They are songs of grief and death and the intersection of life and loss that is my permanent residence. These are the melodies I frantically return to each time I feel I have lost her again, clinging to each syllable when the strum of grief reverberates throughout my hollow body. They are the exact same words that remind me that I will always be able to find her in the deepest parts of my soul, that she will forever be a part of me.
Read MoreI’ll give you a minute, the doctor said. / A minute to sort through the daze / A minute to take in that the baby was gone / A minute to cry out in pain.
Read MoreAs I walk to my car after work in the early evening darkness of winter, I realize that my shaky situational management has, what appears to me, a consequence. I cycle through the past moments of avoidance and self-preservation, replay the flashes of tense minutes forced upon me, of gritting my teeth through apathetic dismissals veiled in platitudes. I weigh them against the softer moments of kind words, timely gifts and acknowledgement, but find an imbalance.
Read More'How Not To Say The Wrong Thing' was originally published in the LA Times in 2013. There is a way, it purports, to show up in the company of people in the middle of crisis, trauma, and loss. People say there is no right or wrong way to grieve and that's true. The aggrieved grieve as they must, a hundred different ways, as is their emotional autonomy. But there sure as hell is a wrong way to be around grieving people. I've seen it. I've witnessed it. Have you?
Read MoreA baby entered my home for the first time, but she wasn't mine. My son watched the baby tentatively, and finally went over to say hello. Uncertain of how to greet her, he waved. He was fascinated by her tiny fingers and toes, miniature in comparison to his own. All the while, I was fascinated by his bravery, strength, and resilience. He was thinking about his lost sister, the one he never met. The one he often longs for. He handled this other baby, his cousin, so well. So did I. If he could handle it, so could I.
Read MoreWe are strangers to one another. You arrived to me through a website in a series of zeroes and ones. But we are space travellers connected forever by shared astrophysics. I was once pulled apart into a drifting cloud of atoms and molecules. Like oil in a dish, my specks magnetically drew to one another over what felt like millennia until there were enough atoms and molecules for an arm, a kidney, an ear, until I was myself again.
Read MoreBereaved parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion, and the other side of getting through this mess called grief.
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Parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion we learn for others, having been through this mess — and see it reflected back at you, acknowledged and understood.
Thanks to photographer Xin Li and to artist Stephanie Sicore for their respective illustrations and photos.
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