Beautiful Empty
It was a Saturday, 8:30 in the morning. I was humming down Orange Grove Boulevard on one of those rare, glorious Los Angeles overcast days. A gray fog hung around lazily while the landscape seemed to be collectively exhaling, on account of the sunless sky, which normally burns and glares and sears until this desert landscape is charred brown. Trees drooped in thanks, flowers lay still, doing their part to not jinx the unfamiliar sky. Even the sidewalks and streets were near empty, as if work and play and errands and coffee were traded in for longer sleep in darker rooms.
I was alone. My mind seemed to match the stillness with one of those rare states of near nothingness, where thoughts and ideas and people and conversations and to-do lists and worry are replaced with what is only visible to the immediate eye. Red light. Green light. Trees, houses, fence. Turn left. I relished the unusual clearness of mind.
It was in this peaceful state, this nothingness, when Margot suddenly rushed up to the surface. Her being, her name, the idea of her seems to have taken up residence in my pores and under my skin and in all of the recesses of my mind that I never knew existed. Out of all these places, she rose up, speaking to me in this nothingness. But this particular morning, it was just her.
Her. Margot. Without everything else.
There weren’t any questions about the future state of our emotions. Will we be happy again? How happy? Will our grief continue to evolve? Will the sadness ever really feel lighter? What happens if she starts slipping away? There weren’t any thoughts about friends who have let us down or those who have been there. There wasn’t any anger. There weren’t any concerns about impending situations of social anxiety. There weren’t any dark thoughts about her death and cremation. Or frightened memories of the hospital and almost losing another life. There wasn’t any confusion over the philosophical questions of life that have resurfaced. There wasn’t any anxiety over the possibility of future children or losing the living one we still have. There wasn’t any jealousy over the happy and innocent families that took their babies home. There wasn’t any hurt over insensitive comments or those who diminish or ignore our heartache. I was free of disappointment and depression and regret. In this moment, it was just my Margot, in the purest form of missing, without all the baggage that usually clouds up her absence. It was, perhaps, the first time the missing held me completely captured since the first time I held her in a darkened hospital room.
I pulled over and cried out for her as I did in the hospital. I screamed her name. I spoke to her as a Father speaks to his children. The brokenness was as raw as ever, yet it left me hanging delicately in a state of calm. The missing felt real, felt good even.
How nice would it be if grief were this tangible, this straightforward? How convenient to simply miss our kids off and on through the days and years, not having to face the other elements that come with grief?
Because so much of the time it’s not just her anymore. Somewhere along this lonely path, the worries and jealousy and concerns and confusion and hurt and anxiety and over analyzing and constant evaluating have ganged up, in an organized mob attempt to distract from the very core of what matters.
My daughter, my second child, the one who should be pulling ornaments off the tree, is missing. And, well, I simply miss her.
Are you able to simply miss your own children, or do you feel the weight of other elements of your grief? Does the simplicity of the missing grow over time, or do all of the other elements to grief get stronger?
27 Comments
Reader Comments (27)
Beautiful post, Josh.
xo
It's very shocking. We won't ever have one of our children. I've been watching my children growing up for 13 years. I'm watching my eldest become a woman, an amazing, talented, strong, beautiful, confident woman. All of the others are equally amazing and yet Freddie, who I love just as dearly and completely, is almost a total mystery to me.
I don't know what he was designed to be good at. I can't quite think how he felt. I can't quite imagine how it would have been to bring him up and see him grow and have a boy and a man I birthed in the house. When everything else melts away, what is missing is the promise of him, the absolute person he was designed to be. He's a piece to our family jigsaw we can never have. Like most jigsaws, especially those with many pieces, we can nearly see the whole picture, I can almost make my eyes gloss over that 7th space. But not quite. He is at once invisible and as jarringly absent as the piece of jigsaw that is not under the sofa, not in a different box, not temporarily lost - but utterly gone.
And though he is utterly gone, I can't quite help searching hopefully for him. The problem with his piece of the jigsaw is that he isn't part of the background or the scenery, he's one of the faces.
And we miss him.
As for the other stuff; our marriage groans and cleaves under the bulk of our grief, and may not be made whole again. But that's nothing to do with her. That's not her. That's us.
As human beings we are built to adapt. It's amazing really that after suffering a loss so significant that any of us get up and go about our days and that, in fact, we still find love and happiness and laughter and friendship. But still, I miss him, the sick and dying baby I held and loved as well as the promise of the man he would have become. I'm grateful all the other stuff has been somewhat charred away and what I've been left with is just the core of my heartache, my son gone away.
Remembering Margot.
I miss her without the other stuff. It is hard to extricate one from the other, because her death was the first loss domino to fall, the others followed behind that one, but in quiet moments, where I am present, I am overwhelmed by just wanting her, and like you, I cry again like the early days. Maybe that is why I romanticize that place in my grief, because i didn't have all the other baggage. I didn't know who was letting me down yet. I am rambling. Love this one. Thank you.
Beautiful post. Thinking of your Margot today.
I think one reason I return so often to the few hours I had holding my son before, and just after, he died, is the purity of that time and space. I was so focused on him, then, on loving him fiercely and marveling at how beautiful and amazing he was, on grieving him. The world couldn't stop for us, but I felt like it did its best to make us a space.
The tangle of anger and bitterness and worrying about being broken, of how to negotiate family relationships now, of trying to figure out what to fix first, of struggling with forgiveness, of wondering what to tell his sister about him, of worrying about how to remember him in the holiday letter, of trying to speak his name to his father - it's all important, all tied up with Teddy and how we miss him, but there are days it makes me feel farther away from him. Sometimes I can separate it out, and sometimes I can't, or don't think to try.
when my daughter was stillborn at 42 weeks, we spent 1-2 years with a grief therapist, working thru, individually and together, all of the feelings, talking it out, letting it all come to the surface. and now, 7 years later, i am glad for that... the grief process was thorough, and because of that, i am able to be with my lost daughter at will, in my mind and heart, as if she did not die, not with the horrid anguish, the fresh memories of what happened that day and the following weeks, months. she is as real to me as my husband, or my siblings (but not my subsequent child, not quite in the same way). for that i am grateful that i spent the time and emotional effort grieving her. to me, it sounds like you are coming to a similar place.
i know this because, 3 years after she was stillborn, we lost her brother too. he was stillborn at 30 weeks, and the trauma of reliving the same feelings of anguish and sorrow *all over again* was too much for me to bear. i never grieved for him properly. i buried all those feelings and simply turned off. and now, i suffer the lack of closeness that i have with his sister, because i still cannot accept that i lost him too. it is a goal, but what sucky work. when i think of him, the thoughts come, but drag with them all of the weight of the other stuff, the whole crappy lot of it.
i'm so sorry for the loss of your daughter.
I think that the words, "I miss her" must have fallen from my lips hundreds of times over the past three years, if not thousands. It is my stock reply to my husband when he asks me why I look a little sad. I whisper it to myself whilst driving in the car. Because after all the anger, the questioning, the worry, the disbelief, everything else, have faded away, it's all there is left to me. A yearning.
When I catch that moment, that missing in its pure state? You're right. It almost does feel good.
I get this. I can be having a "good" day and something will just come flying out of nowhere and slap me in the face. A pregnant person walking by, a random email about baby stuff, realizing that it's Thursday - the day of the week that he was born and died on, etc.
I think along with missing Nathan... I constantly feel like I have to explain myself. People just don't understand or get it. They don't understand exactly what I miss... that my son was real! He was tiny but real. I wish that I could simply miss him but I haven't figured out how to yet. :-(
I wish I could just simply miss my daughter. Instead, all the other emotions are weighing me down, down, down. I think it would be so much easier if it were just missing Simone. I think then I wouldn't feel so terrible. In this moment, everything else has my attention. My empty arms, my empty womb, my quiet house, my TDY husband. The absence of my daughter and the presence of my niece. The holiday commercials with baby this, kid that. Questions go round and round in my mind, Will I ever feel okay again? When will this ache become more manageable? Will I be able to accept this?
My silent pleading, "Please don't send me Christmas cards with your family on it, I can't take it". "Please don't say Merry Christmas to me, it's not Merry this year". "Please don't send me your baby shower invite, I just can't do it (and I hate you)". Oh, the jealousy, the rage, the resentment!
Like Crystal wrote, I want to just miss Simone, I just haven't figured out how to yet.
I've always felt a little bit like an outsider for most of my life, and being childless, especially after loss & infertility, is to be a bit of an outsider. It's a little like knowing that there's a great party going on somewhere, & just about everyone you know is there, but you lost your invitation. We might be having a pretty good time at the party we wound up at, when all's said & done -- but we'll always wonder about what the other party would have been like and -- especially -- who our little girl would have turned out to be.
I crave for moments when it will only be him and me, no guilt, no anger, no going back in time and trying to figure out where things went so wrong. Reading about this powerful Saturday morning that you shared with your precious Margot gives me hope. It's funny what we find hopeful after we lose a baby isn't it.... but it does give me hope that it will be just me and my son again someday. Just us like it used to be. You really take whatever you can get now.
Josh thank you for sharing your courage through this journey that you've been handed, it brings me to tears every time.
Please write. We will read, and thank you. So valuable.
Cathy in Missouri
That was beautiful. It amazes me how in your expression of grief I find myself and clearly others find themselves as well. When ever I try to write I can never get past those three words, "I miss you". I have written them hundreds of times but whenever I try to write more I can't. My therapist keeps telling me to try to write more but it is all seems so huge and yet so congested with other shit so instead I come to read what you have written here and on your blog and feel like you are getting it out for me.
I miss my Gemma.
I miss Margot.
I miss Jacob.
I miss Zachary.
I miss Brandon.
I miss Arianna.
i miss Levi.
I miss all the lost babies I have come to know through their parents.
Thank you for writing.
I hope to see you guys again soon.
Carrie