Mama's Little Bird

It’s been six years. Six years. When will the heat of the summer stop taking me under? When will it stop covering me in its blanket of swelter, causing my eyes to roll back and close, causing my chest to heave like a tiger’s as I walk through it all over again? Time is not distance. That much I’ve come to know. Sometimes it feels like there is little actual distance under my feet from the day Roxy died. I am like a drunken explorer with a broken compass. Every time I think I’ve navigated the swamp of summer, I find myself standing at its precipice again, wobbly and mystified.

We have a late ultrasound of Roxy recorded, and in it, she is moving. I’ve never been able to watch it since she died at nearly 38 weeks in utero, but I find myself thinking about it often. I find myself thinking about who I was then, when she was still wiggling and kicking.

When I wrote this song, I imagined it as a duet that Roxy and I would sing together through the belly of my wife, over the walls of time, through the narrowing tunnel of memory. She would take the first verse and I would take the second. Would she be a singer like Lila already is at age 4 (but too shy to perform without something over her face, being a lot like me)? I don’t know because I don’t get to know. 

The Loch Ness reference in this song speaks to how defensive inside I often feel, knowing that so few ever saw her, she may not seem completely real. But oh how real. How real. 

This song is for you Roxy, my knotted throat, my tired eyes, my first daughter, my second child.

(***I apologize for the terrible sound quality here. It’s a tired live version, but hopefully it gets the point across.***)

Darling, something’s broken
I can hear it through the walls
I can hear them making phone calls
Calling, who can they be calling?
I feel nervous and distressed
There are feathers on my arms and in my chest
I was mama’s little bird
Little bird
I guess that I’ve been walking
Through a world I just don’t get
Through a world that I can’t quit, oh
I am like the Loch Ness
I want it to exist
Wanting to believe there’s more than this
Something whistling through the leaves
Something down under the ocean
Something new and something clean
Somewhere no one else is going
I was mama’s little bird

Do you become defensive of your child's memory? How do you talk yourself down?

The Chill

I love this time of year, right up until the moment
when I feel the chill in the summer eve.

The back of my arms legs neck, the slight scent of decay.

We're bright and beautiful in the summer sun
and then nightfall
and night breeze
and the darkness spreads around me.

We fucked up last year.  We didn't prepare.
Too consumed by the stunning child in our haunted lives
the rage and sadness and death and madness
snuck up, as only memories can do.

Five years without Silas.
A blazing son on his way to his amazing birthday
that instead is merely anniversary.

That first chill of late summer orients my soul.
Distracted by the wild life and breathing love
I suddenly feel exactly like the night we collected the birthing tub.
The indigo evening, the creaking crickets, the harbingers of doom;
they are now his silent calls made mine, made into
the broken sounds of hope stilled, that future killed.

I love this time of year,
but I cannot breathe in the gorgeous evening summer breeze
as my love for Silas falls from my wet, silent eyes,
and I die a little more inside, again,
wanting him quietly, deeply, desperately as dusk settles.
Waiting for his breath I sit still,
chilled to my bones in the sweet summer eve.

~~~~~

Please post a poem or prose rant to your lost child.  My son would have been five years old on Sept. 25, and instead I just get Fall.  What do you get?  What have you found?  What can any of us do about being part of this tribe?

friend

I lost a few friends after George died.  Well, really, they were in the process of being lost during the five weeks that he was in the process of dying and that I was in the process of changing into something different than before.  For those weeks and the ones immediately following, phone calls went unanswered and emails went unreturned.  Our previously close relationships changed into something else, something not anything anymore. I was taken by surprise by the change but I probably shouldn’t have been.  

...

Melissa made the drive to the hospital from across town after work.  She brought a board game and we played scrabble on my hospital bed.  Our laughter temporarily filled the space that the thwump-thwump of his heart tones normally took up in our room.  Nurses, who were as constant as my shadow, mostly left us alone and for an entire hour I felt almost normal again.

...

I can look back at my life and divide it into discrete periods, each one associated with a different version of myself.  Each Brianna, similar in some ways and completely unique in others, was surrounded by a relatively distinctive set of friends.  Adolescent Brianna and Teenage Brianna had some friends in common but they mostly faded away once University Brianna made her first appearance.  University Brianna evolved into Adult Brianna and the story repeated itself; friends came and went.  Throughout all the versions of myself over the years there have been a few friends that have remained steady: veins of marble in the limestone of my life.  For the most part though, friends have come and gone with time. 

...

The necklace that often hangs from my neck is a secret between Jennie and me.  A delicate gold band imbedded with a single diamond, a gift she gave me immediately after George died.  “Your laughing star in the night sky,” she told me. “Remember the Little Prince.”

...

As I’ve changed -or maybe as my friends have changed- so have our relationships.  Sometimes we’ve stayed buoyed to each other and sometimes we’ve floated away, each pushed along by the tide of our own lives.  The friendships that have stuck and have followed me through my life despite all the changes, both theirs and mine, are the ones in which we’ve continued to find new places in our lives for each other. 

 ...

Natalie and Marc flew out for a long weekend after he died.  We went to the beach and to a karaoke bar.  We stayed up too late and drank too much red wine.  They ate Korean fried chicken with us even though they did not eat meat.  They listened.  We talked and cried.  They remember our son…still. 

...

I am not the same as I was four years ago and neither are all of my friendships.  There is no more animosity for the ones who could not stay but there is so much gratitude for the ones that did. 

Tell me about the people who stayed, the people who were there to abide with you.  Tell me about your Melissas, Jennies, Natalies, and Marcs.  I want to hear about the good hearts and the souls who have suffered right along with you.  Tell me about the ones who have continued to love you even as you’ve changed.

vacation

photo by Garry - www.visionandimagination.com

I walked on the black-sanded beach by myself, waiting to come across a large carcass of a whale or ship, something broken and empty, like me. Here it is, I would think, the perfect metaphor for my grief. I would climb it, I imagined, examine it, and take a piece of it home. "You didn't die in vain," I would whisper. "I will remember you." And in that moment, the inextricable link between all creatures would be known to me. Nothing like that happened.

I had never traveled sad before.

After my daughter's death, I fantasized about moving away to somewhere very warm and beautiful. Life is too short to stick around New Jersey. Or maybe this time, when we didn't have a newborn to care for or money to be spent on her, was just the perfect occasion for us to travel the world for a while. We could leave this terrible place where babies are stillborn and you can't make a left turn. Eight months after my daughter died, we packed up our grief and headed to my mother's country, Panama, for ten days.

Some days, I was ecstatic, begging to travel long distances through the country for the possible glimpse of a sloth, or totally jazzed to hit the fisherman's beach to bargain in Spanish for some fresh catch. I bounced on the balls of my feet, clapping my hands like a motivational speaker. "Come on, people, those monkeys aren't throwing poop at themselves. We've got a jungle to trek." Other days, I could barely muster a walk out of the bedroom. I woke up several times each  night thinking about the dog or my father, wracked with guilt and overwhelming anxiety. Something. Was. Wrong.

The other thoughts in those hours of the night were how far away this country is from my daughter's ashes. Lucy's death seemed so small and long ago, like a dot I saw on the tarmac of Newark as our plane arched toward Central America. Oh, but I packed her death. It ached in my every joint, in every inch of my being. Some days, every activity seemed rather pointless or overwhelming or both. "Meh. I'd rather be sleeping."  And the family would leave as I read books and wept uncontrollably.

And I remained cold. Eight degrees off the equator, I shivered in the sun. I wore a sweater most nights, sometimes during the day. I couldn't get warm. It had been like this since Lucy died, not being able to feel warmth.  I carried a bit of winter solstice in my body now.

+++

I cried during very chaotic turbulence, because what I didn't dare speak before my trip or during, was that I was convinced I was not coming home from Central America. Riptide. Hanta virus. Panamanian drivers. Mud slide. Pool accident. Infected finger. Lightning. Freak machete accident. The ways in which one can die on a vacation are surprisingly varied, interesting and around every corner. I sent emails to all my people, "I will always love you." The pilot actually came on the loud speaker on our return flight to say that we may have to make an "emergency fuel landing." This is it, I thought. I was the one with tears in my eyes and hand raised. "Uh, is that emergency landing because we have no fuel? Or is that a landing to get fuel? Could you just clarify the emergency part?"

Once you are on the shitty end of statistics, that small stretch of number is your homeland where no death scenario is too far-fetched, wild, or out of the realm of possibility. I even imagined different ways to be imprisoned in a Panamanian jail for being at the wrong place at the wrong time during a drive on a desolate piece of highway.  And my living daughter seemed a step away from death too. Sometimes I just cried, not because I saw Beatrice's imminent drowning, but because I wanted Lucy to be in the pool with her sister and her father, bouncing and splashing. I hate seeing Beatrice without her sister. My husband without his daughter. The world without a little giggling girl.

+++

There was part of me that imagined this trip as something healing, something different than it was. I tried not to build it up or imagine it being a vacation from my grief. But I admit part of me felt like maybe a change of scenery would change my grief. Just a respite from the exhausting heavy weight of it. Maybe like Atlas passing the world to Heracles for a brief minute just to stretch the shoulders. How could I not be happy in such a beautiful place? But the pure exhausting nature of grief amplified the ugliness inside me and the beauty of everything else. Lush green and grief. Moss and anxiety. I looked out of our room onto the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean, watching the sun set, and still, I was so fucking sad. It's easier to be sad in New Jersey. You are supposed to be sad in New Jersey. This was just another shitty day in paradise.

+++

When we walked in our house, I walked straight to her urn. Why hadn't I taken it with us? I stared at it for fifteen uninterrupted minutes, I missed home.  I missed her (which had nothing to do with home.) I missed grieving her. Home represented non-judgment. No expectations. Just grief in whatever form it came. And yet the vacation was beautiful, dare I say, worth it. I listened to the story I told to other people about the vacation--epic hikes through the jungle, watching twenty hummingbirds fly around my daughter, lying on the beach, rolling a cigar in a factory with my cousin,  spotting a sloth in the jungle, or discovering a moss-covered wall and waterfall.  Those were amazing moments. The truth is when I spoke of my amazing days before, they have really always been an amazing moment or two enveloped by the mundane. After my daughter died,  they became amazing moments enveloped by the grief. And they are, in their own way, sometimes happier. Maybe the juxtaposition with grief makes them happier.

If someone asked me many years ago to describe how both my best and worst moment could be wrapped up together, I couldn't have imagined what that could possibly be. Then I birthed Lucy, knowing she was dead, both so incredibly tragic and beautiful. Her birth, a peaceful moment of agony. And so this first vacation after her death, an agonized moment of peace.

Have you traveled, or been on holiday, since the death of your baby? What was the experience like? How has grief changed your experience of travel? Or how has travel changed your grief?