fortune tellers

I root for each fortune teller I meet.

Say her name. Lucy. Lucia. Say it. Mention her.

photo by ManWithAToyCamera.

I am like a magpie, and their blinking neon sign the shiny thing I must peck. I am drawn to the gypsy caravan, the crystal ball, the smell of sage and incense, the Zoltar machine, and aura of pure indigo. Each one talks about my failing writing career and my husband, artwork and my marriage, how I myself am psychic, and destined to be a reader myself. Nothing about the daughter that died.

Channel her. Speak her words, share (what must be) her stilted, strange wisdom of never having breathed, yet so grieved. Channel her.

The five buck psychic asks me for a question, and I tell her about Lucia. How she died in me, and how my husband wants another baby, and I am scared this baby will die too. Right before he is born. (This was eight months out from her death, but it feels like today.) I wanted to know why she died. Science failed me. There is no physical reason my daughter died, but surely, there is a metaphysical one. I found the five buck psychic on-line. She sends me her reading four days later. She tells me that Lucia is a Buddha and that she chose me for her last life, so she could heal old wounds, the ones that need the comfort and unconditional love of a womb experience. And she knew that I would be strong enough to handle her death. It was the soul contract we made. I read her email aloud on the way to the airport. We were flying to Panama for a week, taking our grief on vacation.

"Do you find that comforting?" I asked my husband. Unsure if I should be offended or reassured.

"Yes. It is comforting." We were comforted for the rest of the day. The next day, we ceased being comforted and were back to relentless discomfort of baby-death, grief, angst, fear, anxiety, and bitterness.

Still, I find that idea most comforting of all the ideas posited by the religions of the world--that my baby is a holy woman, a wise soul, an awakened being, a Buddha. Her soul released from suffering. That I gave her unconditional love, that she choose this life because I was strong and loving and earth mother-y. Further, I found the idea that I choose this life comforting. Of course, it arrogantly supports the vision I have of myself as capable, loving, selfless, in control, powerful, rather than the truth of it which is that I am chaotic, frightened, humbled, mediocre, out of control, powerless. I found out later that this idea is a Hindu understanding of stillbirth, that the baby who chooses to be stillborn is in their last life before achieving moksha, before being released from the samsara, the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Still, that first psychic gifted me with a moment of solace. It wasn't enough, though, I wanted to hear about her from her. I wanted to hear her voice. And so I began my hero's journey through the metaphysical world. In the last three years, I have consulted psychics, tarot readers, astrologers, fortune tellers, palmists, hair readers, angel channels, auric interpreters, shamans and medicine women every few months hoping for a message from my daughter.  And not one of them, until two weekends ago, mentioned my daughter without my prompting. She is gone. Her energy doesn't reside in mine. But I still rooted for them. I thought hard as they pulled cards, sat still in meditation.

All of my writing, my artwork, my entire life changed after I pushed her dead six pound body out of my vagina, surely you can see this on my soul, in my aura. It must be etched in gold, or charred and blackened in the parts of me that once shone. Surely, you must feel it when you touch my hair, look into my palm, read the tea leaves. I can see it, even the cheesemonger can see it when I ask for a pound of provolone. Just say her name. I believe you can.

I watch these psychic shows when no one is around. They are my guilty pleasure. The one with the lady with long fingernails, talking like a mobster. She channels stillborn children here and there, and despite myself I weep, blubber almost. I watch her in the middle of the night, on-demand, so no one can see me almost blubbering. It is babylost porn. She tells the grieving mothers mundane things mostly, confirmation that their children are around them. I just want that. A confirmation of something--that she lived, that she died, that we grieve, that she is a person with a soul, or rather perhaps that I am.

+++

We wear headphones and microphones. It is the Mind-Body Expo and we are nestled on the second floor on the football stadium, tucked in the corner next to the Tibetan arts table. Here there are psychics and soul artists, channels and astral journeyman, reiki masters and healers in modalities I have never heard of, tables of jewelry purporting to open your third eye or connect you to the Akashic records. My sister signs up to see a shaman women. She is barefoot and beats a drum. I waited for the "World Renown Psychic Medium," as her sign states. I read laminated newspaper articles on her table while I waited. She found many missing persons. Well, three.

I have a missing person.

She whispers, "Can you hear me?"

"Yes." My own voice startles me. She tells me about her process and that she will be talking fast. I get a chill and she begins. She tells me that my grandparents are stepping forward.

She holds my hands in her own, and says, "Your grandfather is here. He is holding up two fingers, then a third. Do you have two or three children?"

 I gulp.

"I have two living children, and a child that died."

"Okay. I see you have two in spirit. The miscarried one is a boy. He said he liked the name Michael." That is the only name on our boy list during this last pregnancy so convinced I was that the growing dot in me was a girl. Michael is my grandfather's name. The hairs are standing up on my neck, and in my gut, I know that is true now.

"Your daughter will be reincarnated as your oldest daughter's first child, and your son will be your second grandchild. They will be part of your family again. They have always been part of your family."

The tears fall unself-consciously. I want this all to be true. I want Lucia to be a Buddha, while simultaneously and selfishly, I want her to come back.  I want to hold her again, some day, even as an old woman. I want to bathe her, and feed her rice and beans. It wasn't her voice, but it was the hope that I may see her again. And maybe that was enough.

Tell me about your experience. Have you consulted a psychic, channel, medium, palm reader, tarot reader, or other metaphysical worker for insight into your grief? What were you told? Was it comforting or disconcerting? If not, have you considered it? What holds you back?

Dead babies from the time before

Baby Cosmo

Died

When I was

Fourteen

They made

A documentary

About him

We saw his image

On the screen

Of a 30 pound TV

But of course

He never breathed

And we just saw

His ghost on our

Machine.

He wasn’t the

First dead baby

I had been

Aware of, grieved

My cousin William

Died

Inside

The womb of my

Uncle’s wife

While they were

Far away

Unseen by me

But missed

And wondered over.

I imagined

Her hurt

Felt something

Approaching empathy

Although I was

Still young enough

To find the whole

Birth thing

Faintly obscene

And then another loss

Not mentioned

To me personally

And so I will not speak it here

It is not mine

To share

But I was aware

And felt keenly

The broken dream

Of another family

And then some weeks before

My baby died

I spoke to my friend

About her infant brother

Lost just days after

He was born

And we mourned

For him a little

In the car

On the way to work

I remember as we turned

Onto the road

With the lovely violin shop

On the corner

That I felt a sudden

Premonition

I just knew

That one day I would know

That feeling too

I didn’t realise it would be

So soon,

That I would come to

Speak with such

Authority

About small corpses

And their consequences

But those four came before

When dead babies were a rarity

What was your experience of babyloss before your baby or babies died? When you heard their stories did you ever imagine that it might happen to you?

Coming Home

Sapphira's first child, Shoshanna Clementine, was born at 37 weeks on March 23, 2011. She suffered from pre-eclampsia and went to the hospital to be induced.  After a placental abruption at the cord upon pushing, Sapphira ended up having an emergency c-section.  Shoshanna died three hours after delivery. She shares about herself, "I don't have a blog and hardly write, but I am so grateful to the Glow community that I thought to submit something as an expression of my appreciation and love." In April 3, 2012, Sapphira delivered her second child Julia Zahara. Please welcome Sapphira to this space and join the conversation below. —Angie

"Metaphor is a kind of mental changing room, where one thing, for a moment, becomes another, and in that moment is seen in a whole new way."  —Dr. Mardy Grothe

After Shoshanna Clementine was born and died, I tried to digest what was happening in my life by trying on all kinds of metaphors to explain, understand, or reframe events and emotions surrounding our loss. Different ones worked at various times.  For a long while, I was Indiana Jones jumping from stone to stone, feeling secure and strong with each step, but the earth was furiously shifting up and down, right and left, underneath me, as I ran endlessly to safety.  But none of these metaphors felt lasting, and none of them truly captured what was going on.

Then, one day I was painting with a friend, and a visual metaphor started to emerge, although I only saw it a day or so after the picture was complete.  I painted grass at first—the solid ground.  The pond that was to be next turned into a sea.  The sky followed, vast, taking up more than two-thirds of the picture.  I had to put in a moon, of course, a nod to my father who I always think of when I look at the moon.  As I stared at the open space of sky to the right, a teacher at the studio where we were painting came up to me and suggested I add birds to the scene.  With my permission, he lightly made some squiggle lines, and there was my metaphor.  The three birds were Shoshanna, Seth, and me.

Shoshanna is the largest one—indicating she is closest to the viewer, the one closest to shore, the one leading us back home.  "Let me show you the way," she encourages us.  It is dusk, and I am grateful she is taking us back—back to our home that we love so much and back to our hearts--to find that the broken heart we endure is actually more whole than ever before with her help.

I feel like I have been out to sea—away from the world—far, far away.  With all the navigation systems we have now, I've been able to stay in touch (emailing and texting, lunch dates and movies), but it has been isolating.  And yet Seth and I haven't been alone, really, because there are other people out here on this sea—on the waves with us, flying with us in the sky.  Others who have lost a child too. And while I've felt so far away, I have heard the cries of friends and family from the shore and the whispers that have traveled across the waves to let us know that someone else's heart aches too, that someone else misses Shoshanna besides us.

I'm waiting for this metaphor of coming home to shift and no longer apply, another one to replace the next emotion, the next phase.  But, maybe if I also look at my painting as going the other way—that Shoshanna is behind us, as we lead her out to sea—then I can give myself the permission to come and go as I please, that I can come home when I need to and go out and cry into the ocean when that is what I need.  For isn't that what being home means?

What does home mean to you? Do you have a painting, song or other metaphor that represents your grief and loss? What is it and how has it shaped your understanding of grief and your life?

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?