geography

"psychogeography - the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals." 

Guy DeBord

“No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.”

W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn

My daughter was born in our local hospital, about ten minutes walk away from my own front door. She did not die there. She died in another hospital, in a different town, about fifty miles away. 

The first hospital is so physically close, so much a part of my life, that I have started to tune its presence out. I used to walk past and feel the air dense, a haze of hopes and fears emanating from the coarse render, as though my daughters and I were replicated in every room on every floor. Now it hardly registers, a grey rectangle squatting on the horizon. The memory of my daughters' births overlaid now with a dulling patina of time.

It is the second hospital that haunts my thoughts, the one where Georgina died. It is an old building, a former work house and then an asylum. A strange, twisty place, full of echoing halls and outmoded gadgets. 

My haunting started early, even before my daughter died. In the windowless NICU parents' kitchen, amidst the labelled pots of yoghurts and stained coffee cups, I phoned my friend to tell her what had happened. I suddenly felt myself whizz up to the ceiling and then higher still, saw from above my distress call emanating from the gizzards of the building, a flickering patch of bioluminescence amidst stone and cement, a synapse firing helplessly in an uncaring nervous system of concrete and discoloured gloss paint. Tap tap tapping. And I knew that this place was one which would not leave my mind easily.  

The room in which my daughter lived was a small one, a side ward with a blue linoleum floor. There were four bays, the twins were in the two spots closest to the door, Georgina to the left hand side as you entered the room. This place where my first born spent the majority of her life, where she took her final breath. A room I subsequently spent a great deal of time in. I failed to recognise the incubator in which she had lived when it came around again, or to locate the room where she finally died, where her heart stopped beating. My husband knew them, the incubator he pointed out, the room he would not, but they had already left my memory. This made me feel as though I had betrayed her, that I could not find these two small spots of contact between my daughter and the earth that remained behind her. 

Image taken from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL

I should like to go back into that room and stand there, now that it is empty of people, at nighttime perhaps? I don't know what it is that occupies that space now. An office? A different type of ward with larger occupants? I know that it is no longer a neonatal intensive care unit. That time has passed. The NICU is now located in another hospital on the other side of the town. I don't know what it is that I hope to find there, in that stillness, in the depth of the night. I always had a creeping sensation that there was something happening in the NICU, something hidden away behind the scenes. Because the plastic boxes and alarms surely couldn't be real. Too terrible and strange, surely a facade or a trick. Perhaps I hope that she is still hidden in the walls somewhere. Or maybe I am looking for pieces of her? Or shards of myself? Those that flew away with such force that pieces might still be embedded in the walls, those that crumbled away gently to such a fine dust that they could never be reconstituted, those I ripped out with my fingernails and cast away with a shudder of revulsion. Look, there's the part of me that cared when your boyfriend dumped you. That small pile of fluff in the corner, there's my certainty that everything will, in the end, be ok. That small translucent snippet of cellophane, a discard from some piece of medical equipment, the part of me that looked around eagerly for help, turned to higher powers for assistance and aid. 

There is only one other place where I can feel her so close at hand. Rather unromantically, it is the final toilet stall at my place of work, the one that adjoins the cleaning cupboard. In my dreams, the two places combine, to form a strange lurching amalgam of places where I might find some left behind pieces of my daughter. I turn away from her incubator to find myself in the toilet cubicle, although in reality these two places are miles apart.

I used to kneel there, by that toilet, clutching at the bowl, nausea roiling through my stomach. After she'd died, I walked back into the small, smelly cubicle for the first time in over a year and sunk to my knees again. I suddenly felt solitary and alone although it had been a long time since I had been a being in triplicate. I balled myself up amongst the cleaning supplies, laid my cheek down on the industrial size packet of toilet rolls and ached for her. "She was here," I murmured. "She was just here." And as I lay there, I momentarily felt that I could reach out, grab the empty air and twist it through ninety degrees, to send her hurtling away from her death and back to me. But, sadly, that proved to be just an illusion, although it is testament to my own desperation and craziness that I tried it. I had to check that it wouldn't work. 

 Are there any places that remind you of your baby or babies? Or where you feel a particular connection to them? How would you, or do you, feel about re-visiting these locations? Do you feel that you are looking for something?

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?

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? 

at the kitchen table: ghosts and rituals

The holidays around the change from summer to fall are rife with ancestor worship, death, and touching the spirit-world. Samhain. Halloween. All Souls’ Day. Dìa de los Muertos. Something about the end of October conjures the thinness of the veil between the land of the living and the land of the dead. In many cultures we invite the dead into our homes, places of worship, and communities. We show lost loved ones a good time, with feasting, sweets, games, and offerings. And we prepare for visits from the unloved as well—the restless, unhappy, malevolent spirits who might pop by to instill fear, extract revenge, or just toilet paper our lawns. Frightening costumes are donned to “Boo!” them back across the veil. Communities light bonfires, or pumpkins, to fight the darkness, and to guide the path home for our beloved dead.

Even in this secular community of grieving parents, we use October to remember our children, grieve our losses and remind the world that we are still here. October 15 is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. 

This month, we are sitting around the kitchen table talking about ghosts and rituals. Our answers are here. Want to join in? Post the questions and your answers on your own blog, link to us here at Glow in the Woods meme-style, and share the link to your post in the comments below. If you don't have your own online space, simply post your answers directly in the comments.

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1 | Do you believe you can communicate with people in the afterlife, or they with you?  Do you believe you can do this with your child?

2 | Do you believe in ghosts?  Has this changed since the loss of your child(ren)?

3 | Have your feelings changed about Halloween?  How do you respond to Halloween humor such as zombie and ghost costumes or macabre gravestones as decorations?

4 | Does your religious or cultural background have a day or holiday where the focus is honoring the dead? How do you use this experience to honor your own child(ren)?

5 | Do you ever reach outside of your spiritual/religious framework for comfort from other practices/religions?

6 | Is there a season or holiday, other than your child(ren)’s birthday, that inspires you to perform a ritual in memory of your child(ren)?

7 | Is there a ritual you perform everyday? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?

8 | Do you perform any public rituals (in real life or online) on October 15? How do your friends, family, or community respond to your acknowledgment of loss?

 

(to comment and partipate, please leave your answers and/or link on this month's at the kitchen table page)

special powers

In the early days of shock and tears, my husband reached his last straw in trying to comfort me: she loves us—she would want us to be happy. I couldn’t believe him. It sounded so strange and wrong. She was dead, and a baby. How could she want anything for her parents? But he believed it. He felt her with him.

I haven’t heard from her in a long time. I could tell you that we once had a long talk, or that I saw the spiritual path her soul is on. But now those communication lines seem dead, so I fall back on logic. I say I don’t believe in signs, that my baby does not have special powers, and that she can’t communicate with us.

So have I become a rational creature now? Or are my feelings just hurt by the silence?

* * * * * *

Other parents see signs. In a precious moment, they notice clouds or rainbows or lightning bugs and think, this is for me from him or her, or my child has something to do with why this is so beautiful.

I envy that belief, because it eludes me. If I could see my daughter in the trees or hear her on the wind, maybe I would not be so lonely and angry. But it doesn’t work for me anymore. My child can’t be trying to contact me, because she is a baby. Not an angel. Not a fairy. A baby.  Her little fingers can’t operate the paranormal phone system. She can’t align the stars or send me a butterfly. She’s too little.

I don’t like hearing that she wants me to go on or wants me to know she is okay; that only points to my massive maternal failure. All she should be thinking about right now is snacks, cuddles, toys, and trying to pull herself up to standing. Not how to make Mom feel better. If she were alive, she would not want the best for me. She would want me to find her damn pacifier right now. That’s how I want it too. I want me to be the mommy, and her to be the baby. Still. Even though she’s dead.

And please God, or whoever is out there, do not let my baby be a ghost, wandering between this world and the next. Please let her be someplace safe.

* * * *

On the other hand, I have had messages. And I’ve imbued her with a very special power: the power to leave me.

In the hospital I began, irrationally, to worry that she did not like me very much. Her little face was so frowny, her lips so pouty. She looked mad. (Maybe they all look that way?) Holding her in my arms, this is what popped into my heart:

She needed unconditional love. Something bad happened to her, maybe in a past life, and she needed to know that Brian and I loved her absolutely purely. She wanted love untainted by the scoldings, power struggles, and tears that come with being a human child. By leaving us so early, she was assured of our white hot love forever. It would heal her, so her soul could go on. But it would break me, and I would have to accept it.

I had one visit from her after that. A friend did a spiritual healing on me a few weeks later; the smell of strawberries wafted through my living room on a cold March morning, and we both felt it was my baby saying hello. I could envision fields of the spindly green plants heavy with fruit, and how much my girl would delight in them. Later I planted a pot of hearty alpine berries and got a strawberry tattooed on my ankle, her name hidden in the leaves.

Since then, there has been silence. She feels utterly gone to me, and I feel rejected. I may say it is not her job to comfort me, yet I sit here like a spurned lover, hoping for the phone to ring. This is my deep dark secret—that I am kind of mad at my baby for dying. That I am kind of mad she never calls.

Photo by VanCityAllie

* * * * * * *

Why did I make up this terrible story about her needing to leave us? For a while it felt like a message from her soul, or from God or the great beyond. As the days have worn on, without answers, without comfort, my faith in most things of a spiritual nature has dissipated. Now I think it was just my brain trying to make sense of an incomprehensible event.

I’m not sure this was the best story to tell myself, though. It gives her the power to choose death over life. The power to abandon her parents. The power to hurt us intentionally. All of which is insane. She was a tiny baby inside my body. A very bad thing happened to her, and we don’t know why.

Maybe that’s just too much for my heart to take. I would prefer to think that she never wanted to be here, than to think she is out there in the dark crying for her mommy. I’d rather say that we do not get clouds and hearts and stars from her, because she’d rather be free. That’s easier to face than the plastic bag of ashes upstairs.  

Most of all, I need to believe that this experience is far worse for me than it is for her, because I just can’t stomach any other option.

So some days I try hard to think of her as happy. I try to see her as part of everything, reveling in the universe, sending love to our family every day. Usually I can’t. So instead I absolve her of all responsibility—it is one way communication down that parental, paranormal phone line. If she’s anywhere, I hope she can hear that I love her.

* * * * * * * *

Have you received signs or messages that help you connect to your child(ren)? Was there a particular window of time when you felt most connected that is now closed? What are the stories you tell yourself to help make sense of your loss(es)?  

ghost story

The growl cuts through our nighttime routine.

Beezus and I stop, my heart beating wildly at a sudden, unnoticed danger. We glance at each other then the dog, then at the direction the dog is staring, poised in attack mode. Blackness envelopes the children's bedroom, and the dog stands just outside the door. The hair on the scruff of his neck is raised. As the dog bares his teeth again, my daughter scurries behind my legs.

"Mommy, the dog is barking at a people."
"Honey, there are no other people in our house. It is night. We are the only ones."
"Mommy, the dog is barking, because he is scared because we are the only people."

It was the perfect night for ghosts. You know, in the most clichéd of ways, it truly was a dark and stormy night. The wind rattled our windows. Ominous had been defining my mood for weeks. The chill of a harsh January winter had taken residence deep within me. I was waiting for something to happen. My husband was pulling an overnight shift at the hospital, and I was too pregnant with my son to fight a break-in.  I stared into the dark room allowing my eyes to adjust to the light.

Oh, please just let it be a ghost. Please let it be her.

I tiptoed gently into the room, the dog staunch and rigid at my right leg, the girl behind my left leg. And my eyes rest on a balloon hovering at person height, not quite enough helium to stretch to the ceiling, and not empty enough to fall to the floor.

I know how you feel, balloon.

I swat the balloon into the corner. "It is only your balloon, love, scaring the dog because it looks like a people." And I walked back sullenly. Why wasn't it Spectral Lucy? It is so terribly sad to yearn for my dead daughter to haunt our house, slam doors, drop papers, blow the curtains around when there is no wind. I want her to rock on the antique chair my mother-in-law gave us for the late night feedings.

photo by Paulo Brabo

Sometimes in the most earthly, normal way, I get a whiff of my grandfather--that distinctive crotchety old guy bouquet of overly applied cologne with overly applied aftershave mixed with some Bengay and peppermints. I will be reading a book and the smell of him will drift through the room, like he just walked into the room asking me to check the score of the game. And I don't care if my memory neurons just misfired, or if my old neighbor with a penchant of Old Spice just walked by our house, I take the moment to sit with my dead grandfather for a moment.

Hello, Pop. I miss you.

:::

"Mama, Lucy is stuck behind the red couch!"

My head shoots upward from my crumpled, intense, and near-sighted writing position. I stare at the door. I am immediately rigid in my office chair, as though I have been injected with very cold water right into my spine. Then I look back at my computer screen again, rereading the paragraph I had just written.

Please let her be stuck here, I think. Maybe in that space between the couch and the wall. I could kneel on the cushion and peek into that spot, 'Hello, love,' I would say. 'I miss you.'

I was working on the final edit of my last post Milagros while Thor napped and Beezus played. I wasn't quite sure how I wanted that paragraph to read, but I could visualize myself kneeling on our red couch, next to the antique secretary where Lucy's ashes sit in an urn, peering over the back of the couch, whispering to my dead daughter, "We are leaving now, love. Be back soon." As soon as we'd get home, I'd make a cup of tea, tell her about our day. It would be like having a portal to Lucy behind the couch, because I never did the rosary for her.

"Mama, Lucy is really stuck behind the couch!"

I am a rational woman. A cynic mostly. Someone who wrestles with my belief in God and in the afterlife. I sometimes believe in a little of everything and, other times, in absolutely nothing at all. I am the kind of person that devoted her entire undergraduate degree to studying religion and still consulted a five dollar psychic to find out what happened to my daughter's soul after she was stillborn. I desperately want to believe that the things that go bump in the night are my daughter, but I mostly find balloons where ghosts ought to be.

"Mama, Lucy is really really stuck behind the couch. Come quick."

I don't know her. I don't know what color eyes she would have, what room was her favorite.  I don't know what perfume she would have chosen for herself, or what chair would have been her favorite. I have no sense of who she would have been. I construct who I thought she was in my head, but as I watch my six month old son grow, it reminds me that even the things I did know about her would have changed, like her eye color and hair and her perfect little nose. So, now it feels like I don't know anything about her except that she died in me.

I mourn getting to know her well enough to sense her presence. Like my grandfather, I want to smell her spirit when the right combination of memory neurons fire. But Lucy is just a blank hole, a girl-shaped cut-out in my memory. The negative space of Lucy would have been filled if she had breathed or laughed. It was a room in my heart and brain that I saved for just her. I lack the ability to imagine a newborn ghost as anything but a tiny thing that couldn't lift its own head, let alone walk the halls at night. Maybe that is what I would ask a prophet or psychic or the Oracle of Delphi, can you talk to the stillborn? Can you have a real conversation if they only gurgled if they lived? Can a stillborn child haunt your house? Can she fly through your hallways and slam doors and blow out candles and scare the dog? And if she can, can you ask my daughter to haunt me?

"Mama! Lucy is stuck! I can't reach her."

I try not to focus on signs, and ghosts, and hauntings, and yet, God, I want Lucy to haunt my house. Far beyond scaring me, that would comfort me, wrap me in warmness. I would call to her. I would whisper to her. I would find myself photographing dark rooms searching for one tiny orb of Lucy and post it to the family along with the pictures of the other children with ice cream smeared across their face. I would get to know her. "There's Lucy." I would point to the photograph. "She loves that rocking chair and the smell of candles blown out."

I walk tentatively into the front room. I am savoring the moments of having my daughter call to me about Lucy. Just hearing her name said without tears and heartbreak some days is enough. As I walk closer, I grow afraid, suddenly, of finding her urn behind the couch, something that only occurs to me as I walk into the room and find Beezus kneeling on the red couch, peering over the back. It is the same exact position I had just written myself into a few moments before.

"Lucy is stuck, Mama." And her little finger gestures behind the couch as she blinks back tears in the over-exaggerated emotion of a toddler separated tragically from her favorite doll. I see the rest of our peg family lying all over the couch, except Lucy. 

This is the moment I crave, the one I just wrote about, having her here with us in spirit, feeling her ghost in our daily lives, having a portal to Lucy. Maybe Spectral Lucy forced the Lucy doll down there, just so I would know. Maybe she is watching after all. I stop myself and look around for her. I sniff the air. Listen for the wind chimes. It is so ordinary a moment I doubt the extraordinary-ness of it. I wait for the punctuation mark that never comes. I feel nothing but massive coincidence, even though all these weeks later, I can't quite shake it. The Lucy moment passed, if there ever was one, and I am back to being a toddler mama reaching a little peg doll from behind the couch.

I saved Lucy. That is the thing about naming inanimate objects your dead daughter's name, you get the extraordinary task of saving them, putting them to bed, depending on how maternal your toddler is, or just saying her beautiful name in regular life without cringing. Beezus ran off again in the other direction talking to her peg family about their adventure of being stuck behind the couch. I think about the paragraph on the computer again, lean over the back of my couch and close my eyes.

"Hello, my love," I whisper. "I miss you."

Do you believe in other-worldly encounters? Have you ever had any ghostly or supernatural experiences with your child? Do you feel your child around you? Have you ever had any extraordinary experiences in your grief that have comforted you? What kind of signs do you crave from the other world?