Community Voices: Grief is...

Today we are very pleased to present two more of Glow's community voices.

This first piece is by Ruby. Ruby writes: My second son Edgar died on the day he was born, 21 December 2012.

There is the ocean we went to to shake out baby ashes from a cliff-top. The ocean at the westernmost tip of Wales, a sublime spot, above a wide curving bay where his brother is digging in the sand and flying a little kite. The kite is up and down, trailing along the ground, bobbing up in the sky, hopping across the sand, tacking out above the line of the cliffs. Rising, falling, turning, falling, flapping, toddling. The boy running about is the only child visible to the eye. There’s no baby brother sleeping in our bright-blue beach tent either. His name is in the sand. I scratched it in with the child-size yellow spade meant for sandcastles. The sun is shining and the waves of the ocean are rushing onto the sands, rushing over and over, shushing my grief.

My grief is another ocean. A wilder ocean, an ocean of raging tears. So many tears left to cry, stretching out to the horizon. An ocean from which tsunamis crash over the established land and crush the buildings out of it, leaving in its wake a scene of devastation and no human in sight; there’s no-one left before that ocean. My grief is a vast, slate-grey ocean on which I’ll never come to shore.

There is the ocean we went to to shake out baby ashes from a cliff-top. And then there is the ocean of my grief.

The second piece is by Christina O'Flaherty. Christina is a psychologist and mother of two boys, with a third boy expected in April. She writes to share the experience of losing Finn, her first son, and the lessons loss has taught her.

Grief, during these last three years since I lost Finn, has been my teacher.  At first, I riled and raged against him, as I did most painful experiences in my life.  I fought the lessons and the process, outraged that my life had been so cruelly disrupted, but my patient teacher persisted.  Sometimes stern, often compassionate, my teacher continued to gently guide me to the lessons I needed to learn in order to move forward.  These were the hardest things I’d ever been asked to learn.

In fact, I confused them with punishment, which in some ways helped me to turn inward for an answer as to why this was happening to me.  But, I couldn’t really be sure the lessons would serve me until, a year and three miscarriages later, I felt I had nothing left to lose.  That’s when I learned to listen; to observe the lessons coming out of the chaos around me, like one of those pictures where a perfectly clear 3D image finally emerges from a mess of dots when you stare at it for long enough. 

Grief’s lessons transformed me and I think that was Finn’s purpose in this world.  I miss him desperately but I thank him for his legacy of lessons and love.

Where do you find yourself--right now--in this ebb and flow of grieving our children? Do you perceive a change in your grief from day to day? Month to month? Year to year? What kind of ocean are you in? What kinds of lessons are you learning?

lost in translation

We sat across from her, an arrangement of flowers and a small analog clock sitting on the table between us.  She was young, only a few years older than myself, pretty with a well-tailored black dress and an almost preposterously large diamond ring on her finger.  Her office overlooked part of a very famous street in Los Angeles where the wealthy spend ungodly amount of money on handbags and diamond-studded watches.  She was a psychologist or therapist, I can't remember which now, that we found via a referral from our OB after George died.  There were five names on that list and I picked hers from the lot solely because she was the only woman. I naively believed that her sex would somehow imbue her with special counseling superpowers.  I should have known better.

Sitting stiffly in the overstuffed couch, we told her all about how our life had gone from blissfully happy to utterly broken.  I did most of the talking (between wiping away tears and my runny nose) while Leif sat beside me and quietly held my hand.  I relayed the events leading to George's death and watched her reaction to it all with an observant eye.  She furrowed her brow at the right times and nodded sympathetically when I had difficulty maintaining my train of thought.  She said all the right things and reacted in all the right ways, yet something about the blankness in her eyes made me feel as if instead of talking about the death of a much loved baby we were discussing my disappointment over being passed over for a job promotion.  It took all of ten minutes to conclude that she was an experienced actor and that she had little empathy for the ugly circumstance which had brought us in to see her.  Forty minutes later it was over and I was writing a check to her for an absurd amount of money, thankful to be done with experience.  

Back in the car we agreed never to go back to see her.

After that miserable experience I threw out all the other counseling referrals we were given and turned to the Internet.  I tried every combination of words to find counselors who specialized in pregnancy and neonatal losses. Grief + infant + death + depression + counseling = the saddest collection of words I've ever Googled.  The results were abundant and spanned the spectrum of mental health workers: from family therapists to psychiatrists and even naturopaths.  I must have looked through those results dozens of times before gathering up enough courage to pick one and make the call to set up an appointment.   Given how badly our first experience went it still surprises me that I somehow mustered the bravery (desperation, more likely) to even make another attempt. 

Thus the Internet threw me a lifeline -like it has done for me on so many occasions since we lost George- and brought me Anne.

Anne was the antithesis of the first woman we had earlier met with.  Her warmness was as welcoming as the first therapist’s disingenuousness was off-putting.  Even their appearances were starkly contrasted.  Instead of an expensive black dress and hair slicked back in a tight ponytail, Anne wore casual white slacks, a pastel sweater and a string of understated pearls on her neck.  She smiled easily and it never felt inappropriate or forced.  From the moment we began talking it felt like a homecoming and for the next eighteen months it became my refuge.

When I first started seeing Her I felt alone in my grief.  As much as I had tried to convey to friends and family how lost I was or how deeply I missed my baby it was a language completely foreign to them.  It wasn’t as if they didn't try to understand but there was something fundamentally lacking in their ability to interpret my words and behaviors in the wake of George’s death.  Once I wrote in a blog post that it was incredibly painful for me to be faced with images of carefree pregnant women and a pregnant friend took deep offense.  It made me feel awful, both because I had hurt someone who had been a good friend, but also because it made so very clear to me how alien my experience was to those around me.  That was the last time I ever wrote or said anything of that nature outside of the safety of Anne’s office (and later the safety of private conversations with other baby loss people) for fear of offending someone who was not fluent in the language of loss and did not understand the consequences of post-traumatic stress.  After a time I learned to hold back my words for fear that they would be falsely translated into insults or that they would make the impression that I was more depressed then I actually was. 

It was incredibly isolating and not just a little discouraging. 

To Anne, when I told her how much I hated hearing about other women’s pregnancies or how deeply I burned with envy at seeing birth announcements, I was completely normal.  To a grief counselor I was just mourning the loss of my baby, my pregnancy, my previous life, and my self-image.  She understood my language and there was no need for me to make any effort to translate for her.  I did not have to soften the edges of my sharp and sometimes cutting thoughts.  Every week I saw her it was an emotional and physical relief just to sit with someone and not need to filter or mold every word out of my mouth to either A) convey how devastated I was or B) avoid making myself sound like a black-hearted monster. 

One of the most valuable things I learned from our time together was how to accept that no matter how eloquent the words I used to describe my grief there was always going to be something lost in translation for those people who were fortunate enough to have so far been spared any real tragedy in their lives.  They would never ever totally understand (how could they) what I was feeling but the good ones worth keeping around would make an effort to try.   She assured me that there would be people that I would find walking the same long and arduous road that I was on and they would not need any translation.  There would be people who understood.  I just had to keep my eyes and my heart open along the way. 

Anne was the first person I came across after George died who gave me hope that I would not be alone in my grief forever. I found those other people she told me I would find, other souls who were slugging through the same muddy road as I was: other grieving souls who would become friends and for whom no translation was needed.  Hope is an amazing gift.

Have you seen a grief counselor?  Was it a positive experience?  Was there someone else who you felt understood your grief when no one else seemed to?  Has it been frustrating for you to have people not understand or misconstrue your words and/or behaviors in response to your child's or children's deaths?

felled

The most extraordinary life grows out of dead trees.

 

photo by reassaure. 

Ferns and orchids. Lichen and fungi the color of absurdist paintings. Small toads find refuge under the decay. The forest bed swallows death into a loamy mound of old and new growth. A birch bark lies just beyond. It tells the tale of circles, births and deaths, the years unfurl. I hold it up, that shell of stability, the center falls out like rich soil. I whisper my story to the bark scroll. These words, masquerading as scratches on its old skin, appear on its shell.

My daughter died. I wrote the story out long after it served any usefulness. I wrote about how the grief was gone. No one read about my not-grief anymore. It didn't hurt to have people turn away. I would have turned away in my early months, but I kept writing through it. I would let go of the grief, and then pick it up again. Because since she died, it has always been about her death. Maybe before her death, it was about her death.

There were others who came before me, who reached back. A simple gesture, but monumental, I see now. They revisited their grief while abiding mine. They kept silent and listened to my story and so I did the same, until reaching back no longer served any one. My hands are empty now as my story unfurls. There is new life here. And my story must become part of the fertilizer of others.

I wrote longer than I should have. The reaching was for me, pulling my unforgiveness along, leaving bits of it on the forest to become something beautiful. For when I listened to the other stories, I became more forgiving of my own story, of my own culpability. I didn't kill her, yet I have spent nearly five years forgiving myself for her death. Only you understand that.

Nothing. Nothing can ever make Lucia's death okay. And nothing, not one thing, can ever bring her back. A paradox that no longer confounds me.

Grief is as changeable as the forest. You never trek in the same woods twice. And grief is the same. You never write about the same grief twice. There is awe and emptiness and a void of her that is unique and different in every moment. Yet what I write sounds the same, over and over, because I began looking back at my grief, rather than writing of the present grief. The present grief became the fabric of the forest, the greens in everything. It is still there, the grief, that is. It is my mistake to say that it is gone. It is just different. It is a gratitude, and a comfortability in this life, despite her death. In the early years, the writing became a way to not feel grief. I could explicate a sentence, diagram it, break it down. The words meant nothing but grammatical math. I felt something, but did not, or rather, could not feel the true weight of her absence. I made it pretty, wrote moss around it, wove nature into the story, but make no mistake, it was still daughter-death. Ashes and dead babies. Sterile hospital rooms and calls to funeral homes. Sisters never played with. Babies never cooed after. Three broken people trying to remake a family. Over and over again.

But then it would catch up with me, and I would feel that grief with the weight of a redwood, leaning on my back. 

When a woman grieves alone in the forest, does she make a sound?

I made it a point to be heard when I was felled. I started forest fires, and shot off shitty emails and wrote angry blog posts indicted everyone for my solitary grief. I entangled the hearing with the reaching. My heart burst open, broken, bleeding, raw. And I keened. 

THIS TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE THING HAPPENED TO MY FAMILY!

I screamed it. I would not be silenced so others could feel better about dead babies and grieving women and communities of people who spring up in the dark corners of the internet grieving their children that never lived. I would not be shamed because I painted it, or felt sad about never knowing my daughter, or wore my heart on my sleeve, or for starting a literary arts journal around the art of grief. Maybe all that happened for way too long, but it happened just the way it needed to happen. 

Today, my grief is grown over. The Now of Angie exists, absent of raw grief and anger, simply because I wrote about it and cried in public and arted and complained and felt sorry for myself and felt gratitude and made people uncomfortable and only talked to grieving people for a while and lived moment to moment and created rituals around my grief and made thousands of mistakes. It happened because I grieved out loud, in front of God and everyone. When I fell in the forest, I made a sound. It was a terrible, beautiful, righteous sound only the bereaved understand.

I am walking away from the writing about Lucia's death, not because I couldn't keep writing or because I no longer grieve, but because my writing serves no one anymore. Least of all me. Felled by her death, the forest floor crept over me. Overtook me. And small writhing insects made a home in me, something flew away from the forest floor, others stayed. New life grew in me, out of her DNA which still lives in me.

She is dead. We are alive. This is the great noble truth of our family.

With immense gratitude, I share my last post with the Glow community. Thank you for abiding with me on this grief journey through the last almost five years, for loving me when I could not love myself, and for sharing your stories and babies with me. Through the next few months, I will be transitioning out of the role as editor as well. I am passing the reigns to Burning Eye. Her creative fire and inspiring words will carry this space for new parents walking this dark road, and as always, Merry will continue guiding the discussion boards with aplomb and compassion. Together, I know they will continue to stoke the fires of Glow in the Woods' warm welcoming circle of parents.

Tell me, then, about your grief. How have you been making noises about your grief? Are you feeling heard? Are any parts of your grief are grown over? And what still flourishes?

All the living people have their own hearts

All the living people have their own hearts

Functional hearts that beat and slosh their blood through brain and vein

Angry hearts betrayed, broken, wreaking havoc, taking names

Troubled hearts pounding for the pain of strangers

Retentive hearts for memories of rain and safety

Faithful hearts given away with the promise of eternity

Treacherous hearts twisting burning too soon turning

Playful hearts that invert an empty eggshell in its cup and invite their mother to tap it with a spoon

Wistful hearts trembling for midnight and the moon.

My other children grow and speak in different voices

With words I didn’t teach them

And explore their complex hearts

But my daughter’s heart with all its potential for infinite variety

Stilled in my womb and never had expression

And that became my lesson

To live another’s heart and cells and memory

To write her death in all its vile potency

To understand that I’m her only legacy

And there could never be enough

Money to honour her

Voices to speak of her

Or babies to save for her

The world in its entirety could not satisfy her loss

It rests with me to somehow be worthy of her precious heart

And so I end and start

This is my last post for Glow. I often think of my writing as part of Iris' legacy. How do you feel about creating a legacy for your baby or babies? Do you do something "in their name"? What does that mean to you? 

quietly forward

I don't want to share her anymore.

Initials traced on sidewalks, birth date carved into wood.

MARGOT WAS HERE, inked on my forehead.

Dropping her name like rain, sprinkled over the city, in grocery stores and preschool and dinners with acquaintances.

Neighbors. Bartender. Old friends.

I have another daughter, I'd lament, with downward eyes, searching for a remedy.

It was like this in the beginning. Shouting, screaming, knees in the mud, heart on my sleeve, anything to feel some sort of connection to her.

For months and a year and more months, I wore her story around me like a cloak, heavy and tattered from the daily grind, dark material, drenched in sadness and anxiety. I didn't care how messy it all appeared. There was no choice to put on the cloak, or to share her, to sprinkle her around the city. Grief doesn't give you a choice. I woke up to life without her every day and that reality felt like all there was.

Somewhere along the ticker I’ve gone quiet. The pulse of my sorrow still beats, steadily, methodically, but sharing her so freely feels uncomfortable now, like it’s a violation of our intimacy.  

Shhhhhhh Daddy, I imagine her whispering, they don't need to know.

Suddenly I’m overcome with this urge for privacy, for things left unsaid, for the cloak to whither and fall, for the sidewalks to wash away, for the wood to rot. I want her all to myself. I want the ways she has changed me to be something that I alone know the extent of. I want my thoughts about her kept only for us, sacred secrets between a father and daughter. I want her ashes, the rocks from her river, the remnants from her brief existence to be tucked away, hidden from bystanders, hallowed ground reserved only for a few.

It’s now in the quiet where I find closeness with her, in the whisper of her name, in the privacy of my own thoughts, in the ways in which she has changed me.

Do you ever feel quiet? Do you feel like not sharing your children so much? If so, what brought that on for you? I wonder if some of you might feel somewhat off by the idea of being quiet, of not sharing your chlldren so freely?