. One tiny wisp of her. The grief that whirled in me after she died touched all the other grief in me. I can see that now. That is why I am defined by grief now, because we are all defined by grief. I am not special because of that. And neither are you.

I am more beautiful, though, because of Lucia. More beautiful because grief debilitated me until I grew into the shape of grief and into the shape of love. I am sideways and ugly and in that way, I suppose I am beautiful.

For we're creatures of the wind and wild is the wind.

What ways has grief shaped you? What parts of you feel leafless and empty? What parts of you are heartier? What ways have you grown more beautiful because of your grief? In what ways have you thrived? In what ways have you merely survived?

Glasses, clouds, sea monsters

I don't think I was ever an optimist, but looking back I was naive.  Young.  Inexperienced in the ways of bad things.

No, I was a chump.  

Looking back at those photos of me holding Maddy in the delivery room, before I knew anything was wrong, when I thought I had achieved Nirvana and arrived at heaven on earth, I realize now I was just a chump.  I was totally had.  I bought into the program and surrendered to the joy like a complete asshole.  If Ashton Kutcher jumped out from behind an isolette in the NICU and yelled, "Punk'd!" the week would have made much more sense.

You see, despite my rational half telling myself to remain a cautious optimist, I still banked happiness on the future.  I saw good future events ending in, well, goodness.  I looked forward to them because of the way they'd make me feel. I don't do that anymore. I decided after that never to get punk'd again.

After Maddy died, I was certain I would be a pessimist for the rest of my life.  Glass?  Half empty?  Shit, it's cracked and leaking, it'll be drained before I even lift it off the counter for a look.  Life clearly was suffering and death and destruction, and the Buddhists and Hobbes and Machiavelli were all right:  One big languishing, cynical wait for Leviathan to swallow our terrible selves whole.  Nothing ever turned out as it should, people are mean, and everything dies.  Not only wasn't I very happy, but I got stuck in the present.  Aren't there people who strive to live in the present?  Are they high?  I could've told them it's not all that, it's very limiting to only be able to plan three days in advance because you're trying not to set your expectations too far out ahead so you won't get hurt.  Not only did I not think my future would turn out, I quit thinking about my future altogether. I got stuck.  Mired.  Afraid of the future.

Like everything else gloom and doomy about grief, this too began to ebb with time.  But not entirely.  I could plan two weeks in advance, and then a month, and now even a few months.  But I still don't assume things will be fine.  I know this is a sore spot for the positive-thinker crowd:  if you think about that future event ending well, and think about it really really hard!  And all the time! and make sure not to let doubt creep in there! it will come true.  You will get the promotion, your bank account will fill, the cancer will evaporate, the kids will get into Harvard.  Really!  But come on, really?  And what happens when all those things don't come true, time after time after time?  I'm not saying you need to think the worst will happen, but maybe a dose of realism now that I know bad shit is real isn't such an unhealthy thing. 

For example:  We went on "vacation" recently, but I really made an attempt not to call it "vacation," which implies relaxation and sleep and ample time for reading and sunning and navel gazing.  I called it, "getting away with my family," which is exactly what it was.  So when the stomach virus swept through us in the waning hours, it didn't ruin the whole thing (in retrospect; at the time, I swore I'd never travel again), nor did I sit around and say, "See?  Bad shit ALWAYS HAPPENS!"  No, it was just one of those things, and I thoroughly enjoyed the first 5-6 days, and ergo nothing got ruined.  

It's a matter perhaps of semantics, and perspective.

I believe there are people who can find small elements of thanks in the bad things that happen to them.  I always thought these people were the sunshine-y always seeing rainbows when there's rain people, but surprisingly, I've become one of those people.  There are times when I hear another one of your stories, or read something in the paper that's just wildly awful, and I stop to reflect on how fortunate I was, with my solid medical community and my loving neighborhood.  Or even the amount of control I had in what at the time seemed to be a situation removed from the tracks and barreling over the cliff.  But I think this is different than being optimistic or even positive:  this is letting a lot of time go by, and being able to stop crying and sighing long enough to reflect.  It's ok if you're not there yet, believe me.  You may be someday, you may never be, and that's ok, too.

I've learned to be happy in retrospect, and even happy in my present.  That's pretty huge, given where I was four years ago:  I can look back on an event or even just a day and say, hey, that was wonderful.  That was really, really lovely.  I'm even able to have fun in my present self, or find joy here and there, ducking in the weeds.  But I still don't play that game of cashing in on a future that's not here yet.  No. Way.

When I was pregnant with my subsequent child, my now one-year old son, I did things much differently.  With Bella and Maddy, I thought the biggest surprise in life was finding out the sex of your child at their birth.  Boy, did Maddy ever prove THAT wrong, there are in fact bigger surprises I discovered.  I never wanted to be surprised again.  With Ale, I had CVS at eleven weeks, and found out the sex because I wanted the only surprise at birth to be whether he lived or not.  I had had it, no more punk'd.  And I live like that now:  I can look ahead, but no surprises.  No jumping out from around the corner, no unmarked flowers, no cakes without my choice of flavor.   I want to know, I want to know as much as possible about what will happen -- good or bad.  Maybe it's a control thing, and a false one at that; I know I can't possibly contain all the surprises in life.  But to the extent I can find out, I will.

I still don't think I'm an optimist, but I don't think I'm a pessimist, either.  As cynical as I am, I did not pour myself a large drink and eschew my child-chauffeuring responsibilities to watch the world implode at 6 p.m. last Saturday.  There's a ways until I meet the Leviathan, I realize now, and some people are actually pretty nice and considerate.   I'm certainly not a positive thinker, but I'm not necessarily a negative one.  The bathroom project we're about to undertake?  That will be an improvement, I'm fairly certain.  I think it's just that I now know exactly the kind of very real surprises life can dole out, whether it's a plumbing stack that needs replaced, or a child born with fatal birth defects.  It's made me older, more wary, informed.  I hate being a chump.

Where do you fall in terms of optimism and pessimism, positive and negative thinking?  Were you always this way, or did thing change with death of your child(ren)?  

Grief, suspended. Grief controlled?

My grandmother died two weeks ago. A few hours shy of two weeks actually.

The phone call from my sister broke time in a way we are all familiar with. It really shouldn't have, probably-- it had been a long time coming. She wasn't well, as a matter of fact she wasn't herself. She had Alzheimer's. But physically she was relatively strong. She'd had bouts of infection and a few other things, any one of which probably could've killed her if not for profound attention her daughters paid to every little change. Some weeks before she died a blood test revealed that she probably had some kind of cancer, but given her condition nobody wanted to put her through invasive tests to figure out exactly what kind it was. Her daughters signed her up with hospice. About six months was their prediction. Even that was hard on the daughters. In the end, her end was a lot gentler than her last several years.

The last several years were awful. Watching a strong person diminish is never easy. Watching a strong person lose themselves, lose their understanding of who surrounds them, lose all their bearings in the world is a particular pain, made worse when you are the caretaker. My mom and my aunt kept trying to relate to their mother, and their mother wasn't there. That made it worse.

My rabbi visited us in the hospital, when I was being induced. My son still in me, we talked about funeral arrangements. She explained the Jewish custom of quick burial by quoting from sacred text: "[y]ou can not be comforted while your dead lie before you." I've thought about this a lot during my grandmother's decline. Removed somewhat from the situation, I could accept a lot earlier than my mom could just how little of the woman we knew remained in the woman my mom was faithfully caring for.

My grandmother, in her time, took care of her own sick and dying mother for many more years than what her daughters ended up doing for her. But my great-grandmother had a stroke and lost her mobility. She was still herself, and so she died when she died. In contrast, I can tell you when my grandmother's body died. I can't tell you when she left, not really. It's been a long time since she recognized anyone. Yet mere weeks before she died, she had a good day when she seemed to know who everyone in the family was. One good hour, really.

So over the course of the last four years, my family had to slowly let go of my grandmother. Expectations, understandings. Memories. Things that bind us together. Bit by bit. Two weeks ago the definitive, indisputable end. Before that? Strange state of suspended grief. Her daughters didn't have their mother anymore. But I don't think they knew how to grieve that, and they didn't really have time for it anyway-- they were her dedicated caretakers, after all.

This story is the opposite of most perinatal death stories. We rarely get any warning, and even those of us who do are never prepared-- we're supposed to be raising them, not burying them. My grandmother had a hard life, full of pain and loss. But she also had a rich life, full of joy and love. She was in her late 70s before her mind started going. My daughter knew her, and even if she doesn't now remember most of their interactions before the onset of the bad part of the disease, she has a sense of her great grandmother. We chose her casket because that color and even the spare details on it was the kind of wood furniture she liked. We knew what she liked. The opposite, you know?

We now know that she realized things were going wrong, and to cope, while she still could, she wrote notes to herself. That makes perfect sense-- too proud to tell anyone, but determined to manage.

My grandmother came to visit us along with my parents and aunt and uncle for Monkey's fifth birthday. That was less than six weeks after A died. While here, she asked to see A's pictures. I now think of that as the very last thing I can confidently say she did as fully herself. After she'd seen them, it seems she let go. Even during that trip, she was not the same after the pictures that she was before. I think she must've written a note to herself about A, about asking for the pictures. Either that or she willed herself to stay fully with it until she did. Task completed, she could let go of the enormous work it took to hold on. (She did not disappear completely after that, but she was less present, and for less time. And for a while after, she remembered A-- she'd talk to my mom about how sad it was.) That's the kind of backbone that defined her. And it took one hell of a disease to be stronger than that.

We took Monkey with us to the funeral and the burial. We didn't take her, less than five years old at the time, with us to A's. She still tells us we were wrong in that decision. She probably always will. She's never been to a funeral, in fact. I think my grandmother's was a sort of a proxy for her. She got to see the casket put in the ground, the kaddish recited, she got to see and hear the dirt hitting the casket-- the hollow sound of finality, of indisputable end. From the safe distance of four plus years and her great-grandmother's eighty three and a half, she could imagine her brother's funeral. The rabbi and the funeral director were incredibly kind to her, and that helped too.

She's perceptive. She gets the difference. She knows great grandmothers die, and it's sad, but it is how life works (though she is not exactly happy about this). Little brothers shouldn't be dying, but hers did, and it's a different kind of pain and grief. And yet, she also gets that sometimes the differences matter very little. We were talking about the different kinds of sad, and that though it is how it is, it is still sad for me that my grandmother died. "It's [my grandma]'s mom" she said, as her eyes got bigger with recognition of the enormity of the loss for someone else. Yes, she was.

Have you encountered death since your child's? How has it been for you?