on breaking habits and freeing arms

Today's guest writer, Mrs. Spit, was amazed to find herself pregnant in June of 2007, and heartbroken in December, when her son Gabriel died.

Choosing to move a step forward in your grief is such a personal, such an individual thing. It comes on its own time line, with its own rules. When you chose to get out of the habit about blogging about, about talking of your grief, your dead child, its a hard thing to understand.

The story starts with a story teller - Stuart Mclean, host of CBC's Vinyl Cafe. I wrote to Stuart this past December, telling him that we would be at his Christmas Concert, and we weren't there two years ago because I was delivering a child that died. I didn't have any particular reason to write, I wasn't really writing to tell him I enjoyed his radio show, I wasn't really writing for anything, and yet, I still wrote.

He wrote me back the loveliest of emails. He talked a bit about perinatal death, but he talked more about the process of finding your spot in life again. He used a metaphor of a wood pile, they put wood in front of you, and eventually you get back to chopping and stacking wood.

For a long time, a terribly long time, I needed Gabe to stay with me. As I lost pregnancy after pregnancy, bleeding and bleeding, I needed Gabe. And if I did not have the warm living body of my son, I had his memory. As I sorted my way through the grief of his death, and then 4 more miscarriages, I needed to hold him close, for comfort, for peace and for hope.

I started a new job about the time I went to the Christmas Concert, and it was time to change my focus. To talk less about Gabe, to carry him in my heart, but give my arms a break. Some of this has been quite conscious - I pass up opportunities to talk about pregnancy, about childbirth, about perinatal loss. When people ask if I have kids, I answer quickly - "No". I am breaking habits. I blog less about Gabe as well, if only because I blog more about everything else. The now.

When I was in high school we turned a wooded area into a soccer field. We took the trees down the old fashioned way - with axes and buck saws. We chopped them down, and then we sawed them up. It took all of my junior year to chop those trees down, and all of my senior year to clear the brush.

photo by zach bonnell

Perinatal death is a forest, laid upon the ground. Trees that are no longer trees, but not yet useful wood. Ratty old lodge-pole pine, a bit of poplar, sticky spring sap still coming off. Torn up ground. Rents, when whole trees have been dragged away to chop. Underbrush and mud, with leaves ground in. Alberta wild roses, full of prickly thorns, winter-berry. The smell of decomposing green matter, cold fall days, freezing winter. Cold, bleeding hands, bruised shoulders, broken toes. Perinatal death and half chopped up forests are not places to linger. They are places of purpose, back-breaking, soul-wearing work.

Like everything, work ends. Four years after we started, grass in, the field level, bleachers and junior girls playing soccer, I stood on the sidelines. But for memory, I would not know field was forest. But for this story, you would not know.

Stuart wrote about the process of living, grieving, wanting, wishing. He made a point: there's wood in front of you. You give yourself over to it, testing the sore parts, not sure if you can trust your knees to carry. You start a bit slowly, then you are more able to carry on with the sore bits, and the truth is, it hurts less. One day, the work is done. Then, you find others, in their torn-down forests, and you tell them the dimensions of a cord of wood."Start there", you say. "That one is small. You can manage that."

Do not misunderstand, my classmates, we talk about that forest-field. Once in a while we get together and we reminisce. We share a secret, we know what you see in front of you was not always there. We know that memories fade. Oh, not the fact: the how, all those awful days or work. All that remains is field from forest andthat transformation is good and right to talk about. But only sometimes.

You understand the description I have given you, even if you have never, by the strength of your back, wrought field from forest. You who understand transformation, raw power, hefting, struggling and bleeding - you understand those dimensions that I gave you, you understand 50 cords of wood from forest.

I can talk about what was, what could have been -  but most people see what is. My stories of Gabriel here and gone make no sense, people who have not built field from forest cannot reconcile heartbreak to the composed woman in front of them. Of the power of transformation, they know not.

Most of the time people, they say "Oh, look a soccer field."

Perhaps one day they will realize that soccer fields don't make themselves, perhaps one day you will need to come along and show them how to make one. Or not. Most people live in the ever present now. And truly, now is not such a terrible place to be. Sometimes you wish your now was different, always you wish it included just one more person. Somedays, when you are tired, when you particularly remember, you remember neither the wood or the soccer field, but that horrible place in between.

Most days, you just nod. "Yep", you say, "that's a soccer field".

Change

Every day I make an effort to have a nice time out there in the World.  I'm not aiming for the stars, not trying to seize every single moment with fervor and gusto, I'm just gunning for good.  Good is enough if you can do it on a daily basis.

I sleep later now, every day.  I need an hour or so of semi-wakefulness to gear up and get ready for the chill and sunlight and this relentless, active life. I guess I still can't believe, every morning, that this is the Universe I live in.

I take a shower and I love it.  As hot as I can stand it.  Sometimes I reflect on how lucky I am to even have a hot shower that I can stand in as long as I like.  Sometimes when it looks like a tough one in my heart or my head, I stand there a little longer.  I shouldn't because of the coming Water Wars, but sometimes I can't help it.

Guilt is gone.  I've banished it.  I do what I need to get by and I don't worry about perfection.  Except in the coffee I roast.  And in the driving.  They both need to be perfect but for completely different reasons.  Coffee because it feels good to do it right and it's my job, driving because anything less is disaster.  I am not down with any more disasters.

The day Silas was born was supposed to be the best day of my life and instead it was by far the biggest disaster I have ever experienced.  Nothing like that should ever happen again.  But obviously, since we're all here together, Should is a word we all know doesn't mean a damn thing.

So Should is out now, too.  Expectations are a fool's game, and I choose not to play anymore.  I declare that as if it is something that can be de-selected.  Mostly I try to do exactly what is right in front of me and I avoid worrying about what I think should happen next.  Maybe it is the not-thinking that keeps me up at night.

3am has become my thinking hour.  I know it is going to be 3:11am when I open my eyes.  For a while that brief, nightly insomnia upset me, but now I look at it as a special time, just for me.  Lu asleep next to me.  The cat is tucked tight between us, not even purring anymore.

Usually it's a song that wakes me up.  Whatever I happened to enjoy the most that day is usually the one that's still running through my brain.  The same refrain, whatever it is.  The song-worm, it infects me.  I don't even think about who Should be waking me.

If you break these moth's wing feelings, powdery dust on your fingers or undecided undefined undeterred yet undermind and then it's the steady, static hum of my soul trying to reconcile another day without my son.

It doesn't stop, I'm sorry to say.  Not so far.  Not 2 years after he was conceived.  Not a day goes by that somehow isn't all about him.

The ultimate reason for that is because in a way, I have become him.  Silas doesn't get to do this Earth so I've got to do each day for him, too.  My everyday experience has been utterly transformed, and I do not at all feel like the person I was before Silas was here.  Two years since we started this journey and our lives look exactly the same, but everything has changed, inside and out.  And like Julia said, it is still happening.

I live my life the way I do as an expression of how my parents raised me, of how I have come to know the World, of how Lu's love and presence have become intertwined with mine.  Today is our 5 year wedding anniversary and despite the sadness of these past years it still always feels right that we are together.

Living extra for Silas--any way I can think of--feels right, too.

His brief life has transformed me in ways I am only beginning to understand.  I suppose all parents go through this, but it is especially difficult for people like us because we can never hug them and thank them for everything they help us become.

All I can do is hold on to every day, every little treat and happiness.  I do what's right in front of me and watch and listen for the beauty that appears.  I keep going forward for Silas, for myself, for Lu, and for whatever it is that happens next.  I know what that Should be, but I can't worry about that anymore.  I can only face what Is and somehow deal with everything that Isn't.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How have you changed?  Do you have expectations of how things should turn out?  Do you get the ear-worm of music?  What are your refrains?  Do you manage to have nice days, despite your loss and sadness?

the inescapability of karma, maybe

Angie is a writer, poet, and painter. With the stillbirth of her second daughter Lucia, Angie began writing about mothering and grief at Still Life with Circles. She shares a piece of art, music or writing from a bereaved parent or family member every day at the year-long creative project still life 365, and paints and illustrates mizuko jizo and other aspects of babyloss, pregnancy and parenting.

For a couple of months after my daughter was stillborn at 38 weeks, my husband and I saw a grief therapist recommended by the hospital and our midwives' group. She served a purpose, mainly by helping us answer the thousands of questions we suddenly had:

How do we tell everyone that our daughter died?

What do we do with the nursery?

Is it okay to tell people that we would prefer not to receive flowers?

How do I eat breakfast in the diner where they fussed about my pregnancy?

How do we talk to each other about something other than her death?

After a few months, when those mundane moments of terror in the market passed, our therapy sessions became unproductive. She would ask how my husband felt and he would say, "Hungry."

She would ask me how I felt and I would tell her about Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed, compassion, Buddhism, and suffering. Her eyes would glaze over and she then she would tell me I was avoiding my true feelings by intellectualizing.

"Perhaps individual therapy might be more beneficial for us," I mentioned to my husband as we left her office one snowy Tuesday. I had some bigger questions. This therapist wanted to educate us about our grief, not philosophize about the nature of the universe. I felt nostalgic for a time in which I never lived where a stinky Socrates sat in the town center, just waiting for someone to pose a question about fate, death and the gods. I needed an oracle, an unemployed philosophy PhD. Or maybe even a lama.

photo by MC-Leprosy

I began seeing my Buddhist therapist again. I saw him many years earlier, when I was a single woman bitching about my non-committal ex-boyfriend, insomnia, and my career. I have dabbled in Buddhism for fifteen years. And by dabble, of course, I mean reading Buddhist teachings and writing, but not finding a regular sangha, or community.

Sure, I meditated, occasionally visited a Buddhist monastery for group meditation and teachings, but I never sought an actual teacher who challenged me. Zen. Tibetan. Shambhalan. It didn’t really matter. I sometimes just wanted to feel people around me who could sit quietly together. Intellectually, Buddhism just makes sense to me. Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by our attachments to worldly pleasures and illusions of happiness. One needs to be accountable for his or her actions in every aspect of your life. Compassion, meditation, letting go of attachments and kindness can change suffering. Totally get it. Of course, there were times when I would get fascinated by some obscure text and teaching, but mostly I lived by the basic tenets, except the no wine thing. Alcohol always found a place in my Buddhism.

When I thought I should seek therapy, I sought a Buddhist therapist. I didn’t want therapy devoid of my spiritualism. I sought a more holistic solution to my angst and emotional ennui. The Buddhist therapist became sort of a de facto teacher for a lone wolf like myself. He guided me in meditation. He gave me some incredibly deep insights that mirrored my own beliefs. I learned more from him in the eight month period than I could have imagined. My therapist suggested that perhaps I was a Pratyekabuddha, or a bodhisattva who develops realizations without the guidance of a guru. He encouraged me repeatedly to seek a teacher. He pointed out, "Of course, you know, the challenges of that path are always arrogance and misguidance."

Of course, I have always been arrogant and misguided.

It made sense for me to visit the Buddhist therapist again after my daughter died and I was flailing. After I had met with him for a few sessions, we had begun reincorporating the Four Reminders into our sessions, which had been a bit revelatory to me in my earlier therapy.

1  ::  the preciousness of human birth (It is a gift you are here)

2  ::  the truth of impermanence (You are gonna die)

3  ::  the reality of suffering (Life’s gonna hurt)

4  ::  the inescapability of karma (You better do it right, or you are doing it again.)

He mentioned the last one again. "Karma," he said, "is how our actions affect our suffering."

"Oh, I have been meaning to talk to you about that," I said. And I had. I’d been thinking about how different religions deal with suffering. Majoring in Religion at university, I became fascinated with theodicy, which is the theological problem of reconciling evil and suffering in the world with the existence of a just and good God. But, in Buddhism, suffering is a whole different animal. Buddhists mostly take out God, but leave the suffering. Suffering is the nucleus around which Buddhist thought orbits. Still, something never sat right with me and karma. I want to believe that if someone commits a horrible sin against man or humanity, he or she will suffer eventually. 

But what if you are suddenly the one suffering?

"Uh, yeah, with something like stillbirth or the death of your baby without any reason, I wanted to know, uh, you know, I mean, when I think about karma, with this kind of suffering, the bad-things-happen-to-good-people-type suffering, uh, this is awkward, but what I wanted to know is: do Buddhists think it is my own fault that my daughter died?"

"Of course not," he said, after a pause. "At least not in the way that you are talking about. Traditional Buddhists feel that in our past lives we were all kinds of people: thieves, mothers, butchers, farmers, murderers, liars, nuns, doctors, children, and animals. A monk once told me that if we piled the bones of all the lives we have lived, it would reach through three universes. You may be going through your loss as a result of past karma from a life hundreds of years ago."

I hated that answer.

I wanted to spit on the floor and demand my money back. In no uncertain terms, I told him so. Then he clarified that the complexities of the idea of karma makes it difficult to explain, but Buddhists do not traditionally blame the victim for their own suffering. You could study karma for years and not quite get it. The Buddha taught not to take his words literally. He said to use this teaching to develop my own understanding of the universe. He asked me what I thought. What does karma mean to you now, as the mother of a dead baby?

I think the world is chaotic and random and often cruel. The death of my child had nothing to do with me—nothing I did, nothing my husband did, nothing my daughter did. She just died.

Thinking that Lucia’s death is my karma, or heaven forbid, her karma, or the karma of my entire tribe is of no comfort to me. Without a physical reason why Lucy died, it is hard not to search for a metaphysical one instead. It is hard not to speculate on why the Volcano Gods are angered, or what action in my youth caused my daughter to die now. And yet, I reject that. The guilt of that interpretation would eat me from the inside out until I am nothing but a withered shell of a parent.

To me karma means something much different than tit for tat. Spiritually, I have to figure out my own reason to move forward. What I do have control over is what I do with my experience of chaos and suffering in the world. This life, right now, is my choice. This is my karma. What am I going to do with this experience of loss?

Compassion. Fear. Love. Understanding. Grief. Sadness. Comfort. Kindness. Anger. Patience. Misplaced emotion. Mourning. Selfishness. Selflessness. If I toss each one, carefully peeled and scrubbed, into a blender and drink this past year down, I hope to emerge healthier. I hope this bitter juice helps me emerge more of those things I believe makes the world a place less wrought with suffering. I control that part of me, the patient loving compassionate part, the part that experiences other people's suffering and responds with love. Since Lucy died, I am frequently impatient. I am frequently unloving and unlovable. I sometimes give into anger and pettiness. But I try to use those experiences to forgive. Myself. First for the emotion, and then for the death of my daughter.

I have to forgive myself everyday.

As I walked away from that session, the therapist said one last thing just as I left his room.

"Maybe Lucy fulfilled her karma by living her life just as she lived it. Maybe she simply needed the love and comfort of your womb for those months. Maybe she was supposed to teach you about love."

Maybe.

Did you seek out a counsellor, therapist, or spiritual mentor after the loss of your baby? Why, or why not? What phrases, concepts, or exercises learned in therapy have contributed to your healing? What moments felt at odds with what you needed to heal? Do you remember a session that felt like hard work for you? Why, and where did it bring you?

on survival

In Greek mythology, Medusa is a "guardian, or protectress". She is viewed throughout history as equally beautiful and terrifying.

I wonder how many of us here can relate.

On holiday in July we drove for hours through rolling Turkish hills to visit the ruins at Didyma.  Typically, I need to be in the right mood for these types of things. I was on the fence until my Lonely Planet guide told me to “be sure not to miss the sculpture of Medusa that has remained surprisingly intact among the rest of the ruins”. Or something to that effect.

Sold.

I remember that the heat that day was the kind that gives everything in sight a shimmering, rippled effect. We walked slowly through the remains of the interior, then circled the perimeter.  I felt like a grain of sand on the worlds longest beach - dwarfed by the enormity of it all.  I finally found the medusa set away from the rest of the rubble. I had walked right past her on arrival.

Temple of Apollo, 2nd century A.D. Didyma, Turkey

She sits with pride of place at the entrance, cordoned off and stoic despite the deep crevices that mark her face like scars. More intact than any other scuplture in the ruins.

Look at you. Barely a scratch compared to the rest of them.

I pulled out my camera and smiled, remembering finding this for the first time in the middle of a sleepless night in the month after Sadie died.

Of course you’re here. What better vantage point could you have?

Commanding.

Serene guardian.

Mother hen.

Survivor.

Terrifying when provoked?

I can definitely relate.

.::.

I open my work email first thing to see the subject line, “VISIT TO X CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL”. The air is sucked out of me as I read a lengthy note to all staff about plans for Father Christmas arriving on a Harley, playing on our weaknesses to plea for gifts and funds.

"The children in this hospital are often seriously ill and many will be hospitalised over the festive period. A visit was made to the hospital last week and it was stated that many of these children will be hospitalised over the festive period, some indefinitely."

Memories I’ve had parked in a far away corner wave over my brain like a monsoon and I can’t not cry. I spend twenty minutes in the bathroom regaining my composure.

.::.

I’ve often wondered what it takes for a person to survive something like this. What fabric makes up the kind of soul who can stare down the deepest and darkest tunnel of despair and turn up alive at the other end? Hardly unscathed, but alive nonetheless. None of us are superheroes as far as I’m aware. Just your average Joes and Janes, as random as it comes, without a (traditional) superpower or weapon of choice in sight. Yet here we stand, called on to perform an astonishing, awe-inspiring feat.

This thing called surviving. We do it. We are all doing it, right this second.

We do it with therapy. We do it with screaming and booze and prescriptions and sex.  We do it with the help of partners who are the one person on this entire godforsaken planet who understand us, because their loss is tied forever to our own. And we do it for our living children, or our desire for future children.

And then there’s time, survival’s wingman if there ever was one. 

.::.

“You know you don’t have to feel bad about talking about it.  I think you’re so brave, Jen.”

I do it because in spite of everything, I am still a hopeful person.

.::.

Survival means different things to all of us. What is it to you? What’s your superpower?

gratitude

It’s gut wrenching how much I long for her these days.

A whirl of small brown leaves flies against the windshield of my car as I drive by their tree, almost bare.

Hello, Beautiful…

I feel her close, I really do.

And also, deep in my gut, everywhere in my heart, in all of me – the awareness that my child in her body is missing.

For about a month, we’ve had her picture close by in the dining room of our new home. It’s in a temporary frame… I’m working on something much more grand, much more beautiful. But her sweetest face is there in all its 8x10 glory, peeking out at us as we eat, draw, do homework, putz around on the computer, talk. As I write this.

There she is… and yet that’s not her. It’s just her photograph. Sometimes I feel her there. Sometimes she is in the leaves. Sometimes in the occasional milkweed seed that reminds me of the oh-so-sad-so-terribly-incredibly-painfully-sad week we spent in the mountains after we said goodbye to her. Sometimes in the red tail hawk that flies above Cincinnati, though much less frequently than she did in San Francisco.

When I look at that photograph, I just miss my Baby Girl… in the flesh.

I am reminded each time I look at it just how beautiful she was. And how much she struggled with each breath. That’s when the tears come, when I remember those days in between,

She’s doing surprisingly well… this is what she’ll need in order to come home,

and,

She just can’t get enough air into her small fragile lungs, even with all this support.

That’s when I imagine what it would be like now if things hadn’t turned, if she had come home on oxygen and continued to get stronger.

*****

I know how lucky I am that I got to know her when she was alive. I know how lucky I am that I got to hold her, to kiss her, to sing to her, to touch her soft skin, to look into her eyes as she looked into mine. I know we didn’t all get that in this community of deadbabyparents… I wish we all had. I wish all of our babies were still here, in the flesh, alive and well.

Maybe I have more photos of my baby, but it doesn’t make it easier to have lost her. Nothing can make it easy to lose a child. Easy isn’t a word I identify with anymore. As a word, it feels trivial and doesn’t serve me much. But hard… that feels too simplistic. Sometimes it isn’t hard. Sometimes it just is.

Strange feels more like it these days. Strange because I can simultaneously feel acceptance and disbelief. So many days that is my normal. I still say to Tikva, several times a week, silently or out loud,

Oh Baby Girl… you died. You died.

Then a voice within me will remember, will insist,

But you lived, too. I won’t ever forget that you lived. And for that, I am grateful.

It may have been a blink of an eye, like a daydream… but I wouldn’t trade it in for forgetting the loss of you. Not ever.

*****

I was terrified last year at this time to spend Thanksgiving with our family. I was terrified to be up close and personal with Tikva’s cousin, who was born during the weeks in between my daugther’s birth and her death. I was so scared of being face to face with the reminder that my baby wasn’t there, that he was here and she was not. The fear became something bigger than itself, and I almost spent Thanksgiving separate from my entire family.

But in the end I went. And I sat with this beautiful little boy on my lap, felt his newness, looked into his big brown eyes that reminded me of Tikva’s. And I saw his bright soul, felt his pureness. The ease of being with an uncomplicated soul that a baby is. Connected to him as his own self, not as a reminder of what I didn’t have. He had no idea that he had a cousin who died shortly after he was born. One day he will, and forever he will remind me of the age Tikva would be if only…

But in that moment he was just pure love. And I let myself take that in.

And I looked around at my family all over the house, watching football, taking one more bite of pie while talking and drinking coffee. And I felt so deeply grateful for every single one of them who had held me together before, during and since Tikva’s life. The loss of the months leading up to last Thanksgiving didn’t take away my gratitude for all that remained.

I felt I was still here because of them. Because of my husband and my incredible and brave older daughter, my Dahlia. Because of my sister and my father and my family and my friends – my community. Because of my city, my ocean, my park to walk in, my hawks flying above. My yoga classes to cry silently in. My work to go to for a day’s worth of distraction from my thoughts, and time to read a babylost blog when I needed to go in.

And because of this place I stumbled upon in the early months after Tikva’s death. Where I breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn’t alone, and soon felt the uncomfortable mingling of that relief with the realization that the only way I could not feel alone here was for other parents to also have lost their babies. Where you just get it without my having to explain.

Thank you.

*****

I’m not much for holidays honoring consumerism and the massacre indigenous peoples. I’m not a huge fan of turkey and the gluttony that accompanies this holiday, especially when I know that many of us aren’t blessed to eat every day, much less such a feast. But I do get swept up – just a little – in taking pause for gratitude.

For me, gratitude after loss is different. It’s too simple to say that because of all I have lost, I appreciate what I have so much more. It has something to do with the impossible-to-shake-now-and-probably-forever recognition of just how fragile it all is… that all I really have, no matter how much time I get here, together with those I cherish, is this moment I am in. That understanding just doesn’t let go of me, and neither does the gratefulness I feel that seems to go hand in hand with it.

Because if all I have is this moment, then I better kiss my Dahlia one extra time today, better eat that last piece of dark chocolate waiting for me in the cookie jar, better call my dad to tell him I love him, better tell my husband one more time just how proud I am of him… and I better be kind and gentle with myself.

*****

Thank you, Tikva, for awakening me to the present moment more than anyone ever has. Because with you, I could do nothing greater than be completely present – unconditionally – for as long as we would get together.

And beyond.

.::.

How does gratitude feel to you now? Is it there? The same? Different? If you do feel it, what makes you feel grateful?