A name to every fixed star

I am reduced to tiny acts of motherhood: birthed her, held her, dressed her, burned her.

Named her. I named her.

I rubbed her name into my belly, whispered it to my bedroom ceiling: Baby. Hello baby. I think I know you. I think. I think. I think you might be Iris. Hello my love. Hello. Iris. Iris. Iris. Hello baby Iris.

I whisper it now and tap it out. She is letters next to each other, keys compressed in order.

I R I S

photo by mbecher

In Greek mythology, Iris was the rainbow. She brought water to the clouds and made the sky weep. She was a messenger goddess: tangible divine.

Iris makes your eyes pretty; soul’s window, shining iridescent. She’s purple and gold and upright in florists’ buckets, she’s blousy and overblown in an English country garden.

She’s a naked young woman running into the sea under a slate-grey sky, laughing, laughing as her friends  huddle on the cold sand in woolly hats and wellies. She’s an old lady with paper skin and a soft, powdery scent, peering at a vast, textured canvas in the National Gallery. She’s a bookish child with thick glasses and dimples, reading in the warm spot of her mother's bedroom floor.

She’s my dead baby. But she’s more real to some people than my living children. Others forget her for a time. But soon they remember.

When I say her name.

How did you name your baby or babies? 

lost and found

Cleaning out the basement was like finding a long spiraling staircase into our family, winding and intricate, exhausting and dizzying.

photo by bourget_82.

"Today is Finder's Day," my daughter tells me as she plays with a baby toy she once adored. "The day we find things." We found a box of hand-me-down big boy clothes for Thor that we tucked away for when he was big--3T-4T. He fits into them now. It is good luck, I am informed as the children tug at me, showing me a wheat penny underfoot. I found clothing from my single working life. Six power suits ranging in sizes from Size 4 to Size 12, plus three additional maternity suits. T-shirts that went to New Zealand, Puerto Rico, California, Italy, New Jersey, across the border into Mexico to buy tequila on the cheap. I found my favorite jeans. Ever. My hoodies for cycling. That perfect skirt from Anthropologie with feather fabric. I found all the little shoes, some worn only twice, before Beezus grew out of them. We made a pile of baby stuff--high chairs and cribs and beds that are not quite adult-sized. We are done now with miniature things.

There were boxes of Christmas ornaments bought at the drug store on Christmas eve, made of cheap glass and glitter. Photographs of my parents married and remarkably young, one of my ex-husband and one of me--thin, drinking bourbon, and not wearing a bra. I found parts of myself lost through the years of grief -- the single person, the happy person, the moderate drinker, the tortured corporate lackey, the caregiver, the auntie, the non-grieving mother. I'd forgotten about those people. I searched their faces looking for something that might explain why my baby died and how I became this person.

I was stoic about the process, then grateful for it. Afterward, almost excited at all the space we now had in our basement and in our heads. As I dug through clothes, piles of boxes, I realized how this stuff kept me simultaneously in the past and in the future, but not anywhere close to the present. I kept skinny clothes for a day somewhere down the line where everything would be back to the way it was. It was the same thing with the baby clothes. It was as though we freed ourselves under the weight of next time. I dug through boxes and boxes of little girl clothes marked Beezus Aged Younger Than Now, but still they felt like Lucia's clothing. I saved them for her. I was still waiting for her even up until this miscarriage last month. I saved nothing of Thor's, I admit. I sent all his newborn things to babylost mamas waiting for their next baby to come. But the girl stuff, the stuff meant for Lucia, was put in bins, preserved for the little sister that never came.

Later in the day, I notice a dark stone nestled in moss outside. I bend to pick it up. A caracol shell broken and exposed, its spiral clear and strong. It is exquisite in its brokenness, still filled with something weighty like emptiness. Caracol, I realize, is Spanish. It is a snail shell--slate grey with white and black. The intricacies of its chambers remind me of the sacred spiral. Fibonacci's sequence. The divine ratio. I pocket it.

I had an obsession with drawing the Fibonacci sequence after Lucia died. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 , 21,...I wanted my kitchen backsplash to be designed in the shape of it-one tile, one tile, two tiles, three tiles, five tiles...the front walkway, the back brick pattern, a tattoo, her name.

If I added each loss, the thousands of losses after her death, with the last, the next, the next, grief expanded in me, cut me up into this spiraled pattern. I was put together in a twisting line of boxes something wholly different than I was, turned around and back again, but something like me. Or more me. Lost and found. I felt expansive, larger inside than out. Emoting the emptiness I felt. Her death erased the color of me, blurred my subtleties into pockets of blackness separated by a thin white delicate casing. I became the curious dark holes in the shell of me, lines curving downward, spiraling into a simple black dot.

Three plus years ago, I packaged my grief into bins for another day, put them in my basement. I kept doing that with each stage of clothing Beezus grew out of, waiting for Lucia to return and wear them. I hid the hope away in the chambers of my shell. They are labeled anger and guilt and regret and resentment. Sometimes they are labeled not giving a shit. They were parts of my grief that feel like vital organs. I couldn't imagine living without them, so I carried them on my back, filling the space around me. Until it broke off my back, nestled into a bed of moss and waited for someone to pick it up.

It is Finder's Day. We go into the backyard and pick all that we find. Squash blossoms and fiddleheads. Bark and dandelion. We soak them in vinegar and salt and sugar, serve the strange found food to the guests. We empty the bins of what we wish we were. The bins of what we used to be. The bins of envy. The bins with more children to fill the hole of the one we lost. We fill thirteen contractor bags of those wishes, give them away for another family to make a home, a large perfectly symmetrical shell of happiness that is broken to us, but perfectly useable to others, nonetheless. It is hopeful even.

Our life feels all new now without those bins. Our home is emptier than we thought it would be, but it is perfect, nonetheless.

What things did you pack away things for your child or children that were never used? Were you able to give it away, or do you hold on to those things? Why or why not? How do you think holding onto these things helps or hurts you? Conversely, what things have you lost and found in your grief journey?

The meaning of (a) life

The quote above is from the Jerusalem Talmud, section Sanhedrin 4:1 (22a), if we are being precise. It's Hebrew, so it's read right to left. The second part, one to the left of the coma, translates to "and whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world." If you've seen Schindler's List, you might recognize the quote as a less flowery translation of what was engraved on the ring that the Jews Oscar Schindler rescued made for him.

What's important to me, though, is that that part, the often-quoted part, is the second part of the sentence. The first part, and for some reason it seems important to me that between the two it comes first, translates to "[w]hoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world."

Nobody is responsible for my son's death-- there was no humanly possible way to save him. But, yes, what was lost when he died, what we lost, is an entire world.

That's what we all lost, some several times over. Together-- galaxies, universes even. The mind boggles at the enormity.

In math infinity is not an easy concept to teach. Not necessarily because of the initial presentation, describing what infinity is, but because later it turns out that sets of things that you would intuitively expect to be of different sizes, even sets where you have an intuitive idea of which should be bigger, they turn out to all be of size infinity. For example, the size of the set of whole numbers is infinity. But, and this is intuitively non-obvious, the size of the set of odd numbers is also infinity. As, incidentally, is the size of the set of all numbers between 0 and 1. This is not a math lesson. It is a sort of a meditation on zooming back in, from the idea of the enormity of our collective losses put together to our individual losses, to each little life that did not get to be or did not get to be as long as we wished it to be. Each one a world. Still enormous, still mind-boggling.

Which is why, I think, looking for meaning in their deaths, looking for a reason, a higher purpose, whathaveyou, just doesn't sit right with me. What is lost is so profound, so shattering, that in my book  there is simply no reason good enough to justify it. There is nothing that can be put on the scales opposite the would-be world that is my son's life that would even it out. Nothing is worth it.

Once, almost by accident, I got to see an internal volunteer training manual of an extremely well-respected organization that works with bereaved parents. It had many good and compassionate rules, including one about not making yourself and your motivation for being there the focus point when interacting with bereaved parents because it should not be about anyone but the bereaved family. But then it also had a note from one of the founders of the organization, who is not a bereaved parent. In describing what led them to become a co-founder of the organization, the person talked about their very first interaction with a family that found out that their baby was about to die. It's a very moving story, and honestly I am deeply grateful that in that family's hour of need, this person was there for them. What did not sit well with me was the last part of the note. The gist of it is that when it was first happening, the future founder of the organization had a hard time dealing with the "why?" questions, but that now that they went on to found and build this organization, now they understand.

I remember feeling dumbfounded after reading this. I like the organization. I respect what they do. I think what they do is extremely important. But what the founder said struck me as remarkably self-absorbed. That someone would say that a person, a child, had to die to motivate and empower them, even if it is to help others whose children die, seemed to be to lack perspective, both in terms of what that death actually means (see: entire world, lost) and in terms of what seems like an extremely inflated sense of their own importance in the world. I mean, I can't imagine anything that I could possibly go on to do with my life that would be worth someone else's life, let alone a life so new that the outlines of the world lost as a result are barely perceptible through the fog.

I don't need to find a meaning in my son's death. Or, more precisely, I don't think there can be meaning grand enough to be worthy of him, to be worthy of the enormity of what it means to have to live without him.

To me, my son's death doesn't have to be beautiful and meaningful. It doesn't have to teach anyone anything, and it doesn't have to have changed our lives for the better. In fact, I think if someone tried to find anything of the sort in our story, I'd be beyond livid.

I remember a post on someone's blog from when I was only a couple of months out from A's death that has stayed with me throughout the years. The post was about how of course the deaths of our children are unfair, about how we, the survivors, didn't deserve it. There was a quote too, about how the only thing worse to imagine than their deaths being unfair and undeserved is for their deaths to have been fair and deserved. Jeez, right? What would you have to do to deserve to have your kid die? And if you put it that way... Well, the beauty and meaning thing, I feel similar about these-- what in the universe can possibly be worth my son's life? I have only one answer to that-- nothing, absofrigalutely nothing.

Which doesn't mean that I do not see beauty in our stories, in our story. The difference is that to me the beauty is internal.  It doesn't come from or depend on anything that happened as a result of A's death It's jagged and mangled, and may not look like beauty to anyone but us, and let's face it-- few are willing to look for long enough to see it. The beauty I see is in the origin of our pain, in why our worlds are torn and our hearts-- a mess of shards. That, of course, is grief, the new and unbidden roommate-inside-us.

To me, there is beauty in the pain, in the grief. But not because I enjoy the sight of blood and gore-- I don't. I see beauty in why the pain and the grief are there. They are there because we love our children. And when they die, when we lose the world that was to be them, the pain is the reflection, the mirror image of the love. And to me, that's good enough. Actually, to me that's the only way it can possibly be.

What about you-- do you need there to be meaning? Have you looked for it? Are you still looking? Has your answer changed over time? If yes, how? Why?

the places you'll go

Today we welcome guest writer TracyOC from Mommicked. Her incredibly insightful, clever writing reflects the dichotomy of babylost grief—gratitude in a moment, the heartbreak of forever. In 2007, Tracy OC's twin daughters were born at thirty-two weeks, suffering from Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome. Her daughter C. lived. Her daughter R. died. —Angie

There is a hat sitting on my desk that is bound for Australia.   

Australia.

It seems so far from my little town on the east coast of the US—practically half a world away with totally different seasons and ecology.  Then again, we’re practically next door neighbors if you consider the infinite and ever-expanding nature of the universe.

And there’s the hat itself that makes the world a little smaller.  It is a gift for another babylost blogger, knitted in honor of the fourth anniversary of my daughter, R's, death.

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R was born at thirty-two weeks, one minute before her identical twin sister, C.  R died when she was twelve days old, worn down by the compounded effects of twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), lower-than-expected birth weight, necrotizing enterocolitis and critical pulmonary valve stenosis. The day she died, a cardiologist stood over her bed in the NICU and said, "Sometimes the deck is just too stacked."

C was also smaller than the average thirty-two-weeker thanks to TTTS. But, even though her deck had also been pronounced ‘stacked’, she had a full complement of working parts and a deep well of baby rage. She graduated the NICU in three weeks—three pounds of piss and vinegar.

They were barely seven pounds together at birth yet, they encompass the full span of possibilities offered by parenthood. At the very least, they’re perched on the fence that defines the perimeter—almost died and almost lived.

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"You never know where your kids will take you."

My mom had a friend who used to say that. Her sons traveled the world as members of a famous boys choir. C hasn't done much traveling yet but I can feel the potential hovering just out of sight like the bones of her adult self that are starting to push through the pudge of her four-and-a-half-year-old face. Soon she will become who she is going to be. Soon the small world that my husband, T, and I share with her will expand beyond birthday parties and three-on-three soccer matches and bikes with training wheels into an everything that I can’t even imagine.  Because you never know.

When I think about R, at first, it feels like I know. She spent her entire life inside a plastic box. She was four pounds and sixteen and a quarter inches with blue eyes and curly, yellow hair.  Her eyelashes were just starting to come in. She got to ride in an ambulance.

I can peer into the space where her possibilities ought to be and it looks like an empty pit. I know that there will be no travels, no victories, no failed adventures. Nothing is hovering in the shadows here.

Lately, R’s nothing seems to be the same size and shape as C’s everything.

They both fill all the space inside my head and push until I feel like my skull will shatter into dust and get carried away on the breeze. 

And I wonder how different they are. Is a dead daughter the furthest thing imaginable from a living daughter? Or, when you consider the vast, unending possibilities of all existence, are they more like next door neighbors?

C’s body doesn’t give her entrée to every possible path. In fact, the body that she has is already limiting her possibilities. She’s never gonna be in a famous boys choir, anyway. Similarly, R’s lack of a body doesn’t completely cut her off from the human experience. She is loved. She is remembered. 

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I chose some fancy yarn for this hat that is bound for Australia—much fancier than I'd choose for a friend that I met through other circumstances. Special occasion yarn, if you will. The yarn is manufactured in Japan, Japanese silk spun with wool imported from, you guessed it, Australia.

This giant planet made small by the wonders of technology.

Sheep hair from one continent and fiber extruded from the salivary glands of moth larvae on another continent and jet airplanes and internet yarn stores and the blogosphere all twisted together by a mother who misses her daughter for another mother half a world away who misses her daughter too.

This giant planet made small by the most basic of all wishes.

R exists in a shadow world that is infinitely large and governed by things that I can't really explain. She is an ache in my soul, an unfillable void. But she is also every worthwhile thing that I’ve learned about grief and loss. She is a thread that runs all the way back to the earliest humans and on into the unending future, stitching me to the log ladies of folklore and the brilliant minds pushing at the frontier of modern medicine. She is a web that connects me to parents all over the world. She is a hat that is bound for Australia.

You never know where your kids will take you.

Have you connected with other grieving parents around the world? Have you had a chance to talk or visit them? What places have you "gone," figuratively or literally, since your baby or babies died? Where do you want to go? What other surprising connections have you made?

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?