The male perspective in this particular flavor of grief is so often overlooked by what I'll call "society at large."  Husbands are often asked how their wives are doing, but the question is seldom posed to them directly.  Men walk a fine line between what is acceptable in grief, and what is acceptable emotionally to display as a man.  Today CDE, of Once in a Lifetime, contributes his thoughts on a difficult holiday.  CDE and his wife, STE of So Dear and Yet So Far, lost their twin sons  in December/January '07-08.

 
In the past, I'd never given Father's Day that much thought. It was a Hallmark holiday, like Valentine's Day, like Mother's Day. It was a day to call my father and shoot the breeze with him for a little bit. But not much else. I remember one especially amusing one, during a period when my life had sort of gone to shit, when some cable channel thought it'd be good to show Death of a Salesman for Father's Day. Nothing says "I love you, Dad" like infidelity, suicide, and the shabby, slow death of the American Dream. But Father's Day? No big deal. I spent most of my early adult life being spectacularly unsuited for fatherhood.

Eventually, I got to the point where I probably wasn't any less qualified for the job than most people. I'd matured, developed prospects, and most importantly, found someone who wanted to bear my children. When our lives reached the point that we could actually consider trying to have kids, the thought of being a father filled me with something resembling terror. That terror subsided once we realized that it wasn't going to be as simple as having unprotected sex at the right time of the month. It was hard to lose sleep over the impending upheaval of my life and identity as a person when repeated IUIs yielded nothing more than a lot of crushed hopes. Eventually, the fear of being a parent subsided, replaced by the fear of never being a parent. And in the process, I'd spent a lot of time thinking about the importance of fathers. What it means to be a man, and to be a father. What is expected of us, what isn't expected. The roles men do and don't play. I resolved to be a good father. To stand beside my wife and raise our children right, to be strong, smart, brave and kind.

Eventually, we got pregnant. And immediately, the terror came back, but shot through with elation. We found out that we were having twin boys. I was going to be a father to two boys, and immediately I began thinking about how I would talk to them, how I would explain the birds and the bees, how you shouldn't start fights, but should finish them, how being smart was nothing of which you should be ashamed. How I would tell a son who came out to me that he was loved just the way he was. I added the Dangerous Book for Boys to my Amazon wish list. Boys. Twin boys. I think it was at that point that it stopped being fatherhood and started being Fatherhood. And then we lost the boys, and it stopped being fatherhood, Fatherhood, or anything else.

And it's at this point, in the middle of my grief, my loss, my sadness and rage, that Father's Day finally means something. It is yet another reminder of who I could have been, but am not, and may never be. It is my empty arms, my days not spent shopping for onesies and strollers,  my evenings not spent cooking dinner for the family, my nights not spent with a baby asleep on my chest. I am mourning the absence of something I never actually had. No child grew inside me, nobody expected me to have the same connection to my boys that my wife did. But even though all I had was the idea, the potential, the love for what could have been, that emptiness, that lack of possibility, hurts so much that some days it drains me, empties me, robs me of the desire to do anything but sit on the couch and retreat into the shelter of fiction. I've been told that I'm not like the average man, and I strongly suspect that I wouldn't have been like the average father. But the role of father is one I had learned to take seriously, to respect, and one to which I aspired over the last two years. Father's Day would be a new chance for celebration, for recognition. Hallmark holiday? Sure. But "hallmark" has multiple meanings, and I'm spending this particular holiday acutely aware of falling short of one. 

In that last hour, our hello and goodbye, it was Dave who cried.

I'd never really seen tears well up for him, before.  I haven't since.  Watching him cradle our son as those few salt drops slid onto Finn's blanket was one of the tenderest things I've witnessed, a benediction of fatherhood more fitting, for us, than the baptism we'd rejected.

I didn't cry.  I was too fresh from birth, too present, too amazed by this firstborn boy I hadn't known I'd always wanted, too busy trying to fit a lifetime into the minutes we had.  I sang to him, raw-voiced, petted his dark hair, gazed in wonderment at his tidy, perfect ears, his finger gripping mine.  I told him he was wanted and loved.  I whispered and hushed and said, mama's here...it's okay, little one, don't be afraid.   I knew exactly what was happening, but in that moment - small mercies of shock - it was not happening to me.  It was happening to my child, and just to be present and with him was all the mothering I was ever going to get to do and all my mind could take in.  And so, somehow, I did not cry, me who weeps at car commercials and bristles with indignant tears when the least of my feelings is trod upon.

But later I filled buckets...tears of sorrow and of rage and hopelessness.  After his death was done happening to Finn, it happened to me a thousand times in replay, all the loss and brokenness that did not touch me in the moment crowding in tenfold.  The bright yellow walls of our kitchen, painted in the first days after we returned home, have my tears in their butter hue.  The backsplash of broken tile is a mosaic created of therapeutic sessions, me and a hammer and licensed destruction that kept me, I think, from the siren song of disappearance, of hurting myself.

Dave, though, did not cry again.  He held me, weathered me, all that long summer...and all these years since, in the moments where my bitterness and hurt and grief have burbled up to the surface and unleashed tears and wounded cries.  But this has not been how he has grieved.  His sorrow seems to have no questions, no self-pity.  He went back to work five days later, because he had to and I had already lost my job, and he came home lunchtimes in those early days...mostly, I think, to make sure I wasn't hanging from the rafters. And he answered a multitude of questions about how I was doing and he listened to a multitude of secret stories that came spilling out about others' losses long since unspoken and he came home at night and we sat on the deck and I tried desperately to think of something to say to him but came up silent because I had nothing to offer but lamentations...and sometimes he seemed like a stone that I could only break myself on.

I don't think anyone ever asked me how he was.

And yet even in the worst of it, I knew we were lucky...because there was trust between us, implicit and otherwise unscarred.  Because I knew he tried hard not to judge me for how I grieved, no matter how ugly and exposed our differences made me feel.  Because I knew and did not doubt that he, too, loved our son and missed him and thought of him...even if we weren't able to find ways of speaking that aloud to each other.

But we were still two solitudes, living separate lives for a very long time, hurting - and in ways hurting each other - even while trying to comfort and build.

There is a terrible intimacy in having to share grief with someone.  Even if you both feel it deeply, you almost inevitably will not experience it all in the same ways and at the same time.  And I wonder if there isn't something about grieving that makes some small part of all of us a little like a cat who crawls off to find a corner alone to die in.  The urge for solitude, sanctuary to lick our wounds in in some form or other, seems to be almost a categorical imperative...no matter how we may share ourselves on the internet and even long for commiseration...the reality of mourning in tandem is almost always messy.  Grief exposes too much of us, makes the intimacy of eyes searching ours overwhelming.

Dave and I have come out the other side, three years later.  I can hold his gaze now and look back without flinching, without hiding, without seeing pain there or pain reflected.   There are no other eyes in the world that have shared with me what his have, and we are both healed enough now, in our own separate ways, that the bond doesn't rub raw but honours, commemorates, cements us.  I am grateful for his having been there all along, for not having had to find my way alone.  And yet I know, if I am honest, that we were alone, in the core of ourselves, stumbling along harnessed together by good faith and nothing else for much of that time.  And I catch my breath and think, damn, no wonder divorce rates are so high in the aftermath of loss like this.  And I fear to look deeper than that, because I do not want to feast my eyes upon the scars any longer.