Ghouls
Iris reaches a pale hand out to press against the walls of my womb. She tugs on my umbilical cord and then she’s gone.
Don’t haunt me, baby. You are too small to move things around and make the lights flicker.
I see her in the corner of the mirror and her head lolls forward to display a bulging fontanel.
This is not a pretty thing at all, this grief. She was not a pretty thing. Dead things are not pretty, they are cold and the colour of oil on tarmac.
I sit in meetings and push my thumb against a sore on the knuckle of my right index finger. I am alive and my body relishes its welts. She hovers and reminds me of the other hurt. She is a gasp.
She is my breath. She has no breath. Gasp. Inhale. Exhale. Irisssssssssssss. She rustles the paper in my hand.
I want to write something for you. Something that will make you feel less lonely. My heart squirms like a chicken foetus in an egg.
There is no way to say the things that must be said. I am not wise, I tell ghost stories to the internet.
I should be sold next to pumpkins and plastic skeletons. Do you like to be scared? Come and sit next to me. Hush. Be very quiet. Do you hear that nothing? That’s my daughter laughing.
If you don’t have something nice to say... then say it here. Do you ever find your grief a bit gruesome?
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Reader Comments (19)
I will say this though. I see Joseph out the corner of my eye. Not sitting there, but running past me, like he's playing tricks, like he's running and hiding. Is he doing that? Or, is that my wishful thinking?
I psychic told me (at 6 weeks out) that he would play tricks. He is energy now, and so is electricity. Those who have passed find electricity really easy to play with and he will flicker the lights, set off the alarm clocks. He will also move blocks & toys lying around on the floor, so watch my step. He's a right little bugger she said.
Well there. I did say (some of) it afterall.
I read this and read this and read it again Jess, before I could post back. It really caught my breath. I had to drink a cup of brave tea before I could respond. Your writing is magic and just a little bit spooky.
It makes me feel a little off my rocker when these thoughts hit me but they must be part of grief because I was never gruesome before.
I imagine meeting with a medium and getting to hear that he is with me, near me, the slight weight I sometimes feel in my arms. The butterfly that landed on my shoulder. But I don't really know if that is him and I don't really know if I believe that we can talk to the dead. And do dead babies even talk?
So strange how gruesome it all is...
One day, out of nowhere, I had an image in my mind of a onesie that I bought for my son, Kai- it said "If you think I'm cute, you should see my dad" only this time, I visualized him in the more appropriate "If you think I'm dead, you should see my grandfather"... catching up the loss of my father at 18 and weaving the old grief with the new.
I imagine my memoir--- "The Dark Side of the Womb" ... and the T-shirt I so wanted in the months after Kai's death "Ask me about my Dead Baby"... I do feel haunted most, like Renel said, by the memory of my son dying inside me- the "dead weight" of that lifeless 10 pound boy in my gigantic belly. And like most good horror stories- the kicker is that things are not what they seem. Like all of you- I am the creature in this story- the creature who isn't what it appears to be. Haunted, haunted by a ghost.
Stunning, shivery writing.
So much of this babyloss mess is so god damn repulsive.
Sally: I read you/your blog and I understand; I've only commented here twice; yet I get deleted and I say nothing out of what-should-never-be normal, norm; yet NORMAL would be a precious gift to all of us.
I used to be a fan of Niobe's because she was so much more like me but I think I'm different now (and still no baby)
Jess, you are scary and comforting both at once. Quite a feat.
Sometimes I think that I am very dishonest when I write about the twins. That I am dissembling and prettifying. Because what happened to them, in many respects, was gruesome. Dead things aren't pretty, nearly-dead things aren't pretty either. My girls's first baby photographs look like they belong on a pro-life poster rather than in a baby book. They look like what they are, partially developed foetuses. Exposed to the light long before they should have been. I can see that when I take my motherhood filters away from my eyes. Perhaps I lie in an attempt to twist reality to match my feelings for them.
I wrote a comment here once , a long time ago, that I also posted an apology for. About the blood running out of my daughter's mouth after she had died and looking back at her body, seeing it for what it was and finding it disturbing. Interestingly I never found her frightening up until the point at which I put her body down and looked at it from a distance. When she was dying I didn't find her gruesome, although the process was and I think my husband found both her and me repulsive at various points during at time.
I choose to think of it that way I suppose, that it was only her body that was gruesome. But really what I want to do, is to look that gruesomeness firmly in its ugly eye, take the blood, grease and faeces, the slowly failing organs, and cuddle them up close to me. They're hers after all.
Maybe I'm still desperately prettifying, even now. Perhaps I'm the gruesome one?
And I go back to it, often, just so I can feel close to her again. That makes me pretty gruesome I reckon. x
Seeing her face (even though she was already dead) was a magical moment and I was as filled with love for her as I could possibly have been. But I didn't spend much time with her body, because it quickly started to feel like "her body" and not HER. The second time they brought her to me, cleaned up and in a blanket, she felt a lot more dead than she had at first, and I knew I'd give her back soon.
I find great beauty in the last two pictures we took, which were the close ups of his body, but they are gruesome and are never shared, really. I know they frighten people. He's been dead for a couple of hours, his ribs are slack, his stomach beginning to distend (you can tell the difference in the early pictures), his mouth is slack and open, his tiny tongue just visible. His skin is fragile, thin and stretched and is sticking to itself. The lividity of birth trauma is beginning to appear on his body. Dead, unmistakably. A hideous science experiment of a child. But it is beautiful because it is my son and that is how he looked when we said goodbye.
I will never forget how my friends found beautiful things to say about the pictures, and even then I knew they were trying to see him through my eyes, and past the horror of a baby-in-progress that still looked fairly alien. There are two pictures that are safe, clearly too young to have lived, but less fragile and dead, pictures where you can see his features and trace where they came from. Those are the pictures that can be seen, just like there is santized grief. After the gruesome was ill-received and I was told I was wallowing and choosing to stay at rock bottom, the gruesome grief got hidden away. But it's there, lurking over my shoulder.
As for haunting, yes, but that's not gruesome. That's just my son visiting. He visits me and his father, his grandmother and several of my friends. That was the most wonderful validation for me, when a friend hesitantly said she didn't want to upset me, but she kept getting this weird feeling that Gabe was there, watching over her newborn. The baby that was born when Gabriel should have been? His mother sees them playing together sometimes, always has. Most recently, my friend made a paper-boat on his birthday and took her boys and the boat down to the creek to release it - the boat went against the current of the creek, shooting across to the other bank where it disappeared from sight. We knew who was responsible for that. I'm glad he's not tied down here to me and enjoying adventure somewhere (even if it is only our mass delusional projections of him, and not really him - still the same).
My daughters talk about digging him up sometimes. I entertain the idea. Even when they don't bring it up. They like to talk about the underground skeleton world he lives in and how much fun he has without us. How very Halloween.
perhaps what is gruesome is that i find those last two lines the most beautiful i remember reading.
That haunts me more than anything. It was the only chance I ever had. But it passed from me into a cardboard dish sitting in the toilet. It felt like a waste product, not the baby I wanted so badly.
Sometimes I wonder if that's why it was so hard to start grieving in the first place.
The other thing that haunts me sometimes? That I don't know what was worse.... the knowledge that for four days I was carrying a dead baby, or knowing that for more than four weeks before that I'd been carrying one without realising.
Ghoulish. yes. Thank you for this post.