Our community

Did you ever meet someone where there is something else going on? Sure, you shake hands, either in real life or virtually, and it is polite. But it is like they owed you money in a past life. It’s not exactly like you remember the amount, but something about them makes you think, “Oh, right, I remember this douche bag now.”

If you don’t know, I’m a recently added clicker for Lost and Found Connections Abound, so I have the privilege of reading the stillbirth, neonatal death and infant death blogs on Mel’s huge mother blogroll and passing on news to LFCA. This was the end of my first week. As I read a whole host of blogs I had never read before, blogs spanning from years to weeks since the loss of the writer’s baby or babies, I realized that each of us on this journey experience such universal truths with very individual perspectives. It was humbling and insightful. I was so curious after looking at people’s sidebars, why it is we connect with some blogs and not others?

I know my writing is not everyone’s cup of tea. This journey is mine alone. I’m generally not offended if someone decides to drop me, add me, comment, not comment, but I do think this community is beautiful because of the support from all realms—from the babylost and non-babylost alike, from the pregnant and the trying, from the ones of recent loss and those with losses from many decades ago. Comments are so important, and I appreciate every one. (Except for perhaps that one I got from a sex yoga blog in Malaysia, I could have done without that one.) It is why I comment on blogs often, because when something moves me, or resonates with me, or I see someone hurting, or happy. I can smile at them, open my arms, send a brief note to tell them that their stories were heard.

I just wonder some days what it would be like if, instead of reading these blogs, I ran into grieving women throughout my day, and heard their stories instead of reading them. This used to happen often when I worked as the morning barista in the largest coffee shop (during the pre-Starbucks times) in Tucson, Arizona. People would flutter in. I would see their car pull into the parking lot, and start their drinks. I knew details of their lives that their own sisters, husbands or parents didn’t know. And I really cared about the people who drank coffee in that place. All of us that worked there did. We wondered where they were, if they were regulars that skipped a day. We noticed when people were down, or angry, or happy, or short, or spacey. We didn’t gossip about them, but we talked about their lives as though they were friends of ours. We reached out to those in need. We set people up on dates. We passed along recommendations, and job leads, and books, and anything we could give at the moment.

But in this community, where we might read blogs in our pajamas over our morning cup of coffee, I wonder how much of our mood changes how we read the blog post. Would my own delivery of my words change the message? Would you like me, or dislike me, because of how I speak, or my nervous laughter, or my sarcastic undertones? Could you get past my crazy hair to listen to my story, or would my one wild white hair curled in front of my eyes distract you too much?

:::

Last night, Sam and I went on a date night, dropping Beatrice off at my sister’s house. After our night, we lounged in my sister’s living room with the kids. Cooper, my almost seven year old nephew, had his head against my shoulder, and my sister said to me, “I was telling Cooper today what wasn’t invented when we were children.”

“Yeah, Auntie Angie, there wasn’t an internet, or cordless phones. Mommy told me that you used to fight with her just outside of the reach of Abuelita when she was on the phone.” (Karmically, I know naughtiness is coming my way.)

It made me think. There once wasn’t an internet. And my beautiful new friends in Australia would have not felt like my neighbors. What would I have done after Lucy died? What would my community look like?

A few weeks ago, my friend Kitt sent me a really interesting snippet of a book she was reviewing by a historian of religion named Molly McGarry called, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America.

Here are Kitt's words, because, well, I would have just rewritten them:

I was sort of blown away by this part of the book where she was talking about how mothers of lost children were especially drawn to spiritualism, not because this was new information, but because of how she analyzed it. She talked about Victorian culture and the rituals of grief with which I'm sure you're familiar: the elaborate mourning rituals, the carefully prescribed stages of grief with specific clothing for each phase, the memento mori, lockets, notecards, etc. And I had always thought that maybe that would be an easier time to experience such a loss--not that it's ever "easy," that's a terrible word for me to use--but because death was an expected part of life...there are a lot of books about death in Victorian culture, people's awareness of death, and so on. But grievers who were drawn to spiritualism were actually critical of the way Victorians grieved; the "intricate rituals of middle-class sentimental culture effectively shifted the social focus from the dead to the living, from those who were mourned to the mourners themselves."

But spiritualists wanted to connect to the dead, so they got involved in spiritualist communities, which, McGarry argues, were virtual communities like the internet is today. True, they would attend actual events--séance and the like--in an attempt to connect with their lost children, but they would also subscribe to spiritualist journals and write letters in which they said that no one understood them and their grief except others with the same experience. She wrote: "The medium's bodily transformation in the séance circle was an individual experience collectively mobilized." It was accepted that "only those who had been mourners could sympathize with the bereaved." One woman wrote, "To others my grief may appear excessive, but you, who have lost children, may conceive of the anguish of a mother's spirit, in seeing suddenly snatched from her arms, in the space of a few hours, the idol of her heart...and who in that Spirit-world can replace the mother in this?" [here I thought of the Jizo, as I've learned about it from you.] Here's McGarry again: "What most characterizes this literature is a sense of social isolation among the correspondents, of being without collective comfort and alone with solitary grief. It is hard to say whether these bereaved individuals found themselves actually excluded from the materialistic cult of mourning and untouched by the era's mostly literary ethos of sentimentality or whether they were voicing grief as a longing for connection that these social forms repressed. In some ways, the very existence of these epistolary exchanges speaks to the shared sense among letter writers that their immediate social circles had failed them and that another imagined community, in this case a community in print, was required to assist in the mourning process." And finally: "Spiritualism provided a community of the living for the living."

Such a rich beautiful multi-faceted insight into our people--the babylost. I also thought, like Kitt, that with the elaborate Victorian mourning rituals, and the prevalence of stillbirth at the time, that the 19th century might have been an era where it might be, uh, easier somehow. It is never easy to grieve, as Kitt says. And it has never been easier. I feel like a jerk for even thinking it, but it still is one of those ideas I had. How many of us have written blog post upon blog post about our alienation from our social circle, the non-babylost? Still, I found it fascinating.

I think we would have found each other in a different way in a different time. We would have connected more with some women than others. It might have been through church, or séance, but the other babyloss women would have answered that loud wail across the universe that only a woman who lost her baby can recognize. Maybe we would have been keening together in an ice hut, not fixing our husband's torn kayak, or maybe we would have sat around a campfire dancing our stories with masks and drums, stabbing sticks into the ground, or maybe even we might have sat in a circle in a darkened room, listening to the sound of spirit trumpets or waiting for objects to levitate, but I have no doubt, we would have told our stories to one another somehow.