And i, a gasping new-deliver'd mother

Gasp

I knew I’d be sad about death, when it came.

I knew grief meant crying and wistful storytelling; memories and missing things. The absence of something familiar.

I knew these things in the way I knew what the Prime Minister should do about the global economic crisis. In other words, I didn’t have a fucking clue. Just some opinions based on other people’s words.

Gasp.

It wasn’t like that for me, when it was time for me to grieve. Death was a womb, not a tomb. Her body was empty. She was a husk. My baby was a husk. So what’s to grieve?

There were no memories, no stories. There was only Everything. The infinite possibilities of her.

Gasp

Laundry was grief. It smelt like new. She never got to be new.

Fingernails were grief. They dug in to my palm. Feel this. Feel this. Feel for her.

Chicken dinners were grief. They could never fill me up

My laptop was grief. The ‘Home’ key came loose in my bag. I wept. I’d lost my home.

The 50 bus route was grief. I resented its normality.

A forgotten child’s glove ripped my soul from me on a January morning. It looked so lonely.

Gasp

Then I forgot to grieve.

 It made me sadder.

Does your grief surprise you?

Comments

[Emma]

My grief surprises me a 100 times a day. I'll be walking along, working or just sitting at home, perhaps feeling more like the old me and suddenly I realize that woman is gone and it is like I'm resurfacing from deep water and gasping for air. My grief has changed me, I will never be who I was before losing my Ellis. Sometimes I'm able to forget that for a moment but the intensity of the grief, each time it resurfaces, shocks me.

[niobe]

My grief was like an old friend. "I'd know you anywhere," I said. "You haven't changed a bit."

[Cathy]

Damn, Niobe.

Damn, Jess.

*****

Impossible weight,

crushing,
pulverizing,
punishing,
scorching,

hollowing out,
burning up,
leaving out,
blowing up." {D. Groothuis}

Dulcius ex asperis,

Cathy in Missouri

[Angie]

God, the surprising part is that all of it is surprising. I thought I knew grief. It was sadness. Now, I see grief as the hobo emotion, jumping on the caboose of every other emotion. It rides anger, and fear, and anxiety and cowardice. It hangs out on the back of self-importance, and egotism. Hate and pride and phoniness.

I grieve the grief now, I think. That is fucking surprising. I was absolutely convinced that that early grief was the worst thing in the world to feel. It was suffocating and chaotic and lonely. And yet, I miss it. I miss it because I was so sure in the beginning of what I was grieving, now the grief catches me up and I think, "STILL?!?" And yet there is this sense of grieving so much, so much I don't know. I grieve because I am ignorant of who she was, who she could be, who she will never be. That is surprising. There is a girl. She moved in across the street. She is three, and has wild dark brown gypsy hair. She wears motorcycle boots and print dresses and tries to ride the dog. Fuck that grief surprised me. The grief that wants to pick her up and smell her.

[Brianna]

My grief is always surprising. Today I bought a polyester onsie with an embroidered birthday cake, single candle and the name George scripted on it for a dead baby boy nearly two years gone.

[ss]

it surprises me, because it tends to come out of nowhere.
just yesterday i was at the library, renewing my card. the librarian was chatting, and
then my mind went to this realization that my daughter would never be getting a library card.
just one of the millions of things that she would never be doing. it was hard to finish the conversation with the librarian. the grief took over and i was sullen for a long time.

i can remember in the beginning, i didn't want the days to pass by, because time was taking us further and further away from when she was here, when it had happened. i didn't want to go thru the stages of grief, i wanted to just stay there, in that first part. like the eye of the storm, there was a calmness present, and leaving that time meant that i was going to have to accept that i would have to continue to live, but without her. that was real anguish. and i felt it again for that quick moment, when i realized that she would not be getting her library card. how can this be?! but, there it is.

[Erica]

"There was only Everything. The infinite possibilities of her."

God, Jess. This is a perfect ache of a post.

I'm still surprised. I am also, now, often frustrated with myself for being surprised. You'd think after more than three years, I'd be able to tell when the train was heading through the tunnel.

[sarah]

Oh Jess this post caught me in the throat.

My grief creeps up on me when I least expect it to. As Angie said its the suprising moments, the moments when I think oh she'd be nearly one, she'd be standing, nearly walking. Or when I see my other children and imagine how they'd be with her, what they'd say, how they'd play.

Some days I only have to see baby clothes to want to weep.

[Paula]

Ah Jess, You know when I diet I get those few weeks where I deprive myself until I give in for that treat that tastes a million times better because of the delay. That is your posts. Spread out but oh so perfect when you present us with something new. My grief shocks me. It hits me so deeply somedays. What is most surprising is the things that pull me back under. A sappy commercial, a friend saying something kind, grocery shopping makes me sad sometimes. Things that have no connection to my pain but at the same time it is all so intertwined.

[Jill (Fireflyforever)]

Oh yes, Jess. Oh yes. I was surprised by how physical it was in the early days - milk leaking, stitches throbbing, throat raw from screaming. I had never realised how complicit my body would be in my grief - and now, I'm there with you in those final lines - I am sometimes surprised by the long patches between the moments of intense sadness. I never imagined it retreating to the background of my daily life.

[Anna]

I'm new on the site, I lost my little baby exactly a month ago in the 34th weeks of the pregnancy. My grief is still very new, though it seems that I got very old in these days. Time passes by so slowly... I remember of every seconds of that horrible day, like it happened yesterday, though sometimes I feel that I have brought this pain for ages...

Sometimes I do things that I wouldn't do if I was pregnant or my little angel was alive (having a glass of wine with my husband, spending a whole afternoon with my friends in the city), and very rarely, but sometimes I enjoy these moments. In the very next second I've got the feeling that I'm on the wrong place! Maybe I blame myself...

(Sorry for my English, I'm from Hungary)

[Jess]

Anna - I'm so, so sorry to read of the loss of your sweet baby. That first month... yes, time seems to bear no relation to what it was before. Things can seem to be so goddamn normal, can't they? Because the "different" you were expecting never happened. Sending much love to you. I'm glad you found us here, glad and sorry, all at the same time.

[Anna]

Dear Jess, thank you very much. I belive that people who went trough on similar tragedy can help a lot. Eg. this post - I could have written it, your words like mine (If I was so good in English, of course :-))

One more comment on the grief. As you wrote, there were no memories, no stories. My little daughter was only alive in my belly. I could not officially name her, she was never "alive" for the others. I even do not have a picture of her. I did not have the chance to know her, to teach her things, to see her growing, her first steps, first words. So what do I mourn? I cannot mourn someone, who I didn't know...

Earlier they said in Hungary if a woman was pregnant, that "she had future". I liked this quote. A woman has future when she expects a baby. Babies, children are our future. So I think, I grieve for my future. How perfect it could be. And now on, it won't be perfect ever! We will always miss someone, even in the happiest moments of our lives there will be a small sadness.

[eliza]

It surprised me over and over - is it ever unsurprising the unsuspected ways and times at which is arises? It surprises me that I don't feel much grief anymore - am I terrible mother that I don't? That I focus on the little girl kicking heartily and healthily (for now) inside me and see just as much future as I did with Gabriel? Maybe it's ok, since I know I'm daydreaming, since this is tenuous at best.

I don't know. It's rare, and has been for some time, to wail and despair. Gabriel exists, much as he always has - which is to say he's a spirit if you believe in them and a comforting figment of my imagination if you don't - and I miss him, but the past can't be changed, he can't be here physically again. And for the moment, I'm ok with that. I don't like it, I wish it were different. Some days I hate it. The yellow blanket I bought that I dreamed Gabriel chose for Vivienne? I have very mixed feelings looking at it.

I am expecting a new wave of grief when baby girl is born; a new fresh revisiting of the things we didn't get with Gabriel, that we will never have with him. A family picture always absent one member. But maybe I will be surprised again.

[Lori]

Oh, Jess, your words express so much sorrow......

I keep hearing from the women in my life, friends & family, how "they cannot imagine what I am going/gone through" and this always brings everything crashing back down.

My second loss was six weeks ago at 22 weeks & I feel faded. As if my grief has taken me over & I am no longer here in this body. I feel people see me less though perhaps it is my own awareness is more internal now. My grief is just under the surface of me. I can walk & talk & be perceived as normal but all it takes is a thought or sound or sight to undo me.

The women in the office where I work are planning a baby shower for someone who is six weeks further along than I was supposed to be & the shower was supposed to be for me too. I have already scheduled the day off but part of me feels like a coward for some reason. I feel guilty for not being able to handle it. Every quickly covered decoration or random word of "baby" is quickly hushed when I happen by. And I feel guilty for quashing thier enthusiasm & it all undoes me.

[Eva's mama]

I used to love going to church. It was the perfect bookend to the week. I loved the singing. I loved seeing my friends that I often only saw there. I loved the worship of my Lord. I loved how the kids went to Sunday School. I loved it all.
Now I prepare myself for church. I thinkg, ok, this week I can do it emotionally. This week I can look at the people I love. This week I can sing without the tears streaming down my face.
Every week I am surprised by the sadness that overwhelms me there. I sit in my chair and hold one of my sons and I cry, I cry for the little girl that is not there with us. Every week I am surprised by how much the sweetness of one of the little babies at church stabs me in the heart. Every week I am surprised by how I can't look my friends in the eye or talk about baby things with them, like I used to.
Every week I think I have a handle on it and every week I am surprised by the intensity of my grief in church.
This past Sunday my husband said maybe I should stay home from church for awhile. Part of me is thrilled. Avoid the horribleness of being in church with all those people. Part of me is so sad that something I loved so much is now something that is so horrible.

[Bernie]

Jess,
I first tried to read this post the day my daughter was to be born, one day after we discovered that her heart had stopped. I didn't finish until today, which is one week later. I have trouble resolving my emotions; I resent the fact that I miss her so much despite never having met her, yet I can't help but cry when I envision how she would have had her mother's eyes or what she would have looked like on her wedding day. I don't want time to heal my wounds. These wounds are my lasting earthly connection to my daughter. Your words validate my feelings.

[Hanen]

Gah, you put it so perfectly Jess. I was like that too - imagining that I knew what grief was because I'd seen a flat picture in a book, and then was completely blind-sided by the 3D roaring reality of it. Grief that exploded out of my neat 'tragic' romanticised images and that stuck its irreverent fingers into the most ordinary and sacred things - food, particular items of clothing, nervous trips to the supermarket, my own body.

Bernie and Anna, I'm so sorry for your recent losses - sending love xxxxh

[Jess]

Bernie - I'm so so sorry. It's just so raw, so awful. Sending you much love x

[Brie]

I was sent here by my friend Josh, who also writes for this site. My husband and I just lost our baby girl, what I guess is almost a month ago now...but if I hadn't logged into Facebook and seen it's Valentine's Day because of other people's posts, I would have sworn it was last week that we lost Madeleine.

I was just writing about grief today in my blog and how exhausting it is, which is I suppose how I ended up reading your post to see what others were saying. It's all still new for us, the layers keep unfolding. And I think what my husband and I have realized in this state of grief is that it can also serve as an avenue for past things we never grieved (because they are coming up anyway), so we are allowing it to be that for us, but in that state, it feels that much heavier. Like there's that much more that confuses the process. That much more that weighs us down. Healthier maybe for the long run, but heavier for the present. I think in many ways we are still in shock that we are here. Grief feels immensely overwhelming at times, and even that seems like an understatement. It just feels like a strange place to be.