sorry

It's hard to write about grief at four years out. Hard to know what to write here.

I want to tell you that you will never forget your baby.

I want to tell you that you will find a way to move on, grow about the pain.

I want to be the beacon of hope ahead of you, the woman with the life that has not collapsed around the dark matter of the dying star; that I was not sucked in and lost, heavy as the universe and destroyed in a hopeless inward swirling soup of moulten grief.

I want to tell you that you won't forget, that cosmic clutter and home grown atoms seared themselves into your soul and cannot be unwritten.

It feels wrong to write of present grief here. It feels wrong to write of recovery. It feels wrong to be either - healed or unhealed.

I missed my slot here last month. Almost missed it this month.

Grief hauled at me, made me unreliable. I chose to fail to prove that grief had me in its grip and prove that I had outrun it. But the truth is I couldn't feel it. I was numb. No words came. To write badly is the ultimate betrayal of my boy.

I'm held back and pushed forward by grief, by loss, by the bundle of boy in the paper flat pictures, the boy I grew quite perfectly who couldn't live without tube and wire.

You might imagine that pulled in all directions is unfathomable pain but it seems to bring nothing but inertia and dulled senses.

You don't need me, I told myself, because I am both then and now and neither is helpful. At four years out grief absorbed is of no more use than grief worn smeared upon my person and slathered, unwelcome, on every interaction.

Do you want to know that grief is just as painful 4 years on? Do you want to know that 4 years on I cry most often because his loss is so familiar that somedays I do not think of him at all?

Do you want to know you will forget? Do you want to know you never will?

That is my apology. Grief is endless and full of ends. Grief is circular, linear, long and short, impossible and easy, ever present and constantly receeding.

I'm sorry I wasn't here.

***

This morning my living son, born after, brought me Freddie's picture. We don't speak of him here. We are not a family of vivid gesture and outward remembrance. His photos live in my room and nowhere else. I have not wanted to make this youngest child one growing in the shadow of loss. I've never spoke of Freddie to him.

He asked us who the baby was, seemed to know that this was a baby who had not become a person he could place. And then, with uncanny understanding, he gestured to my candle shelf, to the collection of trinkets and gifts I have bought his brother.

"Baby Freddie all gone," he said.

Yes.

He's all gone.

No fine words can alter that.

4 years or not, it feels a giant of a thing to understand.

I don't think it is ever going to change.

What do you hope for as the days turn to weeks and the weeks turn to years? Do you have a sense of the resting place you grief should have? Or, how do you accommodate your lost baby or babies in your family? And how do you cope when others from inside or outside your immediate family, step outside your coping parameters?

the hardest thing

I have drawn landscapes with words in my journey through loss these past three years.

Baby lost, I lay gasping upon the scorching desert sand; clothes burnt from my back, undefended against the blasting rays of grief. I spread my hands and grains of a lost reality slid through my fingers. There was no shelter, no relief; time as it should have been marched ahead of me like a mirage; my lost boy, my lost life, my lost self.

The hardest thing I ever did was survive the desert. With my back to my boy, I stumbled on, the dreadful knowledge that I was stuck - forever - in the desert.

Damaged and raw I woke to find myself alive and sunken deep inside a sucking, cloying marsh of despair. To wake and find the nightmare still going, the jungle noises of life as grim and terrifying as anything I could dream, the weight upon my chest enough to press the life from me. I wished to sink, I begged to sink; to never hear the sounds that cawed from morning radio like a heartless mockingbird.

The hardest thing I ever did was gird my loins and shut my ears, throw back the blanket and live another day. Again. Again. Again.

The world tilted and we found ourselves on ice; reality biting at frostbitten, delicate extremities. To grieve a baby is to stand alone, perfectly still, balanced and poised awaiting the next tragedy. To barely breathe and await the cracking, yawning sound of deadly cold that will - must surely - claim all that is left of life and love.

The hardest thing I ever did was touch a fingertip to a small white coffin, say goodbye, be polite and brave and GOOD and bargain with the universe to leave the rest of us alone. Please. Just leave us be. Please.

A blizzard hit, my vision fogged and faded and all was obscured; cold, dizzying, grim and suffocating, wiping clean, covering tracks, bringing a clean, white slate with all the mashed and broken earth beneath it. Time passed. I do not remember it. I know each moment lasted lifetimes.

The hardest thing I ever did was live through New Year, leaving my boy behind, losing him forever.

Spring did not bring hope. Spring blossomed and hope faded and the landscape was not fecund and inviting. I found myself wizened, dried up, barren, scrambling over dusty plains and faced with unimaginable climbs. Thorns scratched, dirt stuck in my throat, breath was gritted, dragging.

The hardest thing I ever did was trying again. The hardest thing I ever did was live the months of failed conception, of bitter galling blood and toil.

And then... a precipice. Flat against the cliff, staring down, rock crumbling, skittering away with each weighted footstep. Uncertain, hope, fear, breathless anxiety, the ache of bones and mind. Inching along, one step, two steps towards an unknown summit. Eight months just moment by moment, a ticking time bomb, a waiting avalanche.

The hardest thing I ever did was carry another child and face the possibility of loss again. Such risk, such potential pain, for the hope of a glorious view.

The view. Spread below me, rolling, green, forgiving, gentle. Breathe in, fill my lungs, breathe out. Grasp the moment. Feel the sun upon my face and not be burned. My skin is strong now, strong enough to weather the sting of those grief rays when they touch upon me. But the view... glorious? I see the shadows that my journey etched across it. The dips and rolling valleys hide iced lakes and craggy cliff; grief and I have walked them as reluctant, sullen companions. The distant haze hides dust and desert - and hides my boy. He drifts in atoms of sun and dust and breeze across the landscape.

The hardest thing I ever did was learn to live again, be grateful for what I have, for luck and joy, like people say I should. But without him.

Without him.

What does your grief landscape look and feel like right now? What phases of your experience stand out, either because you weathered them in unexpected fashion or because they were particularly, perhaps unexpectedly, difficult? What is the hardest thing about where you are at this moment?