Guest Post: Right Where I Am- Three Years, Six Months, Twenty-Seven Days and Two Years, Four Months, Four Days

It is my honor to welcome a guest post for Right Where I Am from Danielle. [Remember if you do not have a blog and want to contribute, you are welcome to post right here. Send me an email at uberangie(at)gmail(dot)com.] My dear friend Danielle's first son Kai died a month and a half before Lucia. Danielle lost her second son a year and two months later. This year, Leap Day to be exact, Danielle gave birth to her third son, an incredible little Monkey full of contented joy and love. This week, Danielle emailed me with her contribution to the Right Where I Am project. Her insights into grief and her journey last year are right here.  --Angie

My son is three months old.  He wriggles. He coos.  He smiles at us all the time.  He smiles so much that when he eats, milk dribbles from his laughing mouth and wets us both.  He loves it when I sing- ridiculous, composed-in-the-moment songs about Mickey Mouse socks and poo.  At least once a day I sing through a throat choked with tears, because he is here.

When my grandmother, made Great-Grandma at long last, came to meet him in the hospital, she brought me a baby book to record my first memories of our time together.  It sat on a shelf for the first few weeks, all but forgotten in the sleep-deprived haze of new parenthood.  When I finally opened it,  his brothers were there on every page.  What we thought when we found out we were having a baby: Please don’t die. Who we told first, and what they thought: I didn’t use the word pregnant until the third trimester.  Everyone was terrified, but too polite to say so. What we thought when we were waiting for you to be born: Please don’t die.  Siblings waiting to welcome you home:… Suddenly, I could not write.

Our grief is very quiet these days – overshadowed by the newness and the unbelievable, heart-expanding joy of having this amazing little boy to love. Right now, in this moment, I am happier than I can remember being in years, or maybe ever.  I am falling in love with my husband all over again, as he asks me daily if I think this boy will ever be too old to let Daddy hug and kiss him.  My heart is light as I dance around in circles with my son in my arms.  My son.  Right now I have everything I have ever wanted.

Except them.

The other day I asked my husband if he felt healed, now that Monkey is here.  He didn’t hesitate.

“No.  No.  I just don’t have time to think about it as much.”

And yet we do think about it. It’s in the way we introduce ourselves to the other new parents in the neighborhood, where one or the other of us mentions every time that we had a long, long road to get here.  It’s in our daily conversations about whether we have it in us to risk trying for another living child- ridiculous conversations to be having 13 weeks in, but conversations that feel so urgent, so necessary.  It’s in our amazement that friends, expecting a son in July, are willing to decorate their nursery and take our hand-me-down onesies, believing without question that their child will come home.

He is here.  His brothers are not.  He is here.  We went to hell and back to get him here safely.  To get him here at all.  He is here.  There will likely be no others.  He is here.

For the first time in a long time, so am I.

welcome to the world

Today, it is with overwhelming joy that I share the news that my beautiful friend Danielle has given birth to her third son, Jonathan. And this day, we remember and honor Kai, her first son, and we remember and honor Chip, her second, both gone too soon, missed deeply. Light two candles if you can for each of them.

If you don't know Danielle, let me tell you about my friend. She is full of compassion, grace, and wisdom. She abides, in the truest sense of the world. Her comments have been a breeze of empathy, love, and grace drifting through this community for four years. I am honored to know her. Privileged, actually. So, I wanted to do something for her, and yet wanting to respect her space and natural, understandable cautious optimism, held off until now.

And so, today, let us shower Danielle with love and welcome Jonathan.

If you can, whether you know Danielle or not, open your heart, welcome Jonathan, and write a message, blessing, or prayer to him and Danielle. I will print them out and mail them to her, though I know she will read them here too. But I have an idea...

Guest post: Right Where I Am: 2 Years, 6 Months, 28 Days & 1 Year, 4 Months, 5 Days

It is my great honor to welcome my first guest post on still life with circles. Very early in my grief, Danielle and I began exchanging emails. She was and still is a frequent commenter on my blog and several others in the community. Her insights, wit, compassion and kindness instantly drew me, and many of my friends, to her. Her first son Kai died a month and a half before Lucia, and we quickly began writing long emails to each other about where we were in our grief. There is a respect and love between us that makes it easy to be friends even in the hardest of times. And there have been hard times. Danielle lost her second son a year and two months later.  Sometimes, in our friendship, when those moments get too hard and things are too sucky, we just read a book together, and that helps me more than anything I could imagine. I feel privileged to call her my friend.

Despite many of our urgings, Danielle does not have a blog. I definitely understand her reasons for needing that privacy. On more than one occasion, I have extended my blog to her to write about where she is and to process things. But she never bit. This week, however, she emailed me with her contribution to the Right Where I Am project. Her insights into grief and her journey in particular are touching, hard and important. So, I thank her from the bottom of my heart for sharing right where she is with us all.

I am on an airplane with my husband. In my carry-on are two books, a candy bar, the work I will not do, alcohol wipes, a syringe, and medication wrapped in an ice pack. In a minute, I will have to wake up the sleeping guy with the headphones so I can go to the bathroom and inject myself in the leg. I can’t quite believe I am doing this again, doing this still. Though I am pretty adept at the whole shot thing, I don’t quite trust my aim if there’s turbulence.

It’s been over three years since our first appointment with the reproductive endocrinologist, followed two weeks later by the minor surgery that I thought of then as the hardest thing I would ever have to do for us to become a family. In total I was under anesthesia six times in two years, landing in the emergency room or reeling dizzily for weeks afterwards each time. Counting acupuncture, blood draws, and the four rounds of DIY injections at home, I have been stuck with hundreds of needles. We have spent close to a college tuition for the child we do not have on fertility treatments, herbal supplements, therapy for me, therapy for Alan, therapy for us. We have conceived, lost, and mourned two sons. We are still not a family.

Right after we lost Kai, the fact that the world kept going while my own life had gone off the cliff was more than I could get my head around. I developed an intense, personal hatred of people carrying coffee cups from Starbucks, because they were FUCKING DRINKING COFFEE while I was standing next to them, shredded, on the subway platform. I stopped answering the phone, because questions like “How are you?” and “What’s new?” were impossible for me to answer except through the lens of grief. I developed a one-shouldered shrug, which I used to respond to any question about what I wanted to eat, do, talk about. I screamed and cried myself hoarse in the shower. And on the day we were told that we would never know what happened to Kai- that there was no answer except “likely sublinical infection” (read: black magic)- I wanted to die.

I could tell you the story of how it slowly got better, because it did. I could tell you that while I was in the very hardest and ugliest phase of my grief, I also went to work every day, formed new friendships, went on vacation. I could tell you how possibility came back, a little at a time, and carried us through a whole new set of fertility issues and straight through to IVF. But then I would also have to tell you the story of Chip. He brought light and hope back into our home from the day we knew he was coming until the day we knew he wasn’t. Chip was diagnosed with trisomy 13- a 100% fatal genetic disorder. We said goodbye at 13 weeks, and I went immediately from numbness and shock to white-hot anger. I am married to an extraordinarily kind and patient man. If I weren’t, that anger would have burned our marriage to the ground.

Some days the grief about our children and the grief about our infertility are one and the same. Some days I miss them separately and specifically, for different reasons- our two sons, and the embryo we fell in love with too soon who never turned into our daughter. Some days that missing feels like rage, or fear, or disgust with myself. Sometimes it feels like compassion for Alan, who didn’t get to be the wonderful father he was made to be, or for my mother, who keeps Kai’s ultrasound photo in a frame at her bedside. But mostly I just wish they were here, and I am sad to realize as I write this that I have no real idea what my life would be like if they were.

There are other things now, things that are not grief and anger. There is gratitude- for health insurance, for extraordinary women from different parts of my life who have offered to serve as egg donors or gestational surrogates, for friends who actually seem to like me this way. There is wonder- at big things like waterfalls and small things like figuring out the trick in the Sunday Times crossword. There is wistfulness- for once-cherished friendships that didn’t make it, for the part of me that used to care passionately about supporting Latino playwrights and visiting my grandmother, for a time when I truly felt like a part of this community in a way that I no longer do. There is release- in near-hysterical laughter, in dancing, in the love of my husband. But there are no children. There is no family.

I am OK most of the time. I care about people other than myself again. There are things I want to do, and when I don’t do them it’s because I don’t have enough time or enough money, and not because they don’t matter. If you had asked me at any point along the way, I would have said that I could never feel this OK again. I was wrong. That said, OK is not happy, and I don’t think I will ever be truly happy without a living child. I hope I’m wrong about that, too. I hope I don’t have to find out.

--Danielle