Signs

The conversation happened on an average evening. I wasn’t feeling any which way in particular, wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary. It was just a day, in the middle of another long week, towards the end of a complicated year.

I was taking my time wandering around the multiple level Whole Foods, rolling the cart as slowly as I wanted, perusing aisles that I had never entered, enjoying the temporary taste of aloneness that usually doesn’t exist under these conditions. Normally I’m running between wine racks and around food displays, chasing my two year old, who genuinely believes Whole Foods was created for hide and go seek. A simple visit for shampoo and milk can sometimes take more than an hour with her cheeky company. But not tonight.

As the clock ticks towards closing time, I wheel my cart in the direction of the check out lane to pay for my evening of solitary indulgence. An older woman greets me kindly.

Hello, she says.

Hi.

And that was that, as the story goes.

And then this kid appears. This teenager, with scrappy hair and pale skin, just shows up out of nowhere to bag my groceries. He’s wearing a plaid shirt, baggy jeans and a sincere smile. He looks relaxed and eager almost simultaneously. And he smells like the middle class.

Hey man, he asks with measured enthusiasm. How’s it going?

I have learned how to dismiss these conversations with relative ease over the months since my baby died. In the beginning, when the dizzying shock was all there was, I’m not even sure I heard these kind of questions. I can hardly remember a single conversation with anyone in those first few weeks and months, let alone one with a complete stranger in a check out line. But as the months marched on, this kind of common social courtesy began ringing in my ear like a clanging drum. A friendly and casual how’s it going? from a stranger became a jovial sucker punch: HOW’S IT GOING!?!? ARE YOU HAVING AN AWESOME DAY!?!? I wanted to choke on the nicety. So I learned to ignore, or to respond with a muttered answer, or to simply avoid any situation where this kind of question might surface.

But tonight this sprightly chump has me, before I can even think one way or another. I just answer.

I’m good. How are you?

Pretty good man, he says, pretty good.

You’re putting a lot of items to the side, I note with a smile, remembering my own days in the bagging trenches. You trying to get them all in one bag?

Yes, he replies with an innocent grin.

I know that game. My first long term job was bagging groceries. I spent two years of my life playing tetris with food items, trying to find the perfect fit for each paper bag.

Yeah, he says through a chuckle. Cold stuff goes together, fragile stuff on top.

Exactly. The plastic bag people weren’t any fun though. You can’t organize anything in those bags. I guess you don’t have that problem here, eh? I’m surprised you guys even allow paper bags.

He laughs nervously and the checkout woman flashes me a smile, as if we’ve shared a little dig on her company. And there I am, laughing right along with them, like I enjoy these silly little chats.

And then with a hint of pride, as if he’s showing a veteran his immense talent, he hands me one individual paper bag, filled perfectly to the top with my produce and toothpaste and chips and everything else.

The magazine is down the side, he says with eyebrows raised, not wanting me to miss this little packing gem.

Nice one! I add excitedly.


It wasn’t until I walked out to my car that I even realized what had just taken place. Who was that in there, I thought to myself in a state of perplexity. Having conversations, laughing, using exclamation points - was that me? Did I really just say, nice one!? As I recalled the brief interchange, I could hardly believe it was real, as if I was watching someone else going through the motions of every day people.

I’ll tell you something though. The interaction felt like a minor fucking miracle. A brief sign that maybe this grief, which sometimes feels like a two-thousand pound bear sitting on my chest, is evolving, even in the slightest of ways. Because it’s not as if I forgot my baby was still dead in that moment. It’s not like I magically returned to my former self before my daughter died. She was there. My grief was there. As they always are, tucked and folded in to my very fabric. The truth is, we were all there together, having a pointless conversation about groceries. And it felt pretty okay.



How has your grief evolved over the months and years? Were there any signs that tipped you off to this evolution?

la llorona

photo by A30_Tsitika.

I paint my face like a calavera. I don't know what I am trying to achieve, making myself look dead, but I do it. I am alone. It feels like I am doing something wrong, and in that way, I am excited. I put a base of white onto my face. It reminds me of high school and listening to the Cure and being a punk rocker. Then I pull out the black face paint crayon and draw a joy there, a swirl here. Some flowers and decorations. I am more beautiful with the mask of death.

I want to feel close to her.  I want her to be amongst my posse in the afterlife, the otherworldly gang of ancestors that come when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, guiding me into good real estate decisions and warning me of enemies. I beckon her to come this day, the next and one after that. To rest in my arms while I dress like a calavera. We are but a whisper away from the other side. Maybe we are a coat of white face paint away.

I straddle cultures. I straddle existences. Half-white. Half-Latina. Half-mother. Half-La Llorona. I am an erstwhile Catholic and a half-assed Buddhist. I spent years living on the Mexican border in Arizona, speaking Spanish like a Chicana, and come home to a house full of Panamanians. I married a Southerner and live in New Jersey. I have attended midnight masses in four continents. I put each image of death, each candle burned, into a steaming cauldron, stew them for decades. I take some dark ideas out, adding liturgy and spells, until it is a soothing, warming bowl of ritual. Because above all else, I am a ritualist. I like rites. I like routine. I like customs. I like ceremony. I like something to do over and over because it is. What. We. Do. So I paint my face. I paint my face and I build an altar across my dining room. And I pull out the pictures of the dead.

I line up their photographs on my ofrenda. This time of year feels sacred and frightening. The leaves fall. My people fall. My grandmother. My aunt. My great-grandmother. My grandfather. My father-in-law. My daughter. So, I take a bit of them and add it to my Día de los Muertos altar. I decorate it with their funeral prayer cards, the Irish blessing written on the back. I put little bibles and prayer books. There is a rosary created by a blind nun and a bowl of fruit. I make sugar skulls. I paint a large painting of a woman crying and holding a stillborn baby. I hang it in the middle of the wall, papier-mâché skeletons flanking each side, flower lights hanging around the wooden frame.

Ssssshhhh. Don't tell anyone, but the painting is me and Lucy. It is a 16 inch by 20 inch secret done in bright acrylic. I tried to paint the Virgin Mary, but I always paint me holding Lucia and crying. It is pathological. It makes others uncomfortable. There is this show of competing artists. One of them could take pictures of nothing but clay and red dye that looked like bloody  internal organs. She suffered from colitis her whole life. She tried to create other work, but she always ended up painting organs hanging from a box. I keep painting my dead daughter. I paint death because I do not show her picture in my house, except on Day of the Dead. I put her picture in this little brightly colored frame that betrays the gray of our heartbreak. I can close it up with an orange ribbon when neighbors come by. Does anyone notice our Lucy there, lips red as the sacred heart? The lips are strange and mesmerizing to me, and I have kissed them. The dead wear makeup too.

+++

Is it okay to tell you a ghost story? It is Halloween after all. Sometimes I feel like La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, who walks the edges of ponds, arroyos, the rivers, the places where water runs and her children might wash up. See, the legend goes that her children were swept away by a flash flood, carried off dead, and she, driven insane by the grief, wanders the rivers of the world looking for them. She screams and keens into the night. In another land, the legend is that she killed her children herself, threw them in the river. But the end is the same--they are gone, and she is condemned to wander the earth. But the scream is one we all know. She screams into the night, "Dios Mio! Mi hijos! Mi hijos!" or "My God! My babies! My babies!"

She is beautiful and terrifying. Every old man and woman in Mexico has a La Llorona story, even my mother. It is a ghost story, a nightmare, to lose your children. Everyone knows that. La Llorona is a warning told to children who become young adults. Do not venture out at night or La Llorona will snatch you. Do not go meet your boyfriend by the riverbed, under that beautiful weeping willow, La Llorona will steal you from us. I am both comforted that child loss is acknowledged, even in ghost stories, as something to drive you mad, condemn you for eternity, and also sad that we have such bad PR. I get La Llorona, I do. I feel condemned some days. Like La Llorona, wild hair, wild eyes, wandering the babylost rivers of the internet, wailing, "Dios Mio! Mi hija! Mija! My daughter. My daughter. Oh  my God, my daughter."

This time seems wrought with ghosts and visions and the other world. Today is Halloween and Samhain, the Witches New Year. Tomorrow and the next day, the Days of the Dead. Tomorrow is Día de los Inocentes ("Day of the Innocents") also known as Día de los Angelitos ("Day of the Little Angels").  November 1st is a day set aside to honor children and babies who have died. We who wander the internet wailing have created our own culture around death, our own rituals of mourning. An angel writes our baby's name in the sand across the world. We write poetry. We light candles together. We trade skulls and hearts and ornaments.

I paint my face white, turn myself into a skull. I commune with the dead. I create elaborate altars for her. I summon her, conjure her baby form in the arms of my grandmothers and aunts. I stare into a bowl of water, scrying and crying. There is something comforting in the desperation of these motions. It is something other than wailing.

What ways do you honor the dead during Halloween, Samhain or Days of the Dead? Or if you don't, why not? What rituals have you created for yourself? For your family?  Are these rituals different for your baby(ies) than for your older ancestors? Do you connect with the community of parents who have lost children during October? What rituals feel most comforting to you?

After

I am embarrassed to admit it, but my first thought was that she would be alone. All alone.

I should be embarrassed; maybe I should even be ashamed. I know that I cultivate, have cultivated, will continue to cultivate relationships. I know that I create friendships, relationships, a sense of other in my life.   But my first thought, when I heard that he died in that accident, that it was so sudden and unexpected, that he was dead, my first thought was that she was all alone. She had no one now.

I should know better. I should believe better. That will be me that one day.

It’s just. . .well, look. Frank* and Cassandra didn’t ever have children. I don’t know why, I didn’t ask. I know he had children from his first marriage, but after 15 years they didn’t ever have them together. And suddenly, quite young, he was dead. There she is with a house and travel plans and 2 cars and all of the trappings of togetherness and she’s alone.  There’s a life time of shared memories and no one to share them with. We hold on to the good times and make sense of the bad times by sharing stories. Very often our partner is the closest participant in the best and worst times of our lives.

I cannot help but think, when that partner dies, we lose part of our story.

One day Mr. Spit will die. Statistics tell me that he will likely die before me. He is older and male, and right now as a woman I am apt to live longer.

One day I will be Cassandra. It could be any day, really. If I have learned nothing in these almost four years, I have learned that tragedy can strike without warning, arriving into any life.

I like that song, Live Like You Were Dying, but the truth is, you can’t live like that. Real life intrudes. You can’t live each day as if it were the last. Living life well actually requires that you believe your life is an ongoing concern. You pay your bills, buy groceries for next week, put money aside for trips and plan celebrations. You live as if you have a future. You plan to make more memories, to continue the story together.

One day Mr. Spit, this man who is my comfort, my shield, my laughter, my joy, my companion and my delight, will be gone. I will still be here. I will live without him. When he is gone, he will only live in my memories. I know that when he is gone, I will follow. Perhaps shortly or perhaps many years later. 

It’s not the following part. It’s the in-between. The time I am here and he is not. I would wish that I could go first, but I think that simply replaces my pain with his. It doesn’t make me feel any more at ease to transfer my sorrow to him. One of us will be alone.

So what? The experts tell me that those of us who are childfree develop friendships and relationships to help us as we age.

Isn’t that a bit calculating? Think, just for a second. Shall I walk up to a woman like me, a woman without children and ask “Will you be my friend? For now, but also when I am old? Will you be my friend because at some point bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh will die, and I have no children and I will need a friend? I am a good friend and I am willing to do this for you as well?” And shall I find a man, a man who is handy and shall I tell him that I put a hole in my finger with a cordless drill and I cannot use a hammer to save my life, and will he be my friend? I will bake him cookies and knit him the odd pair of socks and remember his birthday and have no expectations other than a sincere wish that he understands the inward mysteries of toilets.  Shall I go looking, calculatingly, for others to tell my story to, when Mr. Spit is gone?

Is this what people do? Perhaps they are not so calculating, perhaps they do not engage in my tendency to think everything out to the nth degree.

Still.

Cassandra  is alone, Frank is dead, and one day so shall my husband be.  The story, the memories, all it will end.

And I will be alone.

Do you worry more after the death of your child, about what happens when your partner dies? Do you agree that our partners very often share the closest parts of our story? Do you wonder who will keep the good and the bad parts of the story, the closest memories of what made you, you?

*It is always a struggle when you blog, to write your own thoughts and stories and deal lightly with the places that your stories and thoughts intersect with the lives of others. The story is true, but I have altered names and circumstances, choosing to deal lightly with a person in grief.

Ghouls

Iris reaches a pale hand out to press against the walls of my womb. She tugs on my umbilical cord and then she’s gone.

Don’t haunt me, baby. You are too small to move things around and make the lights flicker.

I see her in the corner of the mirror and her head lolls forward to display a bulging fontanel.

This is not a pretty thing at all, this grief. She was not a pretty thing. Dead things are not pretty, they are cold and the colour of oil on tarmac.

I sit in meetings and push my thumb against a sore on the knuckle of my right index finger. I am alive and my body relishes its welts. She hovers and reminds me of the other hurt. She is a gasp.

She is my breath. She has no breath. Gasp. Inhale. Exhale. Irisssssssssssss. She rustles the paper in my hand.

I want to write something for you. Something that will make you feel less lonely. My heart squirms like a chicken foetus in an egg.

There is no way to say the things that must be said. I am not wise, I tell ghost stories to the internet.

I should be sold next to pumpkins and plastic skeletons. Do you like to be scared?  Come and sit next to me. Hush. Be very quiet. Do you hear that nothing? That’s my daughter laughing.

If you don’t have something nice to say... then say it here. Do you ever find your grief a bit gruesome? 

the relentless pursuit of living

I'm used to the lies by now.  They are common and easy to say.  I say them for the sake of other people, but also for myself.  I have to lie so that I'm not always the guy that sucks the air out of a room, even if that room is the entire outdoors on a glorious fall day at the farmer's market and someone has questions about me, about my life, about how I'm doing.  There is no point in ruining every idle conversation and friendly chatter with truth about my dead son Silas.

You're welcome everyone I spared the honest recounting of my recent life.  It isthe absolute least I can do, and it cuts me with a slice of sadness every time I do it.  Three years since he died and it is still recent to me.  Because it is not so much that time has healed my wounds as much as it is that the wounds themselves are the very nature, the very fabric, of my everyday existence.  I miss Silas as a matter of course, just like breathing, just like moving my body, like blinking, like the beat of my heart.

I am still amazed to have learned that a heart can remain beating when it feels like only dust and awful and the endless void inside.  I am compelled to go forward, no matter the pain of my past.  If anything, his lost life is a fuel for me to live twice as hard, twice as present, twice as calm as I ever would have before.  Not enough, of course, it will never be enough.

Things don't always happen for a reason, and it is always better with Silas sleeping in a room just beyond the wall.  That is a lie I usually don't let people tell me.  That's one I have to correct whenever that awful platitude is thrown in my face. I try to be nice about it, but I can't help but say that no I don't think everything happens for a reason.

I think each of us are a living force to make reason and sanity and beauty and love out of absolute chaos and despair.  We lie to ourselves about feeling okay until one day it sticks a little bit.  We pretend that it is fine to not demolish everything we see out of rage and loss.  We answer the questions.  We smile through the pain, feeling the smile our son or daughter might have shared through glorious living genes.  We breathe their lost thoughts.  We dream their silent fears and inchoate hopes and live a tiny shadow life sometimes of what should be.  What could have been.  What isn't.

I have to remind myself that I'm not crazy sometimes.  When I wake up from the dream where I've missed the flight again, but I don't really care, but I do because I should but I really don't.  I have to lay there for a moment and chill, hoping there are still hours before the appointed time of get the fuck out of bed or else.  And I lay there and wonder how I'm not crazy, with a dead son and lost future and all.  It feels good, then, in the cool autumn morning, when I feel dream-crazy and life-crazy and sleepy-person-lazy-crazy and realize that everyone feels this way.  Everyone lies about how okay they seem to be going down the road feeling fine.

But look at the art. Look at the movies and books and paintings and poets.  Read the headlines.  Walk the streets.  There are endless crazy universes inside everyone's head.  A precise and compelling recounting of life and death and love and loss inside the brain of everyone around you.  Some are people of this community that don't even know we exist.   Babylost medusa crazed father parents that don't have their kids are out there in the towns and cities and hamlets where all of you live.  Not to mention families that are victims of car accidents, cancer, embolisms, old age, and on and on.

The people around us tell us lies to help themselves, to save us, to get by.

I always wanted to crush every moment of time that I have into a succulent nectar of life itself that I could wallow in and enjoy.  I thought that raising my son Silas was going to be the way I could do that.  I anticipated a rich life remembering my childhood as I stood there amazed at his development.  I thought I was going to be the best dad of all time.  I couldn't wait to learn everything I couldn't even begin to comprehend as I watched my son live his amazing life.

September 25, 2008 was supposed to be the start of an incredible chapter of life and growth and offspring and hope in my life and instead it was the complete opposite.  And when he died I had a choice.  I could give up or I could go forward.  For a moment the choice was absolutely clear.  When I was told that he was dead in that moment I could have followed him along directly.  A leap off the building.  A scalpel.  The wall and my head. But then right away thoughts of Lu and family and friends flooded my brain.  I had to be strong because this situation was already going to fuck everything up forever and I couldn't also double down and make it worse.

So for many, many months, not killing myself was the baseline I had established as "doing pretty good."   Plus, when you start there, getting out of bed is like successfully ascending Mt. Everest.  I gave myself accolades for simply going outside for a little while.  But those impulses kept growing, kept beating in my heart, kept pushing me forward.  I learned to lie and love it.  I learned to breathe again.  And yet I'm still not sure I can reconcile what my life should be vs what it is today, right here, one month out from Lu's c-section and the start of everything that comes next.

Everything is always coming next, and it is the incredible human spirit, our very nature, that allows us to face the day and tell the lies and forge the hope we have no right to expect and yet we do, and we do and we do.

Make your lies wishes.  Live extra bright and do not let the lies you have to tell stop you from living your life as honestly as you can.  We will always have a special armor, a veneer of experience that is too awful to wish on anyone but also incredibly, terribly, powerfully true.

Go easy through your day and let the simple, innocent grace of your lost child guide you toward patience and serenity.  Oh and also, don't go any more crazy than you are.  We're all crazy enough as it is, and that's the truth.

What are your lies?  What are your truths?  Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?  How do you fit the truth of your lost child or children into your sense of the how the world works?  Do you feel crazy and okay like me?

Nitpicker

I am a professional nitpicker. I sift through documents, link them up to one another, count them, summarise them. Before my daughter died, I’d spent nearly five years analysing other people’s sad stories, their deaths, hospital admissions and operations, reducing them to numbers to be crunched. 

I treat them with more respect these days. Try to approach my computer with a bowed head and leave a little pause as a mark of respect before I attempt to weave these records into a palatable form. Because these documents, when viewed in their human context, tell some tragic stories. One of them is mine.

The strangest day of my life was comprehensively documented. Hospital records show my time of arrival in the accident and emergency department of the local hospital with back pain, the back pain that turned out to be premature labour. What should have been December instead one clear summer night in August.

The birth transcript from the next morning records the dates and times of my daughters' births. It looks like any other record, the hospital must spew out tens of these documents every day of the year. But the recorded birth weights cause something to catch in my throat.

There are a plethora of other documents, transfers to the NICU, treatments administered, the reactions of our daughters, our reactions. All meticulously noted down. Box files upon box files full of paperwork.

When I open my daughter's memory box, there seem to be two distinct categories amongst the contents. Little woollen hats, photographs of my hands stretched over her bruised little frame, photographs of her dead body cradled in the arms of my husband, her ashes. 

And formal documentation. Birth and death certificates, medical records, the paperwork that I must pass on should I ever have her ashes interred. 

Somewhere between these two imperfect, inadequate records sits my daughter's memory. All that is left of her is contained within that box. 

I have retained the slip of paper that informs the registrar that a death has occurred. Signed by the doctor who witnessed her death and decided what caused it. I quite like to think of that quiet, gentle man bringing the whole power of his considerable intellect to bear upon that question. That just for a few minutes, perhaps, she filled his mind as he disentangled the chain of events culminating in her death. A tiny, icy comfort. 

My husband and I had to take this small slip to the registry office. I remember driving there resentfully, sulkily, wishing that someone else could do this. Hardly believing that we were expected to. My introduction to the unrelenting world of parenthood a strange one but still one with an inescapable truth at its core, nobody else is going to do this for you, be your child living or dead. The buck stops here.

I sat in a chair over the desk from the registrar. I seemed to be able to view myself from the outside. I could see the registrar looking at a person who looked like me, who appeared to be holding things together but, in reality, I had been decanted somewhere to the right of myself, gibbering, trembling and translucent. I am certain that I was not the woman who sat in the chair and calmly handed over the slip of paper, the proof that her daughter had died.

Photo by Zach K

I remember that I wanted to sign for my dead daughter's birth certificate. But I couldn't bring myself to sign for her death certificate. My husband did that. He is listed as the informant on her death certificate. His qualifications for doing so listed as being her father and as being present at her death. Such dry little phrases concealing such a world of awfulness.

The registrar spelt one of the causes of her death incorrectly. I wanted to ask her to change it but I couldn't get the words out, they clotted in my mouth. Now the mis-spelling glares at me accusingly.

I left clutching those documents tightly in my hand, the only proof that I had not imagined her existence. Clinging to the sad, strange consolation that, should some great-great-grandchild go looking whilst researching their family tree, they would come across her.  

Seven months after my daughter had passed away, a receptionist in some far flung part of the hospital ‘phoned me. To ask if I would be bringing the twins in for their hearing tests. For a moment, the room swirled around me and I saw my thin, ghost girl alive somewhere. In a hospital filing system. Preserved there. Squashed between files like a pressed flower. And part of me didn't want to tell the woman on the other end of the phone that she was dead. Because I would have liked to maintain the pretence and she was my only co-conspirator.

When my son was born, nearly three years later, my husband and I went to register his birth.

"Only one?" asked the registrar, "Are you sure you aren't hiding a twin anywhere?"

She probably says this to every family that comes through her door. 

"No," I replied. "Just one."

But there is a hidden child in our family. She's been hiding for a long time now.

Did you have to complete any paperwork relating to the death of your child? Did it bring you any comfort or cause you further pain? Or did an absence of paperwork cause you hurt? Did you find any kind souls amidst all the bureaucracy? Or any callous ones? Have you had the disconcerting experience of someone in the 'system' contacting you assuming that your child was still alive?