forgiveness and remembrance

The shop smells of Japanese incense. There are chakra crystals and handblocked fabric bags made in Tibet by a women's collective. There are angels in resin for a buck, magical rocks, and pyramids, and in the middle of lavender eye pillows, I see a smiling praying jizo statue for their garden. A big jizo. It is reasonably priced, and I imagine the red bib I will sew for him. He looks like one of my paintings. I ask the beautiful woman with long flowing scarves in August, and almost no shoes about the statues around her shop. There are jizos all around this place. I ask her if she has more. I want to see them all, and she leads me around the shop, showing me Buddhas, and jizos, and Hoteis. And the first jizo is the best. He is mine.

As we stop, I reach for him, turning up to heaven, hands in prayer position, smiling. The clerk touches my wrist where her name is written on my body. It is a sensual gesture, one of compassion. The touch of a stranger feels electric. Her finger rests on my pulse. It quickens.

What does that say?

Lucia.

Is that your name?

No, it is my daughter's name.

It's beautiful. How old is she?

Actually, she died.

How old was she when she passed?

At birth. She was just being born.

Our eyes meet. It is kind of true, I am trying to communicate. No, it is true. She didn't have an age. She would have been born soon. She died just before she was born, but she was still a baby. Stillborn sounds like miscarriage to strangers. And miscarriage is also difficult and physical and hard and not to be dismissed, if you don't want it dismissed, but those words, stillbirth, miscarriage, pregnancy loss open dismissal and distance from the fact that I gave birth to my six pound baby. Lucia looked like me, and I had to leave her in the hospital for an autopsy, then cremation. So, I said she died at birth. It's not a lie, really. What I really want to say is that I pushed her out of my vagina. She was limp and gray, and weighed more than my neighbor's living baby. Her eyes were bruised and the skin torn. I kissed her anyway, and had to push her little tongue back in her mouth so she would look more alive, because it was hard to see her dead. After I held her for a few hours, she grew cold. I couldn't bear it. I wanted more blankets to cover her, to warm her.

I'm sorry. 

Thank you.

Do you have other children?

Yes. A two year old and a five year old. But Lucia is why I want the jizo, because jizos protect babies that die, and guide them into the next life. I paint them. Constantly paint them.

Wow, really? 

Yes. I paint them for other people all over the world and for myself. It is a ritual of forgiveness and remembrance.

She stared at me, tears welling. And then she hugged me. The clerk in the metaphysical store in a cluster of other stores held me. She said there was a light in me. And I could feel the darkness bubbling under the light. The dark is so overwhelming, I want to tell her, that all you can do is light stuff or it would consume us all. Even you, even your light, gauzey fabrics.


I kneel in front of the jizo I placed under her tree, next to the stepping stones we made for our two babies.

I'm sorry you died in me,I say.

There is no answer.

I'm sorry you died in me, I say again.

I chose to die like that, Mama. 
You did?
You chose it too.
I'm sorry.
Don't apologize to me, Mama. I had a good life.

I light another stick of incense and jam it into the ground.

I'm sorry your baby died in you, Angie.
It's not okay, Angie. I'm not sure I forgive you.
I know, Angie.
But keep apologizing, Ang, I think it might be working.

I perform a ritual of forgiveness. It involves nothing selfless. It is all about me being forgiven. It is empty and dark and sad, and as I walk through it, I am come out the other side full and light and contented.

I think about the life I made out of her death. It involves writing and painting and going to metaphysical stores and letting go. I let go of friends. I let go of expectation. I let go of the future. I let go of my tears. I let go of naiveté. I let go of my baby. I let go of the darkness to embrace something dark in me. I let go of anger. I let go.

+++

Today, I was over at Glow in the Woods writing about this thing that happened to me a few years ago. It was something I never talked about, or if I did, only privately to Jess or my husband, I think. I was embarrassed about it, actually, which sounds weird considering the emo shit I have owned on this blog, but still, you know, there once was a girl on the train and I loved her for a few minutes.

On strength.

I sometimes have the urge to just go to the place that is reserved for particularly disturbing fifties films where the distraught mother loses all touch with reality and dresses a porcelain doll in her baby's clothes, and calls it by her dead child's name. I would surround myself with all things Lucy—her hair, her picture, the little acorn baby that I bought for her Christmas, her ashes. I could create some kind of fancy, strange little Victorian museum out of all her things, wrap myself in another reality, and rock in the corner. I would just weep until I believed she was alive again. It would be morbid and ugly, and somehow deeply satisfying. But I have a child, even if I did this for one day, I fear I would go fully insane and not be able to come back to my beautiful life. But for one day, I want to dress like Bette Davis, and say something akin to "But you are, Blanche. You are in that chair."

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The other day when I wrote that I wasn't strong, I was also a goddamn liar. I have lived a few lifetimes already. There was a time in my life when, convinced that I wanted to be a writer, I decided that I would not turn down any new experience. I have talked to truly insane people, like a man who believed the Illuminati was following him and had tapped his Temple dorm room phone because he was a Catholic. I talked to him for five hours. I once went cliff diving in New Mexico while visiting a Zen Monastery. I tried to be brave then. I did. But I wasn't strong. I really was just a knucklehead. I have always thought that when people called me strong they just meant that. They just totaled all those knucklehead experiences and thought it equaled strength. But to me, that never was strength.

Strength to me is being compassionate, being humble, being capable...I want to be that. I strive to be that. One day, in a seriously delusional moment, after Lucy died, Sam and I were driving I began saying, "Being strong and faking being strong are the same exact thing. No, really, I am just going to pretend I am strong. I am just going to act like a strong person, like how I imagine a strong person acting, and then I am going to get through this." and I giggled nervously,"Yeah, I'm just going to fake it."

After Lucy died, I reveled in the emails and notes I received from my friends, and loved ones. But I was also completely stunned, and still am, at the amount of people who have said nothing. Not one thing. I know they know. In my kindest moments, I see their suffering, and pain. In most moments, I call them cowards. Fucking cowards. And I am shocked at how many cowards I know. My amazing friend, whose wife miscarried three babies wrote me the rawest, most honest email after Lucy died. It stunned me, and I read and reread it. He got it. He has survived this nightmare. He talked about the abyss. He gave me exactly what I needed at the time--permission to go to the dark place, to be angry, to be alienated, to grieve in anyway I needed without regard to my mental soundness. He still does this for me. It is a gift I can never repay. When I wrote back and told him about the cowards in my life, he wrote this:

I am sorry that others you care for and who, no doubt, care for you cannot be more for you in this time of suffering. Such is a bitter lesson for the strong: Because we are strong does not mean that those around us - though they may revel in this quality - will be equally strong when we need it; Indeed, it is in times of weakness that you find that those around you who rely vicariously on your strength are nowhere to be found because they cannot fathom the responsibility of shouldering the load; they cannot be strong for you... And you must find it in your heart to forgive them. You can believe that they are out there wishing they had the strength; the courage to try and lift you up....

But you will find that your strength alone will carry you through this, and you will indeed come out stronger.

But in the end, I do think I am strong. Not simply because I have survived a lot--death, birth, robbery, marriage, taxes, sickness, bills, corporate life, traveling, depression, giddiness...but perhaps it is because I have grown from these things. Because I have let others lean on me when they are going through them. Perhaps it is because even though I don't know what the fuck to say when someone's baby dies either, I still say something. ANYTHING. Even though I am afraid. But I don't think it is any of those things. Not really. I think it is simply because I forgive all those cowards in my life. I do.