Advanced previews

Our dog, the world's best dog, is a touch over 19 months old now. We got him when he was two and a half months old, four days before A's fifth anniversary. He was tiny, and mostly black. He has probably reached his adult size and weight-- north of 50 lbs-- by now. He's black and tan, a proper and gorgeous Airedale coloring. He is playful and sneaky and gentle and social. He lets little kids, even kids who don't live here, pull his tail and stick their hands in his mouth. I mean literally elbow deep. A one year old's elbow deep, but still. He even lets selfsame shameless shorties take his most prized possessions, his tasty-tasty cleanly polished bones, straight out of his mouth. 

Monkey says he's a relaxation aid, because it is impossible, according to her, to sit next to that dog, one arm over him, the other hand petting him, and remain tense. Especially after he twists his head up to declare his appreciation. The dog is a saint. 

He is also a damned crazy rat bastard who takes nearly every opportunity to run off for a mad dash around the neighborhood. The woods behind the houses across the street, the back yards of the houses on our side, back and front yards of the houses one and two streets down. As far as we can tell, he never crosses that second street down and never goes farther than one over on the right. He stops by the houses of his doggie friends in the neighborhood for loud and urgent conversations. But mostly he runs, like the wind.

When he's done, he peaceably surrenders to one of us. Next to last time he did this, he actually came to the front door and waited while the search party returned. Oh, did I forget to mention that he's smart? Last year, he dug under the fence so carefully and masterfully that it took us weeks to figure out how he was getting out. Now that we've used that knowledge to close off his escape route, he is reduced to taking advantage of momentary lapses of judgement or inexperienced operation of the front door. But he doesn't run where the cars are (anymore) and he always comes back. 

He bounces when he walks, and his tags jiggle. It's a mood-elevating sound, a reassuring one. I remember the first time I caught him after he escaped, I didn't bring the leash with me as I ran out. So walking back to the house, I had him by the collar. I had to bend a bit to keep a good handle on it. I was supposed to've been mad. But the rhythm of his steps next to me, echoed by the rhythm of the tags, and his whole pleased with himself air-- somehow all of that made me feel mostly amusement mixed with tender gratitude that he exists, that he's ours. 

Mostly, because there was, also, a familiar ping of anxiety. Not, mind you, anxiety that the crazy puppy could've gotten lost or killed by a car just then. No, anxiety about the fact that someday, hopefully a good decade or more on, someday he will die. This doom-preview is better now, though not entirely absent. I think I just got used to it, acknowledged it into background, if that makes sense. Back at the height of its head-messing reign, this thought would loom the largest during the walking of the dog. Possibly due to the limited multitasking potential of the dog walk, the anxiety would expand to fill most of my headspace. One moment I'd be walking this lovely creature, enjoying the sounds of tag jiggle and his happy little bounce, view from behind, and the next I'd get slammed with the complete certainty that one day he won't be here.

It's not that he is the only creature in the household whose existence causes me anxiety. I am, if we are being honest here, a much more anxious person now than I was before. But with the humans, the anxiety tends to ebb and flow depending on what's on life's menu. And with most of them, rational thought is that they will, most likely, outlive me. The dog, on the other hand, is the only one whose death preceding mine is baked in the cake, barring any catastrophic event or illness on my part. With humans, anxiety is about modicum of control, or maybe just an illusion of it. It's about holding on, hoping not to lose them. With the dog, it's about knowing that I can't. 

It's not going to be the same kind of sadness or the same kind of missing. But in getting a dog, we did sign up for an extra dose of that, eventually. I sort of think that living with missing A makes me know that when it happens, I will be ok, terribly sad for a while, but ok. And in the meantime, there's the sound of clinking tags and the consistently high entertainment value of the dog sliding on hardwood as he chases a ball inside the house. And, and, and... 

Do you have pets? What do they mean to you? Has your view of your pets shifted at all after the death of your child(ren)? Did you decide to get a pet after? Or has it made you decide not to get one? 

Are you more anxious now? Or have you found zen of not sweating most things? 

Youngest Kind of Pain

Since this is Valentine’s Day, I figured it would be appropriate to introduce a song I wrote about the most depressing date ever: the first one Terra and I went on after our first daughter, Roxy Jean, had died.

I honestly can’t even remember exactly what we did, except that we found ourselves walking along the same sycamore and maple-lined campus avenue where we’d first begun dating, some 16 years prior, as two gutter punks trying to find a way to get drunk outside of Spaceport Arcade (yes, we are that old). We’d fill our Styrofoam gas station cups up with such a strong ratio of vodka to red kool-aid (hey it was 1991, and we were broke) that we had to drink it quickly in order to keep the alcohol from disintegrating the cup from the inside out. We’d run wild through the night in a pack like wolves. Sometimes between the buildings, sometimes through the woods by the lake, and sometimes we’d lie around on the dirty floor of someone’s smoke-filled apartment, listening to The Misfits or The Violent Femmes. I smoked Winston cigarettes. She never did.

But I digress. This song is not exactly about those days.

It’s about the night that we walked like ghosts through a past that seemed to belong to other people now. We didn’t want to drink vodka out of Styrofoam cups while running through the night air looking for adventure. We wanted something stronger. We wanted to go home. It was too quiet without our 4-year-old son to distract us and especially without out the baby we should have been losing sleep caring for. We just walked, and the silence surrounded us. We were paralyzed by our shared pain and we did not want to be alone with it.

Oh my God, Oh my God, this is the place we used to walk
When the darkness had yet to leave it's darkest kind of mark
And we were strange
We were borderline deranged
And you had eyes that held the water like saucers full of rain

Through the lotus went the light and I saw something new revealed
I saw the scars from the fight
I saw the wounds that never heal
So strike the stage, I guess nothing can remain
All this running, fucking running, and we're no farther from this place
We're in the youngest kind of pain

We save the softest words for strangers
Because we don't know how to say it
And we don't know what the name is
No baby sleeping in the manger

And there's no one here to save us
There's no one here to save us
There's no one here to save us 

What was your first date like after the loss of your baby? What was it like to try to be romantic? 

a hard talk

It is my distinct honor to  welcome our newest regular contributor Brianna from  Daily Amos.  In 2010, her first son George was diagnosed with heart failure caused by supraventricular tachycardia at 24 weeks gestation. Over the next four weeks, the doctors tried to slow his heart rate down with medication. After stopping treatment, Brianna developed Mirror Syndrome and had to have an emergency c-section. George died shortly after birth. Brianna brings her wisdom and sharp insights to Glow in the Woods. We are grateful to have her. --Angie

When I was a kid one of my favorite books was Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.  I often imagined myself as Max (and what child who has ever read that book has not done that same exact thing) throwing off the shackles of parental subjugation and escaping to a place where I was beholden only to myself.  To this day I still love that book and get a thrill every time my nearly eighteen-month-old daughter asks me to read it to her and yells, “Max!” as we flip through the pages.  There is something pure and honest in the way Sendak writes about childhood that is completely unique to him, which is probably why his books are beloved by so many people.  Maurice Sendak died last year at age eighty-three having written and/or illustrated hundreds of pieces.  Given the subject matter of what he wrote about I was surprised to discover that he never had any particular fondness for childhood and was more than a little preoccupied with his own death.

During one interview Sendak explains what he believes to be at the root of his morbid obsession.  He tells a story of being a small child, about the age of four, and seeing on the front page of a newspaper a photograph of the remains of “The Lindbergh Baby,” the twenty-month-old child of the famous Charles and Anne Lindbergh who was killed during a kidnapping for ransom attempt.  Sendak goes on to recount how profoundly the image terrified him and that his parents never really adequately addressed his distress.  His parents, in fact, denied that such a photograph existed and insisted that little Maurice must have fabricated the entire thing.  It wasn’t until many years later, long after Sendak’s obsession with the Lindbergh baby had matured and developed into the fixation he had about his own death, did he actually get confirmation that the photograph he claimed to see on the newspaper did actually exist.

I don't know why his parents chose to ignore their son’s obvious difficulty processing what he saw.  Maybe they really believed their four-year-old son had lied about the photograph.  Perhaps they thought convincing him that the entire incident never happened was the best course of action.  I assume they were doing what most decent parents do when faced with uncomfortable situations like these; the best they can.  But whatever the reason behind their decision, the result, at least in Maurice Sendak's mind, was that the little boy grew up to be fixated on his own death.

Watching Sendak recount what a traumatic experience he had with his first encounter with death made me think about the first time I learned about the concept myself.  It was when one of our cats died and I must have been six at the time, maybe seven.  She was a tortoiseshell beauty we called Puzzles, name owed to the interlocking swatches of orange and black fur on her back.  She had been sick and my parents sent us down the street to play at a neighbor’s house while they took her to the vet.  At the time I was not aware that they were taking her there to be euthanized.  I assumed they were taking her to the doctor’s office to get medicine in the same way they did when my sister or I was sick.  They returned later that afternoon, driving on our street past where we were playing outside.  I knew something was wrong when I saw my dad in the passenger seat and that my mother was driving, an unlikely sight in our family.  My sister, four years my senior, must have also known something was wrong as I don’t remember her saying anything to me the entire walk back to the house.  When we arrived we found my dad, with a grim look on his face, along side my mother, waiting for us at the front door.  “Puzzles was too sick to get better,” they told us, and that they “had to help her so that she would no longer be in pain.”  They explained that they had her put to sleep, that she was not going to wake up, and what exactly all that meant.  There might have been talk about heaven and what happens after death but I honestly don’t remember what was said mainly because I don’t think that part of conversation was as jarring as the idea of actual death. 

They brought Puzzle’s body back from the vet’s office so that we could say goodbye by having a funeral for her.  I realized that was why my father had been sitting as a passenger instead of his usual place in the captain’s seat: he had been holding on his lap the body of our much-loved cat, wrapped in plastic and placed in a cardboard box.  Later that day my dad dug a hole in the corner of the backyard under a tree where we said our goodbyes.  It was about as gentle an introductory experience as a child can have to death.  I don’t look back on that memory with any fear or resentment but rather with an appreciation to my parents for making the hard choice to talk to us frankly about such a difficult subject.

In an ideal world the introduction I had to the concept of mortality and death is the one a child should get about such a profound subject.  The introduction should not happen by being faced with a black and white photo of a stranger’s murdered child, or by the death of a sibling, or by watching mama come home from the hospital without baby brother or sister… Sadly though we don’t live in an ideal world.   We live in a crazy, often beautiful but just as often fucked-up, world.   Sometimes children do get murdered and sometimes babies do die.  Some of us do not get to decide when and how our children learn about death…for some of us circumstance chooses for us.

Since George died Leif and I have had frequent conversations about how and when we are going to tell his sister about him and why he died.  I guess in a way we are the luckier ones in the spectrum of unlucky baby loss. He was our first child and so we have the luxury of deciding when our daughter learns that she had a brother. Still I can imagine that no matter how or when we do it I will always wonder if we irrevocably damaged in some way her impressionable young mind.  When she is fifteen and painting her nails black, listening to her generation’s equivalent of The Smiths, I’ll be certain that it is a result of my failure as her mother to adequately address her brother’s death.   When she expresses any hint of anxiety while being pregnant with my grandchild, I will have no doubt that it is because she is convinced that her baby is going to die just like her mother’s did.   I don’t think it is possible to escape those kinds of doubts or, if there is, I’m still trying to figure out a way to it.

The truth is that I am not afraid of telling her about death and mortality, per se.  What does frighten me about explaining to her that her older brother died is the part where I have to expose her to ideas like sometimes bad things happen to good people and that there are not always good reasons for why terrible things happen in life.  I worry about having to explain to her at some point that occasionally even our best efforts are not rewarded with happy endings.  I don’t know how or when as a parent you tell your child these things as it seems to me it must at least partially steal away some innocence, and there is such precious little time they get to keep that as it is.   What I do know for certain is that I will tell her about her brother George and that he died even though we wanted him so badly to stay.  I will do my best to give her honest answers when she asks questions about him, as I know that she inevitably will.  I will make sure she knows that no matter how scary this world is that I love her and her brother so very, very much.  Maybe that is all she needs and the rest will work itself out.  

What are your thoughts on discussing the topic of death with children?  Have you had to explain the death of your baby to his or her sibling?  How did you do it?   If you haven’t yet had to address the topic, how will you or how would you do it?  Or maybe you won’t address it.  Tell me why.  What do you wish your parents had told you about death?

a midwinter's night dream

I brush my daughter’ hair off her forehead. We reflect on our day, say some prayers of gratitude to the universe, ask to stay in our bed all night, pray for good dreams. "Mama, I prayed to have a dream of rainbow and unicorns last night, but I dreamed of poopy."

I search her face for cheekiness, but there is none. She is quite earnest. She really did dream of poo. She says she wants to dream of special places, and other people, maybe even people who died.

"Dreams thin the walls between the living and the dead, my love, and even though you cannot pray for a dream and expect it every time, you can ask someone who died to visit you in a dream."

"Like Lucy?"

"Yes, like Lucy."

"I had a dream of Lucy before."

"Did you?"

"Yes, I was playing in the kitchen, and under the stepstool I found twelve ladybugs. The lady bugs came together and formed a girl. She looked just like you with black hair and brown eyes and brown skin. She said to me, 'I won't go back to where I was. Not ever again. I will stay here forever and ever. I can sleep with you if you are scared.'"

"Wow, Beezus, that is amazing. What was she wearing?"

"A red dress with white spots, and she had two little pony tails."

"Like a lady bug."

"I guess so. She was very happy skipping around. She told me and Thomas to get Rodys, and we bounced all around the house while you did dishes."

"I remember that day, Beatrice, because I saw you and your brother bouncing and imagined Lulu bouncing with you too."

"She was there."

"You can play with your sister in your dream. That's amazing. I wish I could play with her in my dreams."

"Just pray for ladybugs, Mama."

+++

I dreamt of Lucia only once. It was before her death. It was the only time I held her alive, and she was just barely alive. Her purple eyes blinked open and I smiled at her. Now, I believe it more a premonition of her death, then a premonition of her life. But naiveté and stupid arrogance couldn’t grasp the idea that the baby in my belly could die. In these four years, I have never felt jealousy of other pregnancies, or living children, or the earth people who never grieve their poor dead babies, but I am jealous of those who dream of their dead as though they live. Even my daughter, (I must whisper now, because I am ashamed of myself) I am jealous that she gets to dream of my baby, even as I want that for her. For everyone. I just want it for me too. A clear portal to our babies that we can access whenever we want.

photo by Douglas Brown.

All my prayers and pleadings have not yielded one dream of her. I carry dreaming crystals to bed, place them on my third eye. I drink teas of mugwort and lavender, write my wishes and put them in the pillow, but still nothing. Though I have not dreamt of Lucy since she died, I have winter solstice. I wake in the middle of the longest night, and look at the sky—a dream-like ritual of bitter cold and release. I watch for ravens and northern lights, cover myself in snow and a woolen cocoon that reminds me of the womb that killed her. I keep releasing the anger and guilt around her death, though I will never really release her. All of this, I think, is like inducing a dream of my dead daughter. Perhaps it is a lucid mid-winter's dream of fire and night and blurry meditations, calling to the ravens to bring her soul to me. It transcends solstice and continues through January, February, March...I commune with Winter herself. Winter belongs to my girl, even if she never comes to that particular cocktail party.

It may be presumptuous to take a whole season for my daughter. Though selfishly, I want more. I want the year. Or at least, just the night. I want one dream with my beautiful dead baby of the snow. I deserve it, or maybe not, but I want something more. Not this vast tundra of nothingness, dreams of wastelands, and empty arms, and ravens who tear at the skin of grief, but never carry my daughter with them.

Have you had dreams of your child or children since their death? Before their death? What was the dream? Was it comforting or disconcerting? Have your children, or other people, dreamt of your baby or babies? How did you explain it to them? How did you feel about it?

The Answer

The intersection of grief, creativity, and writing remains a place of such deep beauty and personal horror, I stand in awe of people getting their hands and souls dirty in it, exploring it with art, music, and writing. Kenny is a songwriter and musician from Bloomington, IN, whose band Gentleman Caller, has just released their fourth record, Wake (Mariel Recording Company). This record meditates on the loss of his daughter, Roxy Jean, who was stillborn at thirty-eight weeks on August 1, 2007. His music breaks me wide open in such an important way. I learn more about my own grief. Kenny agreed to join us at Glow as a regular contributor where he will be exploring his grief with his wise insights, brutal honesty, and dark humor, and of course through his music and words.  —Angie

In the year following Roxy’s death, I was just hunched, squinting and holding on.  I tried to outrun my thoughts, but they were in every hiding place I ran to.  I self-medicated with booze for a few weeks.  Became an expert on panic attacks. Sometimes I just waited, counting days away from the day she died. There was more comfort in math than hugs. I held on and flailed, as quietly as possible, inside my hollowed-out flesh-cage. I went to therapy, took anxiety meds and tried to get to know and understand my new, messed up self. 

During that god-forsaken year, 3 friends also died early, tragic deaths.  One by house fire.  One by drowning.  One by aneurysm.  All three under the age of 40. It seemed unreal and impossible at first… then, inevitable.  Remember, in The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo snaps “NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS!” before successfully flying through an asteroid field?  My life, the lives of my friends and family… ours had become the exact opposite of that.  We weren’t beating the odds, but being destroyed by them, and those odds were giggling.  

Hollowed out by losing my beautiful, dark-haired daughter, and managing my anxiety with medication (prescription and other), I was sliding down and increasingly absent of hope. I started recognizing patterns in the memorial services I was attending. The hollow, crying eyes of the mother, the trembling, shaking hand of the father, all while speakers talked about what the deceased loved, how they loved and who they were… and there was always a song. I was so embittered by all the loss, and death just seemed right around the corner for everyone I loved. I was certain I would not live to be an old man. I felt that no one I knew would. 

So, I decided to write my own funeral song.

I wanted a song that would just tell the bleak truths of my life… a song that wouldn’t put a bow on the end of my life, but a thudding and appropriate period. Somehow, it felt like the bravest thing I could do.

It happened immediately upon returning home after the last memorial service I would attend that year. It took literally the amount of time to write that it does to sing it. It remains, easily, the quickest I’ve ever written a song. It also remains the most cathartic:

THE ANSWER

I did not find the answer in church
I did not find the answer in church
I did not want a god that would not spare the rod
I did not find the answer in church
I did not find the answer in my home
I did not find the answer in my home
I was a stranger to my kin
I was a stranger to them
I did not find the answer in my home
I did not find the answer in school
I did not find the answer in school
I was sucker-punched and thin
I was not like the other kids
I did not find the answer in school
I did not find the answer at the bar
I did not find the answer at the bar
Beneath the stale embrace
I was always out of place
I did not find the answer at the bar
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I took every pill they make
But I was still awake
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I did not find the answer in your eyes
I did not find the answer in your eyes
Not your hands and not your lips
We were always passing ships
I did not find the answer in your eyes

 What songs, if any, have been a comfort to you since your loss?  What songs can you no longer listen to? What would be your funeral song?

glass words

I am so honored to welcome this month's guest writer. Merry's support and love permeates all the nooks and crannies of this community.  Merry describes herself as a "38 year old mother of four girls who came before and then Freddie who was born and didn't breathe but then did and lived for eleven days in SCBU before dying of pneumonia. In January this year we had Ben, our rainbow baby born 21 months after Freddie died." Merry writes at Patch of Puddles.

When I say the words, they remind me of the twinkling, polished nuggets of pretty glass that surround his memorial tree. Smooth, splendid, finished, perfect.

"He's their second brother. We had another little boy but he died when he was very young."

"They did have another brother but we didn't get to bring him home."

"We had another one who spent some time in SCBU. No, he didn't come home unfortunately."

"I've had six children... I have five children."

"He is number six. I have four girls at home."

Sometimes I phrase it so I don't have to say the words. Their brother died. My baby died. Our son died.

I've perfected the words so they skitter around like handfuls of decorative glass pebbles held high and dropped, bouncing in the sunlight.

photo by dalvenjah.

I'm guilty of an art of careful word architecture that parcels up our family pain and speaks it in a way that acknowledges but protects. I sometimes worry I phrase it in a way that make people think we weren't allowed to keep him rather than had him brutally taken. By the time I spit those artfully shaped words out they have been shaped to make them glisten and slide from my lips, not rip . I'm guilty of trying to make it palatable. I worry people think it means I have got over it.

I worry he hears.

+++

The world at large says words back at me that my world in miniature says politely.

"At least you have the others."

"The girls must have helped you get through."

"Thank goodness you didn't have to bring him home for a while. At least you never got to know him before he died."

As if the eleven days bent over his cot, praying to every god I don't believe in to grant a miracle didn't count. As if having four healthy children makes a difference to the pain of losing one. As if, at the birth of a good to go child, someone could say "Do you mind if we keep him and you just pop off home?" and the answer would be "Well of course, it's not like I know him yet!" As if, knowing his sisters, loving them deeply, makes his loss more bearable and not the yawning, gripping pain of knowing exactly how wonderful and beautiful a person we lost.

"It must be so much easier to cope with losing Freddie now that you have Ben."

Out pops a pebble, a shiny glass pebble.

"Yes, it helps. Of course it helps." Treading a path neatly between the socially acceptable and my listening daughters hearing and thinking he became expendable and forgotten. I break my teeth on another palatable pebble.

+++

It's because of my daughters that I had to give up fighting for Freddie. With disability and long term care looming hard and fast, I vomited up the words that we had to let him go. Losing him was not better because we had living children, it was made bitter and bile filled by the knowledge that I could ruin six lives by fighting for him or let him go and save us all.

"It's time to stop."

There was nothing polished about those words, they were molten and then jagged and my cheeks and tongue and throat are throbbing and scarring still.

Don't let anyone tell you that having other children makes it better. Different, but not better.

+++

Just 30 minutes holding the body of my son without wire or tubes.

With the image of my frightened and barely whole children waiting for news burned into my head, I watched my son die, packed my bag and went home to comfort them, to break the news, thank the people who cared for them - and have lunch.

Home to an eleven year old standing at the top of the stairs and sobbing "Is he dead? It's not fair."

Home to a ten year old who took one look at our faces and turned and walked away, the brother she had longed for gone before she ever held him. She never let herself cry.

Home to a seven year old who screamed "You shouldn't have had him! You had too many children already! Have other one now!"

Home to a five year old already shattered to pieces by her parents having been absent for eleven days, who had kissed the bump every night and made him a space in her heart and loved him as only a five year old can and who sat in our arms and seemed to understand and two hours later asked when we would go to get him and bring him home.

Who asked repeatedly, "Is he still alive really?"

All our grief, laid out and raw in the faces of the children we loved. Our children dragged through the splintering, wounding carnage alongside us.

My children, crumpled and bewildered and somehow supposed to filled the gaping hole in my heart, who listened and watched my every move, weighed up my love, weighed up my grief, looked to see if I would last. Looked to see if I could still be mummy.

Home to gymnastics sessions and maths that needed doing and laundry and presents waiting to be given to a new baby brother. I spent the first night after his death not in my bed and my husbands arms, but on a mattress on the floor of a pink bedroom, each of us with shell shocked girl lying either side of us. There was no hiding in a darkened room for me. There was no going to pieces. The greatest betrayal was that we had to put Freddie neatly away ourselves and carry on - go forward - to keep our living children safe.

Life goes on.

Don't let anyone tell you it makes it okay if the babylost have other children.

Sometimes what hurts most of all is accepting I was one of the luckiest of the unlucky people. That my pain is a little more bearable because of my children. But that my pain is magnified ten thousandfold by seeing them hurt.

+++

When I think I can't be any more sad, I hear them speaking pebbles. Polished, perfect pebbles that drop and scatter as they dance the linguistic dance of having two brothers but only one that anyone can see.

That is a special kind of heartbreak.

Look what I did to my children. I wanted another baby, who died, and I made my children learn to speak the language of the grief stricken. I daren't look inside their mouths. I am too frightened to see if there are scars from the glass. I'm horrified, but happier, to see the pebbles.

How do you use word architecture when speaking to others about your child's (or children's) death? Is there one phrase you use consistently? Do you use different words or phrases depending on if you are talking to a stranger, the casual acquaintance, close friend or family member? If you have older children, how to teach them to talk of their sibling's death? Do you overhear them mirroring your words?  What kinds of things do you overhear them saying about death and grief and their family since the death of their sibling?