a girl on the train

I am going to tell you this story. I don't think I ever told it before.

 photo by .aditya.

This was a few years ago, and I was less than a year from Lucia's death, and I was pregnant again and coming home from a midwife appointment in the city. I was on the train. I was listening to Stereolab, holding onto a pole, staring out the window at graffiti and darkness passing underneath the city.

Then I saw her waiting for the train. I couldn't believe it. She walked onto the car, brushed past me. I smelled her without being weird. And she even smelled like I thought she would. She had dark hair and eyes like my husband. I couldn't stop staring at her. She was Lucia grown up. I mean, I thought Lucia could look like her. Then I guess I thought she was Lucia. She must have been twenty-two, or so. She looked athletic with wide shoulders. She wore orange and red, and carried a small purse crossed over her chest, nothing ostentatious. She checked her iPhone and listened to music and tapped her toes. She wore cool, sensible shoes. Clogs. Just like me. And a scarf around her neck.

I whispered Lucia's name, but she didn't budge. I turned away now and again for the sake of convention. But I situated myself so I could mostly stare at her while pretending to look through her, like she was a specter, which of course, she was. And when the train pulled into my stop, I stayed on. I stayed on the train to see her longer. To look at her face. Praying she would smile, or talk. She was my baby, but she didn't know it. I wanted to see the way her neck eased into her shoulder. It was a very adult part of the body, and Lucia was never adult.

My God. Lucia will never be an adult.

The fact hits me like I fell in front of the train instead of rode in it. Lucia will never kiss a boy. She will never go to college, or eat a peach or dance in a rainstorm. I will never run into her randomly on the train where we can ride home together. I sometimes forget the details of all she will miss in my missing. She will not wear sensible shoes on a Tuesday, or crazy heels on a dark New Year's Eve. She will not hate basketball, or love it, even. Lucia is missing everything too. This body, this youth, this sexiness, this life we lead when we are young and death is something conquered, not an inevitable destination. Lucia never left the station.

I have nothing left of her. A wisp of hair, and grief. If there was a tea to take away grief, I wouldn't drink it. It is all I have of her--grief. An astrologer said I ride the train through two worlds--the living and the dead. I will never fit in either place. It is my destiny, he said. By the alignment of the stars, and my birth time, and this life, he said, Remember,  you made this soul contract. You picked your suffering. To me, he said, it looks like you picked the express train to spiritual growth, which means this is going to be a hard life.

I want this grief, this dis-ease of the heart. The grief is love, I think. It is the aching part of love. It is the sad part of love. But it is still love. Grief ties me to her. Aching. Pain. Suffering. They are her calls to me, and in that way, the pain is sweet and beautiful. She is just a name now. To my children. They stopped asking me about her weight, and what age she would be. She is Lucy, the very sad story I told them one afternoon. She is a butterfly now, and maybe a ladybug. She is the dedication of a song, or a picture, but not a real girl. She doesn't ride the train, and listen to music. She doesn't wear her hair down. Not like the other sisters.

This ride home felt like a journey between two worlds. I am Orpheus, walking again with a lyre into the underworld, and it invigorates me. It is not unlike going into 8th Street station. It smells of piss and cigarette smoke. There is a darkness in me. One I finally see. If I embrace it, the astrologer says, I will be happier. Even way back then, before I knew about the darkness in me, I paid the conductor, and followed the girl that could have been my daughter. My Lucia is dead. Her ashes are lumpy (so is my soul.) I probably wouldn't recognize my little girl walking and talking like a twenty year old. After all, I never saw her live. But that girl on the train was her for twelve minutes. And I loved her like my baby. The girl gets off the train and runs down the stairs. I watch her disappear behind a wall. Lucia is dead again.

I cross the platform to the train going back to my home. It's only two stops. The car is empty. It is hard not to cry, so I don't fight it.

Have you ever seen a stranger who reminds you of your child? Is there any adult in your life that reminds you of what your child could have been? Who is it? Do you want to be close to them, or far away? What parts of your child's adulthood do you miss most? 

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?

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?

Pale Blue Dot

See the faint dot between the white lines? That's planet earth. And it makes me wonder about my dead baby.

Just before Voyager 1 ended it's primary mission and blasted off towards the outer reaches of the Solar System, it spun around and snapped a photo of earth, some three and a half billion miles away. This photo was taken in 1990 (and the Voyager, incredulously, is still going).

On the one hand, of course, the sheer insignificance of the earth, and our lives, in the grand scheme of the solar system is sobering. There appears to be a bigger story being written, cosmic and infinite in size, and one that will be downright impossible to ever understand. The notion that any of us, with such finite minds and limited understanding, could have anything figured out seems almost foolish. As astronomer Carl Sagan pointed out, “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

From this vantage point of earth, everything about our significance is lost. The pain and joy and suffering and pleasures of our earthly human existence are all invisible. From out here looking in, our spinning earth boils down to life and death. The collective species lives and dies and enters the earth. End of story.

Insert my Margot into this picture of earth and you can barely discern any difference between her and the rest of the species. She lived, she died. She suffered the same fate as everyone else, and from this far away, the difference between her life and her great, great grandmother’s life is a mere blip in time, the same beginning, the same end. There is no tragedy from this vantage point, no suffering, no feeling of loss.

I am insignificant. She is insignificant. But at least we are together, tiny specks on a tiny speck with no Horton looking out for us. And there is some peace in this reality, some science comfort.

The other side of this image, however, reveals what a crazy, far-fetched, inconceivable fucking miracle it is that we even exist at all. The notion that the universe aligned in just the precise way for the species to make their grand entrance on planet earth, and for the species to continue to evolve over the millennia, and to evolve in such a way that our brains allow us the ability to think and feel and experience this little speck on which we live, is damn well breathtaking.

It’s here where I feel the tragedy of Margot June more deeply than ever. Her own miraculous story was cut short, without ever getting to experience this cosmic mystery of life on earth.  

I used to feel so sorry for my family, for our collective broken hearts, for the life we didn’t ask for, for the loneliness of losing a child. For her mother, whose waisted milk came in and dripped aimlessly down her flesh, who carried her for thirty-nine long weeks, who felt this more than anyone; for her sister, who kissed her in utero and spoke of her constantly, who always got this euphoric look in her eye when we described what being a sister meant for her; for myself and the broken dream of raising two girls, holding them both in my arms as we navigated life together.

Now days I mostly just feel sorry for her.

For in this image, I’m reminded of the revelation that she was, and all that was waiting for her on the other side of the womb. I’m heartbroken she missed out on the complexities of life on earth, no matter how insignificant or miraculous our pale blue dot is.

How does this image of planet earth make you feel in regards to your missing children? Does it bring peace or despair or a mix of both? Does science play a role in your grief? As the time has dragged on without your children, have you felt more or less sorry for yourselves?

Silas' Symbols

The hawk is stationary above the highway.  The mundane light post is transformed into a majestic perch with the beaked, mottled, patient bird gripping the metal with its talons.  It is looking for prey, but it feels like it was waiting for us.

We always point them out to one another on our drives, and not a word has to be spoken.  Silas, we both think.  Silas there somehow in the penetrating gaze of the bird, even though we don't really believe that, not in any direct, concrete way.  It's not his reborn spirit in there.  It's not his soul transformed into a hawk.  

Instead, it is a living, breathing symbol that we can hang our grief on.  Silent, alien, unknowable, beautiful and free, the creature is a perfect specimen of raw nature and it represents so much of what we don't have from Silas, and so much of what we wanted him to be.

Three hawks today.  Yesterday I saw one plummet from the sky to the median between the north and soundbound lanes and then leap into the sky with some squirming fur in its grasp.  The hawks are reminders of his life in a safe and abstracted way.  

After all, it is hard to remember someone you never got to know.  

We remember him as an absence, as a lack, and the hawk serves as a placeholder for everything we still don't understand about why Silas is not here with us today.

At night when the hawks sleep Orion captures my vision instead.  Pinpricks of light billions of lightyears away arranged just so, and they pierce me with their interstellar light every time. We chose that name for him, selected that specific connection, and it ensures that every single night that our planet faces that part of the sky I see him and think of him and hold him close in my heart.

Closer yet, though, is the ink in my arm.  It is a tree of life darkened with death and sprinkled with the stars of his constellation, surrounded by a ring of "S"s.  And it's funny/not-funny how much an "S" looks like a broken infinity symbol.  

Silas is gone forever, but I still find him every day in pieces of my life.  In the hawk above, in the blazing stars of the Universe beyond, in the very fabric of my skin.  I will never stop missing him, even when happy, even when feeling good and right.  

His name is engraved on the inside of our wedding rings, just like it is etched on the deepest walls of our hearts.  The symbols help us remember him as we hoped he would be, but the pain ensures we will never forget the child we do not get to hold in our arms.

What are the symbols you connect to your lost child or children?  Did you create the connection or did some outside force cause you to recognize it?  Do those symbols and reminders bring you peace or pain? Have the symbols changed over time?

Daydream

It feels almost ridiculous to have such a thought. Impossible, really. My daughter isn’t going to be anything. That train has passed. It steamed and whistled and methodically toiled for almost thirty-nine weeks and then, promptly, fell off a cliff. I understand there is no future for her. The potential for choosing ice cream and friends and hobbies and a career are all out of reach for my darling M.

And yet.

Here I am, imagining her doing something with her live self. Something very particular. Something I know almost nothing about, a pursuit I have always found rather boring. And of course, what I imagine her doing could be entirely untrue, a figment of my imagination, a cruel and beautiful mind trick that connects me to her and her to me. It took me nearly seven months of thinking about it until I even told my partner.

I have something to tell you, I told her.

It’s kind of ridiculous.

No, seriously, it’s pretty crazy.

Well, I keep thinking Margot was going to be a volleyball player.

Because of her hands.

***

I unswaddled her as gently as I could, as any parent would have, protecting her head, giving careful attentiveness to each limb, making sure all of my movements were soft against her body. She appeared slowly before me, from head to toe, revealing herself in stages as I unwrapped the blanket round and round her.

Neck, shoulders, chest, arms and elbows. Each was in perfect harmony with the other.

Her hands were folded neatly together over her belly, her left hand wrapped around her right wrist. There was a solemness about the way they were together, a sacred reverence for the tragedy that befell her. They were the first part of her that took me off guard as I unwrapped her. Her hands were simply huge, almost as long as her forearms, too big for her body. Her fingers were long and thick, and seemed to run on forever. Her palms were white and deep, great pools of soft skin and little creases. Folded together, they almost covered her entire belly and chest.

Those hands make me ache for her future.

***

We were recently at the beach, my first daughter and I, on the swings near the boardwalk cafe. I pushed her from behind, counting with each push, tickling her each time she came back towards me. Kids played all around us, screaming and running, playing hide and go seek. Teenagers walked in front of us, down the wooden path towards the low tide. Behind us was a cafe full of families, eating and conversing on the sand. It was much too warm for January and everyone’s mood seemed in tune with the weather.

It wasn’t until maybe the twentieth push that I noticed them, across the sidewalk, less than a hundred steps from the swings. The University of Southern California women’s volleyball team.

There were more than a dozen of them practicing with one another, bumping, setting and spiking white volleyballs around the sand. They were taller than most women, and athletic, with big enough hands to palm a volleyball, and they moved around the sand so gracefully, as if their feet and the sand had a made a deal with one another.

For a good long minute, I forgot about counting, forgot about the kids around me, the conversations at the cafe, the charming weather. I secretly imagined myself in my late fourties, the father of a University student.

I looked for her, my M.

Tall like her father, blue eyes like her mother, great big hands.



Is there something about your child's future that you think about, whether it's about their personality, or their hobbies, career or anything else? Did you have any leanings or notions while your baby was in utero? Or after you saw them for the first time?