I read this Buddhist adage that says, "The cause of death is birth."
Yeah, unless someone isn't born yet, then the cause of death is sex.
I have this outpouring of appreciation for the support we received this year around Lucia's birthday. There is no rhyme or reason to grief. It stalks, pounces on its time, not yours. I reached out and said I wasn't doing well. That act itched me. Eczema stretched the length of me. I jittered and rubbed myself against old bare trees. Scratching the vulnerability away, but it stayed. I needed to feel it to remember my strength.
One Thursday in the middle of the month, I was cooking arroz con pollo for a friend, which is very much like paella, except with chicken instead of chorizo and seafood. And the thought occurred to me that I need wine for the rice. Wine goes in paella, and arroz con pollo and my mouth. At least it did before I quit drinking. Back then, I began drinking when I began cooking. I was alone with the children, and I searched the cabinets and found a bottle of unopened pinot noir.
My heart opens like a lotus, calls for vulnerability as her food. There are moments when only faith stands between me and a drink, or me and an angry word, or me and my death. Grace surrounds me as I stared at the bottle. I don't know if I would have drank a glass or the bottle or nothing. But it caught me up, suddenly afraid of slipping. Suddenly aware that wine is not necessary in any dish I cook now. Cooking and drinking. Drinking and cooking. They are all tied together for me.
Later in the day, I went into a church basement, too overcome to speak, I cried, buried my face in my hands, deeply grieved and full of want.
My daughter is dead four years. My daughter. My sweet sweet girl. And sometimes there is nothing to do but drink. And I cannot drink.
Women held me. All week I cried into women's shoulders, in their hair, on the phone, in their inboxes. This year the grief lessened. I felt a lightness of being that seemed so far away in the last three years. There is magic in my life now. A seed of connection to the Divine, a moment of breath between declarations of her state of mortality. Then the week of her death and birth came, and it was like it happened yesterday, or perhaps even that very day. But I feel protective of me right now. I mother myself now. Care for me, allow me to rest, give me the space for solitude and vulnerability and bad behaviour, yet let me curl up and weep. I feel worthy of protection and grace and connection to the Divine.
January 10, I will be sober two years. My daughter dead four last week, and my body creaking into year thirty-nine on the fourth of January. It all makes me feel old and brand new, like a fawn, spots like code across my back, and my legs not quite strong enough to hold my own weight and yet hours away from running.
These old fingers peck and strum and emote. I always sing, even though I am a terrible singer. Gilda Radnor took singing lessons in the last year of her life, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She always wanted to sing and so she went to a teacher. She didn't do it for a role, or to sing for anyone. Just for herself. Some weeks, I sit and fantasize about that. Would singing be my wholly selfish indulgence? How self-conscious I have always been about my voice, but how deeply satisfying it is to sing loudly. And in the end, I think I sound fine when I'm alone and no one is listening. It is an ego koan.
What is the sound of Angie singing alone in the forest? Beautiful.
In the time before mirrors and you tube and the eternal quest for self on the internet, did we judge what we looked like? Were we wrinkled and hated it? Were we too fat? I look at myself without mirrors and feel beautiful, fine, goddess-like some mornings, then I have a conversation with an angry someone about fat people, and realize how susceptible I am to the mirror of other people's words. Frankly, I'm embarrassed about that too.
I took my guitar with me to my mother's and unself-consciously sang songs with my daughter, or alone. It felt delicious. My family was emotionally tender and my daughter and I made the room cry. Even I cried. Grief singing. I couldn't go on. It had been ten years since my mother heard me play and sing. Back when I could only play Doll Parts then Jane Says on an unplugged electric guitar, and I whispered the lyrics, if I sang them at all. I admit now my punk rock roots have morphed into songs by Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Leonard Cohen, Stones, the Velvet Underground.
These rough fingers run down my husband's cheek and he smiles.
I love when you play guitar.
You do?
Yes. It feels like home.
My soul callouses are worn down, softened. It makes hurts more hurt-y, but it is for the best. I'm not going to work on those cynical chords that recreates the hardness I wore proudly. Sam comes out of left field right after the dude and the conversation about fat people, just when I am feeling shitty and isolated, and says something amazing. He kisses me and tells me that I am gorgeous. Then he asks me if I feel lucky that I am not married to that man.
Oh, you are a mean old daddy, but I like you.
My husband is growing a beard for me and took next week off. After months of sixty hour weeks, I will scratch his whiskers and sit on his lap and call him our Old Man. I keep singing these songs about heartbreak and none of them are about what I think they are about. They are about something beautiful and hopeful.
We wanted to take a trip during his time off. Iceland, we begged. Then just to drive west. To California. The sequoias that swallow cars. Or into the cold rain forest, bed down on some mossy nook, make a sad fire, and sing songs about how we are each other's sunshine. I guess it is kind of square to talk about Joni Mitchell and making a fire. I don't care anymore. I gave up feel self-conscious about squareness when I turned thirty-eight. It didn't work out. The trip, I mean. Travel and gypsy campers, but the thought was enough. We have bills after all, and Christmas gifts. We have this home we built with its strange long horns and collection of small dead insects..
I pull a talisman card and it says, "Protection from cynicism." I need that more than any prayer. Maybe that is the prayer:
Help me release cynicism and cranky irony and sarcasm.
Help me let go of the bitter ennui that is the bedfellow of the eternally cool.
Let me release the cynicism about where I fit in.
Help me remember that I fit in here. With the bearded man and his barefoot kids dancing to Joni Mitchell's love songs, the ones that sound exactly like break-up songs.
I bought a horn pitcher at an antique shop. It was for my husband's birthday, but on the day, I didn't give it to him. It seemed a little strange, and besides what will we do with this thing? I put it on my altar, and today I had the strong urge to give it to him. So I did. He told me it was perfect to have in our collection of weird antique things.
I didn't start out writing about my husband. I read the Shack this week. I cannot tell you how many times it has been recommended to me, the pluralist babylost gypsy. I'm not sure what I think of it, but forgiveness and love and the ideas of judgment were more than appealing. And yet there was this deeply cynical part of me that felt self-conscious reading that book at all. It is the wanting-to-be-cool part of myself. Can I divorce that from what I felt about the book? As I read, that part reared up and wanted to tell the book to Fuck off, and throw it, and listen to music that no one has heard of yet. And so I am still parsing out what I think, but I keep the talisman across my chest.
This week I began meditation paintings other than jizos or about grief. It felt strange and liberating and fulfilling. In that space of letting go of cynicism, it made me feel like I was finally be authentically me. And a year ago, painting angels would have felt like anything but the me I thought I was. I am working on releasing cynicism, and non-forgiveness, but it is a long hard road. I keep singing California, even when not at the guitar, and it makes me miss a place I never loved, and a woman I never looked like.
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.
Last night, someone reminded me that I had eighteen months sober. It is funny to be reminded. I wrote on TracyOC's blog that in the past, my periods of sobriety I marked off my calendar with a big black sharpie, like I was in prison. I counted days like I was dying of sober. So to be reminded tonight of how long I haven't drank tasted delicious.
It seems like yesterday that I was wondering if I had a problem with drinking while simultaneouslytrying to figure out how to stop drinking, (which should have been an answer to the first question) and then later, if I should write about all these shameful revelations here. Being an alcoholic is not shameful to me anymore. I protect myself in my daily life from earth people finding out about sobriety, because many many people still believe that alcoholism is a moral failing. I happen to believe it is a disease, and don't blame myself anymore than I would blame someone for their asthma.
On a day-to-day basis, sobriety is the most important aspect of my life. More than anything. It is ironic how little I write about recovery here, considering I am constantly speaking about it, talking in front of groups of people about my drinking, writing about it in other places. Oh, it is hidden in the words, woven into my narratives constantly. But I don't frequently write about sobriety as a way of life.
Last week, I visited my mother's house and found pictures of my sister and I as children. In every picture of my dad, we played spot the beer and cigarette. It made us laugh, and then I thought about that later in the night, and it wasn't so funny. I don't remember a day of my childhood in which my father did not drink. I no longer think of his drinking as a moral issue, or act like he had much choice in the matter. It just reminded me how important it is to not drink. If I can remain sober, my children won't know what it is like to live with a drunk. That keeps me going some days.
Someone said to me that I would never have gotten sober if Lucy hadn't died. I believe that. Lucy's death was the storyline of my drinking. Before that, my father's drinking and subsequent disease was the storyline, and in between there, cheating boyfriends and work and good times and bad times and there was always a storyline that had nothing to do with me liking the feeling of having all my emotions completely obliterated.
I said a prayer today. It was the most simple, most beautiful prayer.
I cannot tell you what the notes, condolences, comments, and the emails we have received have meant to us. We feel held. We feel loved. We know we are not going through this alone. Thank you. Oh, loves, thank you.
I lost enough blood during the miscarriage to be still quite weak. As I physically heal, I am just very present with this grief and this broken old body. It helps. It is helping to deal with the immediacy of my physical suffering. I know that it will transition to something else when I am alone with my head and the hormonal changes, but for now, it is a small gift to be there.
With my lack of energy, I am channeling all this grief energy into a project for another grieving mama. God, that gift helps so immensely. I meditated tonglen yesterday. Sometimes, it is easier to do tonglen when you are suffering, in my experience, because I can start from that place of saying, "Because I feel this way, I know others feel this way. May I feel it so others do not have to feel it." Sometimes the suffering is so self-absorbing, that you cannot get out of your own suffering. Then the meditation should be for yourself. I am not there, thankfully. Gratefully.
As always, the most difficult aspect is watching Beezus grieve. We are holding each other, sleeping together, crying, and talking about Lucia more. But she misses this little baby that never was. To Beezus, she was a sister already. As I can find comfort and solace in science, statistics about miscarriage and early loss, and all those swirling adult things, Beezus lost her little sister. Again. She is so much bigger this time, and I can see all her grief in those tears. I hold her, my eyes welling up despite myself.
I know, mijita, I know. It is unfair.
We buried the baby last night under Lucia's tree. We lit a fire in our small fire pit and dusted it with sage and cedar, sea salt. I prayed for comfort and release from grief for my children. We read a prayer that I love. Hopi Prayer for the Soul's Graduation. Chris and Lani shared it for Silas' memorial, and it felt right last night. I cried, for the first time overtaken by tears completely, letting her be the wind. The dew. The swift uplifting rush of quiet birds. Little Lucia too. It seemed for her too.
Thank you for your thoughts at this time. Thank you for keeping us in your prayers and surrounded by a white light in your mind.
I also would like to select a winner from the last giveaway post for Still Standing. The winner is RENEL! Renel email me, so I can paint your meditating mama or an enso or whatever you would like. It will help me. I promise.
His name isn't Thor, but when I write about him, Thomas Harry just doesn't quite fit. It is too adult, too grounded. And yet in life, as he runs around the house, I can't quite call him Thor.
Thor means something in this space. Thor is my hope. Thor is the baby I imagined alive. Thor is my dream of a preternaturally strong and otherworldly son, one who can bear grief out of the womb. Thor wriggled in me while I read Madeline, and tickled in me when I drank orange juice. A totally sentient being in utero. Thor held a lightness that was the exact opposite of what I felt. If he were named how I truly felt when I was pregnant, he would have been named some old dead name with too many consonants, a name used only in manuscripts of historical accuracy that is so serious and uncomfortable that no one pronounces it. They just point to the paper. But Thor, Thor made me smile in spite of myself.
Thor grabs my face, hands cupping each cheek, kisses me square in the mouth. Then licks my cheek, giggles. He scrunches up his nose and shakes his head and laughs, like he is a big person, but he is just my big little Thor. My baby.
He is still Thor here.
I remind myself that if he doesn't die, he will be a man someday. A big man, like his father, but with olive skin and dark hair and deep greenish brown eyes, and wide shoulders and strong tree trunk legs that ground him. A man quick to laugh and blush. People will know women surrounded him and taught him something of nurturing and kindness. Perhaps someone will look at him, like I looked at Sam, and think with that back and that very good posture, he would be a wonderful man with which to dance to some old standard, like Cheek to Cheek. And I will embrace her, and whisper in her ear, "Love him to the moon and back. Just like I love him."
His feet give him away. They are still little baby brick feet, strong and thick, same width and length. He runs now, hard and fast. Sometimes he jumps every other step in a mock skip. He tries to keep up with Beezus. He tries to catch her, but her long legs carry her farther faster. He never surrenders. But she slows, eventually, lets him catch her. Chase. Tackle. Tickle. Bite. Kiss. Pinch. Smile.
I call her Little Mama, because she nurtures the boy. She picks him up, wipes off the grass on his knees, kisses his boo-boos, says, "It's okay, honey. Bibi is here."
The women at school smile at him, and he flirts. Subtly. They tell me he will be trouble with the girls. And they tell me about their middle school sons and the girls calling, riding by the house, sending home notes. So handsome, they say. So cute, they pinch his cheek. He gives me lots of hugs, and hides behinds my legs when there are people around. My children are shy. Did you know that about my children? They clam up, hide themselves behind me, kiss my neck and whisper about going home. Both of them still are shy, and use sign language so they don't have to speak in front of strangers.
Two is something.
Two is an Associate's degree. Two is half of high school. Two is a substantial entry on your resume. Two crammed in a lot of evolution--head lifting to rolling over to wiggling across the floor to sitting up to scooting across the floor to crawling to standing to cruising to walking to running to skipping. Two is talking and eating with your mouth closed and carrying your dish to the sink. Two is stomping and knowing exactly what you want to wear. Two is liking broccoli but not potatoes. Two is sentences and thoughts and philosophies about what Santa is and where monsters live.
I have a degree in my boy now. I have studied his feet, in case...just in case. You know. I don't have to tell you why I study his feet. I inspect his little hands, which still have dimples for knuckles, and I kiss each fingertip, which have a mixture of marker and dirt and car goo under the nails. I analyze his two little boobies which I would draw with the smallest nib of a pen. Two wee little dots atop a Buddha belly. His back is muscled and strong, like his arms. People see him naked and screech, "He's cut." He is. He is strong. He has a mass of thick dark hair that grows like a weed. I call him Shaggy and he smiles. "Should we cut your hair, Shaggy?"
"Nooooooooo," he howls, clutching onto his hair like a mini-Samson. But then we cut his hair tonight and it didn't hurt. Not one bit, and he noticed right away and stopped crying and said, "HEY!"
When he was born, someone sent him the book Oh the Places You'll Go! He pulled it off the shelf last night and asked me to read it for bedtime. I keep kicking it around in my head. I just want to infuse him with the truths in that book, but I can only keep reading it and hope he gets that you just have to keep walking, trusting, suffering, learning, and knowing you are who you are with the kind of courageous honesty that isn't popular among high school boys.
Two years ago, I gave birth to a boy who I never quite believed would live. He came in spite of my doubts and fears. He lived though my brain believed him dead already. I hold him in the night now, his legs kicking off the covers as he radiates a kind of warmth that seems divinely given. My little polar bear. My little thunderbolt bearer. My little hammer-wielding pumpkin. For two years, I have watched him outside of me, amazed that he is here and happy, still not quite believing I have a son. I lie on my left side, like I did two years ago, waiting for him to kick, his reactions immediate and comforting. I still rest my hand on his chest in the middle of the night, make sure his chest is still rising and falling. It is a habit I cannot break.
I remember him in me.
I tried not to get too attached back then, and the disconnect with the attachment already there and the fear severed something important in me. I couldn't tell anyone what that was like, so I lost most of my friends during his pregnancy. It's not their fault. It's no one's fault. I am just wired for self-destruct when I am vulnerable. Most everyone who has gone through this knows what I mean. It feels like you are damaged, never going to recover from that space between believing there will be a death and hoping there won't be. Sometimes, in spite of myself, in the last few months of pregnancy, I would whisper to him "I love you, baby Thor. Don't die."
He stretches like the Happy Buddha. All belly and smiles. Arms over his head. Hands turned in. God, I love him. I felt so lost when he was in my belly. I had no context. No clarity. No grounding. I feared. I held fear in my womb. In my heart. In my smile. I lashed out. I turned in.
He might die. I would think. No, he will die. What if I love him too much? What if I love my children to death?
We all die.
But this death I had in for him contained suffering and knowledge and certain insanity for the rest of us. I would know he was dying, and not be able to stop him. He would know he was dying and ask me for a help I could not give. Replaying Lucy's death in my head was like watching a child fall off swing in slow motion. Every time I ran in vain, unable to reach her in time. And then I would think if he doesn't die, I am breaking him with my anxiety and worry and absolute unwavering fear. He will be broken.
He has a long stretchy life ahead of him. He runs and hugs and stretches like the Happy Buddha. I mention it again, because Buddha is his doppleganger. He nuzzles into my neck, and smooches me in a long dramatic MWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAmen. Kisses and nose rubs and arms twisted.
I am in love with you, Handsome.
He squeezes my face, and plants on solidly on my lips. I could get used to this. The girl climbs me too.
"She's my Mommy too, Thomas!"
He screams and nudges his sister. Points at her face. "SHE is driving me crazy!" He seems to articulate in one long whine. I took videos of them yesterday. One of them was him just bugging the shit out of his sister. This is what having a little brother is like. I want to show them when they are in college, when they have children. I should have intervened, but I was entranced. They are so lovely, even when they are annoying each other.
Later, when we are alone, I lift him on the table, and he kicks his legs out. I tell him that he was once in my belly. And he shakes his head. Doooooh.
Yes, Little baby. My big boy. You were right here. (I point to my belly.) We always talked when you were in Mama's belly. You are made out of sparkling water and frozen berries, and every time I drank Orange Juice you moved for me. I called you Thor.
TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRR!
Yes, Tor. I called you Tor. Everyone called you Tor. Some still do. I wanted you so much. And when you came out, you were so happy. You fit perfectly into our family. I asked the doctor if you were okay because you didn't cry. And then the doctor flicked your heel, just like this, and you cried and cried. And the doctor said, "Yes, he is okay. He is just happy."
The rain drummed on the roof last night, suddenly torrential, like the sky opened up, like it was summer. I had read on the weather website that the rain was coming, but then when I heard it, it felt different. I can't articulate it but it felt metaphoric, perhaps important. I would have highlighted that section of the book if I had read it. The rain continued steady and true all night and into today. I didn't mind it. I like the rain. I liked that it was more than a drizzle, and that it was either raining, or not. I stood in the rain for a while tonight talking to my friend. "I am getting wet," I kept thinking. "I am getting wet." I just noticed the wetness on me, but I didn't try to change it. I didn't move or mind it. I wanted to talk to R. He is struggling. We cried first together, over different things. We cried in spite of ourselves. Then we laughed at our crying, then we laughed at the rain.
Earlier in the evening, I called out to her as she walked out the door. She stopped and turned toward me, waiting.
I love you. I said, You saved my life.
I love you, darling. You can always call me. I'm not going to Mars.
And then she walked out the door. I wasn't sappy with her. I didn't cry often. It wasn't our relationship, but she heard my deepest secrets. The things I never told anyone, not even you. When someone hurt me, she was the first person I called. She told me to pray. She told me to meditate. When I was annoying the fuck out of her, she told me to read page 417. She told me I walked in God's grace. She told me I had twenty good things about myself and if I couldn't write what they were, then she would. And she did.
My hands went to my face when she left. I cried in spite of myself. She is gone. She walked out the door of the church, just like every night. Her life is blossoming. I want her to be happy in the new place, far away from me, but I am afraid to be without her. I am just a drunk, still learning to trust. I am so sad to see her walk into the rain.
My hands are wet.
The women rally around me.
It is a big deal to lose a sponsor. It is a big deal, honey. It is okay to cry. You are going to be okay, Angie. Oh, honey, cry. It is a big deal. Call me tomorrow, Angie. Call me.
She is the woman who saved my life by sharing all the dark, hurt parts of her, and then sharing the hope. She is the one who showed me how to recover, the one who guided me in meeting my demons, the one who loved me until I loved myself. She is my first sponsor. She was the first person I met where I wanted what she had--serenity. She said that it was okay to want that part of her. She told me exactly what to do with every minute of my day until I stopped shaking and moaning and crying, until I found serenity. She introduced me to God, and to myself. She listened to the worst I had to offer. She abided and then she said, "I have to tell you, Angie, you are a very nice person. I am privileged to know you."
The rain was not too cold tonight. It is the end of November. The leaves are all fallen. I don't even think we will have to rake again. The sky blushes a soft pink with orange streaks in the mornings without rain. Tomorrow there will be streaks in the sky. It will remind me of a watercolor. Tomorrow she will drive away from this town forever. She will close a chapter of her life, and I will begin a new one myself. My chapter will start:
There is a woman who drives through the rain. She saved my life once.
Despite myself, I am soaked with tears. I knew they would come, but they are steady and torrential at times, but covering my face. The tears are warm, like gratitude, and puddle under me.
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.
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. )
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.
yesterday, i felt so strong. i felt so empowered. "i am really doing good," i thought. only eight weeks out, and i feel okay.
today, i feel so impotent. i drove to visit my father, who is wheelchair bound, and in a nursing facility. he is over an hour away. just me and bea. i notice that i only have 30 miles until my tank is empty. one of the only good things about living on jersey side is never having to fill up your gas in snow and rain. still, i didn't exactly realize this until in philadelphia citylimits. i decided to hit the gas station by my dad's place. when i get there, seven miles left on the DTE, i open my diaper bag to realize that i had left my wallet in my purse. the purse that is sitting next to my front door. i transferred my make-up, but not my wallet. i am an hour away from home. i have no gas. i don't have my wallet. i suddenly realize that i can't prove i am me. i am noone. i have no proof that i exist. if they can't prove i exist, they can't prove lucy existed. i sat in my car and cried.
it wasn't a big deal to ask my dad for money. i just felt nauseated. and as i am taking the elevator up, a nurse gets in with me. she tells me how cute my daughter is, and asks me if i am expecting another. i realized then that i am still wearing my maternity winter jacket, and it puffs out. i just never dug any of the old ones out. plus, to be honest, i am only two months postpartum. this probably should have happened before, but it hasn't. all the air left in the elevator was sucked out in that minute. "uh, no, i just had a baby." stare forward. floor two is taking way too long. "oh, how exciting, how old is your baby?" "yeah, um, my baby didn't make it." "sorry?" "my baby, ahem, died." "i'm so sorry. just so..."open doors. flee. head to my dad's room, and try to pull my shit together.
but i can't. some days i just feel like i won't be able to pull it together. isn't that our biggest fear? to be out in public, in a place where noone knows about us now, and not be able to pull it together? i am shaking and a mess, and yet, i manage to cry for only a minute, and then get on with my life. we always do it, though. we manage to pay our bills, and fill up the gas tank, and shop for groceries. we manage to somehow pull it together to get through the next minute until we can be safe again.
thank you all for the comments on my new blog. you probably don't realize how much you have helped me with your blogs, your words, your survival, your strength, your honesty and the love of this community. there are a lot of me's out there in this world, reading your stories, relating to your experiences. your stories have truly made me stronger. thank you.
