the end of the world

Tomorrow is the end of the world.

The calendar ends. Well, the Mayan one, and the dawn of a new era. It is the same day that my daughter died. She would be four on the day after the end of the world, if her world didn't end.

I remember what that feels like. The end of the world. The rug is pulled out from under you. Tumbling, nauseated, insomniatic, fearful, like you can suddenly see all the poison, juts, knives, umbilical cord accidents, guns, cars as weapons of mass destruction, televisions untethered to walls. You don't know you are dead. You are the hungry ghost, walking the circumference of the earth, looking to eat something that makes sense. It drops out the bottomlessness of you. Nothing nourishes. Nothing stops the pain of change. You float along and bark at people in your chair (they don't hear you, so you slam a door) and yell at people who bring in white flowers and mourn with you. In the blackness, you wait for instructions or an answer, or a white light, but mostly you wait for the end, but there is no end, no beginning, just a suffering of your own design.

The Izmana, the invisible sky god, swallows the earth. He creates it, he destroys it. The light points shoot out his hair follicles and his eyes, but you are stuck somewhere behind a sinus cavity. It is all darkness there, and you doubt a God could even swallow the earth, even though you saw it happening. I bought some extra cans of beans this week, and an extra loaf of bread. Maybe we can outlive the end.

They say we are on a path of ascension. I sat in circle, meditating. The information downloaded into my subconsciousness as the channel stood over me. I sleep to access the records. I am chilled to the bone, and excited, afire and alit, grounded and flying. Suddenly, Grief clears his throat.

Remember me? 
How could I forget you?
I am part of your ascension. I am part of your growth. 
You are part of the problem.
There are no problems. Perhaps I feel part of your regression and meditation right at this moment. But time is meaningless. What was is what is and what will be is what has happened.
It's been four years, certainly this raw grief is done.
It is and isn't. I am part of your enlightenment. Feel me for all of them, for her. 

Lucia stands in a white gown, hair cascading down her shoulders, and she reminds me of a magnet I have. My guides stand around her. And angel walks with her. She is fine.

My sweet girl. My sweet girl. My sweet girl.

She is fine, and I am suffering.

+++

I wept in a circle of women. Cried into my friend's hair, and she held me like a child. I flushed and wiped my tears.

STOP IGNORING THE GRIEF.
STOP IGNORING THE GRIEF.
STOP IGNORING THE GRIEF.

Even if you don't understand it.
Even if you can't figure out how four years later it can rising again, like the oceans.
Even if you think she was just a baby who hadn't breathed yet and what could we miss.
Even if you think other people have stronger, more justifiable grief.
Even if.

Honor the sacred grief. Bow to it. Sit with it. Have tea with it. Bring to the market. Cry on it, baptize it with those tears.

There will be a bonfire. I am wrapping a little bundle in black fabric. It will contain sage and lavender and dirt and mugwort and all those things that no longer serve me. I will pitch the earth into the fire until it becomes air later pour the water on to the coals. I will tell the story of Lucia's birth, how light was born into darkness, and the longest night served me as well as it could. We birthed her in dimmed lights, and I saw purple. I wept on her torn skin and held her close, and walked to my car five hours later. My vagina pulsing from the pain of releasing her. My womb contracting still. Leaving her in a hospital to be dissected then burned was the hardest thing I have thought I would do in my life. I thought they may have made a mistake, even as I held her lifeless body and pushed her tongue into her mouth so she didn't look so dead. But every minute without her has been just as hard as that way. In the earlier days, it was harder even.


I belong to a circle of women in my everyday life and another one in my on-line life where we talk about the sacred, magic, other dimensions, meditation, the divine, ascension, the hard spiritual work and the easy. We create divine crafts, and offer our gifts to one another. But I miss grieving people. I want to create a circle of grieving women, to honor the elements, to honor the seasons, to honor our spirits bruised and battered and still walking from the sunset. If you are interested in something like that, let me know. Leave a comment, or send me an email. 

mourning moon

Every so often, I paint a picture of our family.

I draw it in pencil, then I stain it with watercolor. My old paint dries to my plastic palette. I reactivate it with water, and it gently spreads across the paper. I love the process of making this dried old smear of paint come alive, and useful again. I fall more in love with all of them when I sketch them out. It doesn't seem possible, but my heart center expands. I try to capture Thomas Harry's little mouth just like him, his smile which is both sweet and shy. And the way Beezus always tilts her head off toward her brother every time I pull out the camera. I put the lost babies on my dress like appliques. The raven and the ladybug.

My husband barely acknowledges it. He likes photographs, honestly. I'm not offended. But I like art, stacked together, making something like a symphony of images. Maybe he has made that concession for me, but he never questions the ever-changing art wall in my living room. Artwork from all the people I love, pieces I adore, and work that is significant to us as a family. When I explain it to people visiting, my husband seems just as interested in hearing the whys of each piece.

The process of painting our family has become an inadvertent yearly thing, or maybe every other year. I replaced the painting of me and the children from when Thomas was only two weeks old with this new one. There is Sam and the dog. We are all smiling and Sam's arm is around me. I almost put no background in this painting. Us on white, but in the end, I painted all that negative space yellow, because it is positive space too. The space of possibility. In the last painting I did, Spring 2010, everything was grey and mostly colorless. There was no Sam, or Jack the dog, or Lucia or Michael. It was just me and the kids, but mostly me. Sad, but grateful.

There is a circle of women that I have joined, both a virtual circle and another in real life, and my soul feels alive again. I see images for them--goddesses, angels, vistas I cannot control, pictures that have no context. As this sight opens in me, something else closes. Doubt and attachment, I suppose. I resided in a place of rejection, or rather, perhaps, I sought to paint the negative space around everything that I actually have first. Gratitude an afterthought. With this opening, the fear of alone closes.

This month in the healing circle, all the women chanted our own names, staying on the last sound.

Angieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. 

Like an Om. The vibration of our discordant names together resonated through my spine, my cheeks burned with the truth of it all. It felt close to the sound of God, or compassion. Many years ago, I remember my friend Sid and I reading poetry to one another. And she said, "When a poem is really good, my cheeks vibrate and I can feel it in my jaw." And that is what this felt like the vibration of truth.

I have never felt so free to be Angie, a person that I cut off for years with booze and resentments. The uncool believer in things unseen. The joyous clapper in a gospel choir. The psychic who believes in her gifts. The weird little kid who cannot wait to go on vision quest.

I admit that depression has seized me the last few months, crippling despair almost, but not quite. I couldn't keep up with everything, or anything, really. The process of letting go seemingly a paradox of impossible odds, almost Sisyphean in its absurdity. My health issues gripped me too, and then I was all body--injured and unsteady, weak and damaged. But the letting go was simple once I let go.

In the last thirty-almost-nine years, I have needed confirmation and witness to every single thing I have felt. Love. Friendship. Anger. Resentment. Fear. Kindness. Hurt. I sought it from everyone around me. It is only now that I have realized I do that. Tell my sad story, or my happy story, paint a picture of it for judgment, for a nod of understanding, for justification of my solitude.

I think of the end of the Prayer of Saint Francis as the talisman behind the talisman card I draw this morning, (perhaps I should see that one as the joker).


Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort that to be comforted,
To understand than to be understood,
To love than to be loved.

This last moon, the Mourning Moon, comes on me strong. I wrestle in the night with sleeplessness and exhaustion. They grapple, roll over me, kick me in the jaw. Athena asks us to look at the moon in June, what happened then. For now, you should see the completion of that cycle. What have we released?


The new baby was just dead then, and my breeding years died with him. (I am not lamenting, just stating.) I spent these months releasing one lousy resentment, understanding it, letting go. But it was a much bigger process than just that one resentment of that one person. It was about letting go of judgment of myself, of that person, of the situation, of Lucia's death and the repercussions of grief. I forget what the resentment was about some days now. That is magic. Truly and completely magic. But it is more than that.

In June, I went to a spiritual counselling session. It is not exaggeration to say that she changed my life. I didn't see it then, but now I can see this path she laid out in front of me, suggesting I take it. When I asked her about my circle of friends which seemed depleted and gone, she told me that those souls needed to leave, so that resonant souls could come in. She told me to release them. And I skeptically smiled. I got what she was saying, but the last few years of grief had still been an deeply painful process. I didn't have to release them, I thought, they left.

I needed rituals, prayers, candles, sage, meditations, dreamwork, and conversations with them that ended in hugs and a letting-go. I needed to truly release them, so I myself could be free. I sent them off with prayers of everything I wanted for myself. Those rituals of release and opening have brought friends, resonant vibrations, I suppose, people I love and trust and laugh with, where I can just be corny and psychic and recovering from the spiritual malady that has plagued so many of my people. I can see the cycle from the Flower Moon to the Mourning Moon as this journey of less of becoming who I am and more of releasing who I am not.

My cheeks vibrate with the truthiness of it all. When I paint my family, it is the beginning of the circle of trust and love and non-judgment, and it spirals out into the world. This is the talisman I draw--protection from painting what isn't.

talismans

Skulls line the far wall, and I suggest we start there. Each skull has a card with a name and ethnicity.

Unknown woman
Gypsy.
1932.

Many of the skulls are gypsies and it reminds me of a conversation earlier in the day when we talked about cultural differences. Jess told me gypsy borders on offensive, unacceptably demeaning to traveling communities. The skulls of the gypsies tell a history we all seem to know, and ignore. I say a prayer for the unknown gypsy, touch the labradorite around my neck as a talisman.

I take babylost friends here now among the bones and flesh. I don't know why. I cannot think of anything more morbid and fascinating as the Mutter Museum. It is the home of the stillborn baby. Before I had a stillborn child, this is what I thought when I thought of the stillborn. Babies in formaldehyde and dissected. Perhaps mothers who have held dead babies don't want to see other dead babies in jars, or skeletons from every gestational period articulated into little standing skeletons. Little (two month gestation) to bigger (postpartum). I stare at the one that would have been the size of the miscarriage, if we could have found her body in the bloody mess that poured out of me.

She should have been big enough to find, I whisper.

Earlier in the day, a psychic tells me my miscarried baby was a girl. It is what I thought, I reply. And then I realize in all his readings, the children are girls, even after he is told they are not. Feminine energy. Feminine energy, he repeats.

We see the jars of the stillborn. There is a perfectly normal, beautiful baby with the note, 48 twists in an umbilical cord, the most ever recorded. The baby is still attached. Jess says she is quite jealous of the mother of this baby. She can come here anytime and see her child. Me too, I say. And I am quite jealous, even though this baby has long outlived her mother.

A man the size of my husband says to his wife as she beckons him into a room of body parts, "No. There is a limit to what I am willing to see." And I wonder what disgusts him after the giant colon, and the brains with cancer. The babies? Or the mummified penis, desiccated at the ball sack, darkened into a leather along the shaft? It stands disembodied, next to a vagina in liquid with little wisps of reddish brown hair, and I blush that I notice. What would she look like? Her vagina on display without a uterus even.

We head into the gift shop filled with morbid, clever little gifts, like stuffed microbes with eyes, or hand drawn skeletons. I buy a deck of cards labeled Portable Fortitude, days later, sitting in front of my computer, I pick the three of clubs--protection from narcissism, then I laugh and laugh and laugh until the tears fill a jar. I pluck a strand of grief and watch it settle to the bottom, eyes closed and mouth open slightly. It is like a baby in a jar, terribly beautiful only to those who know terrible grief.

+++

When there is a new moon, I bleed. It falls out of me in a humiliating pool, and I hide it in the darkness of midnight. You know you have a good friend when you talk of menses and sex and you lack self-consciousness about wearing a bra. I am not wearing a bra right now.

We walk by a wall in the city that reads MEDUSA BAR inside a white arrow, and I point to it and ask if she recognizes the wall. I walk these streets with the babylost. I feel like a drink with grief. The Medusa Bar is boarded up with a condemned sign from the city. I pretend it isn't, and there is a secret knock, and a bird call, which opens the window from the inside.

Password?
Daughter-death.
You may enter.

We all have dead babies here, and I sip on a seltzer. The drink of the alcoholic, and I eye the bourbon. I miss grief drinking sometimes. It was so pathetic and grueling and horrible. So fucking bloody horrible. But it made sense. The jukebox plays no music. It is too hard to listen to music. We watch silent pictures from the 20s. A baby carriage rolls down the stairs, and I know the maggots are coming.

There is no secret bar of the babylost. I made that part up. It is a fantasy universe where we band together in a grief gypsy caravan traveling to the pilgrimages of the babylost. The statue of a grieving mother, the painting of a stillborn child from the 19th century, a museum devoted to medical oddity.In various large metropolitan areas, there are safe houses for people like us. They are marked Medusa Bar. 

Jess says to the tattoo artist. "I am here visiting Angie. We both have dead babies." And the painted lady stammers, I suppose, mutters an apology or condolence. It is not hard to see or talk about dead babies if you held a dead baby, or pushed one out of your vagina. It is what happened. Let us call things by their proper name. Lucia was not lost, or gone, or passed away. She was dead, and I wished for a jar to take her home. Every day, I would wake and wish her a "Good morning, darling," on the shelf while I made eggs and toast.

I pull another card. It is protection from divine indifference, and I smirk again.

heh heh heh.

august

Just a little disclaimer: I have been writing all month, just not able to finish edit and publish until this week, so that is why I am publishing a few posts right in a row. Particularly ones about August...

It is August again. When I first came into this community, it seemed all the people I met had August babies. I look on my perpetual calendar and nearly every day is filled with names of babies who died, and their mother's names in parenthesis. It is not my baby I am mourning. It is Roxy Jean that I mourn. It is Samuel Marc. It is Ezra. It is Hope. It is Georgina, Mizuko Star, Tikva, Madicken. It is Noah and Teddy and R. and Katie and Gabriel. It is Aiden. Emma and Chase. It is Lev and Wyatt, and it is Miller and your baby. I would have never met him, or her if they lived. I would have never met Roxy Jean. Yet I mourn her.

I anger quickly. It is my default emotion. My hookable place. When people would say to me, I miss Lucia so much. I would take her back from them.

"You didn't know her," I would spit out the thought, but remain silent. "What do you have to miss? She is mine. You can't miss her. She belongs to our whispers and cries in the night. Don't say her name. You go home to your babies. Leave me mine to mourn."

But I knew they could miss her too. They loved me. By loving me, they loved her. They could mourn her. They could take her death for their own too. She never belonged to me. It took me a long time to understand that.

Lucia never belonged to me.

It is the strangeness of this community of grieving parents. It is the oddity of meeting under these circumstances. Our babies died, then we became friends. In your mind's eye, you see your new friends parent. They are parenting their baby, even if the baby died. And these people you would have never known would be amazing fucking parents. You just know it, because you talk about what you miss about your baby, and what you would do with your baby, and how it would have been if you just insisted they take the baby out of you two days before. These people would be the traveling and reading books every night parents, and playing ball and creating art and listening to the Ramones. You mourn that they haven't been able to parent. Their first. Their second. Their fourth. Their nineteenth. You cry for their loss right alongside your own. It suddenly feels so immediate. You get so indignant.

THIS AMAZING PERSON LOST A BABY TOO!
IT IS SO UNFAIR!
THIS IS SO WRONG!

It snuck up on me. I started grieving a baby in Australia and one in England and one in California and one in Indiana. You grieve for all of the babies you suddenly know about, whose lives are suddenly missed in the world. I fast forward through all the lives never lived--artists and lawyers, athletes and poets, drunks and the person that can always make you laugh. The people I would have never known anyway, those people feel more real than my neighbors some days.

It used to be strange to get a friend request from someone just because their daughter died in the same exact way that my daughter died. It was strange years ago. Now, more than half of my friends on Facebook have dead children. That is how we met. I write status updates about it, and so do they, and we pretend that the rest of Facebook knows who the babylost are and why we post pictures of Day of the Dead and artwork and animal medicine that get followed by hearts, and likes, and loves, and thinking abouts. Probably you are reading and writing them too. And my earth people friends roll their eyes and hide my feed and sometimes mention how fatiguing it all is.  But I don't care. The unfriend button is lovely and invented for people bored with parents who talk about their children.

The thing is now I appreciate knowing what other babylost parents look like, and the babies, and the ones that were running around before the death and grief. Everyone looks so normal. And maybe I look normal. Sometimes I look at those pictures from the before-time...could I tell the difference if I didn't know her baby died? Could I tell when your baby died if you never mentioned it, and we were soccer moms together? Would we be friends if our babies lived?

+++

When I went back to Facebook after Lucia died, I would just write two word status updates.

three months.

I would write and people would make little hearts, or say HUGS! In two little words, it contained a novel of emotions: I need you. Help me. Save me. Understand I am not over this. My daughter died. I don't know how to live anymore. Send help. Send a cleaning crew. Or just send bourbon. But do something.

There was nothing to be done.

At about seven months, my friend posted something on her wall. She wrote about what it is like to be hit by a taxi and be wheelchair bound. It was a heartbreaking, honest, and darkly humorous piece. Turns out two months after Lucy died, she was hit running across the street in the city. I hadn't quite made it back to Facebook at two months out, so she hadn't heard my news, and I hadn't heard hers. We grew up a mile from each other, played softball together, wrote on the school newspaper together. She wrote a beautiful, touching email to me after I commented on her piece. And she told me her best friend Kenny had lost his baby in the same way I had lost my baby. She told me she grieved for Roxy Jean every day. Every. Day.*

I didn't think I could be more touched by her words. "And, hey, by the way, you and Kenny should be friends," she said. She disappeared again a few weeks later.

Two weeks before I gave birth to Thor, I received a few comments and then an email from a man explaining that he was my friend's friend. He was Kenny. The one she mentioned way back in the beginning. I was a year and a half out from Lucy's death.

Kenny and I started writing slowly. Both my childhood friend and Kenny are musicians and writers. It was a few weeks before Thor was born, so he told me about their new baby. The anxiety, the stress, sadness, grief, all of it from top to bottom was what I was going through right at that moment. He was so honest, and the respect and love he showed for his wife. And he made me laugh, and I made him laugh. And our writing picked up speed after Thor was born. Kenny seemed like the boy version of my grief.

I have always wanted to write about him, but it feels weird. Because men and women aren't to be friends. There may be the idea of sex. Or the idea of the idea of sex. But there wasn't. Because we were just grieving parents who liked to write with spouses who don't like to write. Spouses we love and are devoted to. So we wrote. We emailed everyday. Sometimes more than once a day, if we were both there and needing to talk. I read those email to Sam sometimes, and Kenny read them to his wife Terra too, because they were addressed to us all. There were no secrets. Sometimes I wondered if men and women just grieve on different timelines and where he was at three years was where I was at one and a half. Our grief paths intersected at just the right time. He said his wife's grief had changed, and I know what he means now. My grief has changed too now.

It felt cool to have a babylost pen pal. We don't write nearly as much as we did, but I think he is one of the most influential people in my grief journey. One of the people that abided, made me feel normal, made me feel understood, which helped me understand. And in that way, I will always be indebted to him and his wife, and always cry for Roxy Jean.

+++

I had this imaginary conversation with an imaginary person which is the conglomeration of a bunch of shit said to me by different people over the years when I tell people what I write about and do since my daughter died.

It must be sad to talk to so many grieving women.

No. It's not so sad. 

But isn't your grief enough?

My grief doesn't feel as bad when I'm talking to someone else about their grief. 

I don't understand. 

I have compassion for other grieving people. Their grief might get ugly, or mean, or angry, but it never seems unwarranted. Eventually, I forgive myself for my own ugly grief emotions. I develop compassion for myself.

But still, why keep talking about babies dying? Surely, you have forgiven yourself already. How can you listen to sad stories over and over? It seems depressing.

Forgiveness is not a sudden landing. It is a journey. I have to keep forgiving myself. The stories aren't sad to me. They are just birth stories, parenting stories, living stories. The story I hear is not about death. It is about how to live. But some people I know take breaks from the babylost stories to get through times when they need to focus on their own grief or joy.

See, that is what I mean.

Sometimes when you feel unlovable, you have to love someone else. I feel like I need to give back, because someone wrote about grief when they had three years, someone started a website, and wrote and made poetry and I cried and I missed a stranger's baby.

What do you get out of it, though?

Everything.

*My friend Faith wrote and sang this song about Roxy Jean's death, and shared it on still life 365, but I listen to it almost every day. Here it is again. I hope Faith or Kenny don't mind. Kenny also has a new album coming up which I will write about. He wrote a few songs about Roxy Jean, which are so exquisitely beautiful. 

Enjoy this one.

kindness

My friend Jess  wrote these lines over three years ago:


I’ve spent a year re-telling the same sad story. It’s so short too. How many ways can I write ‘My baby died, I never knew her, I wish I did.'

I think about those lines often, when I write, when I talk of her...Lucia died. I never knew her, I wish I did. It's true, you know. That is what all my work boils down to. Jess has a gift for cutting through the bullshit and writing the line that sums it all up.

I never knew her, I wish I did. So instead of not-knowing her and wishing I did, I write and paint and do other yummy, delicious stuff. I wear raven feathers and dance barefoot in my studio to pagan music. I meditate in suffering until it fills my chest. I breathe it in like unwelcome water. Searing pain and dull ache and the feeling of death. My lungs burst, a flood pocked with drowned moths and buzzards erupts from the hole left behind. I light wooden-wicked candles that smell of campfires and crackle like a language. I eat hundreds of life savers, but I am still lost.

There are people all over the world whose babies just died. They feel completely alone, like I did. I remember. I remember thinking, "I will always be that woman whose baby died." Because it used to matter to me which woman I was. I told a friend that, and she thought I was lying. Who would think that? It sounds like literary license, but it isn't. It is what went through my head. This will define me. I knew that this thing that just happened--being told my baby was dead in me--rewired my pathway. That I would have to tell this story over and over again just to make sense of it.


I bemoaned and wailed and called and keened and prayed and clucked and sighed. And then I conjured a community. They were conjuring me. Leaning over cauldrons. Adding eye of nice and aroma of clever. Chanting, "Let these people be babylost and not overly angel-y and maybe a little punk rock too. Let them be artists and magicians and conjurers. Buddhists and pagans and Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians. And full of compassion and patience and support."

There is a community of people whose babies died. Sometimes I write here for them. Sometimes I write here for me. But I am here. Over and over again. I have asked myself if it is healthy. If it is okay. If it is weird.  I asked psychics too and tarot readers and mediums and women that talk to angels. I asked them if it is healthy, but in me I know that I have to give back to this community who saved my life. I know that I need to keep writing here, painting here, talking about grief and daughter-death. I counted on someone three years out, ten years out, seven years out to tell me that what I was feeling was normal and that I was going to be okay. Not back to the way it was before, but something better even. Those people showed me a way to integrate this storyline into my life. Jess happened to write about this today at Glow. Even though I was writing a little bit about it too over here a quarter of the world away. I take writing about Lucia and telling this sad story seriously, because my story has changed. I can say with confidence and love that my daughter Lucia gave me the most amazing gifts. She taught me so many truths, so much beauty, so much compassion. She taught me about my weaknesses and strengths, and I have allowed her death to become the way to connect to thousands of people, because at first, I only allowed her death to cut me off from everyone.

We all grieve. If we don't now, we will one day. If you can find nothing to like about someone, nothing to feel empathetic about, use that as a starting point to grow compassion. Every person has lost someone. Every person will lose someone. Every person will be someone's grief.

Last Friday was the MISS Foundation's International Kindness Day project. For it, I offered to paint mizuko jizo for parents, friends, family, anyone who wanted one. I meant to do it in silence, but after an hour and a half of sitting through the massive tonglen session, then one painting group, it felt too isolating. Plus, the kids popped in, and I talked without thinking. I am human, and besides, it is enough to do thirty-five paintings. I wanted to listen to my music, the rain, sing, dance. I need to also be kind to me. Here is a video I made after Kindness Day. It explains about me and why I do this.

gratitude

After an early Thanksgiving dinner, the baby started whining and grabbing for my shirt. I try to limit breastfeeding to before nap, but I wanted to be still. To lie on my back and not speak. Nor smile, nor cook. Just be. So I grabbed the baby up took him up to bed, even though it was much too late for a nap. After days of preparation, and Thanksgiving pre-k crafts, and pictures, and airport runs, and no shower since Tuesday, I fell asleep. The baby never slept. He slid off the end of the bed and ran to the stairs and called for someone to rescue him. "DA! DA!" I slept a deep hard sleep that made me bleary-eyed and grumpy, but rested. I forgot where I was for a moment. When I woke, I forgot that I wrote about you. I forgot about Thanksgiving and the tree being gone and my daughter being dead. I just slept without conditions. Then I stumbled to the phone on my bedside table, and saw it was 430, and that I had an email. It was from Sugar on the Rumpus. And then I remembered how fucking grateful I am to be able to sleep.

Can I tell you a secret, loves?

I am grateful.

Not that she died. But that I had somewhere to go when she died.

That in your desperation, you created a place.

I pulse gratitude. It pumps through me. In waves. Circulates through the outer reaches of my body, the extremities of my being, even my swollen, grumpy fingertip still gets some thanking blood.

She died.

I don't say that lightly. I just say it because it happened, and I forget that is how we all met. Well, not quite forget, but I look past it. I am grateful for many things, after all, not just you. I spread my love around, Internet. I scoop up the baby and pretend to smell his tootsies, but I spend ten minutes just kissing each toe, and each cell of him. This week, with all this gratitude talk, I have been staring at him more and more. He lived. Do I say that enough? Do I sit in the grace of that enough? I am grateful for my health, my family, my house, my little dog who is quite big now. I am grateful for being an alcoholic and being able to fix the broken parts of me, because now I know what is wrong with me. I am grateful for my strong calves even if I can't buy boots easily, and my long nose.

I am grateful for so much, the solidity around the absence of her. And yet, when a Sugar column popped up in my email last week, asking people to submit their gratitude, all I could think of was you.

94 Ways of Saying Thank You.

Can you find mine? If not, here is what it says:

Dear Sugar,

I am grateful for the on-line community of grieving parents that formed a mini-country after their babies were stillborn or died early in life. At first, I felt exiled to their barren wintered land. Those brave, vulnerable souls saved my sanity, my humor, my baby’s memory. They saved my life. They keened with me. They expressed outrage and stomped their feet. They asked me to tell them the story of my daughter’s birth, even though they knew the ending. They looked past my daughter’s torn skin and white skin and told me she was beautiful. (She is beautiful.) They made me laugh when the last thing on earth I wanted to do was laugh. They shared their wisdom and their children and their unconditional support. They made me feel normal in a world and society unfit to deal with baby-death, dead baby grief, and the idea that healthy people have stillborn babies.

Angie

What are you grateful for, my loves?  
 (Oh, and I am totally answering Cathy from Missouri's question, but this is the first time I have sat to write in a few days. Will do that this weekend, promise. And answer emails. And comment on blogs. )

wild injuns

I am listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue and drinking black coffee. I gave up walking back and forth to the kitchen and placed the entire thermos on my printer. I am wearing my husband's boxer shorts, Uggs, a black t-shirt, and a deer antler strung on a delicate ball chain. The deer antler was found by this hippie in the Oregon rain forest. A women in Philly strings them and sells them. There is something lonely and strange about the antler. Yesterday, I called it a deer horn and people laughed at me. Then I told them I killed the deer with my bare hands and they stopped laughing.

I am painting this scene because I can't capture the particular mood I am in any other way. The mood I am in involved moss, antler, black coffee, men's underwear, and something not quite loneliness, perhaps solitude. I miss Jess in a way that I hadn't noticed before I could see her walking around my little house, talking about the differences between American and British supermarkets.

My truck is larger than one of those Tokyo pod hotels. Seven Japanese business men could sleep in it. When it is just me and the kids, I feel so bloody American. I am self-conscious about it in the parking lot of Whole Foods, and when I pick Jess up from the airport. We don't need this big truck, yet it feels like we need this big truck. We build things. We camp. I don't explain it. I am a bloody American.

There are things you can't imagine about a person when you read their words, like what they are wearing when they write, or how they take their coffee, or what kind of car they drive. But most things are unsurprising in a surprising way. The most surprising thing about her is that it felt like we spend the weekend together all the time. It felt like someone pressed the "pause" button on a conversation we started a few months ago and when stepped up into my large truck, we hit "play" again.

I don't know if it reflects where I am in my life, or the connection between Jess and I is just different, but I was remarkably unanxious to have her here for an entire weekend. I remember the first time I had coffee with another babylost mother. I was a month out from Lucy's death. My uterus was still hanging outside of my body. My breast dripped milk. My heart slow-danced on my sleeve to maudlin accordion music. I felt like I was on a first date. I emoted some inappropriate vocal responses between giggle and ugly cry. I was still wearing maternity clothes and cringing at babies. My hands shook as we spoke. Occasionally I wept into my latte. It was awkward, but cathartic. I had wanted a few weeks in between meetings to recover and prepare emotionally.

There was nothing maudlin or emotionally taxing about meeting Jess. It was easy in a way that makes me feel so much more easy than I actually am. We just hung out for a few days. We found an ofrenda in a bodega on ninth street in South Philly. We had a tarot reading from a women whose left eye rolled up in to her head right before she nailed something. Mostly, though, she went fishing with a hand grenade. I took her to the Italian Market where the cheese guys at DiBrunos swooned and flirted with her. You could see the gears shifting into another mode around her.

She speaks beautifully. She is stunning. This woman can talk about Shakespeare and gangsta rap as easily as a Pecorino. She really knows all about cheese, just like me. I know about cheese. Let me tell her everything I know about cheese. I have a tattoo of Montgomery Cheddar on my ass. I should show the beautiful British woman my ass.

We went to the art museum. I quietly mentioned if she wanted to see the dead baby picture, and she got excited. "WOULD I?!?"

And we stood in front, and took snapshots of it. We grew solemn and talked about the piece. We briefly discussed if we should get a tourist-y picture of our thumbs up in front of Rachel Weeping. (Come on, that's hilarious!) and a tween girl asked her mother why the mommy was crying, why the baby was laying still and grey as Jess and I walked away. Jess whispered in a perfect dead baby mummy cackle, "Because the baby is dead, Kid!"

I can't explain it. It just was perfect.

I am convinced there is a strange shop somewhere in the world. It is on an alley with junkies and drug dealers loitering about. When they notice us holding hands, they point to a door without a sign. There is a small makeshift shrine next to the door covered with marigolds and moss. The door has a rope of small bells on it. There, they sell small dead things strung on chains, and faux fur vests. They paint your face like a calavera, and pose you in front of 19th century paintings of babies dead from the small pox. The women dress you Nauhatl textile dresses with large chunky belts. You hold a large beeswax candle lit with the end of a cigarillo from the old cowboy photographer waiting for you to stand still. The old Mexican women make cafe con leche for you and add dried flowers to your hair while the mustachioed cowboy photographs you and your bestie from the dead baby world. He looks at the British woman, "How does it feel to be away out here where the wild Injuns grow, Kid?" And he points to me. We laugh, but try to pose with no expression. The women read your palm, and tell your fortune very specifically. She holds up four fingers. "En cuatro semanas, the dog will bring caca into the house." They feed you cannoli and cheese. And you will never want to leave.

When I find that shop, I can post pictures of Jess and I that accurately reflects the weekend, but until then, here is a photograph on top of the Philadelphia Art Museum steps. We didn't run up them like Rocky. That is the magic of the internet. We just made it look that way.

Tell me about our internet besties. Ever meet? Ever want to meet? What kinds of things do you think would be in the shop on that alley?




* That is from Benjamin Capps' book The Trail to Ogallala.

november

The baby keeps bringing me markers to open. I don't connect that the eighteen month old is asking me to open markers and then running away into another room. I am writing, dammit. I can't be distracted. Stare at the screen. Peck at the keyboard. Open a marker. I crouch, peering into my post-apocalyptic world. I don't know what genre this novel is. I lead a Girl Army. I have dreams. Except it is not me. It is the me of novel world. A better me. I tick off words. 739, 928, 1125, 1667 words to write today, leading into 50,000 this month on the same story. Must. Not. Divert. Focus.

My couch is beautifully decorated with little marker scratches. My writing for today is done and the marks are easily erased. The baby dances when I find his artwork. It seems a small price to pay for fifteen minutes of uninterrupted writing time in the morning. It is November again. I am writing a novel. In a month. NaNoWriMo. AND I am doing a piece of Art Every Day. I do post about each day's drawing at still life every day.

This year, my sister is writing her incredible book idea, which is so exciting to me because that means one day I get to read it. I actually finished my book last year. (It surprises me as much as you.) I am picking up where the story left off and writing the second part of the book. Or I am writing a new book all together. I never quite finished the book I started last year. I had intended on writing a memoir about my weird life, but the truth is, I want to get out of my head. I want to write about someone else all together. So it is the me after the apocalypse, if I don't die.

Last year, if I am being honest, writing a novel in a month and  painting one watercolor a day for a month for AEDM helped me understand myself more than accomplish anything concrete. I barely revisited the 50,330 words I wrote last year. And yet, every day, those words impacted my life. It is strange revisiting those emotions that come with the chill of autumn settling in. The crisp air blows into our lives and the late night writing jaunts settle onto my bones. Lucy's birthday steps into the background of the opening scene of my novel, stands still and staunch, waiting to be recognized. I am ignoring the imposing figure right now. I have a novel to write. On the other side of November is December. There are many emotions that comes with writing--elation, earnestness, feelings of inadequacy, strength, fears of failure. Last year, I pushed through those feelings with the false bravado of bourbon behind me. This year, it is just me and a novel without a plot quite yet developed. If I fail, at least I have some writing to mine later on. But I don't think I will fail. I am just crossing off another year of firsts. First novel without bourbon.

One part of NaNoWriMo that I love is the social aspect of it. I connect with writers, and we do sprints. We go into chat rooms, or chat via gmail, and use an online stopwatch. We write for ten minutes, the timer goes off. We compare word counts, and plot points, and then go back for another sprint. We do this until we hit our word count, and it is much easier to write when I am accountable to someone other than myself, the Dictator of Distraction, the Princess of Preoccupation, the Viscount of Work Avoidance. If you are taking on this fool task, write with me. Comment here, and let's connect that way.

In other news, my head is about to explode because tomorrow Jess from after iris and Glow in the Woods is coming for the weekend. TO MY HOUSE! I can't stop bouncing. I will get to hug her in real life. Walk around the city. Just hold onto her arm and say, "You are a real person. Not just the voice in my head who makes me laugh and echos my darkest thoughts." I think what I am looking forward to most is just being normal with her. A weekend gives you the freedom to have a long cup of coffee and chitchat like it happens everyday. We will talk of Iris and Lucy and art and work and marriage and just love her. Every bit of her.

music

I forgot to put music on. That was the first thing that popped into my mind after everyone was gone and I took off my shoes. I wrote little tags with ingredients for the food, placed miniature pumpkins in strategically festive spots, displayed the travel journal, bought two different kinds of plastic spoon, but I forgot to put on music for ambiance.

There was a hum, a collective chorus of love running through the day, maybe I didn't hear the silence before everyone left. There was shrieking and laughing and playing. I hadn't expected so many children, though I had a little sheet of paper with hash marks of the number of children. I knew technically how many children there would be, but then to see them run through the house dressed as princesses and kitty cats, painting and drawing and skipping and...

the house flickered.


I bought a box of yahrzeit candles with a plate of milagros and put a little sign next to it.  

Feel free to light a candle in memory of your little one(s).
Pick a milagro, an origami crane or stickers for your candle (if you are moved to do so.)

I didn't want the day to be maudlin. There is a joy here. A joy in this community that people outside of this community don't understand. I mentioned the Open House to a friend. I didn't call it a party. Perhaps I should have called it a party, but I suppose even I fear that we come across as too glib calling this thing a party. "You can stop by," I said. "There will be lots of food and really interesting, amazing people." And then I mentioned how I met everyone. She said she didn't think they could make it. I wanted to explain.

We don't cry. Well, nearly never. Almost rarely. We don't even really talk about death, or how it came to be that we gathered together facing a box of yahrzeit candles and a plate of milagros on a chilly day in October. Okay, sometimes we do, but it really isn't as sad as you think.

There is a joy here. It is a kind of gratitude-joy current. It runs through everything, like electricity, like power. I can't explain it. It is like coming home after being held a prisoner of war for a long time. "You," I want to say, "thank You. You are amazing." It is the simple act of you existing that make me thankful. I hold on to people a little too long, a little too tightly. I say thank you again and again. I ask if they are okay again and again. Not even, thank you for being here in my home for this open house, but just thank you for existing.  Thank you for being normal and beautiful and kind and even-handed and just and noble and open. Even though I hate it. I hate that other people, I hate that You, suffer the way we suffered, and yet, I am so grateful for you. To not feel alone, to have you as part of my extended family, to help us feel normal, to come to my house and thank me. And so I hold on to these women. I want to whisper, "Don't leave. Stay. Live here, if you want. We have room and don't stink (much). We can start a commune. We can light candles every day. We can sing."

With the joy, we don't speak of our grief, the debilitating days that don't come nearly as often as they used to, but maybe still come. I don't know, we didn't speak of it. In the early days, I found it to be so comforting that we didn't even need to speak of the birth and death, the day-to-day hardship. But when we did, it didn't kill conversation. There was no uncomfortable silence. No explanation. No disclaimers. No apologies for tears, or laughs, or not knowing what the hell to say. No wondering if this all was too fatiguing for a normal person. No nothing. Just part of our life. And so the candles became a way to speak of it without speaking of it.

Let us light a candle to remember the ones that aren't here, but who brought us together. Let us light a candle because if we do not speak our children's names tonight, they will still be heard. Let us light a candle because that is what we do now, light candles. Let us start music without sound.

The house hummed. I don't know the song, but it was joyful.

I was self-conscious at the amount of children running and playing. I don't know why. I think it is that moment of ache we all have, even those who have living children, when we see children hugging and playing and being good and picked up and parented. It aches. Each of these children, they are like my children. It hit me that they share something so powerful and important, that though we are all fumbling through this parenting after loss thing, perhaps we are doing something right  by bringing the kids together too. It reminded me of a few months ago. Janel and I hung out at her home with our girls. Janel's second daughter, Beatrice, was stillborn at 37 weeks. I had never met another Beatrice, and to meet one in this way, it seemed providence, something drawing us together. But it occurred to me that she might not feel the same way. I asked her if she minded her name being spoken to my daughter, and she said no. When our girls played, her two girls seemed to say Beezus' name before every sentence.

Beatrice, come to my room.
Beatrice, let's run.
Beatrice, watch this.
Beatrice, let's be lions.

And Janel said, "I think they like to say it to a living girl." And it broke me open and filled me with gratitude that I have met such amazing, compassionate parents in my life. We teach each other how to get through this. That day, when we sat together for lunch, Janel's four year old daughter asked Beezus if she had a sister. Beezus looked at me, and I said yes for her. And then I said, "Beezus' sister died." Janel and I had spoken about how we navigate parenting the siblings of our dead daughters. We have talked about how we speak of death, so I knew that her daughters expected the truth from me, not platitudes, or mysterious words about lost children and passing sisters. And she asked, "How did she die?" And I said, "She was stillborn." And this look came across her face, like she was both amazed and excited. Then she screamed, "WE HAVE A STILLBORN BABY TOO!"

There is a joy here. There is a joy in the collective space between us, even if it is borne of grief. There is a kind of joy in screaming in excitement, "I HAVE A STILLBORN BABY TOO!" We eat and talk about jobs and families and sickness. The kids run through the room and cry and ask for more food. Even Thor cried when Sarah's son left, then again with Janel's son had to leave. His baby friends are going home. He pointed and cried. "Boo hoo, and they have stillborn siblings too."

The candles were a living thing even though they represented the dead. They sang the song behind our day. They warmed the space, they warmed our party. After most everyone left, except TracyOC and family (T. and C.) we sat in the living room with the candles talking and laughing. The light and warmth was so beautiful, even more beautiful that I thought they would be. A powerful unspoken presence in the house. I didn't see one person light a candle, not all day, and yet there were ten lit at the end of the night. It seemed magical. As we sat, talking about the ritual of it, T. said each candle would be a child running around the house. Ten extra children, where would they go? Would we have had room? It stopped me. It sounds strange to say, but sometimes I forget that she would be two and a half, almost three now. And that two and a half, almost three, has a depth and a breadth and a weight and a height and a personality. I miss a being who would be running and playing princess kitty cat. I miss Lucy. It gets so abstract in my writing, a moment in time and space where everything changed, yet stayed exactly the same.  But she was a person with a smile and a light.

I light a candle and the candle is a warmth that feels like her. And all those candles together were kind of joy here. The joy is like a song without words. The hymn of community, I think, or maybe that is too simple. Maybe it is just a feeling without a descriptive. A current that is the most beautiful silent opera in the world.

A special thank you to everyone who came to my home and made the Open House to see the still life 365 travel journal and share in food and friendship. I want to shout out to everyone and just declare my undying love. But you know, already, right? RIGHT?!?!?! And all that didn't. We missed you (and talked shit about you the whole day [I'm just joking.])

questions thirteen through fifteen: gurus, relationships and remembering.

Nerissa: Do you ever feel like a babyloss/grief guru? Not like you are an expert or you are totally enlightened about it all. More like, people (like me) come to you and seek your advice, even though it's not necessarily advice that you give so you are like a guru... Do you know what I mean? Are you ever overwhelmed at how many people share their stories with you and come to you in such a desperate time in their lives?

Thank you for that question, even though it feels a little weird to answer. Okay, firstly, no, I never feel like a babyloss or grief guru. I am just a mother who lost a child. I like to write. I like to connect with other people. And I majored in religion at university. I did that because I have always been seeking the answers to really large questions about the universe, God and human nature. Losing my child made me question everything I believe in and everything anyone else believes in. It also strengthened some really fundamental understandings of the world. I work those things out in a public place like Glow in the Woods and my blog because I crave discussions about these aspects of our losses and grief, so I never ever feel like I am lecturing, I always feel like I am having a conversation.

But more to your point, no. I am never overwhelmed with people sharing their stories with me. I always feel privileged and honored to be trusted with someone’s story and baby. I never take it lightly, but I also don’t feel weighted down or saddened by it, necessarily. If that makes sense. People ask me, particularly people not in this community, if it depresses me to hear about losses and grief. No, it doesn’t depress me. Maybe it is because I see grief as another expression of love. I am always amazed by the strength, compassion and love of the men and women I meet along this journey. Most of the time grieving parents ask me about Lucy as much as tell me about their baby. It was a surprise of talking to people freshly in this community. That is compassion and generosity. At someone's worst moment, people seek to listen and comfort as much as to be heard and seek comforting. And you are right, I just share my experience. I am always amazed at the wisdom of newly bereaved women and men. Their insights usually help me process some aspect of my own grief and experience.

When I first came into this community, I wrote to people a few months out from me, or years.  And I sought refuge in blogs and other women's writings. I also tapped into the community at LFCA and connected with other women in other experiences around pregnancy loss, like infertility or secondary infertility or recurrent miscarriage, but I focused on clicking, (sending stories to LFCA) with Jen about stillbirth and neonatal loss. Truly, being compassionate to another human being in the same situation as me helped and helps me understand and forgive myself for my daughter’s death and make peace with the decisions I have made along the way. They have not all been good decisions or healthy ones, but seeing someone else in their vulnerability and early grief helps me process where I was. If that makes sense. And to understand that I did the best that I could.



Cullen's Blessings (Leslie): How do you keep Lucy's memory alive for Bea and Thor? What did you do on the first anniversary of Lucy's death?

Thank you for your question, Leslie. I sort of answered this question earlier, but I will touch on it again.

The short answer is that I just talk about her, like I would anyone in our family who died. I don't harp on her, or bring her up continually, but I just bring her in naturally. Sometimes I tell the kids, "You have the same nose as Lucy did." And Thomas does. Beezus is starting to grieve her, because she is starting to realize what death means and that she had a sister. She really talks a lot now about sisters. When she asks me a question about death or Lucy, I just am honest. We do have a place where we light a candle and some incense or sage, the warmth and light from that candle feels like a presence in our space. I do it when I miss her, or just want to remember her. Sometimes the children collect things for Lucy's altar. All in all, we try to make it as non-weird as possible.

Lately, Beezus has been singing this song around the house. She is at an age where she makes up songs, and it goes "Fly, Butterfly, fly." Over and over. Sometimes the fly is float ("Float, Butterfly, float.") I asked her about the song, where she heard it, and she told me that she made it up. She sings it whenever she misses Lucy. I never associated Lucy with butterflies or anything, but Beezus made that connection for herself. I told her that when I see ladybugs I think of Lucy. So sometimes, when she is singing the song, that gives me an opening to ask her if she is missing Lucy and talk about how we hold the ones we love after they die. I also read When Dinosaurs Die if she has questions that are hard for me to answer..

We had a very low-key day on Lucy's first death/birthday. We napped and went out for sushi on her first birthday, because that is what we did for everyone's birthday back then. I cried often. I took a bath. Lucia died on December 21st, was born December 22nd, so three days before Christmas. I wish I could say that I have something set to do every year, but I suspect it will change every year. The first birthday seemed so important, I couldn't figure out what to do. I thought about it a ton, actually. I bought candles to light, wrote poems to read, and I did none of it, because it didn't feel right.

Because she died on Winter Solstice, last year we did some solstice-y type things, like light a candle for each window through the house. And say a poem for Santka Lucia. Talk about the lightness and dark. We ate a feast. Last year was also an eclipse, so my sister and I went out in the middle of the night and watched the eclipse in sleeping bags. That feels right and good to stay up all night, light a bonfire, and honor the seasons of change.  So, I think those rituals are going to stay in place now. I try not to worry about setting up something forever. I just do what feels right in the year and place we are all at. Beezus really wanted me to make a cake for Lucia last year. I am not a baker. But I did make cupcakes for her.

I hope that helps. I'd love to hear what other people do or did.



Ines: What's it like to be on the other side of the fence - of babyloss and sub-pregnancy and parenting after loss or through loss dealing - one side and the other side - with women who suffered loss of motherhood alltogether with their loss who have wanted a child or children and can't or don't get to? Do you feel the divide? Have you lost "friends" who "unfriended" or un-followed you? How do you feel about that? Would there be anything you want these women to know or would there be something you would do differently in retrospect? How do you feel about the question? Have I forfeit my chance to win -the gnome book? :-P I loved that book when I was a child and miss it like crazy just seeing the front page on the link you posted.

Ines, it is never too late for a good question, though I did pick a book winner last week. Maybe the gnomes will find their way to Ireland. Thank you for asking it, though I actually think this may be the most difficult question for me to answer. I don't want to sound like an asshole, and yet I also want to be honest. I am walking the razor's edge on this question, so I will try to be as honest as possible with as much love as possible.

I don't think of myself as now on the other side of any fence, honestly. I had a living child when my second child died, so for many people, my experience of loss was already different than their experience losing their first child. So, if there is a fence, I was already on the other side of it. When I began writing, I wrote this blog to process how to parent one child while grieving another. To have an outlet to write about grief and suffering and my religious ramblings and parenting a toddler and everything else in between. Also, I began writing to become part of a community and to connect with other women who were also grieving. And so both Beatrice and Lucia were part of what I imagined I would talk about here. I have never sold a bill of goods that was different than simply my life--all my children and all my parenting and all my experience. The joy and the grief. Perhaps that in and of itself was enough of a reason to not read my blog, or have a reason to identify out of my experience of grief for some people. After Thomas Harry was born, perhaps that divide grew larger, the wall between me and people who lost their only children absolutely impervious.

And that is absolutely fine. Do I feel the divide? No, not particularly. I see us all as grieving parents. And yet, I acknowledge that my experience is different from someone grieving infertility, the loss of motherhood, or recurrent miscarriage. It is an entire added level of grief I don't experience. There are very few people in this community whose experience is exactly like mine. I ache for my friends who want children and, through no fault of their own, struggle with conceiving, the grief of losing children or not getting pregnant at all, the loss of motherhood and their kids and the complex emotions of relating to people who they genuinely like who have living children. I cry with them. I root for them. I try to remain present with them. But I don't know what that is like. Any distance they need physically or emotionally doesn't stop me from loving them fully. I guess what I am trying to say is: I don't take it personally if someone can't be my friend, or read my blog. I want them to be happy and find comfort wherever it is and in whatever form it comes.

Have I lost friends, lost readers with the birth of my third child? I would be surprised if I didn't. I don't catalogue readers or followers. I don't know how many followers I have. I don't know who unfriended me, or who didn't. If you hold a resentment against me, I don't really know about it. (You can email me about it, though.) I think that it is absolutely natural to grow out of blogs, or move on from a blog writer. People cycle through blogs according to what they are going through and what they need. It never offends me when and if someone doesn't read a post I write, or stops reading my blog all together. It doesn't hurt my feelings when a post gets no comments. I am a writer. I am used to rejection, edits, rewrites and insults.

In the beginning, I did care. I wanted to know who read what, if my friends or family were stopping by, and then who were the grieving women coming to visit. I worried about what I wrote and how people took it. I started different blogs for different parts of my life. I tried to control your experience of my writing and my life based on what I imagined would be hard for you if you were going through infertility as well as loss. Then I just felt kind of started feeling funny about that.

I got to a place, and maybe that place I got to coincided with me getting sober and being more honest about my suffering and where I am in my life, but I got to a place where I felt like the reader needs to be responsible for his or her own experiences in the world. I cannot protect the reader from my life. I cannot guess what is and isn't hard to read. I cannot underestimate my reader's emotional ability to handle my happiness or my grief or my daily life. That is fucking insulting of me. How presumptuous of me. How arrogant. Now I work under the premise that people will stop reading if they don't like what they read. I think self-preservation should be the foremost guiding principle of what anyone reads. If a blog hurts to read it, stop. I certainly stop reading blogs, then I pick them up again, then put them down again. I also read blogs of people who have a different experience than mine. I read a lot of blogs of women who suffer through infertility as well as loss. I read blogs written by drunks and addicts. I read blogs of writers and artists.  I read blogs of architects and I have never built a house in my life.

You know what? There is also a whole other set of readers, people who have never lost a child, who can't relate to this blog from top to bottom. But I relate to those people in every day life outside of my blog. I talk to them. I laugh with them. I share experiences. Listen, what I am trying to say is that I am not three people. I am one person who parents living children, who is an artist and writer, who birthed a stillborn child, who rides bike, who is a wife and sister and daughter, who is a Buddhist and a Catholic. I'd love to combine all those parts of me into this blog. I am doing that gradually. I don't know. This space is confusing to me too. I don't know how to be here all the time. I am still figuring it out. I hope that if I lose readers, I don't lose friends.

So, what do I think I would have done differently? I don't think I would have ever split my blog into my everyday art blog and still life with circles. I want them all to be the same blog. I would have just been more authentic about this experience of grief being part of my life, a simultaneous experience with joy. I wish I would have written about my spiritual wrestlings a tad more frequently, because I think people go through that too. So, I guess I would have stopped worrying about who is reading here a long time ago and just been myself.

You asked me, Ines, "Would there be anything you want these women to know or would there be something you would do differently in retrospect? How do you feel about the question?"

To be frank, this question makes me feel like I am missing something. Did I offend these women? Did I upset them with the birth of my child? Did I upset them with something I wrote? I don't know. I understand if it is hard to read about my children. I understand. No one needs my blessing to not read in this space, but if you want to know if I will still be friends with you even if you cannot be present with my parenting posts, absolutely. It is important, drastically important, to protect your heart. So I would say the same thing I always say.

I love you. Go if you need to go. Come back if you want to come back. I will always be here with open arms. Loving you. Email me privately and we can have a friendship separate from my blog. I will always be here for you in whatever way you need me to be.

Ironically, as I was writing this post, my arm was resting on some papers. I picked them up to move them, and a postcard from please be still fell out of the pile that said, "We Are All Connected." Suffering is suffering is suffering. Grieving is grieving is grieving. Love is love is love. We grieve for different things, but we grieve. I think it is a universal form of suffering that every person can relate to, even if they haven't lost a child, or they lost their only child.

If you want to clarify the question, I would be happy to be more specific if it relates directly to something I did at some point in time. Otherwise, thank you to everyone who asked me questions this month. I love answering questions because it helps me to clarify these things in me, and it helps direct my writing when I am feeling scattered and unsure of myself, and I have been feeling scattered and unsure of myself. I hope everyone writes on these topics and links to their blogs. Much love to all of you.

On compassion

After reading Sarah's post, I was thinking about the word compassion. I use that word all the time. It is the main quality I wish to bestow upon my daughter. But I have never really looked it up before. So, I did:

–noun
1. a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

Even the definition makes me feel deeply that the universe is a good place...It isn't that I don't know what this word means, but I wanted to be reminded of all the elements of it. Deep sympathy. Sorrow for another. Desire to alleviate suffering.It isn't simply one of these qualities or feelings, it is all of them together. That is powerful medicine. The synonyms that came up are commiseration, mercy, tenderness, heart, clemency. Wow.

I asked Sally the other day how she found my blog, and she said Sarah sent an email to a few people. Then she honestly said, "I must admit, when i got the one about you I was like 'fuck not another one' almost as if, my heart is full, i can't support any more." And honestly, I don't know how she did, yet grateful that she is. We all have an the exhausting job of mourning, of sadness, or existing. That is enough, like that folktale I wrote about once, that is enough work. But all of these women come together and sound the call. I imagine it sounds like a great wail across the world, hitting San Francisco, Australia, Germany, England...like the bat signal, only a loud, deep guttural cry only a mother experiencing the death of their child knows, to support another new mother of another dead baby. Compassion, indeed. And the effect is tangible. I am here and ready to offer my arms, my ears, my tears, my memory for the next woman, even as I beg the universe that there will be no more women...This beautiful, sad, cyclical community thrives on compassion, and proves the extent in which our hearts are capable and ready to love.

I don't know why I am writing about this this morning, when others have written about it so well. But hell, I will probably write about it a thousand times again. But it got me thinking about these stories. Our stories. I devour babylost stories. Before I could find my own voice, I relied on the stories I read of others able to somehow breathe another day. They told my story. They put words to the anger, the pain, despair, grief, guilt...Some of those women went on to birth again and showed pictures of their beautiful children. Women that wrote stories about a small joy in life, like the first flower popping after a long cold winter (hey, my front lawn is littered with crocus). Stories about women who were finally emerging back into the world, a little pale and clammy, but eager for sunlight on their skins. I wanted to read about survival, especially from women who experienced the stillbirth of their child like me. The most powerful posts for me are the ones where the emotions are so raw, so honest that they floored me, somehow made me laugh a little, but left me slack jawed and crying all at the same time. Where there are no other words to describe the experience except fuck, or wow. I vicariously live through those happy times, laugh at the rants, feel a great satisfaction at pure raw anger and vitriol, and I cry with the sad.

Before Lucy, I didn't know you existed. I didn't know about your children. I'm sorry. I should have known. The world should know about all of our babies. But now, I think their names constantly along with my daughter's name. Name after name, like couples, I cannot think about a mother without thinking about her son, or daughter. They go off in my head interminably. And I think there is part of me that is collecting these names. One day, when they hand me a microphone somewhere, and I will say them all together, in a long litany, so those thousands of ignorant fools out there, of which I am and was one, will know about our babies. And I will say each name, "Angie and Lucia. We will not forget." Standing tall, trying not to cry, and say them all, until I drop...or they pull me off stage and tell me this is the annual book festival of Collingswood...

But I just thought I should remind anyone who might think of themselves as not compassionate enough, your comment on one woman's stupid blog might change her outlook for the day, it might change a tide in Philadelphia, it might change the world.

To being on-line

Aaaaaaaaaah, I just feel like skipping down the street, pointing to random groups of people and gloating, "I'm back on-line, bitches!" Of course, that kind of hubris is probably what caused my computer issues to begin with. Still, my sweet laptop is back in my arms, and I feel much better. Last Wednesday, my computer just ceased being able to get on-line. The geek squad saved me from madness.

It was an incredibly powerful experience to be off-line for a week. I felt utterly bereft. I have set up such an amazingly wonderful community of mothers on-line through blogs, forums, email, facebook...I just felt so down, lonely and sad. A vital part of my support system was instantly gone. I really missed talking to Molly, whose son Colden died four days before Lucia. I can't even catalog the ways in which her emails soothe me. I missed reading everyone's blogs. I miss surfing ridiculously vacuous crap just to silence the inner voice during naptime. I missed Scrabble. I just didn't realize how important it has all been to my sanity. On top of that, being a stay at home mama can be a little alienating and lonely without staying connected to other big people throughout the day. [The only up side was that my house was much cleaner. (So very sad.)]

The day after I took my laptop into the shop, I had a sudden horrifying realization that I hadn't backed up any of my writing, or pictures. I began ticking down all the things I would lose. The only pictures that exist of Lucia were on my laptop. Lucy's birth story. Countless pieces I have written about this time of mourning, and the death of my daughter. I got seriously frantic. I cried on and off thinking of a world without these things. I called the geeks to ask if I could come and back everything up, and they assured me that it not would be necessary. They tried to convince me that they would take care of it, if it came to that. I simply wanted to yell, "But you don't understand, my baby died." In some situations, I would have completely said that, actually, but these are eighteen year old boys working as computer dudes for a while. I didn't want to scare them. I was already being an insane person calling every other day, even though they told me it would be a week. It was a difficult exercise in trying to shake those Type A, controlling parts of my brain. Because despite their assurances, I had strange fantasies of speeding towards the Best Buy, jumping the counter, pushing those black-tied geeks aside, grabbing my laptop, viruses and all, and running home, maniacally laughing. I didn't do that. I waited. Still, I couldn't exactly quiet the anxiety. I spent one naptime writing "lucia paz 12/22/08" sixteen hundred times on a sheet of paper in various hand writings. I just kept thinking about losing my pictures of Lucy. I'm not sure I would have recovered from that. Why do I keep thinking that one more thing will push me over the edge? When the next thing happens, I am still here. I am still surviving. You would think I would have more faith in myself by this point, but maybe subconsciously I realize that it is such a tenuous string that holds my sanity together, I can't imagine it being strong enough to endure any more loss.