the laundry
There is a craggy shore jutting around the beach. Just off the edge of a sloping ramp, he parked over tumbled ocean rocks. My father sits in his wheelchair facing the sea. He always loved the sea. He turns and smiles at me. I stand in front of him, holding my arms out to him for leverage, but he waves me away. He stands and walks, navigating the rocks. He can walk. I can't believe it. He is healed. At night, I dream that my father can walk and that my daughter is alive. They are impossible dreams. Dreams borne of half-awake prayers that start as grounding but end in cures and resurrections and healing. He walks past me toward the wild sea, all white caps and the thunderous booms of water falling to earth. He stands before the ocean, glancing back at me before walking into the water, fully clothed, but free.
photo by RachelCreative.
I’m not sure if my father remembers that my second daughter died in my belly. But whenever I talk about how my baby died, my father cries. His sickness envelopes his body, wrenching his hand into a limp, unusable limb, seating him forever in a wheelchair. It took decades of slow torture, losing his abilities one at a time. His legs shake involuntarily like phantom remembrances of walking.
His emotions run closer to the surface now. He expresses, emotes, leaks tears despite himself. I hadn't seen my father cry until I was in my twenties, long after he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, then it seemed his crying wouldn't stop. I used to avoid making him cry. I turned away from him. It embarrassed me. I cracked a joke. But these days, it comforts me to see his humanity. It reminds me that this man is my father and I am his safe space, even though the crying is so unlike him.
He doesn't remember her name, or at least, he has never spoken her name aloud. He never has spoken of her. He has never asked me about the grief. He has never asked me how I am coping. He asks me how my new house is, even though I have been here for five years. But when I mention Lucy, he weeps. It is like he suddenly remembers. Or perhaps it is as though he is hearing it for the first time all over again. It is so sad that our baby died. He forgets, but when he hears about it, he knows it is sad.
The day after I returned from the hospital, after birthing my stillborn daughter, I called my father. I wanted him to hear my voice, to know that I was okay. I was obliterated, destroyed, yes, but I was alive and talking. When I told him the baby died, he cried. We cried together on the phone. A few minutes later, he asked me when I was coming to see him. He wanted to know when I was bringing his laundry to him.
I hung up and wept into my hands.
Birth, dead child, hemorrhoids, unused engorged breasts, no flowers, no funeral. My father still needed his clean clothes. He still needed his clothes. I didn't even begrudge him that. Even in our worst moments, we still need food, water, air, clothes. I just couldn't give him any of those things in those first weeks, particularly not clean clothes. I wept not because I was hurt, but I wept because I miss my father. I miss his health, his paternal advice. I miss all that he could have said to comfort me.
Resentment for the friends and acquaintances who said nothing was a wild, suffocating vine winding around my heart, squeezing out my compassion, clinging to my fear, bearing a bitter, inedible melon. Yet I have a vast well of patience and acceptance of my father. I suppose it is easy to have compassion for someone who is sick. To be forgiving and loving and compassionate to someone whose disease robs him of his memory, paternal instincts, and empathy. I sit cross-legged and send him compassion every day, even though twenty years ago, I wanted nothing like compassion for him. I wanted my anger. I liked my anger. But it softened after a few years, and transformed into a patient, unconditional love. That is what he gives me, unconditional love, given and received.
Last week, I heard a speaker talking about spiritual suffering. He asked the group, "If you are standing in line in a convenience store and a boy in a wheelchair cuts in front of us, would you lose your temper? Would you have words? Would you ask him to step outside? Or would you graciously give him a moment, gesture for him to take your place?" He remarked that most of us would be forgiving, compassionate, generous to the boy in the wheelchair. We all nodded. Then he asked why we don't treat everyone else in the world with the same compassion. What if you could see everyone as a spiritually sick? All the people who stepped in front of me in line, or cut me off in traffic, or berated me for one thing or another. Or those who couldn't manage a simple "I'm sorry" after the death of my daughter. What if I could see those people as spiritually helpless? Spiritually sick? Emotionally handicapped? What if I could treat everyone else as I treat my father?
After three years, I am only now getting to the point where my anger and unrelenting expectations of other's capability has softened. So much of my emotional forgiveness was spent on my father some days, I thought it sapped my reserve, as though tolerance and compassion were finite resources, quantifiable and conditioned. I wrapped myself in intolerance for people I deemed well enough to know better. Righteous indignation was my woobie, my excuse for not allowing people into my grief, to bear witness to my vulnerability, my weakness, my need for friendship and compassion.
I understand now that my father's gift to me after Lucia's death was needing me. He needed me to do his laundry. To get up and have someone to be accountable to, someone who was able to cry about how sad it was that my daughter died, but who still needed me to get up. He didn't see me as weak, absent, lacking, intolerant. He saw me as his strong, able daughter, bearing the brunt of daughter-death and father-caring. Or maybe he didn't remember her death, but perhaps that was a gift too.
Do you have different standards for support from your friends than your family? Do you expect more from your friends or family? Do you have anyone in your life who receives your patience and forgiveness despite their approach to your child(ren)'s death? What makes them different than others?
15 Comments
Reader Comments (15)
ALL the women in my family are baby crazy, marsupial parenting, homebirthing, La Leche League leading, earth mother types. The whole 'maternity is sacred' thing. So when, as basically the last woman in my extended family to procreate, I lost my son at only 17 weeks and none of those women could bother to acknowledge our loss, let alone me as a mother, I think it hurt more than it would have or did coming from others.
I guess somehow, I naively expected their life principles to provide them with more warmth or at least compassion for my loss, than it actually did. Motherhood *is* holy. It seems I just don't warrant a place in their holy circle.
I had an easier time forgiving the lack of acknowledgement or the lame 'we didn't want to remind you' excuses from my two younger brothers, in their early 20s, childless, single, with their beer and hockey social lives. They had no comprehension of what I'd lost, whereas I thought the motherhood-celebrating women in my family should.
A year and a half on, I still haven't forgiven most of them, I think. My relationship with my only sister (who delivered a healthy baby boy nine days after my would-be due date) is still in tatters. I have been accused of being 'sexist', which I suppose in a way I am.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to articulate that - I think it's always sat a little uneasy with me.
She has a surviving twin, but he was just a baby. I think he alone would have been enough to keep me up and keep me going, but the fact that I really feel like I've processed most of my feelings about her death, I give my older son credit for.
I also hadn't really thought about the grandparents' loss until I stumbled across a post my dad wrote in an online group he's a part of. It's crushing, because not just has he lost a grandchild, but his own child has gone through something that he is powerless to stop.
then, a friend of ours asked the meanest question about the birth/stillbirth. he asked my husband 'well, did the baby breath, you know, on the outside?'. when my husband said no, it was the last we ever heard about it from him- we got the impression that the lack of taking a breath 'on the outside' made it somehow unimportant to him. like, she wasn't even a real baby, she didn't even exist. so, i think 'what an ASSHOLE!!!'. but then, i think 'he is incapable of dealing with this'.
i feel sorry for my dad and our friend. i mean, my dad loves me, and he loves the idea of his granddaughter- he never saw her or held her, so she isn't very 'real' to him- he doesn't count her out loud in the grandchild tallies. but i know he cares about me and her and what happened. but for fuck's sake, at the worst time in my life, he fell asleep. i just feel sad for him. and our friend, it just blows my mind. i think he has sociopathic tendencies or something, to not be able to acknowledge our pain and loss, only asking a technical question who's answer gave him license to erase what happened from his reality. but he is still our friend. i think of the biblical phrase "forgive them father for they know not what they do". i just forgive it- most people can't incorporate a child's death into their life, because it isn't supposed to happen- children are supposed to outlive us, to grow old, live a life, and die when they are very old. this has helped me deal with the desert of life without my daughter (and son)- no one asks about them, about what happened, about how we are doing since... life just moved on for everyone, and, well, i forgive them, because they don't know any better, and thank god for that, really. because when you do *know*, its usually because you yourself have suffered a great loss and can sympathize. at first i was mad, and then i realized that it wasn't going to be any different. no one was going to care as much as we, their mom and dad, do. so, that's been my experience.
i guess my favorite thing about the posts on glow in the woods, is that there are these questions at the end, asking us how we feel, what we think... no one in real life ever asks me, and it is such a relief to be asked. i am so grateful to have the chance to talk about it.
I think like Sarah, I held women, especially mothers, to a higher standard. Like they should KNOW what it would mean to have to birth a dead baby having pushed a live one out and I thought they'd be able to imagine the horror. Then I slowly learned that some people are capable and some aren't - and it took me a long time to distinguish between the two. I've learned to let a lot of things go in the 3.5 years since his death.
Shortly after we lost Braedon, I went to visit my Grandmother in the nursing home she was at for physical therapy. My father warned me in advance that her dementia was getting worse and he had not told her of our loss. I remember as a child finding so much comfort in her arms. She had the softest skin and always smelt of powder and baby oil. I loved to rest my head on her shoulder and tell her the things that were bothering me. She always listened.
I sat with her for awhile and talked to her about life and all that jazz. But all I wanted to do was curl up in her lap and find the comfort she used to offer me. I do not blame her for her condition, it is not her fault and out of all my family she is the only one that I can not be angry with for being absent in our grief.
The rest of my family, well we are not in contact at this time. They don't call me, they don't make the effort. I do forgive them because they just have no clue but it hurts none the less.
Maybe with time bridges will be rebuilt. Maybe I will learn to reach out and ask for their attention. We will just have to see how it plays out.
Personally, of all the reasons given by those abandoning the babylost, I've always found 'your reality scares the bejesus out of me, and consequently, in an act of self preservation, prioritising myself, I choose to avoid you', as among the less palatable. How exactly is that supposed to bring understanding? Empathy?
Or maybe it's just a confession; 'i'm too wrapped up in preserving my own fortunate version of things to have the time or energy to give a damn about your less fortunate version'.
Sorry to hijack a beautiful post, Angie. It had to be said.
Dear Emma,
I'm too wrapped up in preserving my own fortunate version of things to have the time or energy to give a damn about your less fortunate version. I hope you have enjoyed my Facebook updates about my happy life and my Pinterest boards filled with knitting projects and baby booties.
Love,
----
But that would be rude and crazy of me, right? Sorry to unload, I'm feeling especially bitter today.
Emma
Rae, you're obviously one of the rarer kind of friend who has abided with your friend in her grief. We wish there were more like you. At the same time, I think I get what Emma and Anon are getting at, in the sense that... well, obviously we babyloss parents certianly *know* the true horror of going through this - we have no choice but to stare in the face the horrible reality that babies do die - so it seems kinda like pointing out the obvious, really. Thanks for your patience with us in all our rude craziness.
Glad I could provide a smile. And you are right, there are somethings that only people in our sad little club here can ever truly understand.
I wrote the card, and then I tore it up. It was cathartic anyway!
No matter how much people in our "real lives" might fail us, there is always someone here at glow who will relate and understand.
xxoo
It helped then. It helped a lot. I was able to be present in the services that day, in the day itself. Not obsessing on my MIL and my emotions about her. But in the last 8 months or so, essentially since my grandmother's death, I find that I can still get angry. Granted, all of this is compounded by years of conflict on other topics (always with the theme that she knows better how to raise my children than I do). But this is where I find myself on this question-- I can't seem to give the spiritually sick the license. Perhaps it is because in my experience there is a price. Giving my MIL the right of way always ends up hurting my family, and I just don't want to give her that anymore.
I seemed to be doing so well since I lost my own little Isaac a month and a half ago. I think it was perhaps I was still in shock emotionally. I am finding my temper is shorter & my tolerance is less than what it was.
And I will be at home from work tomorrow hiding from a baby shower that was also supposed to be mine. I have been contemplating leaving my job simply to get away from my co-workers calous sympathy. Oddly enough, from those who have gone through some version of this loss at some point, "Oh, dear, it will take at least a year to get back to normal" or "You SHOULD have taken more time". I know they are trying to be helpful so I nod & walk away though I want to scream & rage that there is no going back for me & that more time alone for me would have driven me mad.
It makes me wonder if some new place populated with those that didn't know who I used to would at least be easier emotionally.
I'm so sorry that Isaac isn't with you and that you have had to suffer the insensitivity of your co-workers. I returned to work a month after my loss and while everyone here has been incredible to me, I sometimes wonder if I should have taken more time. But once my husband had to return to work I knew that sitting at home, alone, without my son, would have driven me mad as well. The compromise I've reached (and I know I'm lucky to have to option) is that I take days off from work when I know that I can't face the world, when I just can't handle putting on that mask that we all wear.
We went to Costa Rica over Christmas and while I was there I realized how wonderful it was to be away from everyone I knew, and all the places where Ellis had been with me. It was nice to feel like myself again, even though that "self" will never be the same "self" that existed before August 19th, 2011. For 10 days I got to just be Emma, not the woman whose baby died.
As I approach the 6 month mark, I can look back and see that I have gone through so many emotional stages, many more then once. I do remember that the anger and bitterness really began to come out at about 1-2 months. I have days when I am still just so angry. Angry that my son died, angry that I have to face another pregnancy (here's hoping) so soon, angry that I have to put on the "I'm OK Mask" for the benefit of other people. Because heaven forbid we make anyone else acknowledge that babies die.
I wish that there was some way I could fix this for all of us. We are here for you, on the days that you are able to handle the loss of Isaac with grace and on the days when you just want to punch someone in the face.
XXOO Emma
PS. It is cruel of me but I have found some satisfaction in calling Similac and Gerber and Baby's R Us and demanding that they remove me from their mailing lists BECAUSE MY BABY DIED and I don't need their f'in formula samples. I only feel a little guilty over the two operators that I've made cry...