Light at the end of the summertime grief tunnel

Summertime grief looks different to me than spring grief. Summertime grief is my sabbatical, my respite from most things grief-filled. It is my light at the end of the tunnel.

I took the picture above about three weeks ago, during a writer's retreat—eight bliss-filled days at Fort Worden Park in Port Townsend. Eight days of reading, writing and critiquing other writer's work. Eight days on the Sound with the blue water stretched out before me on the bluff and this photograph at Artillery Hill in Fort Worden.

Eight days to reflect, to revise, to create, to explore.

Inevitably my writing turns to grief. Whether it’s the grief for my daughter, the grief for my father or the two of them together inextricably linked no matter how different each of the griefs actually are.

My childhood grief was of a different sort. My childhood grief began on a dark late January day when my father died. It began with a complicated, misunderstood, misdirected kind of grief that was hardly understood or explored in the 1980s when people still died mostly in hospitals, often alone, and children were discouraged from going to them even for daytime visitations. It occurred during a time in my childhood when I wasn’t equipped with the right kind of questions, and no one was encouraged to otherwise explore alternative methods for dealing with a young child’s grief.

So that grief of my childhood was mostly unexplored, under-developed, uninformed.

Then Grace died thirty years later. And the only thing I was certain about was that our family would not grieve in the same manner of my childhood. Grief would not be hidden. Grief would not be tucked away. Grief would not be buried with our daughter.

Instead, grief was and is out on the table—raw, changing, and filled with surprises of its own.

Now, ten years later, most of my writing around Grace’s grief takes place in the months of May and June. Most of my writing around Grace’s grief takes place in the lonely nights and early mornings of my ruminations.

Then, just like that, sometime in early June, it disappears again, tucked away to shift and lean toward something new that arises the following year.

In the early days, grief was raw even in the summer months. Grief was building toward the due date, when the real birth was supposed to happen in July. And so the month of June was counting weeks until the due date.

But in the later years, grief no longer presents itself the same way. Grief melts back into my bones and tucks itself away—far enough that most people hardly notice, but close enough that when I wake up each morning, Grace still presents herself to me in ways that are surprising.

Grief in the summertime is closer, more intimate, more private.

Grief in the summertime provides me the space to write about and explore other topics.

Grief in the summertime allows me to breathe. And sometimes in those breaths, other surprising kinds of feelings emerge.

And once again, I am changed by all things Grace. 

A love letter

Grace,

If I could sing a song to bring you back, I would.

If I could cry a river to float on and find you, I would.

If I could tie a rope onto a tree and swing into the heavens and find you, I would.
If I could connect the umbilical cord back to your belly, and breathe life back into you, I would.
If I could walk barefoot through the streets, across mountains and into the deserts to find you, I would.
If I could stand in the midst of a tornado to be carried and tossed back out to find you, I would.
If I could swim into the ocean, beyond the waves and toward its center to find you, I would.
If I could dive to the bottom of the ocean floor to pick you up again, I would. 

You are my child.

You are my love.
You are my heart.

You are the missing piece in these three walking hearts.

You are the crack in my being.
You are the hole in my heart.
You are the catch in my breath.
You are the tears in my eyes.
You are the empty place inside of me.
You are the air in the photographs between the second and fourth.
You are the box in the closet collecting dust and holding memories.
You are the name on my lips as I fall asleep and as I rise.

You are the cheeks of Carver, the eyes of Sophia and the chin of Sawyer.

You are missing.

You are the song without its refrain
The book without its epilogue
The river without its lake
The poem without an end

The rest of my days, I will look for you in the gestures of your sister, the sighs of your brothers, and the catch in your father's voice.

The rest of my days, I will love and I will weep and I will sing until my song brings me back to you again.

What death feels like when you are alive...

What death feels like when you are alive is big darkness, a hole so black that even sitting in a planetarium watching a movie about black holes isn't terrifying.

I am not talking about the kind of death where you imagine your own. That kind of death can seem welcoming, refreshing and even holy perhaps.

I am talking about the kind of death when your child dies, before you, making the world into a nonsensical one, twisting words and spitting them back at you in ways that never make sense again.

If I were to write her obituary again, it would say this:

Grace Susie Bain
died on May 29th, 2003
born on June 1st, 2003

And since that time, no language has ever made sense.

That's what death feels like. Language flipped onto its back, ripped out from underneath you so that cards arrive in the mail with sayings like:

"There are no words."
"I will be praying for you."
"God's will is hard to understand."

I don't know about you, but the God I know does not kill babies. The God I know when I cried out in the middle of the night at 3 am with blood all over my sheets, with a kind of silent scream so loud that my cry echoed through the hallways and into the night sky, falling deep into black silent holes, that God, that One that appeared in my hospital bed, He showed up with his hands, these large, gentle hands cupped together to hold me as I contemplated ripping out my IV, tearing out my eyes, jumping out of the three-story window. He just sat there on the bed with me, his hands holding onto my entire body as I felt a single tear fall from His eye, as I shook, my large belly filled with death and empty at the same time. He sat there and said nothing.

And I cursed the night sky, I cursed my failed body, I swore against the injustices of the world and I swore at God, the same one who ripped my father from me when I was five years old. And He just sat there bewildered with me while I screamed obscenities into my pillow and my husband and two-year-old daughter and five-year-old son all slept together wrapped up in a king-sized bed three miles from the hospital.

I do not know what death feels like to anyone else, but this death I felt, this kind of death is the kind that cracks open your heart, sucks out your soul and spits you back out spent and confused. And you stay like that for a very long time. A time so long that if someone were to have told me that, I might have jumped that night. But these are the kind of things you don't want to speak out loud.

There are no words for any kind of death. And still we try to write them. I try to write them.

So that every day, when I sit down to an empty page, the first word that appears in my head is death. Then love. Then grief.

And everything else that follows is something for which my hands are just a vessel.

How I own my grief...

1. Write about it. Write about every curve, intonation, juxtaposition, curl of the lip, gut-punch in the stomach, facial expression, door slamming shut, every feeling that happens because of the door slamming shut, eyes burning, just write and write some more.

2. Say Grace out loud as often as I can.

3. Connect Grace to my father, my father to Grace and then connect them again.

4. When people ask how many children I have, say four! Four. And mean it.

5. In the same way that I own my joy. Live it every day. Grief and joy side by side.

6. Connect my five-year-old self when my own father died to my son who was five when his sister died.

7. When people ask how old my children are, tell them. And every year increase their age by one, except for Grace's in which you respond dead every time and never change your answer. Dead.

8. Remember when your grandmother told you that she never for one moment forgot her first born son who died, and that she was afraid to talk about him out loud because she was supposed to "get over it." Never get over Grace. Remember your grandmother each time because you miss her too.

9. Remember that the depth of your grief is equal to the depth of your love and no less. No. Less.

10. Forget about the stupid people and how they still say stupid things once in a while. If you are feeling especially gracious, say a prayer for them. But don't be hard on yourself if you don't.

11. When someone brings up "God" and "Grace" in the same sentence, put up all your protective walls. Remember they mean well, but it never comes out sounding that way. God does not kill babies.

12. Be with my other children, fully present, and teach them kindness, empathy, compassion and love. Because nothing else matters. Love just love.

13. Sometimes by crying, but rarely in front of anyone else, and mostly by myself in the car while driving. Sometimes, late at night when everyone else is asleep.

14. Sometimes by simply feeling like the loneliest person in the world.

15. By listening to other people's stories and grief and giving them a safe place to say the darkest things.

16. Once in a great while still, not wanting to hold someone else's baby. Very rarely. But still sometimes, it stings too much.

17. By remembering every day, I am alive, and Grace is not. And being okay with both things some of the time. And some of the time, not being okay with it at all and wanting to throw yourself down on the ground and kick and scream.

18. Each May, each May succumbing to my body's own darkness and sitting with it and still learning to be okay with it.

19. By shouting expletives and saying them under my breath too.

20.  Say Grace out loud as often as I can.

Do I stay in this recurring dream...

I am torn. I do not dream about Grace. It is one of my failings that bothers me most in these later years. No matter how much I try to conjure them up on my own (and I do try), I do not dream about her. I envy people who dream about their children. I have found from the many families I've met over the years, that some people dream often and many not at all. So once again, I am not alone. I am never alone.

And still. Still, I envy the dreamers.

So last night, when I dreamed about Grace, when I knew I was dreaming about Grace, I was torn. Do I stay in this recurring dream that keeps happening over and over again or do I leave it? 

A few months ago I was intrigued by a podcast I heard about Lucid Dreaming so I did what I do and I went a bought and read a book about it: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. And much to my questioning mind's eye, it worked. With a few nights of practice, I could remain in my dreams with just a few tweaks in the moment.

So last night when Grace appeared in my dreams, when my body was re-living her birth and death over and over again in my dream, I asked myself this question: Do I stay in this dream or do I leave? I was there with Grace. I could see her and touch her and hold her and feel her. I could feel her in my body and then out. 

The problem of course is that this dream was filled with so much trauma. I kept waking up and falling asleep and giving birth over and over again to my dead child. In this dream, I could feel my body splitting open and pushing her out and my breasts filling up with milk that would first turn painful and then turn red and then turn dry. I could feel her head crowning and myself pulling her back in just one more moment before my body did what it did and before she came sliding out, Grace and I still connected with an umbilical cord whose jobs of providing nutrients and oxygen was no longer needed.

This dream came at me in waves over and over again, the pushing and sliding out and there she was in my arms again and again and again.

And throughout the night as I lay there dreaming, and still lucid and still wondering if I should end these dreams or stay in them, I remember thinking Here she is. Here she is.

I'm  certain you know what I chose. Because dead or alive, I would if I could choose my child over this absence. I would choose to have this dream every night, no matter how worn I feel the next day because Grace was present and I was holding her and I could feel her and she was here among us.

Everything that you expect to happen, happened next. I woke extremely early in the morning, exhausted, spent and sad beyond words, beyond senses. Sad. 

But then I realized the gift in all of this. In the ten years compressed into one night, taking time and bending it in ways I didn't know was possible. Giving me another moment with Grace, suspended in dream-like fashion, to hold her, to be a mother again to her, to whisper things into her ear that only a mother and daughter share, to be her mother. 

And the question of staying or leaving my dream need never be asked again. 

I grieve because I love...

One of the most complicated relationships between humans is the mother-child relationship, and if I'm being wholly honest, the mother-daughter relationship must rank among one of the most complex. We place on our daughters unfulfilled expectations, complex issues that we ourselves wish that we understood better. We worry about how they will be treated, how they will fare without us. We worry if we did enough. We worry when they bleed. We worry when they arrive too soon at bleeding and how do we teach them that delicate balance between being a woman and holding onto their childhood. We want them to be like us and nothing at all like us. We want them to be strong. We want them to understand their weaknesses. We want them to find careers that they love. We want them to love being a mother as much as we do. We want everything for them and nothing at all but what they themselves believe to be love and truth.

We worry.

And so when a daughter dies before all of this happens, then the mother wanders in a desert without direction.

There are so many firsts that never happen, so many seconds and thirds. There are no first kisses to worry about. There are no tampons to buy. There is no hair to braid. There are no late night conversations into the night about what in the world the boy-toy band One Direction might actually be announcing.

There is in all of this the pull of the umbilical cord, the line that first connected mother to child that is still there in the invisible dark and the tug is ever present.

Add to that mix a complicated relationship with your own mother (okay, let's be honest what mother-daughter relationship isn't complicated) and then you mix in guilt and frustration and confusing and panic into all the rest.

Yes, yes, there are other children. Yes, yes there is another daughter. But this missing daughter, the one who fails to show up for the pictures so that you notice the distinct space--head and shoulders between the youngest and the middle child. Why does this picture look still unfinished? Yes, the picture always looks unfinished, as if something has been erased, someone is absent.

Recently someone implied that I spend a lot of time writing about the absent child and not so much about the present children.

I am sure that many others are thinking this same thing. I am sure the unspoken thoughts of many would cut immeasurably into a grieving mother's heart. You know who you are.

But here is the thing. My other children, the ones I see every day, the ones I speak to every day, the ones I hug and kiss and talk to and have conversations with, they are fully present human beings, engaged in their lives, their own lives and don't necessarily want me talking or writing much about them. They are living the lives that they are designing with us by their side. They have voices and speak a similar language as the rest of us. They are alive. Did I mention that?

But this silent one, I'm her only voice, I'm the only one who can keep her voice fresh and present. And believe me, her presence is immutable. I can pretend to forgot (oh, but who would?) I can place her in the recesses of my mind, but that does nothing except bring her closer to the forefront of my mind.

This silent one? She is ever-present. She speaks in ways that I am willing to share bits and pieces of because she cannot do it for herself. Other bits and pieces I cling to on my own in the dark.

"(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands." -ee cummings

...not even the rain...

Indeed.

I do not pretend to have any answers or any wisdom around the right way to grieve.

For me, I grieve the only way I can: Wholly present and honestly. I grieve because I have no other choice.

I grieve because I love.

And I wouldn't give up my love for anything.

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.