burying

There is still so much I think about in regards to Lucy's death. Like the fact I never had a funeral, and that small non-funeral gesture sent out such enormous messages to friends and family. Perhaps that we didn't want to speak of her, or publicly mourn her, or maybe even that her loss, and further our grief, was only ours, not meant for anyone else. We prescribed how others should grieve with us. We told them not to send flowers, or to wait to call. It was all isolation and silence. We did that. No one else did.

We didn't want to ruin anyone's Christmas.

It sounds ridiculous when I say it now. It was two days before Christmas when we returned home without her. Gifts under the tree for her, new ones, and a nursery set up for no one. Our child just died. We made thousands of heartbreaking decisions while I was in labor and she was dead. The hospital demanded it. And I, cramping under the grief, spoke to funeral directors without any emotion. Did we want to have a funeral for our dead daughter the day after Christmas? The week after? Would it matter to us at all in five years?

Throughout the years, I have created many rituals in her honor and her name. All my work has orbited around her death in one way or another in the first three years. Perhaps because all those rituals for the four of us could never make up for that one ritual for everyone else.

December will be five years since I held my daughter. The weight of her I can no longer remember. The smell of her, the look of her, gone like her. I see her in Thor, constantly. I kiss them both when I kiss him. But I wonder if this is the time to bury her, invite the family for a memorial on the winter solstice, include others in our rituals. Is this the time for a funeral?

I imagine it as a huge bonfire on the solstice, us gathered around, remembering there once was a girl who held our promise and love, and she is missed, not just by us, but by all of our family and friends.

I don't know if I had a religion before she died. My religion was me, I guess. Nothing so holy. It was about my enlightenment. My serenity. My peace of mind. And she taught me compassion for others on a global scale. She taught me what it was like to suffer. And not the suffering I had already done--the suffering of a broken hearts and feeling different and letting go of things. Or the suffering of being a normal adult lady taking care of her father, drug addict friends...she taught me that universal suffering, the suffering of grief. To grieve. To let go. To mourn. To be kind in the face of suffering. (I learned that by not being kind.) She taught me all that. I started writing about her and ended writing about everything else, and finding a religion that had nothing to do with a church, and everything to do with everyone else. Through all that wisdom, I would give it all up to have one more day with her. But that is not a choice I am allowed to make. And besides, I wonder if I truly would, knowing she would be gone again, and I would grieve again without any of the lessons I had learned about grief, life and love that I had before that one day.

I will always ache to be her mother, and I will be comfortable with the way life went. It is one of those paradoxes that I would have cringed at in early grief. She is always in my blood. That little smidge of DNA makes her permanently part of my water,  my blood. And so that is how my baby is the water, and this people ash, the bones that are white and grey and sit in my secretary, that makes her the earth. And the fire that consumed her, that makes you the fire. And the prayers and mantras whispered to the wind, calling her for, that makes her the air. And so she is all things to me. I can't imagine her any other way, but esoteric symbols of the infinite--the directions, the light, the dark, the spiral, the labyrinth, the heart expanding infinitely back and forward until it emcompasses all life. But I can't imagine what she would be. Little sister. Big sister. Middle child. Daughter. Grand daughter. I am sister. I am mother. I am crone and I am maiden. And so are you.

I finally am burying her here too. I have to put my grief writing to rest. Put her spirit to rest. I sometimes wondered if I summoned her each time I write her name on my computer or in my journal. Does she come, all put out and rolling eyes?

Alright, Mama, I know, you miss me. Can I go now?

I burned her. (Her body only housed the Lucy I came to love.) And she went with the wind. And what's more..she became the wind  blowing through my hair, a moment of caress, a lover reaching an intimate place in plain site.

Today, I publish my final post on Glow in the Woods. I will be there editorially for a while as we transition a new editor. My grief writing ceased serving me or anyone else. I didn't mind the lack of comments, they made sense to me. There is nothing to say about her death anymore. It was sad, so sad, and now we are here. I don't know what will become of this space. I hope to revisit and use it as my space to write about grief, her death, but mostly about our family. I have paintings for people. I just haven't sent them out yet. Life seems too fast these days. And I am writing at the moon + stone blog every week. But about crystals and tarot. Love to each of you.

lucia paz

I put her name into the search bar in Etsy, in Pinterest, in Google.

Lucia.

And pictures of a girl with long blonde braids, candles crowning her head, standing in the snowy night. Islands, and saints. Eyes on platters and virgins defiled. I get more specific.

Lucia Paz.

There are 13,200,000 results. People all over the world named the same as my dead daughter. She has two twitter accounts, a sex tape, and a Facebook. She's even on My Space. I click You Tube, and suddenly, I float in space. Mesmerized. Awe-stricken. This beautiful, otherworldly dance for a grieving mother. I, Orpheus, watch her floating in something I cannot describe, but I think it the inside of me. I gape at her beauty, her grace, the way this Lucia Paz captures something of my Lucia Paz. It is crazy, yes, but still, I cannot stop watching, tearing up, pushing my jaw closed. I don't know what I expected to find of my daughter on the internet, a website thanking me for searching for her, perhaps, another one reminding me that she is dead, but I found Lucia Paz, the beautiful Argentinian artist, on a Monday's mourning, and she opened something long closed in me.

interview

Archangel Azrael, the angel of grief . Watercolor, 4"x6", 2012.

When Lindsay over at Murmur of Wings asked me to answer a few questions about my art, my heart center just opened up, swallowed the time and length it took. Grief and art and my spiritual journey...wow. Apparently, I am very wordy about it. But I am passionate about the ways in which grief opened me up to release self-doubt and just go for art, and I want to inspire other grieving people (not just babylost, but anyone suffering from grief of any kind) to allow grief to be that starting point of compassion, and release, and connection. So, go on over to Murmur of Wings, and read my interview. If you leave a comment, you can win a mizuko jizo altar painting. And if you are really interested in amazing jewelry, check out her Etsy shop the Gypsy Rebel. Personally, I wear a piece of Lindsay's jewelry every day of my life. I actually created a few with her which are absolutely amazing. Anyway, all in all, she's an amazing person to connect to, and leave a comment to introduce yourself, and win some art. YAY!

ouroboros

I used to think of myself as a series of uncategorized items. Undefined, out of color and alphabetical order. Bourbon and cigarettes, and unwashed lucky socks. Second hand combat coots, and mixed tapes with  names like Heartbreak. I suppose I used to think of myself as a junk drawer. I am none of those things anymore. I have none of those things anymore.

I have this shell that feels nothing like me. It hasn't in four years. It is like I walk through the earth in a machine, bumbling and inoperable, left moving me right. My body turns against itself, and the pain that plagues me feels finally like the manifestation of years of anguish. And that is what my body did to me, or rather I did to my body.

In the past few months, I have felt sick. Arthritis, depression, weight gain, exhaustion, lethargy. I can't remember to return calls or emails or thank you letters. Perhaps, after Lucia's death, I just couldn't muster too much sympathy for me. I grieved and felt sorry for myself, yes, but I also acted out, and retreated and pushed. Those two Angies, the one of good and the other of evil, I hadn't reconciled. It makes me sick. One swallows the other, like the Ouroboros devouring its tail. I am one, not two. I draw it, like an enso, in a few strokes a circle, and a snake eating itself. Then I sage it, say a prayer, meditate on the image. It is not an image of destruction and self-sabotage. It is about rebirth and recreation and primordial unity--that which was, is, and will be. 

I no longer want to feed myself the storyline of her death and of my responsibility. I don't want to feed it to my ailments and my dis-ease. I don't want to give it strength anymore. I wonder if I caused my sickness to find a cause of her death, then I shoo it away as overthinking. I don't want to speak its name anymore. Even when I think grief is over, it comes back, like a mobius strip, the beginning is the end, and the two are a moot point anyway. But the grief and the action of blame are too different things. I release the blame, release the hatred, release the guilt that I didn't even know was there anymore.

I open, open, unfold the turns and twists of me. I, maybe folded into a swan, am still just a piece of paper. The words, melodramatic and wordy, run around me like the rings of a tree. Each description a year, telling the story of me. The song I call out into the night, my song, as I journey into a world where time lays easily on top of itself, and the dead live again. I pocket the paper away, fold it into an elaborate fortune teller game.

Eenie, Meenie. Miney. Moe. Catch a Tiger by the toe...And then it reminds me:

"2008, you were the happiest you ever felt, most contented. Your daughter died."

"2009, You wept for a year. You walked through the underworld. You mourned. You alienated. You survived."

This upcoming year, the one ahead, I envision something magical, important. The path before me has changed in 2012, a hair pin turn back to a spiritual center I had before the marriage and babies and jobby jobs. It was covered over the decaying leaves of grief and alcohol and self-loathing. I sweep them away as I find my footing again.

Remembering.

Remembering.

Remembering this way of beauty and strength and surrender and unconditional love of everything including myself. There is moss on the northern facing parts of me, the shadow parts. I must turn toward the sun now, open to the air, water, fire, and earth. I emerge from the machine that has trapped the storyline of Lucia's death. I emerge from the sickness that I imagined killed Lucia and Michael into the strong body that brought me to this place right here. I emerge from self-loathing into a place of unconditional love and acceptance.

I have been meditating on a word to encapsulate my year. 2009, Grieve. 2010, Create. 2011, Recover. 2012, Open. 2013...what word can you be? I create another fortune teller. This one with words that encapsulate what I hope for--love, blessings, miracle, opening and counting until we reach the fortune for next year. I write on the inside all the words that I hope the next year will be: Balance. Self-acceptance. Open. Clarity. Growth. Trust. Heal. Spirit. But I know the word as I write it.

Emerge.

What is your word for 2013? What does it mean for you?

fortune telling

It occurred to me this morning that this day is our fourth child's due date. It seems strange at how much has changed since we miscarried. I have such tenderness there for that missing person. My body woke up bleeding again, another new moon after all. Just noting that the baby was missing, a little blood shed today to honor him. I wouldn't have remembered the day except it is my husband's birthday. Yes, our fourth child was due on his birthday. Lucia was due on my birthday. Both of them died.

A few weekends ago, I had a medium tell me that our miscarried baby was actually a boy, and his name, which was actually the only name we had chosen for the baby, if he was a boy. I am writing about psychics and fortune tellers at Glow today, because I consulted a few (thousand) since Lucia died. Not actually, but more than I admit in mixed company.

photo by an Untrained Eye.

In the past, I have been a farm girl. In the future, I will be silver and bald and eat beer pellets for breakfast.

Go over to Glow now, and talk about your experience with psychics and whatnots.

mothers

My mother' home bursts with magic. Pheasant feathers and gourds in an antique glass vase. Moss growing in the sacred circles of her brick patio. A skull and a broken pitcher near the garage. The pitcher used to hold spider plants growing long tentacles in water on their way to earth. Somewhere between a glass of water and a pot of soil. There is a cauldron with a dead plant coming out of it under the nectarine tree. She has a makeshift altar above her sink. It has a chalice of water for her spirit guide and Buddhas she finds at flea markets. One looks like ivory and she tells me how she bought it for a few bucks.

The sunrise here is a marvel and the coffee tastes different, like cozy socks and a hug, even though the robusta beans coat my tongue with extra caffeine. My mother and I talk and talk about psychics and spirits and grandmothers, Of emigrating, moving, changing space. We talk about retirement and staying home and my childhood. Then, she mentions to me in passing that mother-daughter relationships are complicated, and I chuckle. Heh heh, yeah, Mama, I heard that once.

My children run through the yard like wild things--they climb trees and track rabbits. My mother tells my daughter she used to kill birds with a slingshot and roast them in the cemetery. She grew up poor and my daughter's mouth gapes open in amazement. My daughter spots a woodpecker in the valley. We sit by the stream, tossing red leaves into the current as the visiting neighbor's weiner dog barks. We climb over the weeping willow the hurricane tossed out of the earth. I used to sit under that tree and play guitar in the summer. My stepfather is non-nonplussed. "I'll put another one in. This bank was too loose. In spring, I'll put in a cutting up a few feet in sturdier ground." I strum my daughter's favorite song there anyway, while she sings.

Oh, my Mama. 
She gives me 
These feathered breaths. 

I made my way here on Wednesday morning to pick my mother up from the hospital after surgery. My step-father received a call when she was rolled into surgery that his mother was not going to last much longer than a week. She could no longer eat, or drink, and the morphine was all they could do. She died an hour after my mother and I arrived home from the hospital. She is the last of the grandmothers in my family. The last of that generation. Sixteen years ago, my paternal grandmother died at 67. My mother's mother died at 95 two months after Lucy, now my step grandmother at 86.

While I mourn for my stepfather, cry with him, his mother suffered from the death that most of us fear. Forgetting our husband and children, experiencing the indignities and humiliations of rotten people and a body betraying its soul. She was surrounded by love, though, and she was never want for anything. I wonder if there is a good death and what that would look like.

The children and I tramp through the woods, and my daughter points out that in the summer this place is filled with poison ivy. She tells me a story about my own childhood. It is the story about poison Sumac. I couldn't see well because my face was so swollen. My aunt had to take me for the day, while my mother worked. My Titi, as I called her, had no idea what to do with me, so se taught me to dance the cha-cha with a record and a mat with feet prints. My mother waits for the children and I at the top of the hill, right by the sweet cherry tree. My children call to her, "Abuelita, Abuelita, we walked through the poison ivy." I want to be an abuelita some day.

My daughter's death was as good as it gets. It hits me. She died in her mother. She never feared. And we loved her like she was going to live forever. There was never pity or grief in the love. But still, how good can it be if you never really got to live?

Being in my mother's home soothes something broken in me. My mother rubs in salve and aloe when she makes white rice in the same pot she's been making rice in for forty years. She puts on another pot of lentils, despite my protestations. She just had surgery. She doesn't have to make my favorite meal, but she insists. We talked about making rice. She taught me when I went to college, but it still took me many years to make it like her. She breaks off sofrito from the freezer and adds a can of tomato sauce. She tells me about being the second youngest of twelve and learning to cook Panamanian food in America. I watch the birds out the window beyond her shoulder, and think that this land is the land of my mother, even if it is far away from the land of her birth. But it is both for me. I feel attached to this land. I dug my feet into the dirt this morning, the dew almost frozen hurt my feet, but I refused to move.

This is the land of my people.

As I stood there, I realize that the hardest part of writing is learning you are mediocre. And in that mediocrity, you still sometimes nail a good phrase or two. You sometimes write something amazing. But mostly, it is just mediocre. But the world is constructed of mostly mediocre. It is part of the suffering. You feel the extraordinary bubbling underneath its surface, but it hasn't (or perhaps never will) quite burst through you. It is like rice-making year three. The phase in which you change from mother to grandmother.

i am stretched on your grave

I am stretched on your grave,
     And will lie there forever.
If your hands were in mine,
    I'd be sure we'd not sever.
My apple tree, my brightness,
    Tis time we were together,
For I smell of the earth
   And I am stained by the weather.

When my family thinks
    That I'm safe in my bed,
From night untill morning,
    I am stretched at your head,
Calling out to the air
    With tears hot and wild,
My grief for the girl
    That I loved as a child.

The priests and the friars
    Approach me in dread
Because I still love you,
    My love, and you're dead.
I still would be your shelter
    Through rain and through storm.
And with you in your cold grave,
    I cannot sleep warm.


Táim sínte ar do thuama, trans. Frank O'Connor

It is a poem I have never sung to my daughter. I took out the stanza about first love and maidenheads. I loved her in a different way. But I still loved her since before I knew I would ever be a mother.But when I hear it, I cannot help but think of Lucia. I imagine myself, fingernails filled with soil and earth, grasping into the brown grass, prostrate over her little body, weeping a brackish mixture of love and blubbering. Grief is nothing like I imagined. I was less cool than I thought I would be, less composed. I was a mess, bloated and drunk in the early weeks, and later, angry and salty.

She had no grave. We buried her in the wind. Fling her ashes to the sea in wild gestures of release, but palm her tiny urn. It is a slight of hand. Now you see her. Now you don't. We cannot let go.

I prop myself on my elbows, aiming at the gravestone. I drove to Boston for the weekend to meet up with Jess and Julia and Niobe. We ask Niobe to take us somewhere morbid and she picks a cemetery.  There is a stone with a carving of a skull with wings. The angel of death. A calavera. It is the first I see, and quite unself-consciously, that I lie on the grave of a young women, snapping a photo with my Android.

I read her name.

Jane a Negro Servant of Andrew Bord, something or other...She was 22 years old and 3 months. I put my forehead on the space above her skull.

You were someone's daughter, Jane. 
And so today, you are my daughter. 
I am stretched on your grave.
I will lie there forever.

+++

There is a hurricane in town. We pack a bag and make candles. My daughter takes a bottle of rose oil, and spills it across the table. The studio smells like the Virgin Mary. The hurricane grabs a window and forces the mechanism open. I lock it shut again. My roses carry on an elaborate dance outside my kitchen window. And I realize suddenly that I cannot save the roses.

Atlantic City looks gone. I don't miss it. I'm worrying about my own ass right now. I see all these pictures of alcohol and parties pop up on Facebook and miss drinking in a storm. I don't miss drinking, as a sport or a lifestyle. I just miss a nice bourbon now and again. It is like that, isn't it? A cigarette never tastes good after years without smoking, though I have imagined it a thousand times. And similarly, a drink would not end well. It would take me somewhere much worse than the hurricane, but I still wish I were able to have just one (even though I never was able to have just one.) And that is the irony of missing drinking. I miss a kind of drink I never did. I grieve a person I never was.

The power went out for an hour or so, then back on again. Sam lit a fire, and we watched a movie about Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren. I drank coffee. It is a full moon tonight, and a hurricane is in town and I stretch on her grave, and create an altar for Dia de los Muertos. The lights flicker again, so I leave you with pictures of my altar.

If you have day of the dead pictures, link them in the comments. I'd love to look.

lifesavers

I have no grief to give you anymore.

No, wait, maybe I do. Maybe it hides behind the confusion. It crouches behind the spaciness and flakiness and the general feeling of being overwhelmed with life. Or maybe that is grief itself, dressed up for work.

Lucy died.

I write about it here. There. Everywhere.

After the last baby died, I grieved for a little, then it was over. I cried only once. I didn't name her. And I wondered if this community had space for not-naming, or even not-grieving as much as it has space for grief in whatever form it arrives. I didn't want to exaggerate the experience. It was physically grueling, but I didn't feel sadness over the life she didn't get to lead. Life was over before it began. On the grand scheme of suffering, it was barely a blip. We get behind anger. We get behind indignation. We get behind sadness. But what about no-grief? What if I felt like I grieved the grief I needed to grieve in two weeks?

Grief is something I poured out of me onto the trees, the flowers, the internet, for three point five years. It flowed into every piece of art and writing I did. Grief isn't a controlled essence. It is not a tameable beast. I couldn't control when it was a torrent, and now as a single tear, I cannot will it into a keen. It drips into this post, of course, but it is a different grief. It is the grief of an inevitable ending.

I have replaced my addiction to bourbon for Wint-O-Mint life savers. I eat them like candy. I chomp them, and imagine the blue spark.

CHOMP. Blue Spark.
CHOMP. There is another.
NARFLE...not quite a spark, perhaps a faint ember, or a fizzle of aqua.

I want sparks in me. I want to feel a passion. I have one. It seeps into all the posts I write now. I don't know how to manage it quite yet. I don't even know what to call it. I would basically live in my studio if I didn't have to manage everyone else's life. There was a time I wept here constantly. That was a grief we all know. I cried about the death of my daughter and drank bourbon. I put the bottle on the floor by my feet, and thought about dying. Not suicide, but it was just that grieving and drinking while being me was torture. This room was a dark place.

But now, I would spend all my time here if I could. All this writing about grief and acceptance and living with her death transmuted that sadness and heaviness into something beautiful and healing. My hands are strong and muscled, and in the nooks and crannies of this room, there are letters from babylost friends, thank you cards, artwork about death. There are skeletons, and political poetry, old love letters, and a dictionary. There are milagros, and sins, if you look hard enough. There are baby spider plants in water, growing roots, ready to be put in soil. All my sacred objects are here, except Lucia.

I burn incense constantly. And when I write, I draw it in through my nose. It becomes part of me, part of my writing.  I write because writing is a compulsion. I don't understand why I feel the words in my fingers, and need to get them out. But I do. Words flow out of me like a faucet turned on, until I have to eat or sleep or tend to a child. I write now into a word document and sometimes post something that no one reads. It smells of sandalwood and sage. There is wax dripped on everything in my studio from the candles I burn to light the incense, and the children leave a trail of the sandbox on the floors. Sand and wax. Wax and sand. It all mixes up together with the smell of fresh, clean mint of Lifesavers. This is what I am now. Sand and wax and mint and incense all borne of grief, but not grief.

If this space becomes gypsy, or fortune teller, or recovery, or art, it isn't grief. And if it stays grief, it isn't me. It isn't my truth anymore. I struggle with it constantly, because this space never meant to be forever about grief. I have a post a month in me about grief, but not five, or even two. I want a space for that post, intermixed with all the others. I start to write about other things here, but it morphs somehow back to grief. I used to think it was because every suffering was a form of grief. Now, I think it is because I want so desperately to stay a part of this amazing community. This blog is like this old bourbon room I'm sitting in, it hasn't quite been changed into an art studio.

After six years in this studio, I rescreened my screen door. I open the glass door to hear the chimes, let the wind blow through the space. It changes the dynamic in here. The art hangs like prayer flags. The wind carries out the old bourbon smell, and the incense, and peppermint. And sandalwood. It carries out bits of artwork, and grief. The wind carries joy in too, and music created by the mourning doves, but no mosquitoes, or flies. I need to start writing about the things being blown into my life right now. I don't quite know how to do that yet. I think it involves new paint, and a different flavor of lifesaver. I hope you stay and read. But if not, I understand. Until then.

grief yoga

I don't think you understand how much you can hate your body until a child dies inside of it. I thought I understood self-loathing and cellulite-focused anger in my twenties. Then she died, and everything I thought I had come to accept about this body was destroyed with her. Burned in a fire. I raise my four arms like Kali. One holds my daughter. One holds my body. One holds peace. One holds forgiveness, and I turn them into the flames. I didn't get the ashes from that one. I didn't want them. They were a dark energy.


It is strange for me, someone once so aware of her body. I used to love these knotty old muscles, lifting babies over my head, challenging my body further than I thought possible, throwing softballs, and tumbling across my college green after a few drinks. I felt betrayed by this mass of cells. I held nothing like who I felt inside anymore. The betrayal kept coming. She died. I developed thyroid disease. It caused depression and anxiety. I had a hard pregnancy with Thor. Addiction. Miscarriage. Biopsies. Aches. Pains. Extra weight that won't come off with liquid diets and bike riding, and I stopped thinking of myself as strong, but someone diseased and frumpy. The goddess of destruction, my cells like little blue goddesses, tongues extended. "You are old, Mama," they taunt. "You are nothing like the athlete, mother, friends, lover, citizen, yogi you once thought. You are just black energy."


My last yoga class was a prenatal class with Lucia in my belly. I felt amazing doing yoga pregnant. And it was our time--Lulu and Mama's time. I talked to her as I rode my bike there. I said prayers to her. I saw her--gypsy curls of black and barefeet. She runs like a fairy through the backyard and wears long skirts and I tuck her into my arm and kiss her. This is what I saw when I stretched and meditated and lied in shavasana. I felt grounded and earthy. I felt beautiful. Truly beautiful. I was about to lose all of that, and had no idea. I would have grasped onto the grass, dug my toes into the soil and sprouted roots. I would have kept swaying, back and forth, in the wind. My grief might have sat less in anger and more in forgiveness if I stayed with yoga. If I could have been more of something that ineffable spiritual quality that I wanted yoga to be. But I couldn't.

I had bought it all. The balance and love and surrounded by golden light. I bought the yoga environment and the teachers acting like gurus and mentors and people interested in my pregnancy and baby. I believed they had a piece of wisdom that I wanted. And then she died, and the teacher and my prenatal massage therapist said nothing. No sorries. No condolences. And then I confronted them, they said what everyone else said, "I didn't know what to say. I wanted to give you the space to grieve." It was like seeing the man behind in the curtain in Oz.

Why, these are just normal people!

It seemed so impossible. I felt so angry against this hypocritical institution of yoga. One that spoke in words that sounded like spirituality and acceptance, but couldn't face the possibility that babies died, and that mine died.  And that love and wholeness I felt about yoga died with her. I resented yoga and all those lithe bodies that stretched and bowed in namaste. I read once that namaste means "I honor the sacred in you." Death was in me. I felt dishonored by that silence, as though no one was bowing to me anymore. Death is the most sacred of acts. We all do it. We don't know where or when. We don't know how, but we will die. It connects us to all the worlds. And yet I felt shunned by yoga. It was a self-shunning. I exiled myself out of the new age community, because I couldn't see myself fitting anywhere other than a cautionary tale.

There is a local yoga studio where Beezus is taking little kid yoga now. It is lovely. It is not the same place I went to practice with Lucia, so maybe it feels different because of that. I keep thinking that I will go back to yoga. Every year I think I have come to a place of acceptance and readiness to face that first class and then it seems too much. I'm too fat, I think. Too damaged.

I am fairly positive that I will cry through my first yoga class, remembering her, honoring her and our connection there. It has been a long time since I cried. And it has been three plus years now since I practiced yoga in a studio. I have been using these two unaware people as an excuse. I have forgiven them. I have forgiven myself for reacting so judgmentally towards them. Just because you practice something beautiful, or strive for that balance, doesn't mean you achieve that in every moment of every day. And we aren't even supposed to be holy every moment of every day. We strive for grace, and forgive ourselves for not coming close to it.

Forgiveness is not something I do easily. Forgiveness has been a journey for me, not a suddenly landing. These women are just people. Young people. I might have been the first grieving mother they encountered, I don't know. Clearly, they had no idea what to say when something so foreign to their world experience happened. They meant well, I know now. They just didn't know. I'm not sure anyone quite knows how much a condolence means unless you have lost someone close. Three simple words--I am sorry. It means the world. It is an acknowledgement that she lived and I lost. I forgive myself for lashing out at them, because I did end up lashing out at both of them. It was not my best self either. I blamed them for a long time for destroying my love of yoga. I blamed them. My response was much worse than their action, I think now. But I still forgive myself for that, even as a cringe at my grief. I was Kali, goddess of destruction. I destroyed everything I cared about after she died. And it didn't bring her back.

Anyway, this yoga studio is having a workshop today and next week called Grief and Yoga, and it is a way to release grief through movement. I already paid for the class so I feel obligated to go. I want to go. I am ready to move past this. I am ready to have my body back, reclaim it from the dead. I thought maybe this would be a good way to cry through a class. To come to a place of peace with yoga. Combining the thing that took me out with the thing I once loved. Facing that fear, though, maybe that is the most important thing to do right now. My old body needs the truce. And so does my soul.

to all and everything

My husband invited a rather large green bush-eating monster who despised all things wild and untamed into our yard. The beast ate our wildflower beds, and our butterfly bush. The monster snorted and huffed up in a slightly savage British accent, "All the wild things in the world make me terribly sick." He chomped the bottom first, then pulled up the gladiola. Lavender caught in its front teeth and caterpillars hung from its lips. The brute stomped through our yard muttering about radicals. He waddled off, farting and muttering about chaos and the proletariat. 

There was almost nothing left of the butterfly bush after the monster left. It was in full bloom with flowers just a few minutes before the monster came, a ton of butterflies visiting and circling. My husband stood proudly by. "Now we look like everyone else. Let us rejoice!" The bush is a weed to most people, but not to me. I see universes in its branches, her arms stretched wide beckoning all the flying creatures to come forth and live together in harmony. "Workers of the yard, UNITE!" Their signs read. Fairies and hummingbird and butterflies and moth create unions and collectives in her branches. Now it it looks like an amateur bonsai hackjob, sad and withered, forced into a subdivision of barely anything resembling bush. My wildflower garden is digesting in the belly of the brute, the leftovers put into yard sacks to sit on the curb until next Thursday. I cried, deep guttural moans, an incessant wave of mourning all day. "My nature, they killed my nature," I tell my sad story to anyone who will listen. It is unlike me to weep, but I raged and ranted, keened and screamed Mayakovsky from our front step.

An eye for an eye!

Kill me,

bury me -

I’ll dig myself out,

the knives of my teeth by stone —

no wonder!-

made sharper,

A snarling dog, under

the plank-beds of barracks I’ll crawl,

sneaking out to bite feet that smell

of sweat and of market stalls and eat the flowerbeds of writers!

I vow to replant. I give speeches in the streets.

WE ARE PAGANS!
WE VOW TO WORSHIP UNSANCTIONED GROWTH AND NATIVE TENACITY!
LET YOUR YARD GO WILD, HUMANS! LET IT BE NATURAL, STINKY AND MUSKY AND FULL OF SEX AND HEAT AND DEATH!
RISE UP WEEDS!
EMBRACE THE REVOLUTION!

I am a wild thing. My nest is gone. My sanctuary ripped out for order. The absence of those beds makes me feel misunderstood. I should be woven into a daisy chain and worn as a crown, rather than cut down with a gas-powered mower, the last bits of me grasping for earth as I am pulled out of the ground. There is nothing left for me here. Summer is oppressive and solitary. Without nature, it is empty. All my places are lost to suburban pressures. Grass is cut once a week. The neighbors wear khakis and eat Hamburger Helper. I feel weak for weeping, but suburbia is stronger than me.


I feel like I will never forgive my husband. It is stupid to be upset and sad about some plants, but I scream the Russian's words anyway and play pretend revolution, but I am just heartbroken and telling tall tales about monsters and Russian poets who cry for better working conditions for the people. The bush is gone and my flowers are gone. I screamed at the children today, because they were screaming at each other, then I wept about breaking that boundary in me. I don't have the strength to stay quiet. I am an coyote. A crow calling his friends, annoying the neighbors. No, I am a cicada whose deep hard shell is stuck to a lawn chair, broken open so delicately that it is hardly noticeable. In fact, I don't think my husband noticed I wasn't in there anymore. I almost looked alive, but I was not there. When the bush left, so did I. I will never understand flower beds and weeding and suburban ethics and I need to stop trying. 


When I am like this, I sit in church basements and drink shitty coffee and pray constantly. 

God, show me your path and grant me the strength to take it. God, help me accept. God, help me grieve. God, save me from myself. 

It is the opposite of grief season here. The wind is hot and wet, my hair sticks to my neck and I beg for a breeze. It is a prayer tucked between strength and guidance. The dog knocks the wind chime when he bounds down the stairs, and I mistake it for wind, then I stand, open armed, waiting for the shell of me to be carried to a garden full of foxglove and butterfly bushes far away from green monsters, fibs about grief, and the bourgeoisie.

summer solstice

Summer solstice passes without a mention. For I am the keeper of time, the marker of the passing seasons. I am the one starting bonfires, and lighting candles, and creating altars. I am the shaman of myself, for I am the only one in need of medicine.

Lucia is dead another half year. Another blazing hot day. I still want a fire to honor the closeness of the sun, the farness of the daughter. My family is sick of solstices and rituals and candles. We lived through her death, they seem to remind me. Let us carry on. Let us eat ice cream with whipped cream. Let us go to carnivals and parades. Let us go to the community pool with our suits and gummy bears. Let us wrap ourselves in joys instead of sitting still in grief. But I am a sentient stationary being--thinking, constantly thinking, perpetual motion thinking, about all we lost and gained and how to make it different by telling a different story.

I still miss her, though. The missing changed, but it is missing nonetheless. Last night, I carried the baby to bed, though he is no longer a baby and the bed can scarcely be called a place where we sleep.

We roll. We kick each other. We read novels and children's books about fairies and queens and big bad wolves. We dream. I met the devil in my dream last night. I called the angels to protect me. They banished him, but I woke panicked anyway.

I carried the baby and whispered, "It is summer solstice, Thor. It seems like yesterday, but it has been three and a half years since she died. Lulu died. Lulu was your sister."

"Sis." He whispered back.

We cuddled in bed and watched the extended twilight sky. The longest day passed without a notice of its length. It was night, then, and I told her story to myself. It is terribly sad, this story. It is about losing. And gaining. And reinventing. It is about sobriety and drunkenness. It is about family and grief and friends and not friends. It is about our good fortune. We are fortunate. We gained so much after her death. Those things may have come anyway, but they came this way, so we are grateful to Lucia.

I don't have a long post in me. I am worn out and sad, exhausted from the week behind me with a house guest and staring at another in front, but she died, and I feel like I have to say it again here where solstice and remembrance is welcome. Every two seasons I remember that one solstice where ravens perched outside our home. The coldness cut into our faces, scarring them into long streaks of grief. We left without our girl. Sat in a car with an empty newborn car seat. It was winter, then. The cold felt hot and oppressive. Everything did. The hardest thing I have ever done was leave that hospital knowing she was in there. That night felt like every day we ever lived rolled into one extremely long and lonely night. It was a year in a blink. I light a fire to remember. 

+++

I appreciate all the guest posts rolling in for Right Where I Am 2012, as I hope my readers have. I had intended on providing the space for regular readers without blogs, but the call went out on b*bycentre UK, which generated many more guest posts than I thought would come in. The pieces that came in are so moving and beautiful. Thank you for sending them. I will have a few more coming up. Since this project has been going on for a month, I decided to close that offer to the public. If you are a regular reader and still want to publish, please email me. (I'm not a heartless bitch.)

feather

This past full moon, the Strawberry Moon, I sat down to write again. Full moons always make me write, but I grew pink at that impulse to write about another full moon and grief. Maybe my grief is cyclical like the moon, growing large, then whittling down to nothing again. There is a longing there when the moon hangs full and heavy in the night. An excitement in me that translates toward insomnia and a pull towards more grief and introspection. My baby died. I give myself the moons.

It is strange to edge into summer solstice and not feel a bottomless pit of darkness. She will be gone three and a half years. We will have a house guest. We cannot even dance in the late sunset by a bonfire. Undress like pagans. Drag charcoal across our faces like warriors. We won't plait our hair, dance until it knots and we look like tramps. We cannot burn charged candles and draw totem. And cry, scream, sing. We won't wrap our regrets and the people we want out of our lives around sage and burn them.

We will be proper people, nodding and forgetting. Toasting to the summer! Long live the summer! Short death for our daughter! May she come back next life soon! May she find us and hug us and be our friend!

I feel so obligated right now. The dog wants to come in. The baby wants jimmies for breakfast. People need to know now. The garbage needs to go out. Bags of our Lucia's almost-future need to go to donation. The school needs a paper bag and a board game and a short day, but still a day. So and so needs their whatsit. And I am just tired. The baby died again, albeit she was not a baby at all, just an empty sac we thought of as a baby. We heard she died, or never lived, at 12 weeks, but it could have been eight, or six, or anything, really before twelve. She was small and not quite a baby yet, but she died. She came out of my body and I bled on everything. Then I had to clean the toilets, using the brush to scrub the blood from around the rims, because I am the mommy. I felt lost in my role at those moments. Or rather I felt found. I didn't imagine it our baby I was cleaning, or the toilet, or the bathroom, or the blood I kept wiping from my palms. It was just a job I do everyday. Like parenting and grieving.

Beatrice cried the other night because all her sisters are dead. Though we never knew if our little dot was a girl, we assumed. Another gypsy sister, all curly hair and the color of Thor. And I teared up too. "I always saw you with little sisters, Beatrice. I'm sorry they aren't there to play with you, honey."

"Me too, Mama," she said, "I'm sorry your sisters aren't here to play with you."

I feel like I'm grieving the loss of Thor and Beezus' little sister. It feels more their loss than mine. I only grieve Lucia and all the life that came with her, which is quite a lot, and might have included another little sister.

To be honest, I hadn't called anyone in the first few weeks of my miscarriage. I have spent three years thinking now that I know better, I will do better. But I just couldn't call. I let people call me--people with issues bigger than mine, like people who wanted to drink, or who lost their jobs. The calls helped, even. There was a palpable lightness of being after talking, particularly when the person on the other end didn't mention the miscarriage at all. I really do not want to talk about it. I don't want to hear her name, if she is even a she, because she doesn't have a name. We only called her little dot, because that is all she was--a dot inside of me. One that never grew.

This pregnancy was destined to fail. I absolutely willed it to exist. I gave our family one try to expand, and it did. It expanded, a nova, came together again, stronger, denser than before. There is no more baby. There never was. I wanted the little sister, sure. I wanted another child in my home, but when she left, I found myself looking at my living children and exhaling. Ahhhhh, no newborns. Not anymore. No worrying for nine months. No anxiety. No comments about how big or little our family is. No sleep deprivation. No blow-out diapers. No all the things that come with newborn life that was scaring the shit out of me.

I told my friend that I saw ravens before the miscarriage. I saw them all over. And she said, "I see death birds before my people die too." I nodded. That was it. She isn't a raven. The death bird was there to tell us she was dead. She is nothing, but the sister that never was.

I bought a three buck feather earring at Target. It was black and looked like a raven feather. I wore it, because it reminded me that my babies died and death birds come. Someone said they dug the Native American thing I had going on. And I wanted to scream. Just scream, like a wild thing, a scared thing, a terrifying thing.

STOP MAKING MY GRIEF INTO A FASHION STATEMENT!!

But it is a fashion statement to someone who doesn't understand. I find comfort in symbols that belong to my babies, even when they weren't babies, just empty sacs where babies almost grew. I want to cover my body in the symbols of all my children. I wear a feather and a deer antler and a wooden moth in my hair. Golden locusts in my ears that remind me of Jess.  I wrap myself in long gauzy skirts and chanclas from Panama, and nursing bras, because some times, I still nurse. I make necklaces out of beads, and I want another tattoo. The tattoo would scream:

THEY DIED!!
MY OTHERS LIVED!!
I AM A MOTHER!!
WIDE HIPS AND LONG BREASTS!!
STOP GAWKING AT THE GRIEF GYPSY!!
THE MOON GUIDES ME!!
THEY DIED ANYWAY!!

There would be a moon and an old woman weeping. Maybe there would be a raven.

curios

When my daughter died, I kept all the cards. There is a manila folder that says "Lucia" on the tab. Every card and note that came to my house, I tucked into the folder. I didn't look at them again in the months or years since. I know they are there. That is enough. The condolences were never lost on me. They were there, the words meaningless and important. What it did was made me love, feel love, feel loved, because of that, they did the most important job ever. Things change, some of those people are gone. But those condolences were the possibility of them staying, and it meant something.

There are so many things about the time of early grief that I want to study. The way I reacted to normal life, for example, or the feeling of being skinned alive and sent on my way. "Your baby was born dead. Then we removed all your skin. You are now free to leave the hospital. Watch for sharp corners, lemons, and salted foods."

I soak the photographs of the girl I once was in formaldehyde. I add in the compassion I had before, and the belief in me and my body. I have another jar entirely with luck, fortune, and giggly spirits. And one for good behavior and doing what I am told. I have a jar filled with the callouses that protected me from holding grudges. They fell off after she died. I put all those little fancy parts of my grief in jars, and keep them on the internet.

I tuck that grief away in yellow liquid, because it feels so unnatural, like a disease. It feels like it needs to be extracted, even though I know my baby died and I am supposed to feel this way, even three years later. I want to study my grief. To float it in liquid. I want to dissect it, pull the blackness out of the moldy chambers of me, weigh it, examine it, pluck out the lungs of it. I want to find the source of our fevers and weeping. I want to find ourselves in the lostness of our lives. I want to lose ourselves in the finding. "We are animals," this strange Victorian curio cabinet of my grief seems to say. "There is a natural connection between us all in this grief, even as it feels lonely and strange." I admit that there is a strong desire in me to make this grief feel natural and beautiful and at the same time, wrong. I wrap it in beautiful, curious words, nature scenes, very tiny spores even. It makes me invent scenes involving organic matter in formaldehyde and science labs. But the truth of it, something in me is dead and floating in dirty liquid.

There is a curio cabinet inside of me. I collect things in it. Symbols and full moon names, like tattoos on me. Strawberry Moon, Harvest Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Hunter's Moon...Lucia's Moon. I see them in script across my back. In the cabinet, there are the jars of who I was, and all these bits of grief. The grief looks like animal fetuses, unformed yet sleeping. They are the emotions I stopped and replaced with anger. There are also bones of animals. Any animal. The ones I crossed in the woods and saved, just because they were some other animal's child. And I would want a wolf to pick up Lucia's bones and keep her somewhere, gnaw on her and think of all we missed. There is a raven feather, because death birds surround me. And there are locusts dipped in gold. They are for Jess and the plagues that seemed to come to my home. There is a deer antler found in a bed of moss by a hippie girl who makes necklaces. She says they are naturally collected by her. I want to believe a caftan-wearing urbanite with Frye boots and a beaded headband tramps through the forest foraging for deer horns, rubbed off in spring, then strings them for grieving mothers. That seems like part of this mythic world I created on the internet after she died. We are magic here.

I am leaving for the weekend. It is a retreat with nuns and prayer and artwork and meditation. It is nestled in the woods. I might have a cigarette, even though I haven't smoked in a seven years. But I might. I always think that when I am around smokers, but I probably won't. I am not grieving this miscarriage. Not a right and proper grief like Lucia's death. My friend said there is a space in this community for not-grief too. The space to just be with a death. It just makes me think about all these years of grieving, collecting jars of the more curious parts of me. I still don't quite understand what happened to me in the last three years. I am different. Not better or worse, just different. Since I began bleeding a month ago, I have been expecting to wake up and be in early grief again, keening and uncomfortable, but it hasn't happened. I remember reading Monica saying that first miscarriage was harder than her son's stillbirth, because she wasn't expecting it. Or maybe I got that wrong, but what I said makes sense to me.

I drink down those jars of the old me, some days, expecting to be that person again who looks welcoming and smells good. I know it would work the same way as if my severed finger were in a jar and I tried to drink it back on. And maybe I don't even want to be that person, it's just sometimes this person's head is too loud, too morbid, too dark. And so I write in jars and put them on the internet.

thank you

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.

nevermore

Yesterday, after a week of tests and ultrasounds, hospitals and bleeding, our doctor confirmed that our little baby died in my womb. I was twelve weeks, but she never grew. I just announced my pregnancy on this blog last week. I'm so sorry to deliver the news in this way.

Today, I am over at Glow in the Woods, talking about our miscarriage and Lucia's death, in a piece called the raven.

moss

I am not playing flute. I am not sitting still.

My head is going a mile a minute.

I am not not-thinking. I am twitchy.

My organs wind around my soul. They are covered in moss and other plants that thrive in damp dark conditions. Everything is dark green and smells of dirt and tears in me. If a surgeon cuts me open, moths burst out of the hole, rushing toward the lights of the operating stage. A tree is growing in there. It is a weeping willow.

I know women like me, whose insides are forest floor and a labyrinth of grief organs. But we don't wait for our children together in front of school. I used to dream of a city-state of the babylost. It would be a large swath of land in the middle of nowhere. We would set up a small town with dirt roads and be surrounded by a large fence made of recycled soft things. We'd build a jizo garden and cry and hold each other, and just know that babies die. And because babies die, everyone knows that nothing is guaranteed. There is a kind of freedom in that, and at times, an oppressive fear. The town accommodates you wherever you may fall on any given day. No running with sharp objects in Dead Baby Bloglandia. We abide here, unless you can't, then we take you to someone who can. I drove into this town and imagined each of you. We boiled herbs in a large cauldron. We chanted and held the one grieving hardest and then the one grieving least, but we held each other. We created the rituals I craved after she died.

I have no right to count my grief organs anymore. It feels that way. My living out number my dead. She is just one. And my two are bouncing on rubber horsies through my house, giggling. But there is something unsettled in me, something that is drawing me out of this house, into the wild. A homestead in a grove of trees. It is a lie that I keep telling myself--that I am like no one here, and no one likes me here. It's when I feel like this, that changing my space will change my head space that I need to remember all I have been through and how deeply that rewrites your insides. It plants terrariums in you. It makes you a mountain of a creature, carved and alone. That is okay. There is a beauty in solitary land, so empty of humans it exists without its story being told.  And yet, I am human. I craved storytelling. I crave connection. That is exactly why this space exists. And why I still need to write.

wisdom

I feel like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that seems like no wisdom at all.

labyrinth

I keep seeing labyrinths, or rather I am just noticing them. They have always been there. There is a sticker labyrinth on the stop sign near the funeral home four blocks from my house. One on the cashier's necklace. One in the bricks in front of my Monday night meeting. To walk a labyrinth is a meditation, perhaps even a prayer, so says The Wise Wiki. There are things I have forgotten, and this is one. My memory of labyrinths involve minotaurs, and Daedalus, and Ariadne. There wasn't a meditation there except do not let the bull-man eat your head.

When you go into a labyrinth, though it looks a tangle of confusing pathways, you always come out. I remember my natural birthing coach telling us this as she taught us to draw a labyrinth on cardstock. It was an exercise. Drag your finger around the path. You can't make a wrong turn. You can't get stuck in corners. You aren't in a maze. I like that there are no tricks. No cleverness here You are on one long path, spiraling to a center that turns around and spits you back out. She coached me to think of labor this way. I forgot, for obvious reasons, anything involving natural child birthing. It just was zapped out of my skull, like Attica Greek and the minutes before I found out she was dead. Wikipedia says the labyrinth is a symbol of our path to God, or the path to something else entirely. The beauty of that analogy sits in my brain for a moment. That is more comforting than minotaurs in the middle.

I dream of the dead. My grandfather and alcohol. They both smile and remind me of what I no longer have. I miss them both, separately, for their own reasons. And yet their absence is okay, they lived their lives.

My grandfather died in the same way that my grandmother died. She harbored an invisible and undetected cancer in her lungs, but still, they both died from pneumonia in hospital, eleven years apart. After my grandfather died, I found a notebook in his belongings. It was from the last days of my grandmother's life as the disease took residence in her lungs, ravaged her. She had a breathing tube in her throat and could not speak, so all their conversations were on this stenographer's tablet.

I can only read a page here and there. It is too overwhelming to read. Sometimes I wonder why I keep it, yet it seems too sacred to throw away. She writes, "It hurts, Michael. So much more than I can bear." And the next line, she asks if he found her socks. To read her suffering in her own handwriting on the page...I have often wondered if in his last days, he thought about that notebook. If he knew the pain that he would experience, the desperation that would be coming. I wonder if that death was something he feared, or more like the devil he knew. Pain I expect is always less than the pain of the unexpected.

The grief changed with the notebook. She suffered. I put that out of my mind, I suppose. I washed the death, because I was not there. It was a beautiful death in my mind's eye. She waited for my grandfather to come to the hospital. Then she let go in his arms. But this notebook reminds me that it hurt her. The illness wrenched the life out of her, squeezing her lung. This strong woman wept and begged for her life.

I never asked myself before if Lucy's death hurt her. Did she suffer? It is so easy to fall right into a maze of torturous grief thoughts. So easy, I didn't even realize I walked into the huge hedge maze with the sign in front that reads:

MAZE WITHOUT AN EXIT!

DO NOT ENTER!

BEASTS ABOUND!

The other day, we sat at the traffic light in front of Harleigh Cemetery, the one behind Dunkin Donuts, where Walt Whitman is buried. It is a few miles from my house. "A famous poet is buried there," I said to Beezus. I don't know why I mentioned it to a four-year old. In the moment, I suppose I thought if you bury me, bury me next to Walt Whitman.

Beezus didn't miss a beat. "Is Lucy with him?"
"What do you mean?"
"Is Lucy buried there?"
"No, honey. Lucy was not buried. She was cremated. Do you know what that means?"
"No."
"It means that after you die, when your soul leaves the body and that person no longer feels any pain and all the tests are done, they burn the body and make sacred ashes. We have her ashes in our house."
"WE DO?!?!"
"Yes."
"WHERE?!?!"
"In the living room."
"LUCY IS IN THE LIVING ROOM?!?!"
"I suppose in some ways she is, but in many others, the important ways, she is not."

But is she in the living room? It feels like a puzzle I cannot solve. And I felt like I had to say over and over, but she is not hurting. It didn't hurt her to be burned to ash and fit into the smallest jar in the world.

I saw this sign the other day and I can't shake it.

I do not have a soul, it read. I am a soul and I have a body. 

Maybe the body is a labyrinth, our soul climbs in and travels about, like a corporeal pilgrimage. We think we are our thoughts. We think we are the body. We forget that there is a way out again. Like Icarus, the way out can be wax wings rising above the whole mess, or the way out is to go back the way we came, but the way of wisdom is to follow the path, wherever it goes, no matter how pointless it feels, because we know we get out somehow.

Grief, however, is a fucking maze. And there is a minotaur in it. The minotaur wants to eat your heart, and then have sex with your corpse. I know it is disgusting, but I am only telling you the truth of the matter. It's a goddamned minotaur. Awful oversexed beast. The maze is designed to catch you up. It looks straight forward, like a hedge path at times, but then it ends, abruptly. Straight up there is a green, dense bush. It can't even be called a bush, it is a wall of hedge. You turn and take another path, and there is another fucking minotaur. Except this minotaur has a concerned look and is asking you why you aren't over her death yet. She was so little, he says, and she hadn't even breathed yet. Maybe it was God's plan, and who are you, really, to question God's plan. You stammer. You  scream at the minotaur, "THERE IS NOTHING TO 'GET OVER'! I JUST MISS HER, ASSHOLE!" The minotaur feels sorry for you, tries to eat your head, and you tell him you taste bitter and salty. Later, after walking for a few more years, it becomes something else, the maze, I mean, not the minotaur. You realize you are walking out of it. You no longer give a flying fuck what minotaurs say about grief. Maybe the maze is an illusion so convincing, it should just be called real. You get out of it, but you must find your own way out. You create the turns. You create the exits. You must believe this path has a way out, even when you don't believe it. It is a riddle. After you walk out of it, you realize grief was a labyrinth, not a maze.

Except maybe that is an illusion too. There is never a way out, but there is always a way in.

I am trying to figure out what I want to say about death and grief, but it is right there, stuck in this puzzle.

Walk forward. You already are in the maze. Walk deeper into the rocky maze to walk out. Trust that you will come out. Or don't. But you will.

mourning moon

I loved you before I knew to love you. I whispered your name on the wind.

Lucia. Lucia Paz. Where are you?

The only thing I hold of you now is the grief, like a cast around my heart. I signed your name on it so many times, it became part of the love I feel for everything. Someone once asked me if you wrote it yourself, I said yes until I believed it.

I miss you. I miss your little head. And your beautiful everything. It is strange to feel lonely without someone you met only once, but I suppose I never met you, not really. I only knew you dead. That is just not the same.

The morning moon hung to the southeast this morning, perfect in its sliver. I felt the dawn inside of me. An awakening to something like solitude, not loneliness, but a learning to be alone. I am a hermit. An old soul. A crone. A holy woman, wild hair like a crown above my head. I cannot take in the flesh, and neither can I let the flesh go. I tear at it with my teeth, small bites for protein. I need strength to be alone. But it is a conflict. I let her flesh leave me. She was taken away to a room somewhere. Did they love her, the men that cut her open? Did they cry? Did they soothe her bruises? Did they pray? Did they know she was named Lucia?

I keep thinking I have written about her for the last time, but then I see the moon in the early morning. The way it winks as it wanes. The way it reminds me of time. And I write about her. Sometimes when I cannot escape myself, I find her. Kept secret behind the moon, playing hide and seek.

Find me, mama.

I am in the winter sky. I am in the early dawn. I am in your seclusion. I am not speaking through mediums and channels and charlatans. I am in the quiet. I am in the tears. I am etched in your skin. I am in the cough. I am the distance. I am the early morning. I am the birds. I am your baby. I am the forest through the trees. I am not here. I am everywhere.

You say you cannot find me, but you have been looking right at me. When you are on your knees, begging for peace, offering yourself to peace, that is where I am.

three

It is too warm to be her birthday. The sun didn't rise and set the sky into otherworldly pinks and oranges. It didn't humble me at God's grace. It was just suddenly bright grey at 7:17 am.

We didn't light candles, or tell stories, or feast last night as I had imagined. No one but me wanted to remember her in that way. Everyone seemed worn down and emotional. I don't want to force grief rituals on the kids, or my husband. That is what I want our grief to be--a rhythm we follow as a family. Every year is different. Rather than candles and solstice, Bea climbed on my lap and asked me to tell her the story of when she was born. And then I told her the story of Lucy's birth and death, and then Thor's birth. My husband cried gently as I told them the stories of our family.

After they went to sleep, I wrapped gifts for five hours. Everyone's gifts, even my own. I wrapped gifts from everyone--us, Santa, my mother, my father, my husband's family. I just wrapped and wrapped until it was her birthday. Then I cleaned up my workspace, and walked outside.

The clouds covered most of the sky, but there was one star I noticed. Maybe it was Lyra's star. It was so bright. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I sat on the steps and tried to meditate, but I kept thinking about how much of a failure I have been at this grief thing. How exacting it was. Someone told me that that is what being an alcoholic is about, and now that I am not drinking, I will heal from her death. I thought about how someone I loved told me that I disturbed them with my grief, that I had made her death a cottage industry. I thought about how much I failed at that friendship, and how much that friendship failed me.*  I try to accept that sometimes people don't like me, and I fail at things. Like I failed at bringing her into the world. And civilians think grief is something you heal from, like it is the goal of my life, or a comfort to think I am ailing now with something temporary.  I thought about all the lovely words everyone said to us on Facebook, in emails, on my Glow post. That warmed me. Then I felt like a failure for focusing on all the negative emotions, rather than just that. What is wrong with me that I can't just focus on all I have? Why can I not be filled with gratitude? Communing with my daughter wasn't exactly working. I was thinking of everything but her.

I didn't even want to sit there in nature, in the dark, and think about her. I just wanted to run out of my skin, away from those words, and that feeling of shame and guilt and failure. The feelings of not being gracious enough, or thankful enough. Someone said to me yesterday that my kids needed me, and I needed to hug the ones that were here. I do hug them. Every day. Lucy gets this one moment these days where the grief is hers, where I am wholly hers.

She never belonged to me. But I always belonged to her and Beezus and Thor. Lucia belonged to the sky and the fire and the wind. I don't know her. I never knew her. I miss everything I didn't know about her. I miss everything I did know about her. I hear her in the chimes in the Spring, feel her warmth in the wood fire that heats our house, smell her in the nag champa that we light to remember her.


I prayed a small thank you for the sky and went inside. Then I prayed to feel her, or have a dream of her.

Please, God, I just want to feel her again. Not in the wind, or the trees, but her. The weight of her in my arms. I want her to nuzzle, to open her eyes. I want to see her live.

I woke up four hours later. Unrested. Sad. The children were awake and wanting to play. I had no dreams. I just shuffled my way downstairs, poured coffee. The kids and I painted in the studio. We watched the sky turn brighter. No sunrise, just brighter.

I haven't cried about her death in a long time. This space is where I come to grieve, like a small sitting room in the gigantic hypothetical farmhouse where we can afford rooms to dedicate to a single emotion. The joy room. The meditation room. The grief room. That room has with a shrine to her, a large leather chair with a broken-in quilt. There is a table with enough room for a book and a cup of coffee, maybe my reading glasses. A box of tissue. The light is soft and a picture window with a seat facing east, overlooking trees and a lake, mountains in the background. That is where the sun rises. There is a sketch pad there. A zafu, a Buddha and a jizo. Windchimes that move indiscriminately. A fireplace.

I don't think we ever heal from our children's death. I will always be sad that Lucia died. That seems more normal than trying to heal. Healing is not even my fucking goal. I just want to have a day like I am having, I suppose. Solemn with pockets of joy and sadness and a feeling of her, or the feeling of a lack of her, all around me.


Thank you for being present with the anniversary of our daughter's death, and her birthday. Thank you for the notes, emails, wall posts, comments. I don't have to space to express the full depth of my gratitude. Your love warms me, holds me, makes me feel loved. Thank you.




* I am not sharing these things because I want you to tell me how good I am, or how wrong anyone else is. I don't think any of this is an abnormal part of grief. This is grief for me. It is guilt and shame and fear and nonacceptance and anger and sadness and restlessness. All the emotions and obsessions from feeling the weight of her death, they are all little emotional avoidances. Maybe you can relate to that too.