ghost town

I lost my daughter then I lost my friends. Not simply lost them. It was more like they drove me out into the country and told me to go run out in the woods for a while, they waited by the car.

"There, Angie, check out behind that big tree. A little further away. There is something shiny there. It is the internet and there are people on there whose babies died too."

"Over here? I don't see it."

"Just a little further. Go on now. Be good. I loved you once."

"Okay. I love you too."

And I watched their license plate become illegible in the distance. I walked back to town, determined to understand, only to find that they moved without a forwarding address. So, I suppose, they lost me.

photo by Denise ~*~.

Villages of friends were gone. I walk into the ghost towns of my past, sidle up to the bar. There is nothing left. I am not part of their tribe any longer. I slam the empty bottle of the long bar. They were drinking buddies, after all, not friends. For years, it made me angry. It made me angry that my daughter died and then I kept losing more and more and more until it was just me.

When it was just me, I saw you. And you. And you. And you. And you is beautiful and amazing. I told you all about the pain of losing friendships, and my daughter, and raising a daughter and every little thing about this experience. I listened to you talk about it too. We suddenly had a little boom town of the babylost. I felt normal.

Normal was all I ever wanted.

+++

Everything about my life changed after Lucia died, even though it looked exactly the same. And I feel attached to all those things I once was, like grape vines winding around the withered parts of me--my arrogance, my lightness of being, my inappropriate anger, my bravado, my aloofness, my old friendships, the confidence I had in my body. I cut the shoots, understanding that those bits of me are dead, but the tentacles grow back, clutching dearly again to something already gone. (I fear it takes the nutrients of my thriving, beautiful bits.)

In the weeks after, it became abundantly clear that I had no idea how to feel anything but anger and longing about her death. I was not emotionally equipped to handle the death of my daughter, except I had to handle it. It was awkward and painful. I clumsily talked to people, until I just couldn't do it anymore. I drank heavily. I watched the same safe comedies over and over. I was afraid to call friends and cry. I thought I would never stop--hysterical, uncontrolled tears. Keening. Misplaced anger. Blame. Fear. Blubbering. I heard the conversation before I uttered a word.

If I say I want to die now, you won't understand. You will think I am suicidal. You will call the authorities. You will take my only living child. I just don't know how to live this life without her. I don't know how to shop for groceries now that she is dead. I don't know how to make small talk. I don't know how to watch Law & Order. I don't know how to do anything.

And so, thinking they understood that about me, I expected them to call me. Surely someone calling a grieving mother would know what they signed up for if they called. It felt rude to call someone, even a very good friend, just to cry, even though, ironically, I longed for someone to call me in the early months and cry. I just wanted to be needed, not underestimated. I had once a month calls from a few friends, which were like tall cool glasses of water in a drought. I never cried during those conversations. I was almost maniacally positive about how fine I was doing. Then those petered away too. Mostly, it was silence broken by long, drunken tirade emails. 

Left to my own devices, I behaved badly. Oh, I behaved graciously here and there, but mostly I was angry, chaotic, impulsive, and afraid, lashing out at unsuspecting strangers in markets and yoga studios. The crying stopped eventually. The misplaced anger at other people slowed. I quit drinking. I figured out how to shop, and chitchat, and watch crime dramas. I learned how to feel all the emotions of grief, not just the loudest ones. I went to baby showers, and parties, and stopped expecting, or wanting, anything Lucia-related to be discussed. That took time, but it happened. The grief fog lifted. 

Being the me I was and grieving was fucking torture. So I changed stuff about me, like who I trust and when I trust and what I trust and how much I trust. I changed what I give and what I take and what I give personally and what I take personally. I changed what I complain about and what I don't.

I couldn't call those old friends after I changed. I didn't know what to say to them anymore. I wasn't over her death. I would never be over her death. But I learned to live with it. Time had moved forward. I moved forward. They moved forward. I missed so much, and they missed so much. Not many people stepped up. Those that did, stepped away eventually. I never called them to ask about the thing I should have been asking about--birthdays, illnesses, new jobs, old jobs, pets, boyfriends, girlfriends, new babies. When I came to fully understand that my daughter was never coming back, I came to understand that neither were my friends. I don't blame them anymore. I was a terrible friend--grieving and overly sensitive, impetuous and distant. I didn't and still do not understand how I could have been any better. I did the absolute best I could with who I was. Emotionally, I was stunted and small. And maybe they were too.

+++

I wrote because I didn't know what else to do with this ache in me. I couldn't speak it to my closest friends, so I wrote her birth story. I posted it on the internet. I thought that was everything I knew about her. I put it on a blog. Maybe someone will read it, maybe someone will understand. It was a flare shot into the night. Or a campfire, as we say around here.

Then I wrote about going to the market. Suddenly, people were there. Other grieving parents. I read about tears in the produce department. I wrote about my fears and anxieties and loves and revelations. I wrote like no one but babylost folk were reading, and sometimes, I wrote like they weren't even reading. I wrote with a kind of freedom that is both naive and slightly endearing. I found myself in the community I longed for since birth--supportive, honest, loving, compassionate. I made friends who appreciated my dark side, as well as the other parts of me. And I theirs. I had found normal.

Writing publicly about grief and pain and the darker parts of losing your child remains both incredibly comforting and absolutely terrifying. In most of my friendships that ended, the complaints centered around my blog and writing. My friends didn't like grieving, complaining, sad, disappointed Angie. 

You wrote about the friends! How unforgivable! You made it sound like we are terrible people! You write about your dead baby every week! That's too much! You make art and sell it! It is about the death of your baby! How terrible! How gauche! Everyone is sick of everything BABYLOST! It is unhealthy! It is wrong! We can't have it!

I never expected any friends to read my blog. It had nothing to offer them. It certainly had nothing to offer me for them to read my innermost, ugliest thoughts about the death of my daughter. I never imagined they would read, but they did.

I wrote because I had no idea what else to do. I wrote because my friends didn't call, and I couldn't call them. I wrote because I needed a community, to feel normal, to feel worthy of compassion. But it came with a steep price. 

Because I lost Lucia, I found something of myself tangled in the tumbleweeds of my emotional and physical defects. After everyone left, something dark and ego-filled, sensitive and critical, drunk and capable of sobriety, redemption, and forgiveness emerged. I forgive those friends, not because they have made amends, but because I have. I had to forgive my humanness. In doing that, I had to forgive theirs. I was grieving the death of my daughter. I did the best I could, and so did they. I sit with who I am now, a human being worthy of compassion. You taught me that. Thank you.

How have your friendships been affected since the death of your baby(ies)? Do you have a blog, or on-line presence? Do your before-friends know about your on-line community of babylost? Do they read your blog, or participate in your forums? How do they feel about it? How have you felt about being public, or not so public? Anonymous? 

Indelible

Who are we, now? Are we still ourselves, the people other people know, except, you know, grieving? Or are we changed forever, marked in a way that changes who we are fundamentally? Is there a middle path, a third option? I'd like to think there is, mostly because that is how I feel-- I am still me, but I am also marked.

I've often wanted to be marked in a physical sense too. To underscore, I guess. Sometimes also so that others could see-- though this desire is much less prominent these days, I've also from time to time wanted to make sure that others couldn't ignore my son. And a physical mark would probably make that somewhat harder to do. There are always the irreverent t-shirts, ones we've all fantasized about making and wearing. But fun as those would be, they are not permanent, and not exactly changes to our physical self.

This is likely why I am always at rapt attention when bereaved parents discuss their memorial tattoos. Some of these are true works of art, with layers of meaning and images in images. I wish I had the creativity to design something like this. But even then, I am so culturally conditioned not to get a tattoo myself (it's kind of a big Jewish deal, concentration camps and all) that I can't imagine breaking with that. So I admire the heartbreakingly beautiful work of others, and I think about how you really need to know the story already to see the entire story in the image. Which means that these are really for the parent, and not so much for the passers by.

So my body remains unchanged, except for what life does to it. And yet, I feel changed, I feel marked. I realize, too, that some of these changes are about my part of the story, and some are about A's, or rather about me reacting to his part. For example, the way pregnancy after is different, that's about me. That part is about what it feels like to be a mother whose child, whose baby, dies. And who then chooses to chance the fear and the anxiety and all the attendant crazy in hopes that another child might live.

On the other hand, the fact that I can't make myself fill out the part of my online profile with a cool local toy store that asks for children's birthdays because it numbers said children? That, I believe, is about him. It's about me knowing in my bones that he was here, and so I can't list the son who was born after him as "child 2." But at the same time I can't very well list the birthday of a dead kid under "child 2," not least of all because the store will then send me gift suggestions for him based on the age he should be for his birthday and various commonly celebrated holidays. And that? Might just break my heart.

So I am changed. But am I marked? Recently, I've come to believe that I am. Not in a way that others can see easily. The most striking of these little internal markings is the reaction I have to a very everyday thing-- supermarkets. Some of the food stores where I shop have flower sections right by the door. And I noticed that every time my eye falls on the fresh cut bounty, the first thought, and I mean the very first thought that enters my mind is essentially about which of the bunches on display I could take to the cemetery. This is more than five years later, so I think it's safe to say that this is not a passing thing. It is, in fact, so much a part of me now, so much not out of the ordinary for me, that it took me all this time just to notice. And I don't even go to the cemetery much now, so I think of choosing flowers much more than I actually do that.

When I did notice, it made me feel only a little sad. Mostly, mostly I think I was and am glad to have this. This change is no less indelible than the tattoo ink, even if less obvious to anyone else. In a weird way it's just nice to know that I carry my son with me all the time.

Are you marked? What are your markings and how do you feel about them? Are you glad to have them? Or would you rather not step on grief land mines as you navigate life?

slow

I move slowly through the world now.  I used to rush all the time.  Always on the go ready for next next next.  Busy at work, busy with friends, I was always looking forward to whatever it was that was happening tomorrow or next week or next month.  Throughout Lu's pregnancy I had my gaze focused on the end result, on having our child in our arms and the whole rest of our lives to get started, finally.

Her water broke, the mid-wives arrived, the longest night of my life started, and all I wanted was for it to be over and our child to arrive.

What I would give to go back to that night and tell the me that no longer exists what was going to happen, and what I had to do to fix it.

To the hospital, now, I would tell me.  Fuck the supposed knowledge and experience of those terrible mid-wives.  Fuck their surety, how certain they were that it would all be fine.  Fuck the protestations of my wife who would not have wanted to go at first.  Fuck all of that.  To the hospital where we should have been the whole time I would have insisted and none would have stood in our way.  The me-then that was terrified and the me-now that is shattered, Lu too, together we might have had a chance. Silas might have had a chance.  Instead dawn broke and he still hadn't arrived until finally in the afternoon they had to drag him out of her, bloody, blue and not breathing at all.

Suddenly we couldn't go fast enough.  The ambulance couldn't arrive quickly enough.  We couldn't get to the hospital in time.  We raced and raced but it was far too late, he was gone gone gone. Everything I wanted and waited for smashed to pieces in a single afternoon, as though the Universe itself had just dropped an infinitely dense and heavy brick directly on my soul.

Now, I go slow.  The stress and pressure I used to thrive on now makes me incredibly anxious and uncomfortable.  It started right away.  As we lay splayed out and shattered by grief and loss, all I could do was take it moment my moment.  After a few days I began to be able to think an hour or two into the future.  As in, maybe I'll eat something... later.  Eventually, after many months of paralyzing sadness, I re-learned how to last a day and take the next as it came.  Tomorrow I'll shower, I'd think, and then fell an immense sense of accomplishment when I achieved that lofty goal.

When I finally started working again I quickly realized that the way I used to do things was no longer appropriate.  I used to finish things just-in-time, but when I tried to do that again I found myself shaking with stress, palms sweaty, and my mind in turmoil as I tried to prioritize and execute what needed to be done.  After several near-panic attacks, I learned I no longer functioned that way.  So I stopped trying.  Silas's death taught me that time will not wait, and if you don't have enough of it to get something done right, you're not going to get any more.

So it's slow how I go, now.  Slow to rise from bed, slow to eat, slow steps through another day without Silas at my side.  He's inside me only, now.  Transferred in death from inside Lu only, beautifully, to inside both of us, terribly.  Inside me are the memories of my hopes for him;  the expectations of what being his father would be like;  the shape and feel of the world that I would have lived in, if he lived in it, too.

I take my time because I experience time differently than I did before Silas died.  Because now I know all to well that we only get one chance to experience each moment in time, and if you miss it or do it wrong or forget what you're about, it is gone gone gone, never to return.

I've come to hate rushing.  Whenever I have to rush to do anything, I feel an echo of that day when we couldn't rush enough, couldn't stop time, couldn't turn things back, couldn't hold on to what was vanishing before our eyes.  We rushed after our hope, our love, our son, and we couldn't catch up to him no matter how fast we went.

So now I go slow and try to get it right.  I couldn't survive another terrible, monumental mistake like losing Silas.  Better to tread carefully, watch closely, savor what I have right in front of me and never for a second expect the Universe to take up the slack when I fuck things up.  But no matter how slow I go, I can never go slow enough to turn it back, to save Silas, to change that terrible day.  

Time pushes me forward away from him, forcing me to face every new day with a shadow across my heart cast by the absence of my son, his tiny features etched in my mind: perfect, beautiful and timeless.

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

How did the death of your child or children transform your sense of time?  Do you think about time differently now?  If years have passed since you child died, has time changed in the intervening years?  If you could go back in time would you be able to change what happened? Would you want to?

Zoë, reimagined

The first in our series of monthly guest posts submitted by Glow readers. Robynne's daughter, Zoë, was stillborn at full-term last July. Zoë was her first child. We are so grateful for her words and perspective. --Angie

In my dreams, you are alive. It is a trick my imagination plays.  Like when I was carefully putting away your baby things, sorting what to keep and what to return.  I held a toy in one hand, and said aloud, "I think I'll save this one for Zoë."  My mind just couldn't wrap itself around a future without you, around the idea of a child that would someday play with your toys and would not be you.  It is still a future that makes no sense to me, just as the present now lacks the logical outcome of my healthy, full-term pregnancy.  I have the baby weight, and the silvery stretch marks, the insomnia, and the instincts of a new mama, but I am missing the most essential piece of this puzzle that I started long before your arrival.

I dream that I go to the hospital where I delivered my daughter, and they give me her body, wrapped in blankets. I decide to take her home because I want her with me. Suddenly, she wakes up...she is alive! I am so happy; I want to show her to everyone. I can hardly believe the miracle that has happened. She is just as I remember her - beautiful, perfect. She speaks to me, almost telepathically, telling me things I need to know. Her words touch the deepest places in me, and I wake up crying in the dark. 

Nine months.  You would be nine months old now.  How have I come this far?  The books say you would be playing with sounds, syllables, even "ma-ma," the two-syllable word I long to hear most.  You wouldn't quite be talking in full sentences as you did in my dream, but you might repeat things after me, and copy my facial expressions.  The other day, I saw a photo of my friend's little boy, born the same day you were.  He was sitting in the bathtub with a huge smile on his face.  He looks more like his mother now, and has lost the look of "newbornness" and taken on infancy.  I cannot believe you would be this size, that you would be smiling at me in pictures and growing into yourself.

I dream that Zoë has grown suddenly from a newborn to a little girl of 5 or 6. She runs around the house screaming with laughter as I pretend to chase her. It is bedtime, and she needs to put her pajamas on. It is her birthday. I catch her and tickle her feet, and then kiss them. "I love you so much!" I tell her. I never want this dream to be over. I play it over and over for days, never wanting to forget the sound of my daughter's laughter. 

I want to believe that these dreams are more than dreams. I want to believe that somehow in sleep the part of me that cannot grasp other realities falls away, and that you are alive and laughing in a place where time dances easily between childhood and infancy.  I want to believe that there is more to this world than what I can see here, in front of me.  I watch a TV show that follows a medium through her day-to-day life, giving people messages from their deceased loved ones.  She reads mothers who have lost children, and assures them that their babies are with them all the time. I want to feel such confidence, to know that you are out there, that you can hear me when I tell you how much I love you and miss you.

I dream of the grief I have over the relationship I lost with my daughter, the connection I felt with her and all it opened in me.  Emotion fills the dream, eclipses any scene or series of events.  I remember it only as a knowing, and a sense of my loss.  Then, in the dream, I am told that I still have this connection with Zoë, but that it can only be like this, in dreams. 

I do not know much of anything anymore.  I find that the ideas I had about life, about religion and spirituality, about things beyond or unseen, have all been scattered and broken open to reveal a deep sense of unknowing.  A realization of how little I have been designed to comprehend.  A sense of humility about what I am meant to know, and see, and understand.  If there is a God, I am like the blindfolded men around an elephant, trying to describe it, and thinking it is a trunk, or a tail, or a rump because that is all I can feel at the moment.  I do not know where you are now - if you are in heaven, or in my dreams, or if Nature just took you back and you became a part of everything.  But I know that you were here.  I did not imagine you.  I know that my love for you is immense, and infinite, and all-encompassing.  I know that you are my daughter, and I will always be your mama.

--Robynne

 +++

Do you dream of your baby or babies? Do you dream of grief? What kinds of dreams do you have? 

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?