Fractures

In the before-before, before the whole world closed down in the global pandemic, and before I lost a child, I spent a lot of time in coffee shops. I used to listen to swirls of conversation partially obscured by the steam hissing out of the espresso machine, huddling behind my laptop or journal or pile of books, feeling a sense of quiet community.

After, back when the world was still humming but I had floated away from it, I couldn’t stand to go to the park or the farmer’s market or any of the communal places where I was always at risk of being the bearer of my own bad news. (What if I have to go to the store and get milk and someone asks “where’s the baby?”)

A fractured bone is just as painful as a true break, the difference is that it stays inside, invisible to the outside world. 

J. was to be my rainbow, the somewhat silly name for a baby born after a loss. The entire earth had already traveled once around the sun from the time of our first unnamed lost one to the date of his conception. The wave of light refracted and reflected, past meeting future. Refracted, not fractured. What is fractured light? What is a fractured life? Is it just words, just metaphor, like everything I have left? 

The worst nightmare I ever had was of a rainbow above a stretch of California Route 1, leading to the secret inlet near Point Reyes where I had seen the humpback whales in real life the year before, when J. was alive and swimming in my belly. In the dream I was inside, in a kind of glass atrium, looking up. I saw the rainbow turn black and white, then crumple, falling from the sky. Two weeks later, at my 11-week ultrasound, the baby-who-was-not-yet-a-baby lay silent and still on that terrible grey screen; another fallen rainbow.

It’s not California’s fault, oh foggy, dreamy Pacific coastline with the twisted Monterey cypresses. It’s just that the state of being broken broke open the state I had called home, the fracture spreading across everything I once loved. 

There was a period where grief settled heavily, after the world broke open, once the worst had already submerged me in its liquid medium. It was quiet there, underwater, where sound travels so slowly. People came over sometimes and talked in their normal voices, but those conversations scuttled and bounced on the surface like little water bugs. Echoes of my past life floated by, a mournful whale call. 

I had so many years of waiting and longing for exactly this life: The two children, the big farmhouse in the country. Space to breathe and walk, more trees than people, peace. They say, don’t move too soon after a tragedy, like leaving is the same as giving up, but all I wanted from the day I lost him, if I couldn’t have him back, was to run away. 

On that long journey east we stopped in Nevada to see Pilot’s Peak; a towering purple mountain that rises from the salt flats, a former island in the great inland sea. There are only ghost towns and fossilized ancient fish there now, though they say you can still see carriage tracks circling the mountain, created by wheels of the wagons carrying gold-seekers on their way to California, searching the parched earth for hidden springs.

I used to have an inland sea. Fantastic creatures swam in me. Someday this too will feel like a tale from the ancient time, before, before whatever it is that will happen next.

Here in Vermont, heating is a major topic of conversations: Wood stoves, pellet boilers, heat pumps, solar panels. When we moved across the country, I became as obsessive about heating sources as I used to be about stages of pregnancy or infant development. Heating is not optional here, like it was in California. If you want to make it through, you need to find something to burn.

When I was pregnant with J, alone on a work vacation in Carmel, I read Susan Cain’s book Quiet, all about introverts and the power of introversion, and suddenly my whole life came into focus. I remember patting my belly and wondering if this one would be my quiet one. I hummed an Edie Brickell song to him on the beach, “I’m glad no one’s here, just me by the sea/ but man I wish I had a hand to hold…”   

These are the words I sing to my new home: Ice pond, sugar house, root cellar, cold storage, overwintering, mast year, hard freeze, snow tires.  

I had two years of living at the pace of grief before COVID hit. I already knew how to hunker down, how to order the essentials online and to spend days in bed. If there is any lesson to be had from living through the worst, it is to skip the small talk: How are you, friend? How are you facing the crushing loneliness of human existence? What fears keep you up at night? How are you preparing for the cold and darkening days? Do you need a candle? A bowl of soup? A small potted plant? “Man I wish I had a hand to hold…”

Shatter, splinter, rupture, split. Driftwood spit up by the sea, left to dry, salted and sunned, an empty vessel. No one can survive those waves intact. 

I learned here in the woods to listen for the dull thump of trees falling in the windy nights. There are so many casualties: branches of the giant Black Locusts, splintered, fractured, lying wounded on the ground after each storm, birch trees bending until they split in two, a giant oak pulling up an old boulder in its roots as it falls, like a dead man’s hand, still grasping.

When I was pregnant with J., I was ready, or thought I was ready, for the split, the divide. I was ready to be broken open. I did not need this lesson, I did not need any of this. There is no better me shimmering in the distance, split and splintered and patched back together. I am only weaker in this resulting condition, in the after, like a bone imperfectly knitted back together.

It’s been four years now, my child. Four whole years of change and growth, hurricanes and fires. There is not one day that I would not take back, not one second I would hesitate to give away in the great bargain of loss, to be back in the before. If only you were still here, if only you were still with me. Waiting for whatever it was that was to happen next.

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Emma’s son Jesse was born still on September 27th, 2017. Today is his fourth birthday.

What fractures have you identified in your life post-loss?