felled

The most extraordinary life grows out of dead trees.

 

photo by reassaure. 

Ferns and orchids. Lichen and fungi the color of absurdist paintings. Small toads find refuge under the decay. The forest bed swallows death into a loamy mound of old and new growth. A birch bark lies just beyond. It tells the tale of circles, births and deaths, the years unfurl. I hold it up, that shell of stability, the center falls out like rich soil. I whisper my story to the bark scroll. These words, masquerading as scratches on its old skin, appear on its shell.

My daughter died. I wrote the story out long after it served any usefulness. I wrote about how the grief was gone. No one read about my not-grief anymore. It didn't hurt to have people turn away. I would have turned away in my early months, but I kept writing through it. I would let go of the grief, and then pick it up again. Because since she died, it has always been about her death. Maybe before her death, it was about her death.

There were others who came before me, who reached back. A simple gesture, but monumental, I see now. They revisited their grief while abiding mine. They kept silent and listened to my story and so I did the same, until reaching back no longer served any one. My hands are empty now as my story unfurls. There is new life here. And my story must become part of the fertilizer of others.

I wrote longer than I should have. The reaching was for me, pulling my unforgiveness along, leaving bits of it on the forest to become something beautiful. For when I listened to the other stories, I became more forgiving of my own story, of my own culpability. I didn't kill her, yet I have spent nearly five years forgiving myself for her death. Only you understand that.

Nothing. Nothing can ever make Lucia's death okay. And nothing, not one thing, can ever bring her back. A paradox that no longer confounds me.

Grief is as changeable as the forest. You never trek in the same woods twice. And grief is the same. You never write about the same grief twice. There is awe and emptiness and a void of her that is unique and different in every moment. Yet what I write sounds the same, over and over, because I began looking back at my grief, rather than writing of the present grief. The present grief became the fabric of the forest, the greens in everything. It is still there, the grief, that is. It is my mistake to say that it is gone. It is just different. It is a gratitude, and a comfortability in this life, despite her death. In the early years, the writing became a way to not feel grief. I could explicate a sentence, diagram it, break it down. The words meant nothing but grammatical math. I felt something, but did not, or rather, could not feel the true weight of her absence. I made it pretty, wrote moss around it, wove nature into the story, but make no mistake, it was still daughter-death. Ashes and dead babies. Sterile hospital rooms and calls to funeral homes. Sisters never played with. Babies never cooed after. Three broken people trying to remake a family. Over and over again.

But then it would catch up with me, and I would feel that grief with the weight of a redwood, leaning on my back. 

When a woman grieves alone in the forest, does she make a sound?

I made it a point to be heard when I was felled. I started forest fires, and shot off shitty emails and wrote angry blog posts indicted everyone for my solitary grief. I entangled the hearing with the reaching. My heart burst open, broken, bleeding, raw. And I keened. 

THIS TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE THING HAPPENED TO MY FAMILY!

I screamed it. I would not be silenced so others could feel better about dead babies and grieving women and communities of people who spring up in the dark corners of the internet grieving their children that never lived. I would not be shamed because I painted it, or felt sad about never knowing my daughter, or wore my heart on my sleeve, or for starting a literary arts journal around the art of grief. Maybe all that happened for way too long, but it happened just the way it needed to happen. 

Today, my grief is grown over. The Now of Angie exists, absent of raw grief and anger, simply because I wrote about it and cried in public and arted and complained and felt sorry for myself and felt gratitude and made people uncomfortable and only talked to grieving people for a while and lived moment to moment and created rituals around my grief and made thousands of mistakes. It happened because I grieved out loud, in front of God and everyone. When I fell in the forest, I made a sound. It was a terrible, beautiful, righteous sound only the bereaved understand.

I am walking away from the writing about Lucia's death, not because I couldn't keep writing or because I no longer grieve, but because my writing serves no one anymore. Least of all me. Felled by her death, the forest floor crept over me. Overtook me. And small writhing insects made a home in me, something flew away from the forest floor, others stayed. New life grew in me, out of her DNA which still lives in me.

She is dead. We are alive. This is the great noble truth of our family.

With immense gratitude, I share my last post with the Glow community. Thank you for abiding with me on this grief journey through the last almost five years, for loving me when I could not love myself, and for sharing your stories and babies with me. Through the next few months, I will be transitioning out of the role as editor as well. I am passing the reigns to Burning Eye. Her creative fire and inspiring words will carry this space for new parents walking this dark road, and as always, Merry will continue guiding the discussion boards with aplomb and compassion. Together, I know they will continue to stoke the fires of Glow in the Woods' warm welcoming circle of parents.

Tell me, then, about your grief. How have you been making noises about your grief? Are you feeling heard? Are any parts of your grief are grown over? And what still flourishes?

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.