Future Perfect

This post is brought to you by 80s synth chords and spaceships made from tinfoil and fishing wire. I'm wearing epaulettes. Yeah, they came back round. The president is a lesbian. I have a belt that makes me invisible. It's awesome. Errr... just trying to create a little atmosphere, folks. Sheesh. The point is, I'm writing from the future.

Today is four years.

Four years ago she died. Four years ago she was born. Four years ago time stopped. Life paused. She was still and so was the world. 

I didn't have the capacity to think beyond that room, that moment. There was no space for "next." And yet events continued to unfold and now I'm here in the future, and it is... different. It is not how things were going to be. It is so unfamiliar, this place.

Jess-that-was is no more. Life-that-was-to-be has not happened. And it's not bad. But it's not what I had planned.

But maybe this would have happened anyway. Maybe you would still have grown apart. Perhaps this was always going to be this way. You. Him. A tree. Some lemon tart. Two living kids singing Happy Birthday. A look exchanged. And then the turn away: Turn away. We are no more.

He blames today on then. I asked him once: where did it all go wrong? Did you ever feel content? And he recalled a time before she was born. He painted our new house for two small girls to grow in. He was so ready to step in to that life. 

But here we are apart. Four years on. There's one girl, one boy and one little jar of ashes. The same house, paint peeling. Looking out; looking beyond. To what?

Sometimes I try to see. I turn the tarot endlessly and hold my breath for Four of Wands, but normally it's just The World or The Wheel and I'm like yeah, yeah, brilliant, whatever, it's not the card I'd choose, but I'm sure I can twist it to mean something vaguely convenient.

And I think back to Jess-that-was, and all her wants, her hopes. Poor fool. She couldn't know the path that she would walk. Yet here I am, a fool again. The future unfamiliar looms, forever imperfect.

She'll not be there. And I still stand. No, I still walk. Towards... towards... towards...

A raygun and rehydrated food. A robot mixing martinis. A womb that's closed for business. And epaulettes, gold epaulettes. 

Do you think about the future? What do you believe it hold for you, now? 

raven

I am wearing a pink gown, the opening in the front. I am grateful for that small gift--back openings makes me feel so vulnerable and undignified. There is a paper blanket covering my legs. My shaking hands fumble with the thinness. I tear a hole in the thigh. It is not meant to keep me warm, I remind myself. There is a blood stain on it, already. I lean back on the table. There is a skylight over the stirrups. The rain falls like a war drum, hard, without rhythm, but persistent. The wet leaves cover the bottom of the skylight.

 

Nature keeps falling, water and leaves. Dead things that look alive. I stare at the counter. Purell and ultrasound gel. A pap smear kit, and non-latex gloves. A black bird flies over the building. It looks like a shadow of a happier bird, something predatory, but special. I know the baby is dead before he tells me. I have imagined the baby dead in all the moments I am not actively thinking she might be alive. But I wait for him to say it aloud.

 

The doctor tells me it looks like a miscarriage. I am twelve weeks pregnant, but with the labwork and the bleeding and the ultrasound without a heartbeat, an empty sac, perhaps, the baby is gone, or was never there. A paradox I may never unravel. My uterus growing and believing, even while I am stunted and cynical.

 

The doctor convinces me to go for another ultrasound because of the trauma of Lucy's death. He thinks I should see there is no heartbeat again. He said, "Just so you know, deep within you, that we did not make a mistake." And I tell him steadily without tears in my voice that I held my dead baby and I still thought it was a mistake. Her skin was torn and growing colder, and I thought she would live again. I thought there was some system-wide error, that she could still come back, if someone did something other than mourn. I thought I could puff my lungs up, cover her nose and lips, and breathe life back into her, as though the doctors and nurses hadn't quite thought of that yet. "She just needs some air," I wanted to explain. "We just need to remind her to breathe."

 

Sometimes I still think that perhaps we cremated her too soon.

 

I watched a hawk chase a raven, diving and attacking. It was a spectacular show above us as we hiked through the woods to a waterfall. We all stopped and gawked. I bent over in the first bangs of unbearable cramping. The ravens have been around me all this month, waiting for the death in me to escape. The ravens swoop low, cross in front of my car, reminding me that I can lose once, lose twice, I could lose them all. It has been an unkindness of omens--dead baby birds on my front steps and ravens, stopping me in the street, daring me to hit them. Maybe I should call the nevermore baby, Raven, the blackness, the hole within me.

 

I received an email just as I began bleeding. "Your life is beautiful, so beautiful now. Do you appreciate it? I think you do. I appreciate it, but I can't bear it. I have to look away. It is painful how beautiful it is." It is beautiful, even though our daughter died. I made something else out of her death--a life I always wanted to live. I understand if someone can't bear it. Joy reminds me of grief too. Happy reminds me of sad. And besides, two children is something, I get that. Two living children cover the holes where the others were. You'd never notice if you didn't search for the spaces where others were supposed to be, if you didn't read our stances and our smiles. It would be hard not to believe the lies we are telling in our photographed smiles. My dead outnumber my living now, but still two children is not all of your children dead. I do appreciate it.

 

What I wanted to say, though, is that we still suffer. We have a beautiful life, but we still suffer.

 

They search my womb and they don't find the baby. The technician says the baby is dead, even though she is not supposed to say it aloud. Words I needed to hear. In moments, I begin the process of miscarriage, passing clots and tissue. As though my body was holding onto her, until someone could speak the truth that she died. The little dot inside of me that was growing once is gone now. The children would ask me how big she is every day. And I would tell them the size of an olive, the size of a lime, the size of a peach. But she was no size, just my womb grew, making space for an unkindness. She is an empty space now. A hole of what could have been.

 

I thought I could slip under the radar with one more quick baby, like Fate could turn her attention somewhere else for a quick nine months. "The last time. The only time. One chance," I said to my husband. "One more chance at one more child, then nevermore."

 

photo by Brian Auer.

I know what I know and I still got baby greedy. I still thought somewhere in me that things would end differently. I am not ranking my sadness, but this is a small grief compared to Lucy. Lucy died, and I held her. I felt like I knew her, she was in my womb for 38 weeks nary a thought of life without her. I never imagined her dead in those 38 weeks. But my little raven died and I only ever imagined her dead. (It didn't help the pain.) 

 

Perching on the fence in my backyard, like the raven, Grief waits for the physical pain to subside to invite himself into our home again. I reacquaint with Grief, another stodgy old raven wearing black. He is silent, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, sitting by my office door, whispering, "Nevermore."

 

 

Have you experienced a miscarriage before or after your loss? How did the grief differ? How was it the same? Did the expectation of loss help with the reality of it? If you have only suffered from one loss or none, how do you abide with others in this community who suffer from multiple losses, or who have not suffered from multiple losses? How do you feel Grief stalks you? Like a raven or a hawk?

The Most

When do you miss him the most? Lu asked me last night.

"Alone in the car," I replied.

When I can't listen to the radio for another second and I'm tired of all the music I have and I'm just driving along quietly and my mind starts to turn, I feel him not-there so powerfully it makes me choke.

In the first months and years after he died driving alone in the car was when I cried the most.  A new story about pregnancy, or that perfectly placed Modest Mouse tune, it would annihilate me and the car was the perfect capsule to scream as loud as I needed.

It is also why I will never, ever put up one of those fucking Baby On Board signs.  I wasn't planning on running you off the road, but since you're rubbing it in my face maybe I should!?  Strange that they don't make a dead baby sticker to add to those insanely annoying sticker families, either.  Also, get out of the fast lane and learn how to drive!  My typical rant makes Lu laugh.

What about you? I asked her, serious again.

"When we're around other kids, friend's kids, that would have been the same age as him.  I always miss him, but that's when it's the worst."

Yeah, I agreed.  Absolutely.

Three year old boys just becoming little guys with their dads running around the yard or walking down the street as alive and independent as only three year olds can be.  I remember pieces of what it was like to be that age, but I will have no memories of Silas at this age.  He vanishes to shadow every time I glance toward him.

In the evening, alone, I feel more alone for missing him, for never knowing him.  The constructs and inventions to heal a day are insufficient to make sense of why we can't share the world with him.

His death added a bone in my body lengthwise through my heart, sliced my liver in two, blew my innocent vision to smithereens, twisted my ankles unwalkable, trapped my breath in poisoned lungs.  I'm not the same person I was before Silas and that kinda sucks 'cause I kinda liked who I was.

More importantly, I was very much looking forward to who Silas was going to transform me into. (insert bitter laughter)

I am transformed absolutely but not at all how I wanted.

To be so wrong about how I thought things were going to go is profoundly undermining. What else will I get wrong?  What other traumas await down the road?  How can I trust myself to make any choices, to have any expectations about the future when his absence is devastating proof of how utterly foolish I could be?

Even worse is Silas's transformation from life to death.  From potential to memory with barely a stop in between.  From ours here to love and cherish and hold, to dust we cannot hug.

A thin, young, sliver of tree quivers in the evening breeze, under the stars of his name and they remind me silently of the never-ending-quiet blasting from his vanished lungs.

When do we miss him the most?  

Always we reply in unison.  Always.

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

Are there certain instances or particular experiences that most remind you of your lost child or children?  Has that changed over time?  Are there new moments that catch you by surprise?

nothing to be afraid of . . . . .

When I was eighteen I had a premonition.

She was standing across the bar from me. In a student union. Not a student. Not a teenager. Something about her posture was crushed. Tiny fractures in her vertebrae. But I didn't recognise grief when I was eighteen. Because I was lucky and stupid.

We were loud back then. Or we were quiet. Boasting with ideas. Or clinging to the wall, hoping to pass unnoticed.

Our thoughts so predictable that you could probably have written them out on a blackboard and counted out the nodding dogs. Insecurity and hubris and hormones. But hers were unreadable.

She was slight with a cloud of dark hair. She drank only water. Her eyes were wide but she seemed to be looking somewhere other than where she happened to be at the time. Sinking or rising to a parallel, near the ceiling or just above the floorboards. Disconnected, in a far off place. She looked mildly upon us. Occasionally her expression was kind. At other times, I suspected, less so.

I almost spoke to her once. Out of curiosity. But, before I approached, I asked someone why she came here, to our bar.

 "Her baby died," was the reply. Apparently her baby had died at the hospital around the corner. In the inner city, it's hard to disentangle places for death and places for entertainment. Perhaps that bar was as close as she could bear to get.

I felt relief wash over me.  That I hadn't spoken to her. Because now, now I was afraid of her.

How sad. Eighteen year old me, you were so stupid. You were afraid of a mother and a little baby. You were afraid of love, afraid of death. How silly. You can't outrun those two, even with eighteen year old legs. If you are a human, those two will chase you down, no matter how fast you run. 

I don't even know if this story was true. I never did speak to that lady in the end. A dead baby is one of those convenient explanations rolled out for anyone acting a little oddly. The handy urban myth. Her baby died. His baby died. An instant and, supposedly, plausible explanation for all sort of scary and strange behaviour. 

Because we're frightening. All of us here. Their worst nightmare.

Altogether now . . . .  

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

****

I emailed a friend this autumn. About how the Halloween themed October page on my cupcake calendar was really pissing me off. It was a cupcake with a gravestone on the top. Hmmmm. Death. Is it cute and yummy? Or scary and associated with ghouls and monsters? Is death frightening? Or is it something appetising and edible? Trivial or taboo? Awful or nothing to be afraid of?

Photograph by Maria Olejniczak

***

Just after Jessica, my surviving daughter, came home from hospital, a film came out on release in British cinemas and was trailed extensively on television. I came to hate this film, 'The Unborn.' Can you guess where this is heading? Something a bit spooky and unsettling appears to be happening? Check. Is there a hysterical woman? Check. You can bet they'll be a dead baby at the bottom of this one. And, let's face it, the title is a bit of a giveaway.

A young woman discovers she was (is) a twin. Her brother died in utero. And now she is haunted by the dead twin? Possibly? I'm not entirely sure from the rather confused plot synopsis I just looked up via Google and, for obvious reasons, I wasn't queuing up to see this film.

Because there is nothing like the repetitive screening of a trailer for a horror film to sneak up on you and remind you of what your life has turned into.

**** 

This strange dichotomy seems to put us in a bit of a bind. We are scary but we must also remain meek. Something to scream at that must also creep about, quiet as a mouse. 

We are terrifying. What has happened to us is so awful that it is wheeled out as an explanation for a multitude of sins. It is a frequently used plot device, the dead baby. It has been written about at Glow before, by far better writers than me, please see this wonderful post of Tash's here. Arson? Drinking too much? Suicide? Even, as in one extremely popular British soap opera, stealing someone else's baby? The motive? Yup. That's right. A dead baby.  

As someone with my very own, extremely personal, dead baby, I do sometimes wonder what people think of me. Do they think I'm eyeing up their babies, ready to make my snatch? That I'm drinking from secret bottles of gin secreted about my house? Crazily cackling over my box of matches? I know it's been a while since my daughter died but there is still time for the crazies isn't there? But, in reality, all I do is love her and miss her. And sigh quietly.

A fictitious dead baby stands in for unspeakable horror, an explanation for the most erratic and strange behaviour. One that might even afford the perpetrator some sympathy (although don't bet on that, poor baby-snatching-lady from the soap didn't get much here in the media) a real, honest-to-goodness, true life dead baby seems to be a different proposition. When they stop being a plot device and become a real child. My daughter, Georgina, who I loved and cared about. Not a handy explanation or short hand for why I'm so screwed up. It is, apparently, less easy to discuss her than it is a made up baby on a soap opera. I've had entire conversations about the dead-baby-mama-turned-baby-snatcher plot with people who have never once mentioned my own daughter. Although I know that they know that I have a personal interest in this storyline.

We don't talk about that. If this happens to you in real life you'd better not become unhinged. You can't even get away with being slightly angry in some quarters. Don't yell, don't even whisper. Don't tell anyone your feelings or you will be giving too much away. Bad enough that your baby died. Don't talk about it for heaven's sake. Don't have any feelings about it. Don't, whatever you do, write on the internet about it. Just keep quiet.

Scary. Scary and silent. Silent about the very thing that makes us scary. An odd corner to be painted into. One that I'm uncomfortable in.

Do you think that 'joe public' finds us scary? Do you ever feel scary?

 What are your feelings about the 'dead baby' plot device, that favourite of literature and film?

Why is talk about strong emotions, death, love or anything that really matters, so very unfashionable? Or is that just in the circles in which I move? For the purposes of full disclosure, I'm 32, British and move in circles composed of mothers with young children and/or people who like numbers and databases. Is it different where you are?

What It Feels Like To Almost Have A Child After Losing A Child

Two weeks from today, on May 7, around 12:30pm in Los Angeles, we are scheduled to meet our third child, a boy, who if anything like his older sisters, will be long and thick and blue eyed and full of hair.

We have a name picked out for him. We have a few things ready for his arrival; an old car seat, some hand me down articles of clothing, an aqua colored swaddle blanket and a scattering of other necessities, like baby soap and a sealed bottle of whiskey. Barring any unforeseen calamity or early entrance, he will come into the world after spending thirty-eight and a half weeks inside his Mother, the same amount of time his sister spent in utero before dying.

Seventy-five weeks of pregnancy has come down to this.

+++

We are dancing more and more these days. My three year old and I run around the house singing wildly off key to the vibrations of Florence + The Machine, cranking the volume during the “loud parts,” as Stella refers to them, and pumping our fists and spinning in circles and group dancing with Momma, which involves an awkward three person and one belly swaying hug.

We have been doing this sort of tribal dance ever since Margot died. It was always a brief respite from the agonizing grief, a tangible way for us to contrast the sadness surrounding Stella’s life with some joy. But something feels different now. As the song ends and we throw ourselves onto the couch in exhaustion, the sadness that once lingered after the dancing is now replaced with anticipation, the light at the end of another long pregnancy tunnel, the hopeful gift of a son, out of the ashes of his sister.

+++

I have been growing a beard since we entered the third trimester because I don’t know what else to do for my son in utero, because it’s the only outward sign of hope I can think of, because the simple act of not shaving feels like something I have control over. It is thick and black and surprisingly vigorous after two months. And it’s mostly awful looking, something my partner says “doesn’t look bad or good.” But it’s there, growing simultaneously with my son, exuding love and hope every time I pick food out of my mustache or my daughter yanks at it in laughter or I itch it at work or gently pull at it while I’m thinking or reading.

+++

Thirteen months and one day ago, as my partner bled and bled with no clots in sight, we were twenty minutes away from a hysterectomy.

Thirty-six and a half weeks ago we got lucky, damn lucky, that the cells of a tiny egg and a tiny sperm entered into a union that has, up to this point, stayed the course. There is gratefulness in abundance.



Mostly though, there is this inescapable feeling like our lives are hanging in the balance, like we’re standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a rugged coastline, waiting to be pulled back or kicked off the ledge.

I don’t know how we could go through this again.

I really, really, don’t know how we could go through this again.  

It’s damn near impossible to keep myself from looking over the cliff, from imagining the free fall should this little boy not make it. The fear, which introduced itself early on in the pregnancy, as if on cue, has successfully set up iron gates around my hopeful heart, holding me in a perpetual state of doubt, my gaze nearly fixed on the rocky coastline below. The emergency run to labor and delivery at thirty weeks didn’t help. Nor have the poor non-stress numbers, the abnormal blood work, or the two dozen times we had to get the doppler out to see if he was still alive. The only relief from the fear and worry is that it’s persistence has become commonplace.

And then there is the hope. Hope that this baby will live, and keep living. Hope that I will hold him in my arms and look into his eyes and tell him that he is my favorite boy in all the world. Hope that I will get to introduce my three year old to her live sibling, to see the two of them together, a dream of such vivid beauty I can hardly even think about it.

Hope that in two weeks time, we will pick up what’s left of ourselves, step back from the cliff, turn around and walk back towards home.

___________

If you have had a subsequent pregnancy, what was your experience like? If you haven’t had a subsequent pregnancy, how does it feel to read about other members of the baby loss community who are pregnant? Is it hopeful? Diffiicult?

See? Magic.

I am sitting on my front porch with a cup of coffee, watching the sun set on the brick building in front of me. The sun behind me, and the world is a beautiful place, filled with red and yellow and gold. My chair is comfortable, my coffee is good. The dogs are sniffling around the front yard. I can hear the sounds of children, in those last few moments before the call to come in for the night will go around the neighbourhood. It was a busy week of travel and meetings, it was a busy Saturday of errands and household things, and I have this brief time – with nothing but to sit and enjoy, watch the changing of the light.

They call this the magic hour.

What is grief, but a form of magic, I ask you? What is the terror and the pain and the horror that I found myself in four years ago, but a form of magic, a spell, an incantation that was thrown over me? It is easy to imagine the vile and loathsome creature that took my son away from me – it is easy to think of a cave, a foul smell and the guttural words of a spell. That seems as good and as reasonable an explanation of any about why tragedy struck me, struck mine, struck you and struck yours.

Magic, all around us. Old order magic with no waiving of hands, muttering of incantations. Magic, hiding in plain view. Magic that is good and magic that is so terribly evil it is impossible to behold. Magic held into balance, just barely.

And it seems a reasonable explanation that the magic of that spell would slowly wear off, that I would be able to find my way in the world. I look the same as I did back then, more or less, I walk and talk but I am utterly changed. See? Magic.

I believe in goodness and mercy, all the days of my life, in spite of what happened. Perhaps I believe more strongly now. See? Magic.

And on my front porch, watching the liquid line of gold fall towards the ground, I can be captivated by sudden and ephemeral beauty. See? Magic.

Grief then a form of magic. It seems appropriate to think that – the best explanation. So much of our world seems fragile, improbable. The quickness of the life and death, the peace of a Saturday night sunset. The curve of my son’s ear, the way his finger was crooked just like mine. See? Magic.

And this. The world I live in now. This wholeness and this peace that I find has come over me. My contentedness and my delight in beauty. I wouldn’t have believed it possible. See? Magic.

It is customary, at the end of a Glow Post, to ask a series of questions. This is my last post on Glow, and I would beg your leave to simply say thank you. It has been an honour for me to write here. I thank you that you read. I wish you comfort, and when you are ready for it, magic.