Apology no more...

As a girl, a woman, a wife, a mother, I have been apologizing most of my life. I took lessons from my mother and my grandmother who were really good at it because I imagine that they too took lessons from their own mothers and grandmothers.

But recently I’ve stopped apologizing.

I’ve stopped because as I reach my daughter’s 10-year death anniversary, I realized I no longer needed to apologize for my tears, for the way I felt, for the fact that yes, I am still and will always be grieving because what mother wouldn’t grieve the rest of her life after burying a child who never had a chance? After all doesn’t the cliché that we would lay down our own lives for our children come from some depths of truth in all of our bones?

In the early years, I thought the worst question was this:

How many children do you have?

I looked up and looked away in trying to figure out how in the world do I answer that question?

But then after I discovered how to answer that question with lots of practice, I realized that the harder question was actually this:

How old are they?

Depending on my mood, depending on the day of the week, depending on the company, I answered the questions differently each time, but if I’m being wholly honest, which is most of the time these days, the answers go something like this:

I have four children.

Oh, the person continues, that’s lovely, how old are they?

Take a deep breath, pause and begin: 15, 12, 7 and dead.

Let me just state the obvious: If this question is posed at a party, I’ve just rendered the party part pretty much over.

People look down; people look up; people back away.

I smile, sort of, and then I used to apologize. I. Used. To. Apologize.

On the day my daughter died, I apologized to the nurses backed up against the wall, standing there like death had just entered the room. And it had actually. Death had entered my body two days early to lift my daughter’s soul and take her breath and stop her small heart from beating to leave behind a body that I needed to deliver.

I’m so sorry, I said. I’m so sorry you have to be here today for this. They nodded politely and placed the plastic flowers outside of my hospital room—their apology to the lab employees who would come later on to draw my blood.

And then the doctor arrived, a doctor I didn’t know because it was a weekend and because my doctor was out of town and because her doctor on call was already busy so we were way too far down the doctor line, and I got a doctor who hadn’t delivered a baby since back in rotation during residency.

That’s when fear entered the room. Fear and death in the same room is not a good combination.

“We need to get this baby out quickly,” she explained.

“Why?” I asked. “Why?”

Of course her “quick” I thought meant being wheeled into surgery and cut right out of me and taken away which honestly felt like a relief even though my previous daughter had been born at home in a birthing tub in a record four-hour labor that brought all the wonder and amazement that that kind of birth is supposed to bring.

“Well,” she declared, “we don’t really know how long she’s been dead, and we don’t know what could happen to you because she’s still there.”

At the time, I believed her, and it wasn’t until my own doctor arrived at the hospital to visit two days later that I found out that no, there was no rush and yes, I could have gone home to tell my other two children and to prepare my body and to prepare my mind (if such a thing is possible) but instead I nodded in agreement and said okay, I’m so sorry to call you out here on a weekend and she answered by inserting a cervadil in my cervix to get this labor moving, a labor that in all took 24 hours, which was 15 hours longer than my first labor and 20 hours longer than my second and still much too short because that was the last 24 hours that I got to carry my daughter inside of me and try to keep her safe.

I’m sorry it’s taking so long I said as the nurses arrived at midnight to insert a second cervadil into my body because labor was still too slow and this second cervadil would get things moving faster.

And it did.

Not only did it get labor moving faster but it moved blood out of me so fast that my levels dropped precariously low and people were now talking transfusion as I laid there in my bed pressing the button to deliver the morphine faster as I wanted the numbness of it all to stick around.

You don’t have to feel the pain of this labor the nurses had said to me earlier in the day knowing that my beautiful birthing plan requested no intervention at all unless the baby was in danger. Suddenly, I was the one in danger.

At three a.m. with labor coming faster and the blood finally under control, I woke up with my own mother sleeping next to me in the hospital room chair, and my husband at home with our other two children and a bevvy of women asleep in the waiting room and I thought, “This is what death feels like.” This kind of pain that is so black and so dark and so lonely and I prayed to God that I was sorry to Him for every bad thought inside of me and I apologized for so many unspoken sorrows and so many things that I was certain I was being punished for and I offered just like in all of the books and fairy tales to trade my soul to the devil for my daughter’s life and to trade my life for my daughter’s and to give up everything in exchange for hers to no avail but a deafening silence in the room and my tears, the same kind of silence that would come ten hours later when I pushed my daughter out of my body and into this world that would swallow her up in fire just a few, short days later and deliver her back to me again in a box of ashes so tiny that I thought they must be those of a bird not a baby.

I’m sorry, I whispered to a God I could no longer hear in the dark, I’m sorry for everything, and when nothing came back to me in return, that’s when I knew this was no happily ever after fairy tale about to come true.

If this were a book or a movie, I’d tell you now it’s time for an intermission.

Or perhaps if this were a year earlier, I’d apologize to you for taking too long to tell my story, but this is not my story really but my daughter’s life. And any child’s life is worth ten minutes of your time, yes?

And while this story seems to be so much about death and grief, I’m here to tell you that this is a story about life and love because my love for my daughter is so wide and so deep that it extends beyond the eight months that my third child, my second daughter, lived inside of my body.

This story is a love story that involves three years post-death to deliver a healthy baby boy albeit in a car (an entirely different kind of love story) to help me find redemption and love again in a way that I didn’t know existed.

And this story ends by telling you that I am no longer apologizing for the tears that occasionally still fall, for the crack in my heart, for the amount of love that spills out of my life and into the world because one small child, one small infant that I gave birth too was born into a room of deafening silence and tears and when my husband and I looked at each other and had to decide what to name her, we looked at each other and almost immediately said Grace. Grace because no matter how dark and how lonely and how sad I sometimes feel about all of this, I still believe in Grace.

And for that, I will never apologize again.

How it begins...

It starts, slowly at first, a kind of yawn inside my body, a slow and laborious groan within, and I never know when it will come, when it will first rise up inside of me but often it comes after the crocuses have bloomed and died, after the buds on the cherry blossoms disappear and the maroon leaves take their places, after the days turn longer and the nights turn from cold to cool and then, just like that, it begins...the yawn inside my body, the whispering around the edges of my heart.

here i am, remember me?

yes, yes, i never forget you my child. you are always with me.

And while that voice whispers toward me all year around, this time of year, it tugs me in a different way as my body remembers the birth, prepares itself for long, hard labor and darkness that falls for so many days, weeks and months to come.

This is May, my body declares, and I will take over from now until early June.

Some years, my body declares itself just before the visit to the midwife, late May, when the last kicks and the last turns and the last rotations are happening, when the settling into myself happens and the last deep sighs occur, when the heart still beats--bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum--so fast inside of me, 165 beats a minute.

But this year, this BIG and LARGE and confusing tenth year took me by surprise. For the unsettling, the groaning began in late April. April! What of this noise and confusion and tears falling so soon and so early and so many weeks still from your birthday, from your death day, from whatever series of days you want to call them.

 here i am, remember me?

yes, yes, i never forget you my child. you are always with me.

And what to do then so many years out from this, from you and so many things to do each day--meals to prepare, papers to grade, classes to teach, work to be done, children to raise--who can spend an entire month with their body pulling them down and down farther and deeper into this space and toward that place where darkness takes over and declares itself entering the body and how long will you stay this time? You never even ask permission, you just enter and stay as long as you want.


here i am, remember me?

yes, yes, i never forget you my child. you are always with me.

And these tears, they fall in places like they did in those early days, in the car when you think no one might be looking, late at night when the rise and fall of the breath of so many others are sleeping in the house, in line at the grocery store inconveniently making you leave the cart of groceries in the middle of nowhere, in the classroom as the children ask you for help when they are planting seeds.


here i am, remember me?

yes, yes, i never forget you my child. you are always with me.

And my body continues to groan and ache and pull at me even as I shout, stop, stop all this right now, this instant but you know, don't you, that there's nothing really I can do but succumb to all of this, to fall into this space, to remember the curve of your chin, the forehead, always in lament itself and the long legs stretched out before me. And my body remembers the long and painful and deep labor that took more than an entire day, more than 24 hours, and that doctor yelling at me to push, push and I continued to defy her and hold, hold just so that I could carry you one more minute, one more moment in this sacred space you and I shared together, this place of holding, holding, keeping you safe, keeping you warm and floating and suspended and all of that ended when you came sliding out and the silence of all of it tore me to pieces in the places my body wasn't already broken from this labor until I wailed for you and made noises you couldn't make or hear or feel anymore.

And my body groaned unfamiliar sounds that scared even me from my own self.



May has arrived and you and I my dear are in this together.


here i am, remember me?

yes, yes, i never forget you mama. you are always with me.

Until I was no longer sure what was real or pretend...

I spend a lot of time thinking about safe places and what it means to feel safe. Each of us has our own ideas about safety and there are things we do to be safe and keep our families safe such as locking our front and back doors, checking them once more before we fall asleep, wearing seat belts, holding hands with our children when they cross the street, asking babysitters a lot of questions before we leave our children with them, looking in our rearview mirrors as we drive defensively, the way we are supposed to.

I think it would surprise many people I know that even though I'm an extrovert, I much prefer silence to talking--that I spend more time in my head than outside of it. And a lot of that time inside my head is spent thinking about trust and safe places, and safe people with whom I can share my deepest thoughts. There aren't many. Not even those closest to me have a free pass to my interior self. It takes years of developing a relationship for me to trust anyone.

I think about safe people a lot because when I was growing up, I didn't feel very safe and that was hard for me to understand as a child. Yes, I spent a lot of time checking doors and windows, and watching out for the "boogey man" as many children might, but much of my time was spent looking deeply at people to decide whether or not I could trust them, whether or not, I could talk to them about the dark spaces inside of me. I tried many times and discovered very quickly which people would violate my trust and which wouldn't. The pool of people I could trust grew very small as I grew older.

There is a great deal I keep close inside of me. Though it seems as if I share much of who I am, there is much of who I am that I don't share.

I remember watching a beautiful movie called Losing Layla--a gorgeous, haunting documentary about the desire for a child, watching that child grow inside her mother, and the subsequent shatter and grief that followed when Layla died. The mother, Vanessa Gorman, is a stunning person, and I knew the first time I watched it that somehow we would meet one day, and that she was the sort of person I could trust.

The first time I watched her movie, I was in Arizona surrounded by bereaved families and all of us were stunned and subsequently jealous at the fact that Vanessa was able to leave the hospital with Layla and take her body home overnight so Vanessa could experience being Layla's mother. Grace had only been dead one year, and I was still deeply bereft. The fact that I only held her for four hours made this film even more painful to watch. It hadn't occurred to me as it had to Vanessa, that I could launch some sort of campaign to move mountains to bring her home.

The film is a personal, inside look at grief and love in it's purest and rawest form. When the movie ends, you feel as if you know everything that Vanessa is thinking and feeling.

Then, toward the end of the film, after Layla has died--though you don't know how much time has passed, the viewer has the sense that enough time has passed that Vanessa has some distance on the early days of grief. The camera zooms in on Vanessa and as she talks some more about her feelings, as she chokes up and tears fall, she pauses. She pauses and says that she wants doesn't want to share everything, that she talks to Layla but much of that is private between mother and daughter and that it's important to keep some of those conversations from the viewer.

That is how I feel most of the time--that while I'm sharing seemingly bits of my personal story, that much of it is really private. That perhaps what I am giving people is a glimpse into an interior life that is complex, dark, confusing, at times lonely and private, very, very private much of the time.

And I often wonder how much of that has to do with feeling safe. That had I felt safer as a child, would I feel less likely to hold things close to my heart as an adult? Or perhaps if I felt safer as a child, there would be less darkness to hide.

I don't really know the answer to that question, but I do know that I have large issues with trust. That as much as I find and understand and discover grace and beauty in the world and as much as I am astonished by it and find goodness within most people, that I don't feel very safe much of the time. I am on red alert, watching, thinking, feeling, protecting the interior self.

Of course, having children, causes me to spend a lot of time thinking about how not to let them experience those same awkward and uncomfortable feelings that I do. And there is a lot of interior dialogue about whether or not I have succeeded. Do they feel safe?

I know do know this: I didn't feel safe enough as a child to express my emotions, to share my feelings, to say what I was really thinking. And so very early on, I discovered that masks were useful. Exterior, invisible masks that I could wear when I stepped out of my house and into the world. Invisible masks that I could put on when people came over. Invisible masks that after a while felt much more comfortable on than off until there came a day when I was no longer sure what was real or pretend.

Yes, yes, hello. Lovely, I'm just lovely and you? Of course, yes. It's a beautiful day. Thank you. Oh, I'm doing really well. Yes. Yes.

While another part of me inside was screaming out for help silently, wordlessly: Hello, hello. Can you hear me? Can you help me? I think of piece of me is dying, and I'm scared and confused and hello, hello, is anyone there?

High school was a difficult time for me. It was a period of deep confusion, of deep depression, of self-loathing and immense frustration. It was a time of multiple masks, often so many that at times, I forgot which one I was supposed to put on, and some times, I tripped over myself and nearly "got caught" with the wrong mask on.

And now, as a parent, I reflect on this often. We have our own children to raise--Terry and I--and I don't want them to experience that depth of confusion and pain even though I recognize that I cannot protect them--nor would I want to--from all of the painful emotions we have experienced. After all, to a certain extent, it defines how we become parents.

I am hopeful from the number of fits and tantrums and range of emotions displayed in our family now, that my children don't experience those same issues with trust and safety because I think those were at the core of my difficulties.

The death of my father when I was five years old shaped and molded my interior self more than anything else in my childhood, most especially because it shaped and molded the adults around me. And the death of my daughter when I was 36 years old shapes and molds a great deal of my interior self as an adult.

Both deaths guide me toward understanding love and loss, toward opening up more of my interior self than I would have felt comfortable doing before.

And much of the reason for that is this:

That on August 9, 1997, our first child, Carver was born. And when he was born, my universe shifted in one of the most provocative and profound ways I had ever experienced. Everything I felt about safety and trust and love fell out from under me and I was exposed and raw in a way that I had never felt in my entire life. Holding that child in my arms for the first time, I experienced love in a way that I'd never known before. And in experiencing that love, the loss of my own father came back toward me tenfold in ways that I'd never understood before.

I knew when I was holding that child and staring at him for the first time, that love had more power than I had ever realized.

On February 3, 2001, when Sophia was born, those same feelings of love poured over me again, a second time--how can that be?

And so when Grace died on May 29, 2003, and when I held her sleeping self in my arms on June 1, 2003, everything about love and trust and safety fell out again from under me. But this time, I was exposed and raw in an entirely different way catapulting me into the depths of darkness that I didn't know existed.

And then on March 4, 2006, something extraordinary happened again. I gave birth for the last time to one more child, Sawyer. And there once more was love in its purest form looking up toward me, and I knew then that the world was much more remarkable, complex, stunning and confusing than I'd ever realized. And darkness and light settled side by side with one another in my life at times competing for my attention and at other times sitting comfortably beside each other.

Steve Jobs once said, "We can never connect the dots looking forward, but we can always connect the dots looking back."

I refer to this a lot because it makes sense in my own life.

I work hard at connecting dots and weaving the fabric of my story across decades and across countries, across relationships and across loves and losses.

I started this post thinking about what or who makes me feel safe.

I don't know if that question can really be answered. I don't know if I'll ever truly feel safe in anyone's company, but I do know that those feelings of fear and distrust propel me forward as much as love does. All of my emotions fuel my interior thoughts and help me to mold and shape my life however broken or confusing at times.

I admire people who truly feel safe, who feel able to open themselves up to things that I spend time protecting myself from. That is not the world from which I come, but it is a world that I know exists, however rare.

I do know that today I feel safer than I ever have. That I feel like some of the time, I can pull the masks down to reveal a self that is getting to know who she really is, what she is meant to do and how the world looks all at once beautiful and compelling, rich with love and loss. It is a world of contradictions, and I don't think I'd have it any other way.

Tell me about the world in which you live. I'd love to listen.

Anger? Anger! Where in the hell did that come from?

Grace,

Wow! Here goes nothing.

I'm angry, no, actually pissed, and the thing is is that I haven't been angry in a really long time and not really ever at you. 

So why now? Why nearly after ten years?

I don't know if I can answer that. But I can tell you some of the things I'm angry about. And I thought I was done with anger. I mean, that was years ago. That was at the doctor, that was at myself, that was at the world, but it's never, ever been toward you.

And now, now I'm mad as hell. 

You could have chosen a better time, really! Why May 29th to die? Why June 1st to be born?

See, here's the thing. I like spring, I really, really like spring! I like the sunshine and the flowers just peeking up from the earth, and the way the dirt smells. 

I like the way the sun shines, cool in the morning, breezy in the afternoon.

I like Easter and the promises it brings.

I like my birthday at the end of April.

I like Mother's Day. No, I love Mother's Day. It's a reminder of these amazing children who I gave birth too from my body, born of love.

I like spring and all the promises that it brings after we have made it through winter, through the dark, cold nights, through the shorter days and cooler sun.

And I want to sing and dance and throw up my arms and rejoice that we made it through another darkness.

But here's the thing: there's a goddamn shadow that I just can't shake. And it's there, and it's dark and it tugs at my heart and it tugs at my soul and it shouts out to the universe in a language that scares me and in a language that's hard to understand and is filled with four letter expletives.

And dammit Grace you went and stole May AND June. Both months for me. And there's always that lingering sense that I was really expecting you in July so there's a third month you tried to steal!

January would have been a better month. Dark. Cold. Dead of winter. See, metaphorically it fits. When I write, all my characters die in the winter, all my sadness happens in the winter. It just works better!

But no. That didn't happen did it?

In fact, I tried really, really hard to give you a safe place. I ate all the right food, I mean I really did well with that pregnancy. In fact, it's one of my better ones. I did mostly organic fruits and veggies, I took my pregnancy vitamins for months before I got pregnant and during. Even on the days I threw up.

You? Did you try hard? Did you? I mean did you give it your best shot? When things were starting to get rough, did you kick me harder, did you try and send me any signs? Because I'm trying really hard to remember Grace. I'm trying to remember what might have taken me to the hospital one day early, what might have sent me kicking and screaming into the ER before your heart stopped!

So yeah, I'm pissed. 

TEN YEARS. And now this!

See ten years is double-digits. Do you know that when Carver and Sophia turned ten they were really excited. Double digits! And fourth grade. And most of us will remain two digits for the rest of our lives.

But no, you didn't even give me a day, not an hour, not a moment with eyes wide open.

See there's that whole still birth issue--dead at birth thing where people still, still don't really think it should be as big of a deal as it was. They didn't even meet you.

I didn't even get a goddamn birth certificate. Some stupid 'memory of life' thing that someone framed for me. And do you want to know the ironic thing? Do you? You get a death certificate. Yep, you have a death certificate but no birth certificate.

So were you even real?

Huh?

Tell me, will you. Were you real? Because you never cracked a smile, cooed a sound, shed a tear. You never even looked at me.

Dammit Grace.

Dammit!

Mama

Sawyer,

It's been one of those days. I don't know why this day more than others, but it probably has something to do with your sister Sophia's rat, Emma, dying this week.

Death is on your mind.

And so tonight when I stepped out of my office and into the dining room where you were drawing a picture, I wasn't prepared when out of the blue you said, "But it's not fair that I never got to see her."

Out of context of course, I didn't know what you were talking about. "What, Sawyer? What are you talking about?"

"Grace," you said. "It's not fair that I never got to meet Grace, and I never got to see her alive, and I didn't get to meet her. I miss my sister."

Your other sister, Sophia, who was sitting across the room got up and came to your side and gave you a hug.

"Why did she die? I don't understand. How did she die?"

The questions starting coming in rapid succession.

And when I sucked in my breath, asked if you wanted to sit next to me and talk about it, you quickly said, "Yes. Yes."

And so we sat side by side for almost 30 minutes as you asked all kinds of unanswerable questions and tried to then answer them for us when you were not satisfied with my answers. Most of the time I just kept giving you those hopeless, utterly frustrating responses, "I just don't know."

There were pauses between our sentences.

"Mama?"

"Mmhmmm."

"Were you sick recently?"

"Have I been sick lately? Well, I didn't feel well last month."

"Maybe that's why Grace died. Maybe because you were sick when she was inside of you and so she just died."

"Oh, was I sick when Grace was inside of me?"

"Mmhmmm."

"Well, I was sick actually when she was inside of me, yes. I had a terrible flu. But then I was sick when you were inside of me, and I was sick when Sophia was inside of me. Lots of people get sick with babies in their tummies."

"Did she not want to see me?"

"No, Sawyer, no. That's not it at all. She would have loved to see you."

"I just miss her. I just miss her alot."

"Me too. Me too."

And so it went. And then I took out her album, and we continued sitting side by side, and we looked at the few pictures of her that we have. Mostly she is wrapped up in blankets, mostly she is hiding up against my chest, mostly the pictures too are inadequate in describing who she was."

Mostly, the whole entire thing is so inadequate that trying to talk to my seven-year-old son about it seems to fall impossibly short.

Two nights ago, you started crying in bed while Papa was trying to read to you. You couldn't stop crying and finally, finally told Papa you couldn't tell him why you were crying, but you would write it on a sheet of paper.

"I want to se ema" is what the sentence said.

Emma was Sophia's rat who died three days ago. Sawyer was already asleep in bed when we discovered her. She was not in very good shape when we found her. And so Terry carefully wrapped her up in a paper towel and placed her inside of a baggie.

"Should we keep her in case Sawyer wants to have a burial?" Terry asked me.

"Sure," I said half-convincingly because who really wants to store a dead rat in their freezer?

And you cried some more and finally asked Papa, "Can I see her again?"

"Yes," Papa said, "You can see a part of her-because she's wrapped up-and then we can bury her and say goodbye." And that seemed to satisfy you a little bit as you drifted off to sleep.


"I didn't get to tell Grace I love her, mama. I didn't get to say goodbye."

"No Sawyer you didn't. But a piece of her is with you. She would have loved to have been your big sister."

And I would have loved to have been her mother on this earth, in this life, in this world.

Yes, Sawyer, yes I miss her too. A lot. But I am grateful beyond what I can possibly express that you are here to share your grief with me. I will listen to you. I will be here for you. And I will grieve with you. And together we will never forget your sister who would have loved to watch you grow up, who would have loved to go to your soccer games and cheer you on just like we all do. She would have loved to be here too. I'm certain of that.

Love,
Mama

Here I am in this moment, in this tenth year...

Here I am in this tenth year, 2013, moving toward Grace's tenth birthday, keenly aware of the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds that have gone by without.

In the months of January and February, the light ever so slowly creeps back into the afternoon. People notice one minute at a time as the light rises into the evening.

This is grief. Our light creeps in gradually, and the darkness still returns. In those early days, weeks and months, the light hardly seems present at all.

Ten years without looks something like this:

3,650 days
5,259,490 minutes
315,360,000 seconds

Without a child. Without my child. Without my daughter. Without Grace.

In many ways, it becomes incomprehensible. How exactly does one live without their daughter? How does one move forward not just through one day but through all the years?

It is of course not something that is done by choice. For if we could, I imagine all of us would stop the darkness from falling at all. To imagine a life without this grief, it is a kind of fantasy that I can only imagine because I see it in the faces of other parents.

Ten years without, and I continue to be amazed at how quickly it all can come back when I pause to think about it.

I know I've written about this before but now it feels even more, like my understanding has deepened. In the movie "Rabbit Hole" there is a brief scene that describes perfectly how this year has felt to me so far:

Becca: Does it ever go away?

Nat: No, I don't think it does. Not for me, it hasn't -- has gone on for eleven years. But it changes though.

Becca: How?

Nat: I don't know...the weight of it, I guess. At some point, it becomes bearable. It turns into something that you can crawl out from under and...carry around like a brick in your pocket. And you...you even forget it, for a while. But then you reach in for whatever reason and--there it is. Oh right, that. Which could be awful--not all the time. It's kinda...not that you'd like it exactly, but it's what you've got instead of your son. So you carry it around. And it doesn't go away which is...

Becca: Which is what?

Nat: Fine, actually.

It is what I have...this brick...instead of this daughter and well, I have so many other things. I have the grief of others I carry with me, their beautiful children, their beautiful stories and memories. And I love that I know so many others who understand this deep grief. I love that I can carry their children with me despite the deep sorrow that is conveyed.

I have my living children who I love with such deep ferocity, the sort that I am certain they can never really understand, for how could one understand a love with such depth?

And now I wonder sometimes, what empty would feel like without this hole in my heart? For it is not an emptiness as much as a weight, and a cracking open of the heart in ways that I can never fully reveal because I hardly understand it at all my own self.

There is still so much misunderstood about grief, about stillbirth, about this kind of loss. But I have hope when I think of how far we've come in other areas, that perhaps, one day we will have the kind of understanding we wish for.

Another grieving parents says it so beautifully that when I hear him speak of it, the tears just fall without pause:

“I’d just like you to imagine being catapulted from the joyous anticipation of a baby’s birth to the despair and devastation of a stillbirth. I’d just like you to imagine your partner ashen white, trembling in shock, rocking a dead baby in her arms. I’d just like to imagine having to tell friends, families, grandparents, that there is no baby. I don’t have to imagine all that ….”

--Steve Hale

Imagine this: there are those who live in this place and time without having lost a child. Are you one such parent? At times, I have such overwhelming jealousy for those kind of people that I think if I shared it, it would feel wrong. I would lose friendships. I would be seen as outside of the realm of 'acceptable' but truth sometimes is more than we really want to understand.

And if you want to know the truth then know this:

Not one day, after so many years goes by that I do not think about Grace. Not one single day. 

In many ways my grief grows just as each day my love grows for my other children. Each day as I watch them grow, I am amazed at the strength and beauty of their lives and I am amazed at the lovely adults they are growing in to. But with that realization, comes a depth of grief that I cannot explain. Love grows over time and grief does not diminish. Like love, it grows and changes. 

Ten years without. And still so much for all of us to learn and understand. 

Grief does not change you...or does it...

I read an amazing book recently: The Fault in our Stars by John Green. And if you haven't read it, well, you are missing out. It has it all: Love, live and death. Oh, yeah and the C word--Cancer.

One of the best quotes in the book requires repeating:

"Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you."

I have been thinking about this quote a lot in the days and months since I read the book because for a long time after Grace died, I simply said, "Oh, I'm a different person now." But was that an easy escape? An easy answer?

Am I really a different person? Yes, in some ways I very much am.

Yes, to a certain extent grief has changed me, but not as much as it has revealed me perhaps.

See, because really, I have been grieving since I was five years old, since my father died, only I wasn't aware that I was grieving because 40 years ago, grief was dealt with differently.

But it was revealing me. In fact, there was no better way that grief revealed me than in high school when I did all kinds of things that would be considered dangerous. But I hid them pretty well, I think, from the people who cared about me.

I tried cutting, but I didn't really like it much. I smoked weed, I drank alcohol, I starved myself--500 calories a day for six months until I was in the low 90s. I stood in the middle of the street once willing myself to be hit by a car. I slept many nights with bottles of pills under my pillow wondering if I should just take them and get it all over with.

I prayed every night for death to find me. I was convinced I didn't want to live.

I did all those things thinking I was a bad person, I was an unlovable person, I was a person who wasn't likable. I wasn't the most popular, nor was I the most unpopular. But I didn't do them because I thought I was grieving. I did them because I thought I was unlovable.

No one should be made to feel unlovable. It is one of the most lonely, isolating, scary, horrible emotions to feel. And lucky for me, there were just a few people who revealed themselves to me during those lonely years that I think really kept me afloat. People who appeared in my life at the time when I really needed them to even though I didn't know it back then.

So I stayed afloat, barely. But I did, and as soon as I could, I left home to go as far away as possible from my unlovable self that I could.

I spent a lot of time running in my 20s, though I still didn't know what I was running from.

And then in my 30s, I thought everything was fine. My past seemed some distant shadow of myself that I wanted to forget.

Except then the unthinkable happened. The unstoppable.

My child died.

My daughter died, and I couldn't save her.

My daughter died, and I couldn't hide grief behind myself any longer.

Suddenly, I was a fatherless daughter and a daughterless mother.

And then my childhood revealed itself to me again in the form of so many dark and unbearable nights.

Saint John of the Cross speaks about dark night of the soul in his 16th-century poem titled the same. It has to do with God, with light, with soul, with detachment, with all of the confusion and sorrow I had been experiencing my whole life. And where in the world was God in all of this?

Only what if my dark night was a gift? What if my dark nights were a revealing of a gracious God? Were a revealing of the self?

It is hard to think about the unthinkable.

Still, when I think back to those days in high school, I mostly feel grateful now that I survived them.

There are no high school prom pictures to remember those days by.

I didn't go.

What I remember are a lot of lonely nights, a lot of pretending to be someone I never was, a lot of missing my father and being unable to talk about him.

With Grace, at least, I did grief differently. Oh, I spend a lot of days and nights missing her, but I didn't hide behind any kind of other self. (Okay, maybe, occasionally, at a dinner party in the early years when people asked how I was and I knew they didn't really want to know), but not on most days.

Because Grace has revealed a better sort of self in me, a self that is empowered by my grief, a self that is happy to talk to you about my sorrow and to listen to the sorrow of others.

A self that will fully admit it completely sucks to have a dead daughter. And it really sucks to have a dead father that I don't even remember.

Yes, indeed, grief did in fact change me.

But it also has revealed me.

And I imagine in the years to come (I hope) it continues to reveal who I am, who I am going to become, who I am continuing to be.

The top nine things Grace has taught me during the last nine years

1. Grief is not something you get over, you move on from, you lose, misplace or forget about. It doesn't just disappear from your self. It is complicated, vibrant, fluid and takes you on a journey to places you never, ever expected to ever go. Some of those places you never want to return to but others are filled with light and beauty.

2. I will always miss Grace, and nearly each day, upon waking and falling asleep Grace is on my mind just as my other children are.

3. My relationship with Grace never dies, simply because she cannot be here in person. Our relationship has grown and changed over the last nine years. 

4. Grace has taught me more about love, joy and happiness in these grief-filled nine years than all the other 36 years I lived without her. 

5. Grief is way more complicated than I ever imagined even though since the age of five, I'd been grieving the death of my father.

6. Grace taught me that my behavior in high school wasn't bad or wrong--my behavior was misdirected grief for the death of my father ten years earlier. Learning that in my 30s was eye opening.

7. I haven't perfected letting go or giving up control, but these last nine years have forced me toward trying to do that more often. Most days I still fail, but Grace shows me that really so very little is in my control. I'm still grappling with that.

8. Losing a daughter sucks. Big time. And leaves a big fucking hole in your heart. And once in a while a self-pity party is just fine thank you very much.

9. Nine years of missing her is no less painful than all the other years. It's different, yes. But I miss her. Every. Single. Day. And that will never change. So don't try to change that.

fragile...handle with care

The clock ticks and the days pass, and I am keenly, keenly aware that these are the final days and final moments in which I held her inside me, in which she floated freely in my body. These are the days...and then "the day" arrives which becomes a series of days.

The day I woke up and knew.
The day I found out.
The day I was induced.
The day she was born.

These days arrive, and the hair on my body stands on end.

I know it is time because everything, everything my husband says to me, I second guess. I become sensitive, fragile, breakable at any given moment. I am on edge.

Handle me with care. Tread lightly. Walk slowly. Be patient. Or not. But then stay out of my way.

I walk down the street looking at girls and wonder, "Is she nine? She looks nine." I've even asked a few girls, "How old are you?"

Nine. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

Nine impossible years without. And still, and yet...

It is not impossible to find joy for joy exists. It is not impossible to find happiness and love and laughter.

All of these things exist within and without, but what never goes away, what never disappears is that deep ache, that pull toward longing.

If I were to ask you, do you expect that one day you will wake up joyless for the rest of your life? That one day, you may wake up to find happiness has left you never to return? Of course not. So too, does grief never leave. So too does my longing and aching and pining for Grace never leave. It is there side by side next to the joy and happiness that my other children bring. And this time of year, this time of remembering, of experiencing, of waiting, it returns and I am once again drawn back toward that darkness, toward that dark week of waiting, of asking hard questions, of wondering, what could possibly have gone wrong and when, if ever, will anything be right again.

Yes, yes, things are right and lovely and beautiful and exciting and fun, and yes, things are still longing, and aching and missing and vacuous.

The hole in my heart will never completely close; it will always feel broken, feel without, feel not fully whole and still, there if you peer inside, you will see indescribable joy, you will notice unbelievable love.

You will find me still broken and still grieving and still madly, deeply in love with all of my children.

So when you see me this week, when you notice my eyes fill with tears, let me have my moment, my remembering, my pain. Because that pain is one way to express my deep longing, my love for Grace, this ache inside of me that this week shouts out, I am fragile, I am broken, please tread lightly in my presence. 

I am a bereaved mother who desperately misses her daughter. I am the mother of four children, and I selfishly still want all four of my children here.

I miss her every single day of my entire life. 

I am and will always be Grace's mommy. And I will always long for her back in my arms.

Always.  

With and without

The juxtaposition of joy and sadness, darkness and light, satisfaction and desire. It is all there at once, sitting side by side, sometimes one looms larger than the other. And this is my heart, this is the deep aching inside, the crux of the emotional undulating of my body. I am a mother. I am with and without.

With and and without my children.

Mother's day opens the month for me with a reminder of what is coming, the ever present tug, the feeling of not enough and yet how can this be with so much? How can this feeling of not enough loom so large when so much around me says fullness, light, love and beauty?

And yet, and still, and always.

It is May, and with it yet again comes another few weeks of holding my breath, of remembering, of aching, of longing. Who ever knew that this kind of longing never goes away, that this kind of tug on the heart remains. And for as often as I have said yes to the world, there is always a pause. Yes, but...

It is in this time of year when darkness comes early for me and remains long. It is the night of winter, the time of waiting, of wondering, of longing. The nights are often longer than the days with the smallest of noises wakening me, and the easiest distractions pulling me toward the memories.

If I were able to describe my longing, I would, but it is a deep and cavernous longing filled with the sort of ache that no amount of love, of exercise, of companionship, of hope, of food, of conversation, of joy can fill. It is a longing that burrows deep within the interior of my heart and mind and can only be understood through some kind of emotional experience that can only be felt.

Nine years this has gone on and finally, finally after nine years, I am beginning to understand that my grief has no middle or end. Certainly, by all means, there is the beginning, there is always the beginning because that is the place from which all of this cracks wide open. Which brings me back at once to May, to the start, to the last Mother's Day with and the first Mother's Day without. To the last week of May with, to the first day of June without.

And it is in this emptiness, the place from which this longing springs deep and eternal.

Why is it that I can no more remember what I ate for dinner last night, but I can remember these last few days with and without? I can remember the smells, the temperature of the air, the eyes of the doctor, the hands of the technician, the sad look on my midwife's face. The sadder look on my husband's face. The confused look on Carver and Sophia's faces. I can remember the cold feeling of the gel from the ultrasound machine, the colors of the walls, the meager bar of soap in the bathroom, the plastic flower on the door, the feel of the thin string in the bathroom to pull on in case of emergency. In case of emergency, the oxygen mask will fall and you will never be able to breath again in quite the same way.

In case of an emergency, place the mask over the mouth of your child first and then yourself. Yes, yes, I would place the mask over my child's mouth first. I swear to god I would if you would have let the damn mask fall. I would have placed it over her mouth first, and held my breath until the chambers of her heart were beating again. And only then would I have placed the mask to my mouth. Only then.

May 23rd. And in these last days, hope still remains because she still remained tucked inside of me floating in that comfortable chamber, no mask necessary for breathing.

May 23rd and birthdays and Mother's day have passed, and while I can't seem to get comfortable in bed, I know that these last few months are always the hardest.

May 23rd and still for seven more days, Grace remains suspended in my body alive, and I remain suspended in a kind of ignorant bliss that my body is about to rape me of.

With and without.

Forever and ever.

This is my grief. This is my love.

This is who I am.

Grief and its geography, 39 years later...

After 39 years of this grief journey, I don't know why I continue to be surprised by it, but I am. I am surprised by the way it lands right in the midst of my day and takes me off-guard. And there you have it.

My fourth child, Sawyer, is nearly the exact age I was when my father died. Five and three-quarters. Or to be more precise, I was five years and 286 days old when he died. And so on December 16, 2011, Sawyer will be five years and 286 days old. As the fourth child myself, I watch Sawyer closely, observing him, trying to find out exactly what five and three-quarters looks like since memory fades and discovering exactly what it is I lost.

It turns out that no matter how deep you go, how far you search, you can never fully understand what it is you've lost, but I think I have a pretty good idea.

Sawyer at five is so attached to his father. He calls out for Terry, he asks Terry to dress him, he asks Terry to wrestle with him, to read him books, to make him a snack, to watch a movie with him, to scratch his back, to tickle his back, to go on a walk, to play with the dogs, to be his punching bag when he's angry, to drive him to school, to pick him up, to arrange playdates and to make him more snacks and while Sawyer and Terry are not the same as I was with my own father, in them, I see a glimmer of what I was about to lose, and I see that played out again and again in all my children but most especially now at five.

Because at five and three-quarters, Sawyer is both branching out on his own, demanding things from us, still wanting to snuggle, still ending up in our bed and then suddenly wanting to be left alone. Sawyer is discovering his remarkable world by sounding out words: L-O-V-E. Love. And saying things like, "Mama, Grace died right, but she'll be coming back soon." And there much more complex things he is doing now too.

For example, he has written his numbers all the way from 1 to 1,413. He writes them on a number roll, each number one after the other with the perseverance and focus of an older child.

But he still has his moments of absolute collapse and panic and sheer frustration and trying to regulate his emotions with his logical mind, and sometimes despite his best efforts, he can't regulate them because he is five. So instead he collapses into an emotional meltdown.

And while Sawyer and I are not the same, I am just again understanding through him the depth of my loss. And here in this moment is a glimpse of what I lost:

I lost the ability to sit on my father's lap and read a story.

I lost the ability to tell him that I love him.

I lost the ability to understand how much he loved me.

I lost the ability to be his only daughter in flesh and blood.

I lost the ability on Father's Day to make a card and give it to him.

I lost the ability to call him up in the middle of the night as a young adult and use him as a sounding board in understanding the confusing rules with dating.

I lost the ability to have him walk me down the aisle.

I lost the ability to watch him hold his grandchild in his arms.

I lost the ability to fall apart in his arms when his granddaughter died.

I lost the ability to call him up as an adult when so many complex issues in life no longer make sense.

And what I really lost was the ability to understand what it means to have a father, what it means to be a daddy's girl, what it means to be unconditionally loved by him.

And I don't care what gifts came out of that loss, I will forever mourn his absence in my life, and I will forever miss him.

I will forever wish that this darkness, this emptiness, this place in my heart where both my father and daughter together leave a deep chasm and deep longing never really existed at all.

Because sometimes, this darkness really sucks, and this longing for a father is so much larger than we can ever really understand.

And this kind of love hurts entirely too much.

And so still the grief rises inside of me when I least expect it.

Because love after all turns out to continue to be the thing that matters most.

For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.

It's a six-word short story that takes my breath away. Whether or not Hemingway wrote it is sometimes up for controversy, but I like to believe it's true. Either way, it's written. Six words. Carefully constructed to hold a deeper truth than any I have ever read anywhere else:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Bam. Gut-wrenching. Having read it in graduate school when my literal self posed as a reader, writer and critic of short stories, I read it with gusto, ate it up and spit it back out, analyzing the six-words into what seemed to be profound, graduate-school like gusto.

And now? Now, I just sit staring at the words over and over again.

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Grace.

I couldn't even write about her this year in her eighth year yet. Why not? Perhaps I am trying to preserve some sense of privacy now, some sense of holding something inside me that I can't possibly release. After all, how do you capture what your eight-year-old daughter might be doing when your ten-year-old daughter is standing before you reading a poem:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Yes, those are my shoes. Yes, there is something wrong, something missing. Yes, give them back.

Only I wouldn't have sold them I don't believe. I think I would have held onto them if only, if only I had shoes to hold onto because even those weren't purchased yet. I am sure that I would have recycled her sister's shoes only 2 1/2 years old, but what would I do with a pair of unworn baby shoes, perhaps still in their box, perhaps white with pink bows or pink with white bows?

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

I cannot hardly believe that school has started and an entire class of third graders lines up, and she isn't part of them. She doesn't stand amongst the others in our family.

Grace.

For sale.

Grace.

Baby shoes.

Grace.

Never worn.

It is the small things now that can undo me. The surprises, the take your breath away and catch you off guard. The whisper or hint of something that never was.

past. future. present.

My six-word story has to be written. Has to be recorded. Has to be remembered. For after this, who else will really remember any of it at all? Because all of us will simply be a figment, one day, of this world's imagination.

And so it goes.

And so it is.

And we too shall come to pass.

Sarah. Terry. Carver. Sophia. Grace. Sawyer.

Lent and Spring and Seasons

It is spring and with it comes the waiting, the wondering, the remembering.

How is it that a body prepares itself for a grief that happens time and time again?

It is also the lenten season, and with it comes a period of 40 days in the desert, of holding our breath.

Each year I welcome spring with eagerness, as crocuses appear and delicate lilies of the valley sprout. And each year, I forget and remember what the season is about to spring upon me.

Grace.

I appear in church on Wednesday nights in the spring, and in our church we honor lent with Holden Evening Prayer. It is a service of vespers, of chanting, of praying, of psalms.

And each year, one of Grace's funeral songs is sung. And each year I forget and am blindsided by that grief rising again. Of funerals. Of remembering. Of sadness.

This year, the song appeared early in lent. So I thought tonight, I'd be safe to return. The song passed. What else could possibly blindside me?

And tonight, blindsided again, by a sermon about Mary at the foot of the cross and the pastor spoke about parents who experience the death of a child. He spoke about 'those parents' in a third person kind of a way, a way that I'm sure wasn't meant to be impersonal, but how can it be anything else but that when you are the parent sitting in the pew and realizing, "Oh, that's me; I am one of those parents." And the pastor is speaking from the pulpit, protected from the grief of ever knowing what it is like to be childless, with his own children sitting there?

I am like Mary without her child.

I am one of those parents that has to be dealt with.

I am a childless mother with some of my children present. Some not all.

It is spring and as March draws nigh, and April showers greet us, my body gets tense; my muscles grow tighter, and I begin to hold my breath in a way that I do every season.

I am in a period of waiting. I am 40 days in the desert. I am slouching toward Bethlehem to find myself at the foot of an empty manger.

There is April, and then there is May, and with it comes the rush of emotions, the undulating pulse of the memories, rising again and again.

Recently, a friend posted a video news clip about the children in Japan being swept away by the tsunami. The children. More of them than one can keep inside of a head.

It is a frightening number of children still missing. And yet, each child, is just one child of one parent; each one should be individually remembered and mourned, but how can an entire nation mourn just one when there are so many?

One child is enough grief to last an entire lifetime.

Where to you place the grief of an entire town of children?

Sometimes, I am blindsided by my own grief. I don't pretend not to be.

I live my life fully present in the moment, while all at once remembering the past and looking forward to the future.

It is spring and with it comes the waiting, the wondering, the remembering.

How is it that a body prepares itself for a grief that happens time and time again?

What is the value of a human life?

I have been thinking about value a lot lately.

I have clients now in my consulting business where I have to place a dollar value on my time. And I have to decide: Do I charge them hourly or do I charge them project by project? And sometimes I wonder if I am over-charging them or under-charging them. I don't know that there is a right or wrong answer really. But it is worth thinking about and worth examining from time to time.

That being said, I also think about the value of our time in general. I recently listened to a story on NPR that was addressing the value of a human life. The attorney spoke about compensation for families after the death of loved ones, particularly, the 9/11 families.

What is the value of a human life?

Indeed.

Is one life more valuable than another? Is there a monetary value that is different from person to person?

The attorney versus the night time cleaning person. The doctor versus the patient?

How do we assign value to life and how do we place a monetary amount on that?

There was no monetary value placed on Grace's life. She died before birth. Even if we had chosen to get some kind of childhood life insurance for her, I'm sure it would be small in nature. Even then, would a check having been received in the mail for $10,000 after her death made anything better? I doubt it.

And still there are real financial implications to families after their children die. Jobs are lost. Mental health capacities are reduced. Even jobs that are kept are difficult sometimes to maintain and return to.

And let's not forget the emotional value of a life. This is what interests me even more.

In this case, is Grace's life more valuable now that she is gone because so much time and energy is spent on helping bereaved parents. Is this even worth bringing up? What if she did decided that in her own life, she had no real drive or motivation to do anything other than what she had to do to make ends meet. Would her life be any more or less valuable than the person next door?

My emotional life would be different for sure if Grace were here. My emotional state would be different.

I have continued to say over and over again that I would trade my more realized and aware self for less awareness if Grace were here. But as time passes, as I learn more about myself, about my responses to grief, about what she continues to teach me daily, is this still true?

There are no easy answers to any of these questions. In fact, I hardly think there are answers at all. But that doesn't mean the questions can't be raised.

What is the value of your own life? Are you living up to what you think it should be? Do you need to?

The perfect metaphor

Really, I have the perfect metaphor. Something is wrong with my heart. Literally. Something is wrong with my heart.

Okay, it might be pericarditis which technically is an inflammation around the sac that surrounds my heart, but it has everything to do with the beating of a heart. It protects the heart.

I have had tests this week. EKGs, blood work, ultrasounds. I had the first ever ultrasound of my heart, and there it was on the screen beating, pulsing, opening and closing the way a heart is apparently supposed to beat and pulse.

I wasn't prepared for the anxiety of the ultrasound. I wasn't prepared for the aliveness of it. The only ultrasounds I've had, of course, are of living and not living babies. This would be different, I thought. Of course, it's not a baby, it's a heart.

Oh, wait a minute, that's right, this is an ultrasound of a beating heart. And there it was. My heart beating, and all I could think of in that moment, as the technician was rubbing the gel over my chest and rubbing the probe over my heart was that This of course, is what a heart is supposed to do. Beat. Beat.

Why didn't I prepare myself better for that moment? For the memory of the not beating heart. For the technician in the room with the probe over my belly. Beat. Heart. Beat. Move.

I wasn't prepared for the memory of Grace's non-beating heart and for the contrast in size.

My heart, my heart looked nearly the size of a baby's head. Her heart was just the size of a plum, unmoved, floating in space.

"The opening and closing of your valve looks good," the technician said. "Thank you," I responded. I couldn't say anything else so I just turned away waiting for the test to be over, thinking of Grace, of her still heart, of my heart cracking into a million pieces. And I wanted to turn to the technician and say, tell me, do you see a hole? Can you see the cracks? Is that what you are looking for?

And suddenly I was terrified that she could look into my soul, and she would see the darkness.

Yes, something is wrong with my heart. Something is very wrong with my heart, I wanted to say. A child is missing. A child is gone. Can you see that with your probe?

The pericardium is the sac that surrounds the heart. It's function has three purposes. The first is to keep the heart contained; the second is to prevent the heart from overexpanding; the third is to limit the motion of the heart. My pericardium is enlarged. It is inflammed, and I can't help but wonder if it's function hasn't been tested too many times. What kind of sac could possibly contain my heart? What kind of sac could limit the motion of my heart. My heart has been cracked and sewed back together. It has a hole, and I don't believe that any kind of sac could prevent it from overexpanding.

You see, after I gave birth to Grace, my heart shriveled; it withered. It died. But then, I found Grace in the eyes of my other two children; I found Grace in their souls. And three years later I gave birth again and he came out eyes wide open and heart pounding hard. And in that moment, my heart grew again. It grew and grew and grew.

And in these last two weeks, as we have all suffered illness, my thirteen year old still managed to pass me in height. As he lay next to me shivering in bed, his body continued to grow, and my heart continued to grow in awe of him. And as the four year threw up in my lap, over and over again, I held his head and willed him better. I watched his body melt into mine, and I prayed over him again and again for health. And my heart grew.

And now the nine year old is sick. And tonight she laid in bed with me and wished for wellness. And I wished with her. And again, I could feel the pains in my chest, the crackling of my breathing, and I knew that still my heart was growing larger.

So, yes, I do have pericarditis, and yes, the sac is inflamed, and yes, my love spills out of that sac each day. And it continues to ache for the one lost child.

I imagine this inflammation will subside. I hope that the sac returns to its normal size, but I also know that the heart is never, ever the same.

I believe it can contract and expand. I believe that the love I feel for all my children will continue to grow. I believe my heart will always be inflamed. And I hope it never really stops.