No Change in Me

I suppose it’s because I’m leaving my job. I suppose it’s because I’m leaving the industry I’ve worked in for six years, I’m leaving the place that I conceived, carried my son and went back to after Gabriel’s death. I suppose it’s because of that I feel this need to return to places.

To stand in the bathroom I used to run to and cry in. To walk through the library I walked in that day it was raining, when I saw the statue of the beautifully pregnant woman. To walk through the city square, to walk past the desk I sat at. To sit in the coffee shops I have sat in. The meeting rooms. The elevators.

I am not the same woman, but I worked in the same place. I could touch the places I touched when I was pregnant and there was some comfort in reaching back. I leave this place where Gabriel concretely existed.

These places in their way sheltered me: the people who actively gave me comfort and succour and the people who utterly ignored my bereft-ness – they participated in my grief if only by watching it.

I don't want to leave
But you can't live for free
You can't eat the air
And you can't drink the sea

The new job is amazing. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime. It’s a brilliant move for my career.

You see, I couldn’t take this job if I was the mother of a living four year old. It simply wouldn’t be possible. I will commute, back and forth, to another province, 2 hours each way on flights – gone from Sunday night until Friday night.  I couldn’t be the woman running through airports with a laptop case and a suitcase, with a child at home. I do not believe I would be motivated enough to live a peripatetic existence for a job.

There is a place in me that doesn’t want to move forward because it believes if I stay here long enough, Gabriel, that life I thought I was going to have will find me. Suddenly I will wake up, and the room next to me will have a four year old, red headed boy in it.

And I leave this place, I leave Gabriel, I leave all of those dreams behind. I face the hard truth: there is nothing for me in this place any more. I have gone as far as I can here. Moving forward requires moving on. To stay here would be to bide my time, waiting for a thing that can never come.

 Flikr: Alaz 

There will never be a little red haired boy in the room next to me. There is just me, with my suitcase, waiting to catch a plane.

So I'll join in the leaving like all of the rest
Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver West

*****

Murray McLauchlin’s song I have quoted from, No Change in Me, talks about East Coasters moving away for work, and their terrible yearning for home. Grief, at least it seems to me, is a terrible yearning for what we thought home would be. As my career takes me further from the way I thought my life would be, I realize baby death means saying good-bye to unexpected things in unexpected ways. Have you had an unexpected good-bye?

Comments

[Josh]

This is so rich Mrs. Spit. Grief DOES feel like a terrible yearning for home, for what we thought would be. What moving and poignant wisdom, even though I wish you never had to experience such wisdom.

[Anna]

Very good post, thank you very much. Though I am not in the phase to leave it behind me, it's so close still, but I am sure that this will come ones. (When? Can anybody tell? How long does it take to overcome on loosing Eszter? If I know I will do, I just have to know the time...)

Loosing my little baby was an unexpected good-bye. I held my little daughter's body in my arms, I was supposed to say good-bye in the moment, when I wanted to welcome her. Later I had to say good-bye to our dreams, our lives that we'd expected, the idea of haveing a little sister for my other daughter. I was not ready for that. We were dreaming about it for 8 months, and had to say good-bye in a second.

Maybe I will have more "material" good-byes in the near future - like changing job, changing a house. But for this moment it won't mean that I am ready for new things. I would rather mean, that I escape from this situation. My job, my house -as you wrote- are the places where my daughter existed. I feel I just can't spend my days faceing all the time this terrible reality.
I have two more weeks to return to my work. I'm afraid.

[ss]

your post resonates with me, very much so. i was too afraid to ever leave those places, probably to my detriment. i resented my abilities and opportunities to do things because i did not have a (living) child to care for. time stopped. subsequent infertility and another child dead, 5 years passed- and i find myself only now being able to address the shell of an individual that i became, as i waited for that alternate reality to sync with my life- it never could, it never did. it is painful having to say goodbye to that dream, but it is necessary, i believe, to continue living, and not allowing the worst part of the loss to claim your own life too. i was not able to do this for myself- i eventually had a living child, and i had to move forward and beyond, on his behalf.

perhaps this is an element of grief 'defining' a person. do you remain the person who you were when your loved one was still with you? or do you move forward, allowing life to continue to unfold, taking opportunities as they come, even if they take you away from that place, that person, who you were, who you wanted to be? i think the grieving process eventually allows for us to somehow have both- the comfort of those memories of place and time, resides equally with the ability to have new experiences, to live a life that doesn't feel like a consolation prize.

[Erica]

I love this, the way you write about moving forward. You capture both the hope and the grief of it so well.

I often feel like Lot's wife - I can't help but look back and look back, even when I know that my baby isn't there any more, that I can't run back to him or stand still and wait for him to find me again.

[Branwen]

Mrs. Spit,

I first want to thank you for writing and sharing your journey with us, and also congratulate you on your new position. Your posts always move me in so many ways. Your journey is one that my husband always says I must consider as a very real possibility for us.. we may never have the chance (or we may decide to stop) to parent a living child. You are constantly showing us that living a life without a child(ren) can (and is) being done, every single day. It equally terrifies and inspires me. My husband says to me all the time, you are more than just Simone's mommy, you are the woman I love, the mother of my child. We have each other, we carry her in our hearts and we still have a lot of living to do until we see her again.

Thank you so much. Please keep writing, please keep showing us there is a way..

xoxo

[Ania]

I lost my baby a little over three weeks ago and the part of me that wants to run, that wants to escape everything that is a reminder, is also the part that knows I cannot run away from myself. The physical world around me is the same, it hasn't changed. It's the inner world that is different. I remember grieving my life prior to the pregnancy in the first trimester, thinking that I would never be able to do the things I wanted to do. Not with a child. And here I am, alone again, wanting nothing more but to be with my child, not being able to care any less about what I could do with my time, now that it's free. I'm looking for my drive, for a new purpose in my life. I have changed. My little Leif changed my life in more ways that I thought possible within the short time that we have spent together, from cell to a fragile 3 lb body. And yet, life goes on. I take my lessons and become the better human being that he taught me to be. There is no past to go back to, no future to look forward to that will manifest as projected, but there is the ever strong present and from here, I move on.

[E]

Ania, I cannot help but envy your ability to do in 3 weeks what I still cannot do in 6 months. I feel this acutely when you say that you could not care any less "about what I could do with my time, now that it's free." I still wish for Blue's future, for the past I had with him. I know I am a better person now, with more empathy, more compassion. But I really couldn't care much less, given the cost at which it came. Most days I am moving on, but not all days.

Thank you, Mrs. Spit for your lovely writing and your ability to capture in words what the rest of us are thinking, yet fumbling to say.

E