On Levity*

“Now, I will always be the woman whose baby died.” I stared into the red, desperate eyes of my husband after the ultrasound tech, the doctors, the midwife, and the nurses left us a minute to catch our breath and process the fact that they just told us our baby was dead. We howled for minutes, held on to each other, stared at each other and began crying again. But then, as though marking off a checklist of realizations, I laid my head on his shoulder and murmured in his ear, “People will whisper about me when I walk in the room. Nobody will tell jokes in front of me. I’ll always be that woman people pity. I will be a walking bummer.”

There is absolutely nothing funny about grieving your baby. Believe me, I have tried to make light about my current state of being. Noting that most of my friends haven’t called, or the majority of my own family has not even mustered an “I’m sorry for your loss,” I mentioned to a friend, “Yeah, being a pariah is not all its cracked up to be.” Ha, ha, yeah. No response. Everything meant to bring levity just sounds pathetic and bitter. I am that woman laughing at her own feeble existence, while younger, half-full type people pityingly clench their teeth in an almost smile. “If we laugh, we will just encourage her.”

The only thing remotely funny about my grief is that sometimes I cry so much I hiccup. It is hard not to laugh at inappropriate hiccupping. “Sometimes hiccups make me want to shove an ice pick into my diaphragm,” my sister said once during a pause in an especially frustrating cry/rant about Lucy’s death. I giggled a little, and then it took hold of me. The laughs rolled in, gaining momentum, and then we really lost it, like we were crazy or drunk. Inappropriately guffawing at body noises was about the only buoyancy we got in the early days. But it wasn’t the kind of levity I craved.

The death of my daughter meant my personality suddenly gained the kind of gravitas that made me feel like someone’s shell-shocked great uncle. It’s all about the Great War now. Being in babyloss world feels a lot like what I imagine it feels like to hang out in the VFW, though we are veterans of a different kind of war. You don’t have to speak of your trauma to have it understood. You can really only joke about the Nam if you have been there and lived through it. We all were in the shit together, and that is why when one of us makes inappropriate jokes about our dead babies, we are the only ones who get it. Anytime you begin a statement, “See, that was funny because…” you have completely nullified any possibility of humor. And, well, I’ll admit I have said that more than once this past year as I tried to describe a funny dead baby blog post to someone outside of this community.

In the in-between time of finding out via ultrasound that my daughter’s heart had stopped and giving birth, I spent twenty-four excruciating hours in the labor and delivery wing of a hospital that births over five thousand babies a year. At some point, during the pitocin drip, I begged for television’s mindless comfort to drown out the occasional scream of newborn baby. “If there is any justice in the world, Raising Arizona will be somewhere on cable today.” It was three days before Christmas. It was all touching welcome home stories, angels, Christmas trees, and gift-giving. Bloody hell. Reminiscing less than a year later, what was I thinking? I was literally hanging all my hope on a comedy about infertility, baby kidnapping and loss. But maybe I was searching those channels for something to remind me of what I was twelve hours earlier, what I could be again—someone irreverent, goofy and light. Somewhere someone was making light of the shit life has to offer a young couple. I wanted to memorialize the visage of who I once was. And yet, isn’t that part of what we lose? You know, besides our babies, some of our friends, our safety, our belief in a just universe, our semblance of normalcy, our joie de vivre—we lose our levity.

The truth of it is I lived months of torture—grieving my child, keening into the abyss, swirling in dead seriousness, literally. I must have laughed in those early weeks, but I cannot remember doing so. I stopped searching out humor. Every priest walking into a bar no longer indicates the beginning of a joke, but everyone’s inherent need for a stiff drink. I just surrounded myself with the heaviness of my life. I read memoirs of grief and loss, watched movies with maudlin titles and sadder endings. Even small talk had the power to floor me. An off-the-cuff joke or light comment had the weight to disable me for days on end. Flippant comments about how hard it is to parent two stung like someone called me fat and stupid in the same breath. I used to be able to make small talk, participate and blab on about nothing in particular. Suddenly, small talk felt like daggers on every inch of my bruised soul. I couldn’t fake or conjure levity; it just remained an unattainable goal.

Upon reflection, what I was really saying in the first minutes after finding out my daughter was dead, what I was immediately beginning to miss about my personality, was my lightness of being. Would I ever be funny again? Could I crack a joke at my own expense? I have a sacred cow now. Something I will never think is funny. There are no such thing as a funny dead baby joke to me, just cruelty by people who have no idea. I have one thing now that no one, no matter what kind of shocking comedian they are, will mention at my roast in forty years.

Now more than eleven months later, I am finding room in my grief for humor—not humor in my daughter’s death, but humor in my life. When people say time heals, I absolutely disagree. Time doesn’t heal. Time changes grief. It allows for space. Time allows for levity. And that brings its own kind of comfort.

* Monica asked me to contribute a column for Exhale Magazine under the issue theme of levity. Exhale is going through some internal changes and the next issue will come out in January. I have been thinking about this topic so much since I wrote it, I wanted to share it here first and find out what you think about levity.