the end of the world

Tomorrow is the end of the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She is fine, and I am suffering.

+++

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

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

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

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

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


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

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.

waning gibbous

It is a waning gibbous moon.

I am a waning gibbous woman. A humpbacked thing half of what I could be. The moon hangs over the tree line, bright and sure of itself. I am floating somewhere else, to the north, cold and unsure. It is day and you can still see me, even though I am a creature of the night these days. Don't let the list of things I do fool you.

I am on autopilot.

Bake cookies. Drive children. Drink coffee. Sweep floor. Make craft. Cuddle children. Wrap gifts. Send Christmas Cards. Chit chat with parents. Pick up girl. Answer email. Go to the market. Send text. Watch Miracle of 34th Street.

I pencil in crying.

Schedule a meltdown. Between pediatrician well-visit and lunch.

I don't know how to feel anymore.

It is the sad truth of my life that I can't quite figure it out these days. I feel happy and like a liar. I am in awe of nature. This morning, I walked out as the sun rose over the CVS at the end of our street. It is the most photographed strip mall sunrise in New Jersey. And the strange lighting, the still illuminated bright waning gibbous moon over the trees, make me feel silly for being all up in my deformed head, pointy and shadowed. See how I am a liar?

I want a mountain top.
Legs crossed.
Palms up and open.
Watching my breath drift out of my nose and my mouth.
I would soak in the sky until my belly puffed out with clouds and nothingness.
I eat the moon, and the solstice and the sky.

*Burp.*

There is something pulsing behind my eyes. It is blood and love and moonlight. It is cold outside, but not December cold. The cold pushes against my eyes too. The unseasonable warmth pushes back. It has the feel of the first warm day of Spring. It is confusing my grief hormones.

I lie on the ground, my arms outstretched. The ground is wet and dry, and the points that touch the ground grow cold. Carrying three children within me marked my body, changed my person. I have crow's feet and side saddles, and large sagging breasts. My stomach muscles tore. I carry my weight like I am still carrying a child. My knees ache. My back spasms. My boob leaks milk. My skin's dull and pocked. My hair falls out.

 My friend photographed my family last weekend.

My husband asked me how I like them. "They are all so gorgeous except for the ones with me. I look fat and scabby and sickly." There is nothing more attractive than self-loathing. His eyes go all glassy and he thinks that I am the most charming woman he has ever met.

"You are beautiful, mama." I turn and the girl is standing in the doorway. I am ashamed of my lack of confidence and constant focus on how ugly I am. I want something different for her.

Thank you, my angel.

She watches everything. She listens to everything. She soaks me in like the moonlight. Even if I am a waning gibbous moon, I am still bright to her. Sometimes I think my body beautiful in its transformation into the soft warm pile of mother earth flesh that folds on itself. She sees me differently than every other person in the world. And she makes me beautiful.

the knot of a tree

It is morning. The sky is pink.

It is mourning. My sky is black. My arms grow like grape vines, winding around all I love, weaving into the tree we planted for her, in the hair of my boy and his sister. I feel something more than grief, something like a chasm of hurt in me. Every piece of my life falls into it. Every hurt goes in there, screaming and grasping for ground.

I pour the coffee. It is morning. The lights slices through the clouds like a ladder. Oranges and pinks and weeping and hunger. Sometimes I believe in heaven simply by dint of the beauty above. Something besides the cold and emptiness that science insists are the only thing residing there, something like the beautiful essence of our collective conscience, should control that light and live there.

Beezus asks me if her sister is big now or if she is still little. She gestures with her arms, open and then brings her hands together in the size of a newborn. And I say that she is neither. She is just ash and bone. She is dead and not growing anymore. I tell her we can look at the ruins of her sister. Lucy is in a jar on the shelf.  We could pour her out on an earthenware plate, and see if she is still there, in the white of who she once was.

It feels inappropriate to say this to a child, but I want her to know that her spirit isn't in the jar, just the shell of her is. She is somewhere else, somewhere within us and outside of us. She is the wind and the breath and the whispers and the phone falling off the wall. She is the ladybug and the hummingbird and the moss in our terrariums. Some people believe that babies who die turn into angels, but in God's world, angels were never human, they were warriors. I ask her what she thinks.

She tells me very matter of factly that she thinks when people die, they go into the trees.

"That is why it is very important to hug trees."

God speaks through other people, maybe God speaks through you. Maybe God speaks through Beezus. Maybe God was speaking through the people who have told me that I am a horrible person. Or the ones that insinuate that grief is something different than love.

Maybe

I know I have said this before, but I am grateful.

Not that she died. But that I had somewhere to go when she died. I am grateful for the ones who can hear her name, and bear witness to our struggles without judgment. I am grateful to my friends who love my children, all of them. I am grateful there are trees to house our children, and children to tell the story of the earth to us.

She died.

Almost three years ago now. It feels like I can count my grief in rings. The years of famine and grief and withering mark me, gnarled and grey. I looked dead once, but I am green again. I have a knot in the middle of me that small rodents crawl into and make a home. The knot feels like a hole, but it is a home. I must remember it. I cry again and know that the tears carve something like a chasm of love. They formed the knot and the hole and the gulf between before and after and everything falling inside of it.

Winter Solstice. Lucia's birth story,part 1.

November 27, 2008. I had a dream about Lucia tonight. I was on my grandparent’s back porch—a large redwood deck looking into the Pennsylvania wood. My hands were searching my belly, feeling her position, and I could feel her head under my sternum. Breech, I thought. But my hands searched her head, and continued to her shoulders, and then connected to her arms which wrapped around my middle. Then I realized she was holding onto my belly, rather than being inside me. I looked down to see her dark hair. Ah, she is beautiful. Simply gorgeous. When I held her up I could see these violet eyes, and a smile. Her nose was crooked, so I took my finger and pushed it straight. And her eyes were violet. Stunningly violet purple. But what stuck with me was her smile and the peace on her face. That is what she gave me—a sense of peace from her smile. It is all she did, smile. I held her as I once held my Beatrice, on the left, to feed from the breast…it wasn’t a long enough dream. After my dream, I wanted her middle name to be Paz, which means “peace” in Spanish.

December 21, 2008. I had predicted many months ago, that my daughter would be born on solstice. That day, a Sunday, there was something about the lack of movement that was disturbing me. Had it been one day or two? Did I feel her yesterday? I couldn’t remember. Chasing my 20-month old daughter means that I seldom pay attention to movement during the day. I had attended a baby shower earlier, and thought I felt some shifting, but honestly, that seems all I have felt for Saturday and Sunday—shifting. Her bum would suddenly be hard and in front. Maybe there wasn’t enough room. I was 38 weeks. She must be tired from all the contractions I had had Thursday and Friday. I kept justifying all these different reasons for not feeling her be squirmy, but the truth is Friday, I know she was wiggling, and Thursday, I was in the hospital being monitored for what was a slightly elevated blood pressure. She was there, and responsive, and her heartbeat was beautifully loud in the little room.

Sunday evening, after I sat for a while, I began prodding her, moving her head, trying to get a reaction from her, but her body felt limp in my belly. I searched my belly for a heartbeat with a stethoscope. Nothing. My husband told me that it is difficult with the stethoscope to hear the heartbeat. I called the midwife. She told me to come to the hospital to be monitored.

In my mind, I kept thinking that I was going to look like a fool to come in and be monitored for my healthy baby. But still, I couldn’t be sure. I was just so anxious at this point, so nervous of that which could not be spoken. I asked Sam so many times, “Is she okay, Sam? She is going to be okay, right?” And he tried to remain optimistic, but I think we were both scared in the same way. We didn’t want to speak of what could be.

To say this was completely off of my radar is an understatement. I had prepared myself for the most horrible possibility of, say, having to have a c-section, rather than natural childbirth, but the idea that she could possibly die had never even entered my consciousness. We sat in PETU waiting for the nurse to come check her heart rate. She was one of those nurses you want on your team. Loud. Brash. Endearingly maternal to those who are brave. She searched and searched. And I began to cry. She said, “Ah, honey, sometimes I can’t find the heartbeat, let me get the ultrasound tech.” The team came in, and when there were three, and my midwife, I think it began to hit me that something was really wrong. The tech and the doctors introduced themselves. They started. “Here is her head.” And I saw her head, and then the screen panned down to her little ribs. Nothing.

“There is no heartbeat,” I said it first, I think. And the doctor said those words that I never wanted to hear, “Your little girl has passed away.”

I held onto my husband and we wept and wept. There was something about that moment that was so incredibly primal. I just wanted to shave my head. No, scratch that, it’s not quite right. Shaving my head sounds like a nice process. Studying religion, I had read about Jain nuns who pulled each hair out of their head for fear of hurting the lice that might be peacefully residing in their scalp. That is what I thought of, quietly pulling each hair out of my head until I was bald. Suddenly, yes, even lice were someone’s kid. Then, I wanted to wrap myself in orange cloth and fall on the ground sobbing. I wanted a ritual right then. Anything.

After a minute, I asked all those questions, “Why? How?” And then they began saying that it is nothing I could have prevented or done. It was not my fault. And that I may never know what killed my daughter. How had I gone through my whole life not knowing this? How had I managed to escape this particular insight into how cruel the world is to some parents? As though I found out that God picks some children to simply draw the life out of, without explanation, I felt outside of myself. As though I was someone who just had their forehead branded with a symbol of their grief, I just simply spoke the obvious, “My heart is broken.”