reflections: five voices from the family

This month on Glow in the Woods, we are examining family relationships--both our family of origin and the one we create on our life's journey. We want to look at how those relationships change after the death of our child(ren)--how they grow, how they suffer, how our parents and siblings grieve, and how they bear witness to our suffering. Today, we asked the family members of our regular contributors to talk about their grief, the death of their grandchildren, nephew, and niece, and the experience of bearing witness to our grief. We are honored to have them sharing their voices here.

jess' father, tauny.

Debbie and I knew her birth date in advance.  We had no hesitation in enjoying another day cycling in the Pyrenees with our friends, secure in the knowledge that the day was already special.  The route up Port de Bales was challenging, exhausting but exciting, all the more so because of the impending delivery which we chatted and laughed about with our other cycling friends – “How old are you, Granddad?”  “Come on Granddad, keep up” – the usual banter.  

At the end of the afternoon, we were about to head down to the evening meal with the group when the anticipated call came... and our lives changed irrevocably.  Debbie took the call from Jessica, expecting happiness but instead receiving the worst possible news from our distraught daughter – Iris was a stillbirth.  We were stunned.  Telling our friends, packing the bikes, hastily arranging flights back to the UK and driving into hospital was a soft, grey canvass smeared by a casual hand stroke.  Meeting Iris and sharing our grief with Jessica, her husband David and rest of the family will remain a jagged and sharply etched memory.

It was not the first time I had experienced severe illness in children, death in childhood, or even still births.  As a paediatrician of twenty-five years, I had “been there, done that” many times in the role of a caring but detached health professional.  My role was to diagnose and treat children, to alleviate suffering, to prevent the consequences of illness and to counsel affected families with warm, wise words.  I was told I was good at my job, and prided myself in my knowledge, my skill and my empathy.  

My experience was no preparation for dealing with Iris.  Intellectually, I could comprehend her death, but emotionally, as a father and grandfather, I was raw, blind and helpless. It was not possible to reconcile professional and family roles and the conflict was devastating.  Even now, several years and many distressing discussions later, there has been little resolution and thoughts of Iris jangle discordantly at work and at home.   

There is a little hole in our lives, and I can’t heal it.

catherine w.'s mother, cynthia.

The consultant who delivered the twins described the survivor as ‘an innocent bystander’, for although she was intimately bound up with her twin sister and with her underwent their extremely premature birth, she did not play an active part in the events preceding and following their birth. Held in her own membrane and nourished by her own placenta, she simply slipped out after her slightly larger sister and in turn was scooped up and cared for by professionals. And at once she was a ‘bystander’ no longer, for all passivity and inaction were gone as she in turn embarked on her struggle to survive.

The dictionary definition of the word ‘bystander’ is as follows: ‘A person who is standing by; a passive witness; a spectator.’  All of which shows what an odd sort of word it is, because what is being described is in effect someone who simply happens to be present, someone who is not a participant but could give an account of what they have seen, and someone who has stayed to look on. A number of other words, some pejorative, could be used to describe such a one, for what right thinking person would choose to be a bystander? In normal circumstances I would certainly not stand by. If I could be of no help, I would leave so that others could get on with doing what they need to. And yet, when my daughter’s twin girls were born, I could not tear myself away even though I could do nothing more than stand by, and be a passive witness, a spectator. Hard as it was to see our tiny grandchildren fighting to stay alive, I would not have been anywhere else, and painful as the whole experience was, it was also a privilege to witness their struggle. Twin 1, as she was styled by the hospital, lived for four days. She fought so hard and rallied time and again, exceeding expectation time and again. Knowing that she would be left with less and less each time she refused to submit, I could not find it in me to exhort her to fight harder or to hope that her life could be prolonged beyond what she could bear, certainly not for our sake, the sake of the living.  

She died in the afternoon, in the arms of her mother and with her father by her. Unable to hold her until there was no hope for her, they gently tended to their little girl until she died and then prepared her little body for the morgue. Her life was so short and yet complete. She was brave and dignified. She certainly taught me as much in the few hours I had with her as those who have shared many years with me. I am deeply grateful for her life and for the kindness and generosity of my daughter and her husband for allowing their respective birth families to ‘stand by’. We could do so little to help and I for one was keenly aware that I was very much on the outside looking in as I witnessed my daughter and her husband go through something I had never experienced with courage, fortitude and dignity.

chris' brothers, mark and michael.

mark.

I remember the day I drove home from work shouting and screaming with tears running down my face.  I remember the mad dash to get things in order and get down to Connecticut.  

A deep, profound sadness cut into me and spread like cancer the day Silas died.  I also remember seeing the small divide between my older brother me that had slowly transformed into a canyon as days and weeks turned into month and years start to diminish. The tragic event that transformed all of us also built an unbreakable bridge between two disconnected brothers. It draws us closer to each other every day.  

I'll never say anything good has come from all of this, but I will say ONE thing has changed for the better.

michael.

This horrific situation brought us closer together as brothers.  I stayed at the house for a couple weeks after the tragic event and although it was horrible to deal with such raw emotions, I knew I needed to be there. It reinforced how strong our brotherly bond truly was.  

Unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with difficult family situations having dealt with a mother battling MS my entire life.  It seemed very natural to just drop everything and be there in any and all ways I could for as long as I was needed.  As time passed, however, it became more difficult to know exactly how much support I should be giving and how much support my brother needed.  I tried to make sure I was there as a shoulder to lean on, but sometimes felt like maybe I was coming up short.  

As years passed, I was able to make some peace with the situation, but I knew those emotions were still very raw for my brother and sister-in-law.  It was very difficult to see my brother in such anguish and not be able to do anything to help him.  The only silver lining in this situation is that Silas has brought us closer together and has made me appreciate how great it is to have the brothers that I have.

angie's twin sister, kellyann.

I held on to my niece as I cried.  She was already asleep, and snoring in that way that little children do.  She just lost her sister, her “almost” twin, and she had no idea of what she has even lost.  This is not happening.  It’s a mistake.  Some stupid horrible mistake that we will never think is funny.  I walked down the stairs of my sister’s house, staring at their beautiful life; and then my eyes stopped at the Christmas tree.  This is a just a bad dream.  I’m going to wake up and it’ll all be gone.

People often ask me what it’s like to be a twin, which is a hard question to answer when it’s all you’ve ever been.  I can tell you that when I wake up in the morning she is the first person I call, and when I have news about anything, she is the first and sometimes only person I tell.  She celebrates with me when I am triumphant; she holds me when I am sad; and she tells me I am being an ass when I am being an ass.  My children call her their “other Mama”.  She brings me coffee, love, crafts, stories and joy in the middle of the afternoon for no reason at all.  She is quite simply my very best friend of thirty-seven years.

The next morning I arrived at the hospital, and quickly found my sister and her husband.  They looked tired, puffy-eyed, and both forced a smile.  I hugged them and cried, and my natural instinct to make sad people happy starting wrestling against my tears.  Wake up, Kelly.  Wake the hell up.  I still remember turning on the tv to some inane comedy thing just to help us forget where we were, why we were there and what this means for our family.

I not only lost a niece that day, but also my very best friend lost her daughter in the cruelest way I could imagine.  My niece lost her sister.  My children lost their cousin.  My mother and father lost their granddaughter.  My brother-in-law, who is like a brother, also lost his daughter.  My husband lost his niece.  And when she was born, she was perfect, beautiful.  She looked just like Snow White with her red lips and pale skin, dark hair and delicate features.  She looked just like we imagined.  

We.  It has always been the two of us.  It’s hard to always think of yourself as two sometimes.  Especially when the pain overwhelmed me.  Us.   And so in that way, I felt my uterus contracting as I watched my sister cry and labor Lucy in a darkened, nearly silent room, where the only sounds were her cries and our sniffles.  And for the months after Lucy’s birth and death, I felt my sister’s heartbreak in small and big ways whenever someone asked about the baby, whenever someone didn’t and even when she watched our girls play together.  I listened to her rage and her sadness and her guilt.  She said aloud the things I felt as I looked into her eyes, as I held her hands and drank coffee with her.  

My own grief was often pushed aside to sit with hers.  I think I swallowed it down so I could answer the questions when someone asked about Angie.  I still don’t resent it, if that is what you are wondering.  It helped me function.  I cried when I sat with her.  And watching her so open with her grief taught me so much.  That we all grieve in our own ways.  For me it was crying as I sewed, as I sang along to Nick Drake and washed the dishes, as I held my own children and let them ask me those painfully honest questions that only children can ask.  One of my sister’s favorite quotes is from some bicyclist that I can’t remember, but I do remember the quote.  “It doesn’t get easier, you just get faster.”  And I feel the same way with my grief, it doesn’t get easier, you just get better at dealing with it.

It took me months to accept that it had really happened.  I remember calling Angie and crying.  “I can’t believe this happened to us.”

“I know, sister, I know.”



If you are a family member to a grieving mother or father, what has your grief looked like? What is the experience of bearing witness to your child's or sister/brother's grief?

If your child or children have died, what was it like to bear witness to the grief of your immediate family? What do you think their grief experience was like? Did it draw you closer, or push you further apart?

Snowglobes of Tradition

Grief says “You ate the Eggs Benedict 15 days after you held your son in your arms. You ate the Eggs Benedict consumed with the memory of his gasping for breath and dying. You did all of this because it was tradition on Christmas morning. Did it make any difference?”

It’s hard to think about tradition without thinking about family. It’s hard to think about tradition without thinking about your parents and it is impossible to think about tradition without imagining handing down your traditions to your children.

I don’t, to be perfectly frank, have much of a family. My mother and I are, at least for the present, estranged. Whether or not that estrangement will end and if it will end is up to her. My other family is in BC. I have no siblings. All of this makes holiday tradition ever harder. It often feels like I have to create a new community for each occasion. Without children, I confess, I feel lost at Christmas. Without children I wonder if I look pathetic as I decorate the house and plan meals.

I like the Eggs Benedict Christmas morning, I like the prime rib with Yorkshire pudding. I like the stockings, I like the tourtiere. You could write my epitaph thus: She prepared a lot of food and there was no one to eat it.

I wanted a large family that did the same things with every year. I wanted to have the same faces around the Christmas table, many faces. What I wanted, or at least what I thought I wanted was for things to never change. I thought if I didn’t have to build my own community each holiday, if my community was built in, then holidays wouldn’t be so hard, so lonely and feel so futile.

I thought, by having children, I would have frozen Christmas into a perfect snow globe for all time.

 Flickr Ali 505Except, that’s not what life does, that’s not how families work. That’s not even how traditions go.

There are no snow globes of tradition, except those we create in our imagination and memory. That's why we dream about tradition - because we can create perfection in our imagination or in our memory. We have no such guarantees in our forward-thinking life. It is possible, even likely, that I could have had 4 children and spent Christmas thirty years hence all alone.

Age, birth, death, marriage and divorce change our traditions. We bring in new ones, we toss out old ones.

I can change my thoughts on tradition. I can ease up, I can be more flexible, but that belies a single truth: I don’t want to be more flexible. I don’t want to have to give up the notion of tradition and I certainly don’t want  to give up on the snow globe of perfect imagination.

I wanted to hang on to all of this. I wanted to pass this on to my children. I wanted to tell them that I ate Eggs Benedict every Christmas morning for all of my life and they should too. I wanted stockings, overflowing with goodness, carefully placed on their beds while they slept.

This year I looked at what I thought that perfect snow globe would be, what I really wanted and I realized it is not possible. My snow globe will always be missing something – someone.

In the middle of the snow globe, mixed in with the snow is a heavy dusting of grief. This year, the fourth year after Gabriel’s death, I am finally seeing it. Grief at Gabriel's death, at life with no children swirls around the holidays because it pervades our traditions.

And maybe that’s where the struggle really lies. Maybe the need to examine the traditions I continue, maybe the frustration at creating my own community for every holiday really comes from this: they are but a remembrance of what I don’t have and what I can't do. Without living children I am powerless to create that perfect snow globe. Anything I can create, through what traditions I maintain, through what community I can build will never match to what I imagined.

Tell us: How have your traditions changed? Do you approach the holidays the same way? What sort of community do you include now? How did Christmas go for you?

her name

photo by  Neal.

All I ever gave her was a name.

The most beautiful thing I have ever done was to name the girl for Light and Peace. Lucia is the light. Paz is the peace. She is the light and the dark. The peace and the war. I named her long before she became who she ended up becoming. What I mean is that I named her long before she died. I named this child metaphorically. Metaphorically only if she were dead.

All I ever gave her was a name.

But what she gave me was infinite. The understanding of unconditional love, of absence, of suffering, of impermanence, of fear. (Fuck, I was afraid after she died. I was afraid of being alone and being with others.) She gave me an understanding of without. She gave me the whole of the abyss. I didn't smile when I saw her. I didn't laugh because she was here. I found her birth beautiful, but it didn't erase the horror of her death. I wish I could have at least given her the sound of joy once.

I gave her some kisses, tears. I gave her an urn. A place on the shelf in the secretary. It sits in front of all my books about God. Those things seem the least I could do, the very least.

I gave her part of my wrist. I wrote her name across it--the name I gave to her. When I tattooed it on me, I took her name back. All I gave her, I now have--the blood, the tears, the urn, the name. It was her second birthday, and I didn't know what to do anymore. I wanted her on me, in me again, blood pulsing through her little beautiful body, so I wrote her name on the inside of my wrist. The blood rushed to the spot when she removed the needles and ink. Her name written in black in a cloud of inflamed skin. With her name tattooed on me, I can always possess the only part of her I gave her. I can always send my blood to her again. When I squint my eyes, her name looks like Sanskrit, or clothes hanging on a line. Like hieroglyphics that show little symbols of grief and heartbreak and undying love.

After her name, and before it, I made two dots. She is in the middle. Two breaths. Two pauses. Not the end of my story, not the beginning, somewhere in the middle that seems like a beginning and an ending. Three years ago today, she died. Three years ago tomorrow, she was born. Even though I have integrated her death into our family, into my being, into my body, the fact catches me up. She died. Forever.

I take comfort in the physics of it. Everyone dies. This is not about me, or my family. Then I get all caught up in the metaphysics of her death. I want her back, and science won't give her to me. My four year old daughter explains to me that TracyOC's four year old daughter C. believes that when sisters die, they go into the sky. Beezus believes that when sisters die, they go into trees. I imagine in another place that weekend Tracy and I were talking about the same thing.

I don't know what I believe anymore. She is gone. Last year the moon was full, and eclipsed on her death day. The night felt magical and important, like Nature herself was reminding me of the mysteries I will never understand. Like the mystery of her death, and her life, and her holiness. In those mysteries can be a beauty, a light, and something resembling peace. There was a sense of connection in it, the death and the eclipse and the full moon and the winter. This year, I feel numb, quiet, and confused. The wind whistles through the eaves of our house, makes it sound like footsteps on the back stairs. It is solstice. It is cold and dark. It is a new moon. Total blackness. The Earth has not yet given birth to the Sun. And if she does, will the child be a dying star? A supernova in our bellies?

A shooting star across our lives, and then she is gone. Poof. Make a wish.

In the first year, I tried desperately to transform my grief into a kind of joy about her. That never worked. I could only transform it into a kind of reverence for her, a kind of worship of her holiness. I would whisper her name. Lucia Paz. She is a holiest being I know because she never spoke, or breathed, or prayed, or harmed another living soul. She just died. And in death there is a peace, maybe even a light. She was pure love given. Pure love received.

All I gave her was a name and it was someone else's name. A saint whose eyes were plucked out for being too beautiful for a celibate. When they plucked her eyes out,  God made more beautiful eyes grow back in their place. I bake Sankta Lucia buns with saffron and think about her eyes. The skin on her eyelids were torn and bruised, and I had to lift them gently to see the color. Her eyes looked dead.

We are only making them for her.

The saffron buns, I mean. She doesn't eat them. She is dead. So they stale and mold over. I mourn the buns. Sankta Lucia is celebrated on one of the darkest days of the year. Candles are lit and a little girl wears a white dress and a crown of candles. She sings a haunting song about light and peace. We remember our Lucia on the darkest day of our year. It is so dark, it never seems like day at all, just an twenty-four hour cloak of darkness over our family. The saint's eyes were plucked from her skull, like my daughter was plucked from my womb.  She didn't grow back. She floated away into the night sky and became something else, maybe a tree, or perhaps nothing.

I sit outside tonight. With ice lanterns and cocoa, I wait for the Earth to give birth to the Sun. I wait to give birth to her. My tears freeze into long icicles, hanging in front of dawn. Eternally winter solstice in my heart, eternally the darkest day. I will whisper her name to the trees, the sky, to the nothing I feel inside me. She will not come, but perhaps the waiting is the important part.


Tell me about your child's name. How did you choose it? What does it mean? Did the name change after your child died? Did the meaning change after your child(ren)'s death? Was it symbolic? Do you have any rituals or yearly practices that revolve around your child's name?

i'm gone and i'll never look back again

Laying flat on my back on the couch surrounded by the darkness in my heart is how I have spent many bright days and long cold nights over the last three years since Silas died. I was not new to the idea of sadness and loss and hardship, but it was a revelation to be consumed by it so completely.

After all, there is nothing as completely devastating as the loss of your son or daughter.  We know our parents and grandparents are not immortal, but it seems like a given that our children will outlive us long and strong, healthy and true.

But now I know.

Silas's death transformed my guts.  I used to shit perfectly.  Once in the morning, once at night. Solid, honest craps each of them.  But now I'm erratic.  Sometimes the toilet sucks, and I know I'm not good when I'm not looking forward to that daily event.

Do you know the gurgles?  When laying flat on said back completely annihilated by how painful it is to miss my son I feel the slow crawl of tension mixed with terror sleazing through my innards in the dreadful, lonely night.  Lu is next to me so I'm not alone but the loss is endless.  Like the night will never end.  Like the gurgle slip-slithering through my insides will never end in a solid shit.

It is the gut-pit we all know.

It seems clear to me that all the sorrows of all that is known can fall endlessly into the despair that parents feel for the loss of our little ones.

Based upon my own experience, it really is that fucking bad.  You can't hyperbole the shitiness of this shit.

Our arms are made to hold them close, even when they are not here.

Here he is, though.  Absolutely present in my life.  My son Silas.  He exists more concretely in the typing of his name than in his physical existence.  I held him briefly hooked up to tubes and then later when it was only us, but I've held him even closer in the way I think about him, the way I write about my life without him.

I've learned to think in a certain way that seemed invaluable to survival.  Music was my first refuge.  I fell in love with music that made me feel Silas's absence with crystalline clarity.  After music it was laughter.  My brothers helped to remind me that bitter laughter is better than none at all.  And if I could find my way to open my mouth to speak or yell or maybe even laugh, then food and drink would surely find it's way in.

Look at me!  I'm a normally fuckitioning human.  Yeah that's right.  Fuck you functioning.  Good as fucking new.

Slowly I re-learned how to present a relatively normal facade, but always at the center of our focus was creating Silas's sibling.

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

I write to you now from the other side.  Stop reading if you are angry about not having a child, or if your loss is so fresh everything is enraging.  Read that top part again, and keep fighting.  Don't let anyone stop you from being exactly who and how you need to be.  Do not stop.  Do not stop.  Get up, stand up, throw those fucking hands up.  Push out the night.  Hide from the daylight.  Embrace your endless, enraging tears for your child, your daughter, your son, your big sticky stinky shitting fucking life.

It's true, it really does suck this much, and it always will.  Always always always.  It will always suck exactly this much that you and me and my wife and your grandparents and our siblings lost a life that was going to be amazing.

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

Stop reading if you're not pregnant yet with your next child, of if you're in your pregnancy and are freaking out all the time like we were.  Stop reading if you're me a year ago and I couldn't stand to read about the next, bright part of people's lives.

I'm on a futon in the living room and Puck is digging his furry, feline head under the folds of my sleeping bag.  The detritus of baby surrounds me.  In what used to be my bedroom: my wife, the other cats, my second son Zephyr, all sleeping & feeding & crying & pooping as babies do, and sometimes moms and kitties, too.

I stopped believing in hope and now it's my full-time fucking job.  I hope he's okay.  I hope that rash is no big deal.  I hope he's not crying because he's deathly ill.  I hope I get to see him more tomorrow.

I have to hope, and I've trained myself to stop that silliness and deal instead with exactly is right in front of me.  Except now, what is right in front of me, in my arms, is a son I feared to hope for.

The gurgle is in my heart, now.  The gurgle is in my brain when I see Zeph's little-old-man-new face staring back at me, absurdly alive and utterly clueless to how powerful he is. He has annihilated time.  It reminds me of when we first lost Silas and day or night meant nothing at all.

It is so much better now.

I didn't want to write this part.  Lu thought it was necessary, though.  She wanted people to know that there is still always hope of some kind.  We were the worst kind of unlucky to lose our son Silas, but we are profoundly fortunate to have Zeph with us now.  She never let go of that possibility while I continued to prepare for exactly what was, every day, over and over again, no matter how shitty.

She's in there right now using her breasts to feed and grow our son.  I'm out here on the futon writing about our insanely brutal and beautiful and sad and hilarious lives as Airbag blasts from little speakers, my toes tucked into the sleeping bag and Chumby our cat curled up on the couch.  I will sleep tonight completely enraptured by the endless darkness of Silas's absence and the now-ever-present force that is my other son Zephyr who is brilliantly alive and utterly confounding.  How do we do this now?  How does anyone?

Okay, I hear tears.  Maybe time for a diaper change or midnight dance-party.  Different day, better shit.

What physical aspects of your life changed when you lost your child?  What have you reclaimed since then, what is forever altered?  Has the lack of physical connection with your lost child forced you to find other routes to feeling close to them?  What are they?  What else do you want and how will you get it? 

good grief

'Tis very true, my grief lies all within; 
And these external manners of laments 
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief 
That swells with silence in the tortured soul; 
There lies the substance: and I thank thee, king, 
For thy great bounty, that not only givest 
Me cause to wail but teachest me the way 
How to lament the cause.

A voice. It sounds as though it is coming from far away although its source is right next to my ear. "Stop it. You're embarrassing yourself," he hisses at me. I don't respond. I don't stop. "You're scaring that little boy." 

I can feel his muscles tensing, wanting to move away from me. But he doesn't.

I have fallen into parts. A dry, thin, Greek chorus of me hovers up close to the ceiling. Tutting and disapproving. Scathing. All this emotion. So very florid and unprepossessing. It idly ponders things like the upholstery on the chairs and the many layers of gloss paint on the hot water pipes, painted and repainted over and over again. Bored with the hysterical fit taking place beneath.

I note the frightened face of the young boy with distant horror. "Shut up, shut up, shut up," I whisper at the collection of other fragments of me gathered on the floor of the same hospital corridor.

They form a fleshy tube designed for howling through, with my physical features stretched and wrapped around its outside. They slump on the floor, melodramatically collapsed. They wail and leak. And continue to wail and leak. Blood, milk, water, phlegm. They are beyond being reasoned with. 

The distant pieces inform me that I should be embarrassed and mortified.  And I am sorry for scaring that passing little boy. Very sorry indeed. It seems to me that his mother has an accusatory glint in her eye. But I cannot stop.

He looks at me, my husband, with a look that has been repeated many times since. 

You are doing this all wrong, you are very strange and you are a stranger to me. You are, not to mince my words, completely and utterly batshit crazy. My wife, what on earth has happened to you?

***

This is not how I thought I would react. I had an idea, before I had experienced any such thing, that I would be elegant in grief. Graceful. Gracious. I imagined that I would retain my kindness. That I would be considerate. That I would be the tower of strength that others could lean against. 

But I never imagined that the first death I would contend with would be that of my child. My three day old daughter. It transpired that I simply couldn't grieve for her quietly or discretely. This experience knocked my small claims to calmness, stoicism and compassion over the head and carried them off. Leaving a space to be occupied by my inner banshee.

Death didn't barge in. Not yet.

I still wanted to pretend that I hadn't even seen Death come in at the door. Because, in my childish grief mind, if I didn't see Death, perhaps he wouldn't see me. Or them. Besides there was no room for Death. There was no room for anyone at all apart from me and my daughters. I barged in on myself and squashed my face into my own face so hard, that I could no longer see. There was only me. My grief. My pain. My own closed eye pressed up against my own closed eye. Forming a greedy trinity with my children that occupied my entire field of vision, relegating my husband, my sister, my mother, my father, manners, social conventions, simple human decency, all to the peripheries. 

I was not the ascetic grieving mother, dressed in black with a single tear welling in the corner of her eye. Grief didn't endow me with restraint or wisdom. I was a despairing, empty thing with a ravening maw. Cramming myself with sweet things, fussing like a toddler over being too warm, too cold or too tired. As though all the inhibitory circuits in my brain and the taboos ingrained therein had been abruptly switched off. I wanted to scream and drum my heels deep, deep into the ground. Eat twenty three packets of chocolate biscuits. Walk around all day wrapped in a duvet. Storm around in tears, unable to contain anything, sending it all spinning out into the ether. 

But a few weeks later, I woke up, showered, dressed, brushed my hair, applied my make up and drove to the hospital. I sat quietly by the remaining incubator. Tears moistened the corners of my eyes. When one of the nurses asked me why I looked so grumpy, I replied, "Oh, that's just the way I look. No need to worry. I'm fine."

An internal switch had been thrown and I can't go back. To that greedy, grasping, uninhibited sadness. Sometimes I almost regret it, almost miss it. I don't think I'll ever cry for my daughter on the floor of a supermarket again. No matter how much I might feel as though I want to.

***

I am not proud of my behaviour in the immediate aftermath of Georgina's death. I have had to apologise to many people. But I don't know how to find that little boy or the young man who rounded the corner of the supermarket aisle looking for a tasty snack only to be confronted by a wailing woman in amongst the crisps. 

At the time, it didn't feel anywhere near enough. Part of me wanted to make even more fuss, to scream louder, to tear my hair and rip my fingernails out and leave them in a pile in the corridor, to scare more passing children. Surely my daughter's death deserved to be marked by more than the scaring of one paltry little boy?

At other times, it feels like too much. How could I have done that? How could I have folded in on myself so weakly, so comprehensively? How could I have frightened that little boy and embarrassed my husband? How cruel and how selfish.

Nobody can teach you how to lament. You can only muddle through in your own fashion. 

And no matter how public the display, or how private the lamentation, it would have been only the merest shadow of that unseen grief, the substance of which is known only to me.

Do you feel that there is such a thing as 'good' grief? Some sort of standard (or polite) way of behaving in the event of a bereavement such as this? Do you feel other people might be holding you to this standard, judging your grief as a success or a failure? Are you even judging yourself? 

Do you feel you let everything out or kept everything in? Do you feel proud of how you grieved? Or do you, like me, look back slightly shamefacedly?