On compassion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.