Invisible Shadows

Silas’s invisible shadow leaves markers of emotion on the milestones of Zephyr’s life.  From birth to smile to first steps to sentences, I revel in Zeph’s vibrant growth overflowing with life, yet I feel the silent echo of our lost son’s nonexistent experiences reverberating through the house, Lu’s eyes, my soul.

Everyone sees Zeph as an only child.  That’s what he is in every obvious way.  But I cannot help wondering how different his life and personality would have been if Silas were here as his older brother.  That it is impossible to fathom how that fundamental variation would have transformed all of our lives is slightly maddening.  I try to picture it and vanish down the vortex of endless possibilities.

I dread the moment Zephyr realizes or is told about the friend and brother he should have had. That sadness is a shadow on my every gesture and thought, and I hate that he will learn, someday, what he doesn’t have. At night as I lay in bed, sometimes the pipes start to knock as they heat up and warm the house.  First it’s soft and light, then louder and more solid.  The knocks are intermittent but consistent and when they wake me up in the middle of the night and I lay there listening, anticipating, waiting for each next knock, I can’t help but think about the soft gray ashes in the drawer next to my bed, next to my head that are all that is left of Silas’s corporeal body and although I don’t believe in ghosts or hauntings or maybe even the afterlife at all, I can’t help but hear his shadow knocking on my soul, knocking softly every day and night, knocking softly on my heart.

I see his fleet shadow flying around the corner when I walk with Zeph down the block.  Silas is already ahead, already gone, but I’ve got to keep this little guy’s hand in mine as we amble along, going slow like only a two year old can do.

Do you have moments when you feel your lost child closely?  Is it a sound or a place or state of mind?  If you were fortunate enough to have children after your lost child, what was it like to explain to them what happened?  How do you deal with the what-ifs & should-have-beens?

Leave This World Alone

First of all, I’d like to announce that this will be my last post for a good long while. It has been a great honor to write for this blog. I discovered it around a year and a half after my Roxy died, and it really gave voice to so much that I had been feeling, because it wasn’t all “angels up in heaven” talk. It helped me find my own voice, and really pulled me out of the writer’s block I had found myself in following Roxy’s death. I believe it saved my writing, which saved me. I can’t thank Glow and all the readers and writers, past and present, enough. Thank you so much for having me here.

I saved this song for my last post because it was written during a “where do we go from here moment.” A couple of years after Roxy died, we took a vacation to the gulf side of Florida. One evening I watched the shadowed sun go from the beach. The ocean was so forgiving and just looking at it made me feel some new kind of peace. All that nothingness. No sound but the surf rolling in and out. It was the first time I tried to say goodbye to Roxy. It was the first time I tried to let her go. I didn’t tell anyone, but I stared at the ocean and I whispered her name and I said goodbye and thanked her for coming. I sat there and watched and remembered the sound that the words made, barely leaving my mouth. I thought of some of the things she had given me as she left:

An understanding of loss. I could help others in their grief because I wasn’t afraid of them.

Gardening. I became a gardener when she died.

How little of the world mattered to me compared to my children.

Note: In the first verse of this song, I am speaking to myself. I am talking myself down. The second verse is my goodbye to Roxy, I suppose knowing she’d never leave me.

I heard the bats over the beach
I saw the ship sailing out of our reach
Come on, leave this world alone
And learn to hear the thunder all on your own
Once it hits you, it will ruin your clothes
It will kiss you with a death inside your bones
Honey, leave this world alone
And learn to hear the thunder all on your own
There’s a lonely cotton dress on the line
Hope I catch you off your medicine tonight
Is there anything left besides?
This is all so fucking frightening
Your silhouette against the lightning
And I remember when you came
And how you really, really tried to save me
So I could leave this world alone
And learn to hear the thunder all on your own
Every year your shadow grows
And the wind is howling like a distant trombone
With my fingers in the dirt, exploring
There is nothing left but work and mourning
Take this for what it’s worth, my darling
Every year your shadow grows
And the wind is howling like a distant trombone
Leave this world alone

I really appreciate all of you for reading and listening to what I've written, and I hope for some moments of peace for each of you. It's all we can ask for, I suppose.

lost in translation

We sat across from her, an arrangement of flowers and a small analog clock sitting on the table between us.  She was young, only a few years older than myself, pretty with a well-tailored black dress and an almost preposterously large diamond ring on her finger.  Her office overlooked part of a very famous street in Los Angeles where the wealthy spend ungodly amount of money on handbags and diamond-studded watches.  She was a psychologist or therapist, I can't remember which now, that we found via a referral from our OB after George died.  There were five names on that list and I picked hers from the lot solely because she was the only woman. I naively believed that her sex would somehow imbue her with special counseling superpowers.  I should have known better.

Sitting stiffly in the overstuffed couch, we told her all about how our life had gone from blissfully happy to utterly broken.  I did most of the talking (between wiping away tears and my runny nose) while Leif sat beside me and quietly held my hand.  I relayed the events leading to George's death and watched her reaction to it all with an observant eye.  She furrowed her brow at the right times and nodded sympathetically when I had difficulty maintaining my train of thought.  She said all the right things and reacted in all the right ways, yet something about the blankness in her eyes made me feel as if instead of talking about the death of a much loved baby we were discussing my disappointment over being passed over for a job promotion.  It took all of ten minutes to conclude that she was an experienced actor and that she had little empathy for the ugly circumstance which had brought us in to see her.  Forty minutes later it was over and I was writing a check to her for an absurd amount of money, thankful to be done with experience.  

Back in the car we agreed never to go back to see her.

After that miserable experience I threw out all the other counseling referrals we were given and turned to the Internet.  I tried every combination of words to find counselors who specialized in pregnancy and neonatal losses. Grief + infant + death + depression + counseling = the saddest collection of words I've ever Googled.  The results were abundant and spanned the spectrum of mental health workers: from family therapists to psychiatrists and even naturopaths.  I must have looked through those results dozens of times before gathering up enough courage to pick one and make the call to set up an appointment.   Given how badly our first experience went it still surprises me that I somehow mustered the bravery (desperation, more likely) to even make another attempt. 

Thus the Internet threw me a lifeline -like it has done for me on so many occasions since we lost George- and brought me Anne.

Anne was the antithesis of the first woman we had earlier met with.  Her warmness was as welcoming as the first therapist’s disingenuousness was off-putting.  Even their appearances were starkly contrasted.  Instead of an expensive black dress and hair slicked back in a tight ponytail, Anne wore casual white slacks, a pastel sweater and a string of understated pearls on her neck.  She smiled easily and it never felt inappropriate or forced.  From the moment we began talking it felt like a homecoming and for the next eighteen months it became my refuge.

When I first started seeing Her I felt alone in my grief.  As much as I had tried to convey to friends and family how lost I was or how deeply I missed my baby it was a language completely foreign to them.  It wasn’t as if they didn't try to understand but there was something fundamentally lacking in their ability to interpret my words and behaviors in the wake of George’s death.  Once I wrote in a blog post that it was incredibly painful for me to be faced with images of carefree pregnant women and a pregnant friend took deep offense.  It made me feel awful, both because I had hurt someone who had been a good friend, but also because it made so very clear to me how alien my experience was to those around me.  That was the last time I ever wrote or said anything of that nature outside of the safety of Anne’s office (and later the safety of private conversations with other baby loss people) for fear of offending someone who was not fluent in the language of loss and did not understand the consequences of post-traumatic stress.  After a time I learned to hold back my words for fear that they would be falsely translated into insults or that they would make the impression that I was more depressed then I actually was. 

It was incredibly isolating and not just a little discouraging. 

To Anne, when I told her how much I hated hearing about other women’s pregnancies or how deeply I burned with envy at seeing birth announcements, I was completely normal.  To a grief counselor I was just mourning the loss of my baby, my pregnancy, my previous life, and my self-image.  She understood my language and there was no need for me to make any effort to translate for her.  I did not have to soften the edges of my sharp and sometimes cutting thoughts.  Every week I saw her it was an emotional and physical relief just to sit with someone and not need to filter or mold every word out of my mouth to either A) convey how devastated I was or B) avoid making myself sound like a black-hearted monster. 

One of the most valuable things I learned from our time together was how to accept that no matter how eloquent the words I used to describe my grief there was always going to be something lost in translation for those people who were fortunate enough to have so far been spared any real tragedy in their lives.  They would never ever totally understand (how could they) what I was feeling but the good ones worth keeping around would make an effort to try.   She assured me that there would be people that I would find walking the same long and arduous road that I was on and they would not need any translation.  There would be people who understood.  I just had to keep my eyes and my heart open along the way. 

Anne was the first person I came across after George died who gave me hope that I would not be alone in my grief forever. I found those other people she told me I would find, other souls who were slugging through the same muddy road as I was: other grieving souls who would become friends and for whom no translation was needed.  Hope is an amazing gift.

Have you seen a grief counselor?  Was it a positive experience?  Was there someone else who you felt understood your grief when no one else seemed to?  Has it been frustrating for you to have people not understand or misconstrue your words and/or behaviors in response to your child's or children's deaths?

always hearing voices

If I’ve ever felt sadder in my 41 years on this unforgiving planet earth than I did when I wrote “Always Hearing Voices”, I do not know when it would have been. As many of you know, unfortunately, and as Elizabeth McCracken wrote, “grief lasts longer than sympathy” and this song was written in the sober realization of that singular, undeniable fact.  

One of the casualties of hitting the bottom of the well (which I tend to believe is a special place reserved for someone who loses a child), is that it hammers a spike right into the center of your life, and fault lines splinter out in every direction. They create divides between you and everyone, even (and sometimes especially) those that are the closest to you. The spike creates a hole through which every reserve you have is emptied. Every bit of patience, understanding, forgiveness and even, sometimes, love is sucked down the hole, leaving you a twitchy, angry shell, unrecognizable even to yourself.

This song is about feeling wounded by the people in your life who love you the most, and how lonely that feeling is. It’s about feeling lost in the dark, months after your loss. I did not seriously consider suicide because I had a living 4-year old in my house. It’s a pretty raw thing to admit, but if it weren’t for him I have no doubt in my mind that there is an excellent chance I would have eaten a bullet that night. I felt crazy, wounded, lost and completely alone. The concept of suicide was less scary to me that night than was living. It was as simple as that. Sometimes, continuing to draw breath is the bravest thing in the world. I fantasized about suicide, not as a real option, but in the same way someone might fantasize about a night alone with Johnny Depp or Scarlett Johanssen. It ain’t gonna happen, but man, it can be fun to think about.

At the time, I felt like those closest to me were limping away from the accident, not realizing that I was still trapped under the car. I couldn’t even scream, so I just wrote this song.  Grief can have a terribly selfish, self-absorbed face, and it can be as lonesome as lonesome gets.

On the phone, it don’t seem like she remembers me
Or the shape that I’ve been in
On the phone, making noises
I am always hearing voices
On the phone, in the hall and on the run
There’s a rattle in my brain
I am always hearing voices
And they’re flowering your grave
And they decorate your portrait
On the phone, beating hard and back to listening
Where’d you go?
In the dark, we make our choices
I am always hearing voices
In the dark and talking to the gun
And it’s funny how you laugh
How you laugh when nothing’s funny
And I’m picking up my map
And I’m hitting the high ground running
There’s a rattle in my brain
I am always hearing voices
And they’re flowering your grave
And they decorate your portrait

Ever been here? You're absolutely not alone. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

inside the broken

There are things which broke on that day which will never be repaired.

My ability to give a toss, for one thing. I walked out of the hospital wearing pyjamas, clutching a yoghurt. Less than an hour after watching my 11 day old son die, I left the building having forgotten to dress but feeling it was important to not waste the money spent on a breakfast yoghurt that my throat had been too constricted to eat.

A million times I have reconstructed that morning, imagined that I screamed and howled and refused to be parted from him, imagined myself cradling him - illegally outside a car seat - on the journey home. Imagined his breathless body in our home, loved by us all, for a few hours. Just a few. Long enough for all of us to hold him.

A piece of me broke when I laid the body of my child upon the bed, turned my back, walked away, left him forever. I went quietly. I walked with measured steps, climbed inside my car, composed myself for breaking the news at home.

I stared at the car in front of us, proclaiming in a jolly yellow sign "baby on board" from the back window.

I didn't cry, or snarl, or instruct my husband to ram their smug, unknowing selves off the road with their sneering, crowing, baby sign.

I don't miss the drama queen, nor the woman who put her own needs and wants first and had a baby to suit herself. She broke. She is long gone.

The mother who arrived labouring and optimistic was not the one who walked out empty armed and brokenhearted. I wonder at what became of her on those haunted corridor days, the long nights hovering above a SCBU crib. I wonder at the mother who left, grief already put to one side, able to turn her back to a beloved but dead son and focus on the living.

I would not have believed that I had that in me. I would not have believed that my soft soul, so often such a shaken and shifting thing, would have hardened, frozen, stiffened and done the deed.

I am not sure if I want to be the mother who walked away. It does not feel honourable nor does the walking illustrate the love, or the desire to stay forever, suck him inside of me, curl up upon that bed with him inside my arms and keep him warm with my warmth until we both grew cold.

But the one who arrived home. Broken, yes, but strong. So very, very much stronger than anyone believed. Least of all me.

There are things that broke inside of me that day; faith, trust, patience and tolerance. Energy for the small worries, some measure of mercy for human foibles are long gone. I do not wish to be troubled by the minutiae of petty irritations. I do not suffer them gladly.

What was left, when all that cracked and fell away, was new, pressured hardened, solid, changed.

I survived.

My son died, in my arms, under my gaze.

But I survived. I changed, changed deeply to my core, but I have survived. Sometimes, I rather resent that it is possible to do so.

Can you identify parts of your personality that have changed since the loss of your child? Are there changes you welcome in some way or do you resent them utterly? People talk about 'becoming a better person' as an aspiration after experiencing loss; is it possible for that to happen? Is it damaging to even try? In what ways has grief been a journey for your 'self', your character and how do you feel about it if it has?