wisdom

I feel like this.

Her death was the sound of a tree falling in the forest. It made no sound, because no one heard it.

When I realized my daughter fell and I didn't hear her, I screamed.  I became uprooted, immediately tumbling to the ground. I was expended, losing its green the moment it lay still in the mossy bed of the forest floor. It made a very loud sound that everyone in my world heard.

It is a zen koan. The wisdom of her death and the living after. I am not wise. Don't get me wrong. But I am wiser than I was. She died. And I cannot change that. Should I deny growth to spite suffering, to accentuate the injustice of her death?

I admit, for the first year, I specifically resisted growth. There was nothing like growth. If you said something about growth, I spat at you. I bit your head, held on with my rotten teeth, growled. It was the absence of growth. It was a deforestation. I pulled up all my groundlings, the trees beginning to take root in the same place where she fell. I slashed and burnt acreage of me and acreage of friends. I embraced the ugly part of it all. Ugly felt bad, but it is what I knew.

I keep thinking of a friend who had dentures put in her mouth. Her teeth were slowly worn away and blackened by a combination of bad choices and bad genes. She finally got them all pulled, fixed, as they say. When the dentist put her new teeth in, she looked in the mirror and cried. She said that the teeth didn't look like her. They had no gaps, they were white and straight and perfect. Her teeth were yellow and crooked.

That wasn't her, she said. And the dentist asked her if she wanted him to put dentures in that look like rotten teeth. "That is not my job. My job is to put teeth in that look beautiful. You are not your bad teeth."

We grow attached to our scars.
I was attached to them. Attached to my knots, and carved initials in the trunk of me. Maybe I am still attached to them.

I keep writing about grief even when I come here to talk about a tree falling in a forest. I keep writing about what I learned after Lucia died even though I did not want to learn a damned thing. I hated advice. I rejected anything that sounded like I learned something, flipped off prayers and platitudes and comfort.

What I learned was specifically because I didn't want to grow. I wanted to be stuck with my rotten teeth, my felled tree, useful to no one. Perhaps I learned more about the extent in which I could be annihilated and still look normal, function, resemble human. My defects, my strengths, my humility, my arrogance took root in me, grew another withering, beastly creature, less tree and more fungus. I don't begrudge me. I did the best I could, but it was not enough. I took the path of selfish.

Here is what I learned: I learned what I value in my friends. I learned what I appreciate in my acquaintances. I learned how to accept from strangers.

I began to understand the necessity for boundaries. Who shares what and who gets to know about Lucia. I needed boundaries. I learned that I don't have to tell everybody everything I know, as my friend's grandmother says. I figured out whose judgment matters. I found out painfully which friends abandon me in my hardest hours, and which just didn't know what to do. There is a difference, and I appreciate that now. I learned that I am a spiritual person from the top of me to my bottom. It is how I want my life to be. Not religious, but in service to something bigger.

I suppose in some ways I feel wiser, more grateful, more mindful, more present in the moment. Because she died, her death reminded me that everything and everyone dies. I hadn't quite been living that truth. Because I could not change that she died, not through magical thinking, or dying myself. Not from giving up, or giving in. (I did both at different times.) You learn something from that. I have no control and in having no control, there is a freedom. But I chose this path of trying to figure out what I could learn from the worst moments of my life. Who I was then. Why I let my child's death erase all of what I believed so I could embrace intolerant, unkind, judgmental, and angry. I learned anger is my default emotion. I should be ashamed of it, but I am not. It is just who I am. I learned that. And then I work every day to change that reaction to everything.

I feel like Lucy's death made me better, because I have had to change every bit of me. I had to change, because being the me I was and grieving was fucking torture.  So I changed stuff about me, like who I trust and when I trust and what I trust and how much I trust. I change what I give and what I take and what I give personally and what I take personally. I changed what I complain about and what I don't.

Believe me, I resented that I had to change and grow and learn something. But she died, and I couldn't change that. But I could change me. I could change my reaction to grief. I suppose, you can say that Lucy's death has given me a kind of humility and wisdom I was sorely lacking without the years of losing every. little. thing. And yet, I would give all that up if she could live.

And that seems like no wisdom at all.

another post where i kill a metaphor by slow torture

I feel like I am the precipice of major change in my life. I read the cards, lay them out, one right after the other. Something has to give, but I feel paralyzed by something like too many choices. It's a first world problem. In my card layout, there is beauty and fear in the middle of sticks and wands and cups and...Grounding, that is what I wanted early on. Some ground beneath my feet. My life restarted after Lucia died. I can't integrate that person I was with the person I am now. It's not even that I want to, but in my mind's eye, there is a line. A deep line. I can see it. That line reminds me of the line in the sand that Bugs Bunny draws for Yosemite Sam.

I feel like I am falling. I dared myself to cross a line into the air. I threw myself into the abyss. It was all I knew, now I am searching for grounding.

I was someone else.

I sometimes like that someone else. I mean, frequently, I liked her. It took me many years to like her, despite the teenage angst and the anger I once held. She was ignorant and oblivious, but she was trying to find something resembling serenity. She searched and studied sacred texts, meditated on red rocks barefoot. She shaved her head, and wore beads, and she liked people. I'm not sure how I feel about me now. I don't like me or not like me. I just am a deeply flawed person who is trying to do the next right thing. Before I was a deeply right person doing the next flawed thing. I can see that clearly now, but I still liked her earnestness.

After my daughter died, the easiest part for me was that she died. I could wrap my brain around that. Death happens. It was a medical fact. She was not breathing. Her heart stopped. I understand science in that way.

I engaged in magical thinking, willing her back, praying for something like Lucia in a sunspot or a ladybug or just a sense of peace around me, bartering with God, the gods, the universe, anyone that would listen. No one took my trade, and to be honest, I wouldn't have believed them if they did. It took a long time to realize I couldn't wish her back, or pray her back, or find peace in her gone, but when I did realize it, there was a peace in that realization. Conversely, the hardest part was being so far from my spiritual and moral principles. To be so angry and sad that I could not be the best me, I could only be the angry and sad me. To know it and not be able to change it. To work so hard at being honest and kind with friends and family about where I was, but still hurting them in the process. Yesterday, the Dalai Lama's status update was "Many people think that patience is a sign of weakness. I think this is a mistake. It is anger that is a sign of weakness, whereas patience is a sign of strength."

I never thought patience was a sign of weakness, I just couldn't be patient. And I knew it was weak to be angry. And that heaped shame and guilt and all the other crap that makes us feel worse on top of me. I was anger personified. Daughter-death is a justifiable anger, I thought, I still think. All the anger I swallowed for years while I endured humiliations and heartbreaks, it all came up again when the doctor said my daughter's heart had stopped.

MY KID DIED, GODDAMMIT, GIVE ME SOMETHING TO THROW! SAY SOMETHING INSENSITIVE! HERE IS A LINE IN THE SAND, I DARE YA TO CROSS IT! 

I was being as patient as possible. Pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth. I hear that a lot these days. I think it is true, but it was a resentful petty growth in the beginning.

Fine. I'll grow. But I won't like it. 

I only grew in the way I wanted, toward the other babylost people I met. They received my patience, but no one else. Another line I drew, I suppose. I don't resent it anymore, the growth that came after my daughter's death, it just came much much later than I initially thought. In the early months, I was able to see through this dimension. I saw all the death around me, the suffering of people. I couldn't see the normal people going about their business. The funeral homes on every corner were lit from behind, beckoning me to look more closely at the suffering and the death. People hold grief in their shoulders, in the bags under their eyes. They hold it in their haunches which slow them down. I could see it hanging on them. And that, I thought, was my growth, the seeing and empathy part. Maybe it was, but I had no tolerance for the unsuffering amongst us. And even though I could see it, I drew a line in the sand, and said, "I dare ya to cross this line."

Someone said to me a few weeks ago, "Do you want to be right or happy?" And that is where I am now, trying to choose happy, even though right now, I am not happy. I am saying all this because I have to live with the consequences of drawing lines in the sand, keeping people at arm's length, of being a flawed creature succumbing to the demands of grief on a daily basis. There was room for understanding, but I chose to ignore it, instead choosing to dwell in a rickety cabin alone on the edges of the wilderness writing manifestos about grief. When people made mistakes in my grief, I graciously told them that I needed space and never came back. I suppose I didn't even draw the line. The line cast by my daughter's death was a ravine, long and deep with rabid weasels in its basin. Maybe I am just slowly filling that line, trying to rebuild the gap between who I once was and who I am.

Something.

There they were, walking amongst the fleece jackets, a young couple with a baby in one of those framed backpacks that you really only need when taking on Everest. Really, I heard the baby before I saw him, but my daughter had been chanting "outside" for fifteen minutes. He was just one of the noises in REI today. I'm not one of those babylost mamas who cannot be around pregnant women and babies. Maybe practicality prevents me from dwelling on other people's babies, or maybe it is simply that I want my baby, not just any old baby, but I think babies are keen, pregnant women beautiful, and families heart-wrenchingly touching. Still, when I noticed them in front of me eventually, after Beatrice ran off to baby bicycles with her father, my knees got weak.

It was her that made me want to vomit, run away, shake violently, take a generous shot of Jamesons. N. She was in my prenatal yoga class for months. She cried every Sunday morning when we went around the room said our names, how far along we are, what are issues for the week were. An architect by trade, I think she was having trouble wrapping her brain around this all-encompassing feeling of unconditional love. She was afraid. Every week she cried over a new fear. She once cried because she didn't know how she was going to be ready in time. And there I was, sitting in remarkable flexibility, like some swollen Buddha, saying "Pregnancy is a wave. Follow the wave."
"All the baby really needs is a boob, a diaper and your arms."
"Enjoy this time of expectation and planning."
"Revel in the long days of waiting, and sleeping, and relaxing."
"Be kind to yourself."
"You are doing everything right for your baby."
"Your baby is happy with just you. You cannot spoil a baby with too much love."

I virtually flaunted my laid backedness. I was so fucking cool. I was the only one in class who knew what it was like to have a baby and I had done it naturally at that. It was like I held some ancient secret that I wanted to share will all women. "If I can do it, you can do it," I said. "I was only in labor for 21 hours. It is a pain that is productive. It isn't like other pain." I was such an asshole.

And there she was, like I once was, with my husband after our first child, walking around loudly in an outdoor store, planning for our first hike, camping trip, bike ride...everyone listening to us. We didn't care. We were new parents, and our life wasn't going to change. We were taking the kid on our back and hitting the road.

I cringed. I slunk back into toddler wear, and began hyperventilating. Sure, I wanted to see the kid. I would have once run to her, drooled over her beautiful boy, told her how stunning she looked, how perfect her baby was...but I was completely paralyzed. Stunted. Immobile. Wholly inadequate. Instead of gushing, I wanted to tell them about Lucy. But I couldn't. I just could. Not. I mean, they were happy. Look at them, picking up expensive little onesies for camping, blissfully unaware that babies die because of nothing. Their world still had order, justice, kindness...I couldn't tell them that their baby was one yoga mat away from a dead baby. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror hiding behind a rack of clothes, trying to figure out a way to my husband and baby. I look so sad. So broken. So sleep-deprived and depressed. A person no one notices in the store. A person no salesperson asks to help. I hopped rack to rack until I somehow managed to pop into the aisle with Bea and Sam. He took one look at me, and said, "Come" and held me. He put the keys into my hand and said, "Go to the car if you want." And I thought, "Yes. I will run to the car." But I didn't. I didn't run. I decided to let fate decide if N. would see me, talk to me, ask me about my little girl. I am tired of hiding from people who are happy...she didn't see me. Too wrapped up in her own very loud new baby world.

Why do i feel so compelled to write about these moments? It happens to me everyday. To every one of us. Something that takes my breath away, reminds me of a before-time, of my ignorance, of my grief, of my dead baby in a more concrete way than simply the usual background chanting of "Lucy is dead". It happens so often, in fact, it is more out of the ordinary to not break down crying in public for one reason or another. But here was this woman. A woman so scared, so sure something was going to go wrong, and here I was so laid back, so sure everything was going to be just fine. Never again will I take anything so important for granted. Never again will I look at a pregnant woman and think, "Suck it up. It'll be fine." I was like some sort of twisted Greek heroine who told the gods that she was too smart for them to take her baby. I think the cliff notes of my life would summarize this chapter of my life as: Hubris killed Angie's daughter.

Maybe the moral of this post is simply: today I didn't run away from my demons. I didn't confront them, like a brave person, but I didn't collapse and run to the car either. Maybe I was supposed to remember my arrogance today. Maybe this is progress. Maybe this is something.