pomegranate

I open my mouth. The scream escapes. It is a primal, ancient scream. The Banshee wail that precedes death and mourning. It has been building inside of me through all of my tragedies, humiliations, fears. But the death of my daughters propel it forward, out of me. It is also the scream of Demeter. It comes from deep inside of all women. The goddess roars through me. It is hardly a noise one knows before a child dies, it is something entirely different. A different cry, an animal sound, a wild rage that tears through normal ears. It is the hurricane. The volcano. The typhoon. It is in the Ancient Greeks, the Druids, the Celtic gods, the old Norse and Inuit tales where I find my story into the underworld. We babylost are no longer of this era and we should stop trying to be. We come from the distant past. The grief goddesses inhabit us to retell their stories. We channel their woe, their anger, their cries. We are transported to a place halfway between heaven and hell, the blessed and the cursed, the living and the dead.

+++

I can only really muster worship to the goddesses of grief--Demeter and Hecate, the Norse goddess Frigga, the Aztec goddess Coatlicue. There is a distinguished lineage of goddess grieving. She rarely behaves well. I learn the lessons of grief from mythology. I starve the world. I punish others. But the earth people will be restored. It is me who withers again when Summer leaves, every year, when I am reminded of my daughter's death. It is me who curses the most human parts of myself.

The chill moves through me. I nod to Autumn, bow to her, make elaborate arm gestures to welcome her through my life again. Autumn equinox marks Persephone's descent--her return to Hades, the god who abducted her all those millennia ago, raped her, held her captive in the underworld, fed her pomegranate to seal her fate. Her mother Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, begins her long walk around the world weeping, mourning, taking the life from the crops. Autumn equinox marks my descent too. I walk into my grief season, seizing the harvest, choking the life from everything around me, falling into a deep darkness. It is a welcome turn, when the earth and sky match my insides. It is my slow trudge until my daughter's death day on Winter Solstice.

This veil is thin now in October. Do not underestimate its power. The ancestors step just out of view, like through a gauzy film, whispering: Be better than you think possible.

I shake my head and rub mud into my skin. I light bonfires and bring them forward. "Oh, no, I mourn now, grandmothers. I am my shadow and myself. Two people mourning. Weep with me. Share half a tear, half a cry with your half-daughter."

On the first year, when the earth opened and swallowed Persephone, Demeter walked the earth for nine days searching for her daughter. She ate nothing. She drank no ambrosia. She refused to bathe. She just hunted her only daughter, desperate and possessed with the finding. There are rumors that Persephone screamed before she was taken. Hecate heard it, in fact. And they ask Helios, the sun god, who tells them it is Hades who stole the virgin, raped her. When she was told what happened, she enlists the help of her friends Famine and Petulance to punish the humans until she can see her daughter once more. They are the withered old hags of goddesses, but powerful nonetheless. They delight in cauldrons of poison and starvation and cackle to themselves. And Demeter, a compassionate goddess, felt justified in her actions.

Persephone is allowed to return home only if she has eaten nothing. But she could not resist the allure of the blood red pomegranate, sexy and furtive. The juice drips down her chin, and Hades licks it off her, sealing her fate to return for six months every year.

photo by zenobia_joy.

I find myself jealous of Demeter, seeing her daughter for six months, exacting her grief in such a global way.  And the jealousy reads like a sweet nectar of what could be. I drink in the hope. Lucia ate pomegranate in my womb. Or rather, I did. I pulled the seeds from the membranes one by one until my hands were sticky and stained. I didn't know better. The seeds shone like garnets in my hand. And I, gluttonous and greedy, ate more of the underworld. I couldn't stop at six. I ate the entire fruit and then more. I ate resentment and anger, grudges and hurt egos, swallowed them whole. They were still alive and writhing when they hit my stomach, inches from where Lucia slept.

When she died, I walked this liminal land, the space between the dead and the living. The land running alongside the river Styx. I barely heed the warnings of those who came before me:

Do not pay the ferryman if you see him. Do not approach him. But wave across to the others, vacant and plodding through the dark. Ask for your child. Wail, if you must, the shriek of Demeter will be recognized here. But do not get on the boat. And for the love of everything holy, do not eat any pomegranate seeds yourself any longer. They mean something different now, love. Even though they taste like Lucia. They mean something different.

I have existed in liminal spaces for a long time. The borderlands are my patria. My homeland. I am half white and half-Latina. Half-American and Half-Panamanian. I am half a believer, half a skeptic. I am half straight and have AB positive blood. The creatures drawn to me wear horns, and tall boots with twenty-seven buckles, and white make-up, wooly vests and listen to songs about vampires, but work in a corporate office during the day. I live in a suburb, a small town that feels like mid-town. Halfway between city and country. We have a farmer's market and tattooed vendors who smile at your bike trailer and say, "Right on."

After the first snow without her, I became half a mother. Half a breeder. Half of my children are dead. I have half a song. It is about winter, and the triple goddess, and pomegranate seeds which I suck just enough to be allowed visitation rights. She is gone and my summer never comes. Just space and time until I grieve again.

It is half a myth without an ending.

Do you feel between worlds? Which ones? Do you feel close to certain myths or stories now? Has that changed since the death of your baby(ies)?

Mile markers

When I first went to see what would become Monkey's school, I was visibly pregnant, with A. At the open house I chatted with the then-head-of-school, partially about how she thought it was really nice to have a girl be older than a boy in a family because sometimes girls mistake their brothers' age-related competencies for gender-related ones and begin to believe they can't do things their brothers can. I hadn't thought about a dynamic like that before, but for some reason it stuck with me. A couple of months later, after we applied to the school, Monkey had her own interview there. By that point I was huuuuuuge and rather a slow-moving vehicle. I remember plopping down on the bench in the lobby, grateful for its existence, uncushioned hard surface and all.

That bench is still in the lobby, in that exact same place. But A is not. He was dead barely a week after that interview, more than five and a half years ago now.

Monkey loves her school. Not likes, loves. We love it too. And most of the time we are very happy with it, too. Most families at the school send all their kids there. Which, all of it, is making this a tough fall for me.

We have so many hopes and dreams for these little people. Some are general and vague, like that big one, that they be happy. Others are more concrete. We taught Monkey to swim and to ski, and I had some ideas that we would, some day, splash in the water together, A included, or race down black diamonds, me trying to keep up with the rest of them. Hazy, but not too hazy. No date and time certain, but I would've guessed something like that would be happening by the time A was five. There are no guarantees, of course. The boy could've broken a leg, ending a season before it began. He could've even, gasp, hated the whole exercise of skiing and refused to partake. Worse things, too, could've befallen him and us. But statistically those dreams are more likely to come true than not once you hear the heartbeat. And, you know, certainly by ten full weeks past viability.

And then comes The Day. The day their little hearts stop, the day we learn that we will not get to bring them home. All these dreams, visions, plans-- they all come tumbling down that day. We may be too shell-shocked to realize it right away. We all know the big one's gone. But it may take us some time to pick up the pieces of all these other dreams, to name them, and in naming them to mourn them. In that big pile of rubble it may be hard to find the individual pieces. It may be hard to tell whether the shard you are holding is from the play with cousins dream or the holidays at the grandparents' dream or even from the often underappreciated until it's out of one's grasp my family, all under one roof, fed and content dream.

Whether we choose to bag the whole pile and put it on the curb for the next garbage pickup, or to spend the time carefully looking through, from time to time, an errant glimpse of a shard or some semblance of it is likely to catch our eye and pierce our heart. I remember sometime during my first year, there was a post from a babylost blogger who was a good bit further into the process than me, about how she got stymied at a video store by a gaggle of teenage boys picking out a movie. Because suddenly, at that moment she knew with ridiculous clarity the many things, big and small, her son had missed out on because he died-- growing into a boy and then a teenager, and a young man, friends, messing around, movies. You can't plan for these. You might guess what landmine will get you one day-- I fully expect, for example, to some day fog up my ski goggles because of something that will inadvertently unearth a shard of that dream, but you don't know when or exactly how it will get you.

Then there are the perma-mines, the baked-in-the-cake grief mile markers. When we get up in the middle of the rubble, some of these are staring us right in the face-- you know, the family affair where you were supposed to show off the new addition; some are regular and predictable, clearly visible amongst the suddenly bare landscape-- the monthaversaries, the anniversaries, the hangings of the Christmas stockings, if that's your thing.  And then there are the one of markers-- the ones that were there from the beginning and never moved, even if they were, then, too far away to see.

I had a tough time coming up on the fourth anniversary. For some reason, four was shaping up to be qualitatively worse than three, and I was not doing well. The whole month was dreary and difficult, dragging and draining. It sucked, ok? And yet, in the middle of that slow dance of misery, in one bright moment of realization I knew that as bad as this buildup to four was, it was going to be a soft landing compared to what would have been A's first day of school. See, Monkey loves her school. We had decided she was going there before A died. Which means that unless something extraordinary would've happened between his birth and this fall, A would've started Kindergarten at the same school right after Labor Day, about five weeks ago now. In that very same moment of realization when I first saw the start of school marker staring me in the face, with 18 months or so still to go, I also knew, I just knew that on that day I would throw up.

Coming up on the school year I was a wreck. It didn't help that the Kindergarten class has three siblings of Monkey's classmates in it. It didn't help that I knew it would before Monkey ever started at the school, five plus years ago, thanks to the unthinking remarks from a mother of Monkey's then-future classmate. I didn't want to meet new families at the school-- the K class was oversubscribed, and I know that my head would keep reminding me that one of these families wouldn't have been at the school had A lived.

The first day of school came. We brought Monkey to the school, and we hung out, and I didn't throw up. I came close a couple of times, but I didn't. And now I think I wish I did. Maybe then I would be able to walk through the lower school and carry on a conversation at the same time. Maybe then I would not want to shut my eyes every time I see the K teachers lead their charges down the hall. Maybe then I would be done with this, the almost-final perma-mine.

This was the almost final "for sure" marker. I've hit a few of these before. From here on out, I think there is only one more, and the date is less than determined. Had A lived, sometime on or shortly after his 13th birthday, he would've had his Bar Mitzva. I know that will nail me too, probably at Monkey's ceremony first, and then on A's anniversary that year. And maybe a few more times for good measure.

Have you encountered any grief mile markers? Of what variety have they been and how has it gone for you? Are you from a family that celebrates Thanksgiving together every year? Or is it more that you have been stung by sudden recognition? If you can see a marker looming in the distance, how do you prepare? Or do you?

glass castle

Jessica is a mom to five, four in her arms and one in her heart.  After the loss of her infant daughter in 2007, she left the corporate world behind, vowed to soak up every living moment and found her writing roots again. I've been reading Jessica's beautiful blog for many years as she has grappled with life after the death of one of her triplets. You can find her wearing her heart on her sleeve at her personal blog Four Plus an Angel. —Angie

photo by Ayrcan

You have played that game, on the computer, the phone, in life, where the water is rushing through pipes and you have to turn the pipes in the right direction so they fit and the water can continue to flow.

You find a straight one, then one that turns to the right, then to the left, some that cross over each other and some that turn back the way they came and then you ultimately get to the end. Finding a piece that will connect it all, you realize that once it is placed, once you slide it into the correct position the flood will come. A path will have been sealed and the pressure that began at the start will find its way through your maze and seep out. It may trickle or gush or pour in buckets but once you have chosen to open gates so carefully guarded you will drown, you are sure of it.

So you don't complete the path, you leave that last piece tilted a bit to the right or jutting back to the left or you just keep picking up pieces and putting them back, knowing they are not where they should be and the pressure you have never released continues to pulse in the maze of your mind.

Life keeps rushing past even though yours stopped. You lost a child and with her went your optimism, your faith. You move and walk and breathe but not fully in or out or forward. Sometimes you want to scream at the world for continuing to spin and sometimes you want to whisper a question of how exactly they all manage to do it.

You are never fully anchored to the ground, your mind and your heart are divided between the earth and the sky and while you wish for a day to just cry, you are pretty certain that a day or a month or a year would not be enough.

Continuing to walk on ground left shaken, you tiptoe around cracks or stomp at the injustice and squelch the desire to pound your fists, because the walls might just come crashing down this time.

Grief and loss have become your glass castle, buried feelings and put off tears your pipeline that may never find land. You are suspended yet buried, trapped in a world of living without someone who should be. 

Does life after the death of your child or children feel like water rushing past you? Or rather, do you feel swept away with life? Do you feel untethered, or grounded? Jessica refers to grief and loss as a glass castle, do you see your grief as a building, and if so, what kind? 

Sounds

In a departure from my usual style for Glow in the Woods I have written and recorded a poem. You can hear me read it here:

Do I sound sad?

Can you hear it in me?

When I utter banalities

Or common courtesies

About inclement weather

Or paying bills, or other

Everyday utilities

Is that all I’m saying to you?

Or do your ears twitch at

A catch, a crack

A different quality

So “Tea or Coffee?”

Comes with neither milk nor sugar

But rather a side of

“Your choice doesn’t matter to me because neither will bring my dead baby back to life”

Or when I ask

For someone to email me some

VERY IMPORTANT THING

Does my reply seem to be

In some kind

Of dolorous code

Thanking them for

Distracting me

From my melancholy?

Or when I say

“A return ticket to the city please”

Perhaps you’d be aware of the silent addendum

“Not that she’ll ever return to me… because she’s DEAD”

(These are all thoughts I’ve had by the way

So please laugh at me and

My ability to

Dramatise

Catastrophise

And generally

Over-egg

The grief-pudding-of-my-eternal-sense-of loss

Some things deserve derision

Occasionally. Maybe.)

Perhaps

Now

Four years out

My subtext

Has truly

Become

Subliminal

I no longer

Shout my pain

In every word

I even talk about

Sad things

With an air of

Warm reassurance

Then I eavesdrop on myself

Hear

A fragment

Of my voice

On someone else’s

Answer phone

Or notice something

Alien in my

Sister’s tone

That used to be so

Similar to my own

But now seems

Less familiar.

And I hear it plainly.

The sound

Of ancient

Agony

Rasped across

My vocal chords

And I wonder

How it’s possible

That people can

Hear me speak

And not weep?

How anyone can

Ever answer me

Without their own

Remembered grief

Bursting out

Until we are all wailing

At the sky

Sorrow’s choir

Swelling loud

Out out up

Wildly shaking the world

Hurling us about

So we’ll never

Forget her or anyone!

Lost names thunder

Against the horizon

And burst the

Eardrums of the lucky ones

Windows shatter

The plates of the earth

Shift and grate

Teeth rattle

Trees are wrenched

From the soil

Violent noises

Siren voices

All around

Surrounded

Until it seems

The ground would yield up

Her dead.

Is that how I sound?

Is that how I sound?

Or am I only sad in silence now.

Do you have a grief radar? Can you hear it or see it in other people? Do you think they feel it in you?

She's In California Somewhere

I was supposed to call him back months ago. He had left a simple message:

Hi, this is Eric from One Legacy. I’m calling in regard to a question you had. Again, this is Eric at One Legacy. Thank you so much.

It was a message we had spent a year waiting for. And it was there for the taking, for calling back, and I sat idle on it, pressing mute, or pause, or whatever it took to buy myself some emotional strength.

They had made it clear from the beginning of the donation process: after one year we could find out if our daughter’s heart valves could be used to help another baby.

One year. I remember wishing the time away, as if knowing what happened to her valves was all that mattered, as if I could skip facing grief and living in sorrow and missing the most important year of my life.

And then the moment was suddenly upon me.

I yearned for good news. I begged for science and circumstances to align in such perfect harmony for there be some life that was made easier, or saved, by the freak accident that took my darling Margot. I desperately wanted there to be a child crawling around somewhere with a part of Margot inside of them. The constant thought of this miracle materializing, of her valves fusing together with ventricles and atriums of another human being, seemed like concrete evidence that something beautiful came from her.

I have taken gifts from her absence, things I have deemed beautiful only because I don’t seem to have a choice to think about them any other way. I have taken the experience and carved out lessons and wisdom from it, become more fully human, more content, more thoughtful. But even all of the gifts in the world seem so trivial in comparison to what Margot got out of the deal, the one who didn’t even get a breath.

But these heart valves. This felt like something real. A gift directly from her to another, not a gift that was painfully extracted by her parents, but entirely, physically, from her.

+++

The nurse told us that if we wanted to donate, we only had a few hours left with her. They needed to keep her cold, she said. They needed to take her in for open heart surgery.

I opened her delicate eyelids and unwrapped the swaddle around her body. I studied every solitary fragment of her flesh, memorizing the shape of her elbow and the curl of her lip, tracing the outline of her sizable hands. I helplessly pleaded with her to miraculously wake up, even though I knew it to be in vain, and then pleaded and begged none the less. Rain cascaded down the window of our third floor ICU room, and I watched the dark ominous sky hovering over Los Angeles, as if nature and the state of my brokenness were in some mysterious union.

When it was time to say goodbye, we were sleeping together on a fold out bed, my arm wrapped around her chest, my nose pressed up against her hair. I placed her body in a clear plastic basin and watched her disappear around the corner.

Almost all of her returned to me a few days later in the form of ashes. Everything but those valves.

+++

Fear has me in a noose. What if there isn’t good news? What if her valves weren’t right? What if they sat idle for too long and were terminated somewhere, thrown into a bin, or saved in a jar.

I’m locked in my bedroom, phone in hand.

Hi, Eric. My name is Josh Jackson and I’m calling you back in regards to my daughter Margot. She died in March of last year and we donated her heart valves and I wondered if you had any information on those valves.

The words come out like one continuous sentence, sputtered out shaky and broken. I feel exposed, laid bare by a year of grief that has slowly eroded the confidence and security and strength that once filled my being.

Yes, hello Josh. I am so sorry for your loss. Let me see what I can find out for you.

There is a kindness in his voice that makes me want to weep.

Thanks for waiting. It seems that we haven’t yet found a match for them, but her valves have recently passed a follow up test that allows them to still be used. Usually our donations get used within the first year, so I would expect them to go to someone soon.

I don’t know what to ask next, even though the questions are streaming through my mind like flashcards.  How do they test usability? What happens if they find a match? Can we find out the name of the recipient if there is a match? Should I call back later?

Silence.

Where are her valves right now? The one question I hadn’t thought of, the one question that matters.

Silence.

They are somewhere in California.

Suddenly I’m thrust into this primal act of fatherhood, still looking for my missing child, as if I somehow forgot that her valves, still workable and life giving, were my daughter.

WHERE? WHERE EXACTLY IS SHE? WHAT IS THE ADDRESS? WHERE ARE THEY KEPT? I HAVE TO SEE HER.

I want to shout and scream, but the words never make it out of my mind. It’s all I can do to hold myself together, to keep myself from running out the door and into the drivers seat and to every lab and hospital in California, in search of what is left of her.

I thank him for his time and effort and grace and vow to call back in a few months, as if I’ll somehow forget.

Eighteen months later and I’m still searching.


-----


How far out from your loss are you? In what ways are you still tangibly confronted with your child’s death?

4 years gone

Tomorrow is Silas's birthday.  He would be four years old.  Imagining our four year old son cavorting through this house, the yard, our lives, is painfully impossible.  I can imagine what that Universe would look like from the outside, but not how it would feel in there.

It would have the same hint of crimson in the leaves and the same gorgeous fall breeze alight on a brilliant blue day.  There would be the same cool and colder nights and suddenly hot September afternoons.  But maybe I would not notice the touch of decay creeping into the shadows.  Certainly the first falling, orange leaf I witnessed would not carry the weight of death and despair like it always does now.   With my amazing son's fourth birthday helping to usher in autumn, I probably would not hate this time of year.

September makes me cringe.  With the flip of the calendar I know what is coming, but I have no idea how to deal with it.  I doubt I ever will.

Taking a quick inventory it appears that this year's emotions are: helplessness, fear, anger, disbelief, confusion and a deep and abiding despair.  In other words, same as it ever was.  In detail: I can't change the past.  I'm afraid of anything happening to Zeph, ever.  I'm still quite upset with the midwives, and at my foolish, naive trust in them.  That this is my life and that my firstborn son is dead remains impossible.  Four years now I still don't know how to properly prepare for and honor his birth/death day.  And of course, still, always and forever, I am profoundly sad I don't get to share my life with him and see what kind of man he would have grown into, and how he would have changed me.

I always feel all of that on some level, but this month and week and final days compress and tighten in my veins like my blood is being replaced with liquid concrete as my memory unfolds the events of that long night and longer day.

Growing up my mother would always recount the events leading up to my birth.  I loved hearing her tell me our beautiful, shared history.  But Silas's day is made of silence.  No one wants to hear that story and I can barely stand my own mind as it ticks off each milestone and moment.

The outpouring of love and support from friends and family as Sept 25 approaches yet again has been... nonexistent.  I'm shocked that is the case, frankly.  Maybe they are planning a surprise grief party, but I doubt it.

Our families had been incredibly supportive and understanding as Lu and I thrashed in agony in the first years after he was gone, and then they continued to handle us gently and kindly as time passed.  But maybe four years is enough for them.  They did their best, and now that's pretty much it.  New son in our life and new babies all around means new beginnings and big happiness for everyone and it's time to move on and let Silas drift into our past, as if his life was just something that happened, instead of something that is.

There will be a few friends that are conscious enough to make a call or send a text or email.  And I almost wish I could steal all knowledge of Silas from my amazing mother debilitated from MS and my incredible father taking care of her, if only just to save them from any more hardship and sadness, but I know they are crippled with despair over the loss of their grandson, and I know they know what is about to happen once again.  I wish I felt that same conscious understanding from others, but the fact is people are mostly wrapped up in themselves, and if you want anything from them you need to tell them clearly and loudly exactly what you want.

But that's the problem.  I can't say, "Hey it's going to be Silas's birthday in a few days and it is still really really tough, so I need you all to just say his name to me and tell me you miss him and show me that you remember."  Because if you have to remind someone to remember something, they're not really remembering at all, are they?  They are just responding to your clearly spoken need without any of the actual remembering or forethought.  And that fucking hurts.  It's that same expectation game all over again, but I don't really give a shit.  They should remember.  They should tell me that.  They should reach out and grab me as the calendar winds up to Sept 25 and launches me to the edge of the Abyss once again.

Instead we'll do it ourselves, and take care of each other as we always have.  We are going to Silas's tree tomorrow. This will be the first year we have a living, breathing child in our lives and it definitely makes it far better than it has ever been before. Of course as we sit there around his older brother's memorial tree I am not going to be able to stop thinking about the fact that someday I will have to share this deep sadness with this gorgeous, innocent child.  And that, of course, is awful.  I don't have any idea how I'm going to handle that or how his understanding of this awful history will affect him as he grows up.  I already feel terrible that we will have to break his heart someday.

Me, Lu and Zeph are going to Silas's tree tomorrow, and we're going to plant tulips and have a little lunch picnic and cry our fucking eyes out and laugh at our amazing son who loves to play with sticks more than toys and enjoys eating rocks as much as fruit.  He loves both of us so vividly he almost can't handle it sometimes.  He's a wonderfully wild and alive little child and I wish with every cell of my being he had an older brother to torment and grab and run with and learn from and squeeze just as hard as he yanks on us.

I'm not working at all tomorrow.  I'm just spending the day with Zephyr, as I always do on Tuesdays.  It should be his older brother's birthday party.  Instead it is something else I wish no one would ever have to endure.  With silence all around and everyone consumed by their own lives, we will embrace each other hard and make this awful day slightly less unbearable just by doing it together.

The concrete fills my veins drop by drop as this day approaches, until I am immobilized by sadness, and my soul shatters with every step I take through his birthday, his deathday, his impossibly brief life.  I will settle into bed as dust tomorrow night and I will dream of his stars and wish his younger brother had Silas in his life.

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

How has the day of your child's birth and death changed over the years?  How many years have gone by since you lost them?  What has changed about how you deal with that day?  How have the people around your responded (or not) to that anniversary?