Last time I was this pregnant was the day my baby died. It was a busy, crazy day that turned into the evening our after started. Our son was born the next day. That was exactly eighteen months ago.

I want to say something profound. Dates, numbers, coincidences. I also want to say that it's just a day, it holds no power. (Right? Right?) The boy who is still alive in me is no more or less likely to die today than any other day. But today I am unmistakably more anxious than yesterday. 

He looks like his brother. We know that from the ultrasounds. It started with the nose. I saw it on the anatomical scan, and almost gasped. A had this weird nose that nobody else in the family has. Of all things, I didn't expect the nose. Since then we have seen the cheeks, which are not surprising-- they are my dad's, mine, Monkey's, and A's. Other features are less clear, but the time before last the ultrasound tech pointed out his big hands (A had long fingers) and that he had some hair. A's hair was curly. 

Is it just that were he to be born today, I would know what to expect? What he would look like, what his weight would feel like in my arms? He is smaller than A was, but not by much-- half a pound or so, likely. That was the thought I was working on this weekend, as the doctors worked to stop my preterm labor-- that I may, in a matter of hours, again hold my son in my arms, that were that to happen, I would need to let myself be in both places at once, simply because I don't think I could stop myself from going back.

The birthing rooms in my hospital are pretty similar, though the beds in some face one way, and in some-- the other. The rooms where I had given birth to my two children so far happen to frame one side of the same wall of rooms-- Monkey's right up by the ORs, and A's down the other end of the hall, where there would be minimal interaction with the world of live babies being born, where they could then walk us out through the back door, so we wouldn't have to run into any happy people. The room where I was this weekend, fittingly, I guess, was half way down the hall between the rooms where Monkey and A were born. This room was set up the same way as Monkey's, with the bed in the room facing the bed in A's birth room. If I peered really hard through the walls, and through time, I could see us in that other room. Monkey's birth was behind me, has been for over six years now. A's, in some way, was, and still is, in front of me. 

So tell me, please, if you have had a subsequent birth already, how did it feel? How did it go? If you are still hoping for one, what goes through your mind as you think of it? Or do you give that part any thought at all? If you are not going to get one, what does that do to you?

Today we feature a guest post by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore.  Her is a familiar name to many-  she is the founder and CEO of  the MISS Foundation and is  a foremost advocate for Stillbirth Policy.

As Joanne writes on her blog, she is a mother of five children--'four who walk and one who soars'. This post is a gift through her beloved Cheyenne that she gives to us. These are words that we need to hear, touch, and read. And perhaps ponder over, ruminate and whisper to ourselves. These words we need to hear, from a fellow bereaved, who have traveled further ahead of the road, and who beckon us with a warm glow of light.

14 years ago, on July 27, 1994, my beloved child died.

And so I surrendered.

I was catapulted into dark, deep waters where waves of pain and loss crashed down upon me relentlessly. Grief, like a powerful rip tide, ensnared me and then carried me far from the familiar shore. I could no longer see my home between the waves that hammered me, and I fought for even a glimpse of the recognizably blue sky. The waves persisted ... and tumbled me, over and over and over, disorienting and confusing me. All was darkness and panic.  I fought it. Occasionally, I would reach the coveted surface for a desperate, gasp of saline-laced air only to be wrenched back under moments later. Pockets full of time, direction, and reason were emptied into the hungry ocean. Grief filled my lungs. I would not survive unless I surrendered.

Like any good surfer knows, there is no other way to survive this type of Herculean force. Thus they teach the mantra: Surrender to the waves. So, too, it is with the tide of grief; and the battle, which I could never win, ended. I allowed the victor to take me adrift to unfamiliar shorelines and places of discomfort. I became one with both the quiescence and wild motion of the waves.  I was mindful of grief‘s proclivities to ebb and flow, tolerant of its unpredictability, patient with the bitter taste it left in my mouth; and in exchange, it became kinder to me. We became cautious comrades.

Eventually, as does the rip tide, the sea of grief released me to the shore. It spit me, grateful, from its jowl like Jonah from the whale’s rancid belly, and I found my way back home. But the places I had seen while on my unintended and uninvited abduction would change me forever.

This was how I survived in those early months and years. I allowed myself to just be.  I stopped questioning myself – my impulses, my tears, my thoughts, my rituals, my wishes, my suffering, my sanity- and I let it be.  There was a certain peace that followed my decision to surrender. I no longer had to pretend to be “fine, thank you”, and I would no longer be the metamorphosed elephant at baby showers where only miracles are welcomed. I no longer punished my failure to complete grieving within the allotted three-month time period by subjecting myself to the insufferable insensitivity of others. I could relinquish the rehearsed smile and perfunctory hugs and, instead, acknowledge my ongoing sadness, isolation, and despair. I could be- me.

Here I am, 14 years later, and filled with gratitude for having surrendered to grief. My daughter’s life was worthy of every tear I shed into my ocean of pain. Her death was worthy of my armistice with the waves of grief.  Our love was worthy of a moratorium on normalcy and mediocrity. Simply, she was worthy of whatever time and space I needed to mourn her physical absence in my life.

I am still, on occasion, overtaken by the tidal waves of grief.  I don’t fear their arrival, and I am more prepared, now, to be transported to distant shores. I carry her flag with me as I travel, bury it deep in distant sands, and I hope to help others know her through knowing me.

I am stronger and have faith that I will survive and learn from what comes next. And I trust that the waves will release me, as they do, and I will come home once again.

Sometimes Ma, in her extremity,
weeping privately over the washtub,
senses my presence, feels that I'm near,
calls herself a fool. But she's not mistaken.

I *am* there behind the stove. I am the heat
on her brow, my privilege to tarry,
suffered to loiter as I couldn't in life,
moonbeam, magpie, gust in the slough.

I am not alone as she fears, nor unhappy.
No chip on my ineffable shoulder. Rather
a rich air of communion, buoyance—what
you feel when your heart swells. And
there *they* are—Ma, my sisters, isolated,
stragglers, each with her own reduction:
*should have been me, could have been me.*
Staggered, drifting, aimless as cattle
in a blizzard, heads lowered, numb,
the horizon hopelessly obscured.

—Sharon McCartney, The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder

everybody's doing it.

it's in, it's fun, it's great for teaching social media or sizing up a site. but until i saw Mad's stark and poignant Wordle a couple of weeks ago on the topic her February miscarriage, i hadn't considered that the novelty site might also serve as a tool for art therapy of a sort; that it could offer a mirror reflecting one's own words and sorrow and thought processes back to oneself, reconfigured.

the healing process doesn't really end, i don't think.  the pain becomes less immediate.  the desire to connect to it fades.  but, for me, with peace has come a curiosity about meaning, an urge to explore - from outside the raw wound that is personal narrative - what it means to live through loss and come through the looking glass.

so i entered text from my own posts here into Wordle, and stepped back, imagining myself perched on a bench in a wide, minimalist gallery, taking in the conglomeration of words and connections as if they'd sprung from some elsewhere, as if the blood they spoke of was foreign to me. there is healing in distance, my grandmother always told me. there is insight, i thought, maybe, to be found in this bird's eye view that brings my words back to me jumbled and reorganized, full of acrostic mystery.  

i cast my tea leaves and hit "create," and time, and think, and baby and grief and wanted all leapt from the page, not entirely unexpected but still surprising in their relative size and relational combinations.  in Wordle, the frequency of words in the base text impacts what size those words show up as in the created piece.   time made me nod.  think made me laugh.  i overthink everything, always have, but didn't realize the theme had come through so dramatically in writing.   the left-hand side conjunction of still, think and back juxtaposed with the alternate combination of still, go and back - with go slightly smaller, like a longing finally discarded - made me wistful...for the longest time, in my sorrow, i wished myself back to the time when my son was alive.  in moving beyond that place of wishing, i have left something behind forever.  but both realities - the one in which i think back and the one in which i would go back if i could - are present in the Wordle, roads diverged only by one word.  elsewhere, tiny wanted baby and peace wrong and healed though never exactly enough and the way lost fits inside time all catch my eye, my breath.  these are things never quite articulated aloud, yet there they are, alive on the screen.  seeing them is like looking through an old photo album, a former life flooding back in the recognition.

what do you see?  have you tried one of these for yourself?  is this art for you, or just a novelty gag?   what place has art - of any kind, writing included - had in your own grieving and healing process?

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.

            -- from Amy Bloom, "Away"

I've been chewing on this quote for months now, and I suppose it's time I do something with it.

The line comes from Amy Bloom's novel Away, wherein the protagonist loses her family in a Pogrom and flees to America.  And then finds out that her daughter, who she sent out of the homicidal rage to the chicken coop, may (may, maybe, could be?  Is it possible?  Is she crazy to believe?) be alive.  And the book proceeds to outline her physical and emotional journey to discover this truth.  It's a beautifully written book, and contains many sentences which were so hard-hitting in their gorgeousness, that I reread them multiple times.  And many, like this one, stuck with me.

It has come to my personal attention that, uh, (tries to remember what day it is; uses fingers to count) 17 months (!) after the fact, that I'm still "in the closet" to many people in my life (read: nearly the entirety of kids' parents in Bella's class, save for one who's shut like a clam due to that doctor/patient thing), and others (read neighbors) simply know the bare bones:  my baby died when she was less than a week old.  So I'm now, finally, hallelujah, to the point where I'm totally ok talking about it, and hell, kinda want to talk about it, and I'm faced with what to say.  So I got to thinking about the clean, tidy anesthetized version, scrubbed up twice with disinfectant and anti-bacterial, free of pet hair.   (OK, maybe not entirely free of pet hair, picks something off my keyboard and something else off my coffee mug.)  And the messy, nasty, gutwrenching, terrifying underbelly.  There is the story I tell in public, and not even that often,  which often simply gets condensed to, "I had a baby, she died when she was six days old."  Then there's the underside, the "smear," that gets told here and in therapy, the story my husband knows.  The story that gets replayed in my head, and in my nightmares.  The two memories, and why I withhold what I do, and why I tell what I do.

For starts, I don't even know where to insert this information into a conversation.  No fellow pre-school parent, for example, has ever asked me how many children I have.  Or if I plan on having more.  Or anything.  Which in no small measure, I'm grateful for.  But I'm now worried that when the opening comes, it will be like a bomb dropping and leaving a wasted plain.    There is, after all, the polite thang.  I'm assuming, having long-ago thrown out my Miss Manners handbook on neonatal loss, that it's probably not polite to discuss death of infants at all.  I think it scares people.  Hence my "in the closet"-ness, and not wearing my "My Baby Died" t-shirt when I pick Bella up.    Really, the whole story's a smear -- so why go there?

I'd love to tell you I'm as brash in real life as I am here, but I'm not.  Frankly, I don't give two farts about other people's scare-factor after what I've been through,  but apparently I do a bit. I don't go there, I don't even give them the nice memory.

Should I broach the subject, there's the why-part, which is really none of their business -- my genetics or infectious self. Inevitably when I tell someone, the next thing out of their mouth is, "Oh my god, what happened?" and I'm left wondering how to elaborate in a way that tells them something, but perhaps not too much, and does so quickly.  And I do this, knowing full well that they probably really don't give a shit, and THEY asked me to be polite, and they're praying I don't go into deatil.  "She was born with a host of irreparable, fatal problems."

But depending on whom I'm speaking with, part of me wants to start elaborating.  To let them know what a shock this was, and that I was not some head-in-the-sand, completely naive late 30-something mother, who smoked or did drugs or drank myself silly for nine months.  "I had a clean amnio, we went to term -- in fact, a week late."   Am I negating blame?  Letting them know how horrific the bombshell was?  Warning them that the universe can be horrifically unkind when you least expect it?

And I hesitate to get into the genetic discussion with most people, even though I know they're wondering (I can practically hear it) if we're going to have another baby.  I don't want to tell them the odds, because in the event I do become pregnant, I don't want them thinking I'm crazy, or knowing that we've used a gamete donor.  Strangely, some people I'd like to shield from this information are in my own family.  I don't want them knowing the odds, anticipating, worrying, getting emotionally invested; nor do I want them rejecting, replacing, or writing off.  But, honestly?  Sometimes I hear myself slipping into the odds, and the scary knowledge that there's "no way to know prenatally."  Am I telling them how pissed I am about my chances and choices?  Preparing them for failure in case there is another?  Trying to scare them too, informing them that ultrasounds are merely gross generalizations that occasionally can predict gender and obvious visible problems, but occasionally fail to discern numerous, mortal conditions?

The two memories.

I had a baby, she died when she was six days old.  She was born with a host of irreparable, fatal problems.  (I had a clean amnio, we went to term -- in fact, a week late.  I have up to a 1:4 chance of this happening again, with no way to know prenatally.)

And the underside of sobbing, anger, despair.  The memories of hospitals, tubes, needles, seizures.  The discussions about comfort levels, and removal from life support.  The knowledge of funeral homes, cremation, and explaining death of a sibling to a toddler.  The ongoing aftermath of grief and all of its gross, infectious ooze:  sleeplessness, bewilderment, weight I can't lose, short-term memory loss, jealousy, anger, loneliness.  All of it ugly.  Except for her, of course.  She was beautiful, and sadly, not meant for polite conversation.


************************

A couple months ago Mr. ABF came home from a social day of community service with the news that neighbors of ours are "splitting up."  It was news that took my breath away -- two people I adore, two people who've been together for what seems an eternity, two people who are part of the backbone of my very lovely comfortable community.  And the very next thought, after my heartbreak for them, was the heartbreak for us, how it would impact the neighborhood.  They would no longer host or attend functions; their house would sell; their dog, who my daughter insisted on dressing up like on Halloween, would no longer walk by my house.  And the NEXT thought was jeebus, this must be how everyone thought about us:  heartbreak for them, a cloud over the fun-loving community.

These are people who will now be where I am, with the big elephant in the room, no one knowing exactly what to say, including myself.  These people, when pressed, will assuredly also have their two memories -- the one they tell us ("It's nobody's fault"), and the one that careens inside of their heads.  They were so gracious when Maddy died, showing up in person at our door, with hugs and tears and an explanation that they really didn't know what to do, so they brought chocolate.  Which made all the sense in the world to me.  They were people who nudged me out of my shell to say thank you, and people who followed up with me, months after everyone else assumed I was ok, and asked how I was doing -- for real.  These are people with whom I shared the honest answer:  Awful, but functioning.  And so now I feel the need to reach out to them, to let them know I also have no idea what to say or what to bring to the table (Chocolate?  Vodka?) but that I'll be there, that I understand the elephant in the room, the uncomfortable realization that you're no longer who the neighborhood thought you were, that you, too, have two memories.  I'm not asking to be let in on the underside, I'm not even sure I want to hear it.  But I'm willing to bet they'll be grateful that I understand it exists.

Are you "out?"  To everyone or a select few?  And which -- or how much of your -- story do you tell?

We were truly ridiculous this month, with literally dozens of back-and-forth lobbying sessions, new discoveries and cart-upending nominations. Part of the happy problem is that we're meeting many of you for the first time, digging back through your archives and finding not only gems in this month but in past months that we can't resist acknowledging here.

So we always say it's tough to choose one 'best post', but this month, your hearts and words made the task especially difficult.

This month we honour Carol at Happy Sad Mama for her post, Happy-sad. Five years past the stillbirth of her daughter Charlotte, Carol reflects on holding her own identity, blessings and ordinariness in one hand, and the vivid, almost-like-unrequited-love of babyloss in the other. I liked how Carol's writing holds a bright light further down the path, showing flashes of acceptance that give me hope.

Remember to nominate your favourites by the 14th of every month--we so deeply appreciate hearing new voices. And as always, thanks to all of you for participating!

July's glowing nominees were, in random order:

STE at So Dear and Yet So Far for High wire act 

Hisaak at Rebuilding Myself for What I wish I could tell you

Angie at Bring the Rain for A beautiful song

Carol at Happy Sad Mama for Writing

M at My Sanctuary for #135

Mrs. Spit at Mrs. Spit Spouts Off for Last kick and Fathers

Steph at Mi Isla Sola for Dear Isla

K@lakly at This Is Not What I Had Planned for The fear

Jenny at There's A New Monarchy In Town for What I know

Stephanie at Hopefully Trying for This is what it is

Becky at Life with Love and Loss for Pregnancy after loss, part one 

You can't write and cry at the same time.   I wrote that sentence, or something like it, back when I first started blogging.  I think it was part of a post trying to justify -- to myself and to the world at large -- my inability to see anything larger than my own anguish, the posts choked out of me like sobs.   

I say "or something like it," because I can't be sure exactly what it was that I wrote.  Though I try to be reasonably scrupulous about checking those things I can check, I can't bear to go back and read through my early posts.  Even imagining them triggers a shuddering claustrophia, terror of going back to that dark and narrow place.   

I feel a little of the same fear when I read blogs written by the newly bereaved.  I'm less wary of those who, like me, started blogging only after their losses as a way of channeling their grief.  On those blogs, the words tend to be weighed and filtered, the pain veneered with prose.

More difficult to read are the blogs by people who've been chronicling a pregnancy, when suddenly everything goes terribly, unexpectedly wrong.  I start those stories at the end, then go back to read the earlier posts, viciously ironic in retrospect: the heartrate at the first ultrasound, a link to the options for changing tables.  

I read those older posts like a novel, seaching for clues that might foreshadow the coming disaster.  But, of course, real life doesn't work that way.  We're always being blindsided.  We're always unprepared.  Life is a run of discontinuities and the gods have a weakness for the O.Henry ending.   

When I come to the end of the posts, I feel helpless.  I want to give something, but when I look down I usually find that my hands are empty.  My experience -- however similar to theirs -- is valuable mostly to me.  All I can do is watch and, once in a while, say something that I hope is, if not exactly right, at least not too blatently wrong.  Because if it's hard to write and cry simultaneously, to read and cry at the same time turns out to be no trouble at all.

Do you read lostbaby blogs?  Do you comment on them?  Are there specific things you try to say or not to say?