A Museum of Flowers

As we walked around the lake near my house, my sister-in-law said, "They really ought to have museums with only beautiful pictures of flowers and landscapes." I told her about the painting of Rachel Weeping and how I began to weep in the museum the other day. She was there too, of course. She said, "I was afraid you had seen it." She was good to talk to. She listened, she nodded, she told me stories about women who had survived the death of their children. When she said that there should be a museum of just flower paintings, I agreed at the time. Yes, only Monet, Renoir, Pissarro. It sounded like a good plan. Only safe paintings. Only paintings that don't make babylost mamas cry. They shouldn't hang pieces like Prometheus Bound, which also hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When we saw it in the European collection, she said,"Did you see Prometheus Bound?" And I said, "Yes. I totally forgot that hung here. It is magnificent." She laughed, embarrassed, because I think she was about to say how disgusting it was. And it is hard to look at an eagle eating a man's liver. It is graphic. But it is also spectacular. Spectacularly horrific, but spectacular. Is this part of my personality that was here before? Probably. I have always loved Greek mythology, and the macabre, and well, that painting has it all.

The past few days since the museum trip, I have thought about it long and hard. Even though, I wish that we had some sort of babylost guide book, much like a morbid Lonely Planet, that warns us about paintings in museums; particularly baby-filled parks; scenes in movies that involve childbirth, miscarriage, stillbirth, cot death, death of anything innocent, young or child-like, or particularly touching scenes involving mothers and/or fathers; desperately coded songs where we might hear our own heartbreak present; and anything else likely to take our breath away, make our knees shake and send us into uncontrolled crying in front of visiting guests and strangers, I still think the painting Rachel Weeping needs to hang in the Museum of Art, even if it made me cry. I think it is desperately important for it to exist. So, I have catalogued the reasons why, as my brain is wont to do:

1. and/or A. In Peale's time, there was probably no place for men to talk of the sadness over the loss of his baby, and his wife's unhappiness. Painting it, perhaps, was his way to communicate how important and very sad this event was to him and his family. Perhaps it was his only emotional outlet. I dare say that is probably exacerbated by how prevalent stillbirth was in his time.

2. and/or B. Stillbirth and child loss is unfortunately part of our lives. To pretend we only have flowers, girls by rivers, and portraits of rich European girls in fancy dress means ignoring part of the human experience. We babylost mamas are already in the closet, must art also shield the world from our grief?

3. and/or C. Flower paintings are boring.

4.and/or D. This painting is entitled Rachel Weeping. Not Baby Lying There Dead. This painting is about our pain. This painting is about our grief. This painting is outing us in the American Collection. It is all about the Babylost Mama. About us. About Women. About all Mothers. Flowers are not about us. Flowers are about someone else, someone maybe we once were, but are no longer. Flower paintings are about pretending the world is a beautiful place. Flower painting are about pretending our babies don't die, and we are not sad. Flower paintings are for wimps.

5. and/or E. When we want to show pictures of our beautiful children in a room full of mothers who have pictures of their newborns yawning, we don't. We protect those mothers from our children, from our babies with their peeling skin, and red red lips. So, let us call this painting beautiful. Let us call this gray child cute, stunning even. Let us look for her father's nose,and her mother's lips. Let us hang Rachel Weeping front and center of the American collection, not behind a tall boy dresser. Let us think Rachel Weeping is more beautiful than a painting of flowers. And if forced to stare at painting after painting of cut flowers, let us remember that those flowers are dying too.

6.and/or F. Of the thousands of works hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there was one that I saw dealing with stillbirth. One. Rachel Weeping. I cannot even remember how many flower paintings I saw. I also can only specifically remember the contents of one, which is Van Gogh's Sunflowers, and that is simply by dint of its celebrity. Does our society repress death so much that one painting of a dead baby is too many?

7. and/or G. And the most important reason: Rachel, we will not forget your baby.

Angie Weeping

This week, we have out of town guests. Normally, I love having guests, showing everyone around this city, especially people that think that Philadelphia has no redeeming qualities. I like pointing out the history and art, the beauty of the city...I like telling those goofy Philly stories, showing them it really is a small town by walking around and running into people everywhere. Of course, it is different now. I wasn't sure I would have the energy to do it. Everyone seems a little bored with my stupid banal knowledge of the city. Perhaps I've truly lost my joie de vivre, or maybe, closer to the truth is, no one ever really enjoyed my ridiculous tour guiding.

Still, we hit the Art Museum yesterday, which is impressive without me having to do anything. Just by its mere existence. Now, I have a membership, and have gone/go quite a bit, but it has been a while since I wandered around the permanent collection. I generally go for a new show, or just head up to the Asian art section and Buddha-gawk. So, I was delighted to have an excuse to look at the European collection. The Philadelphia Art Museum has an amazingly vast collection of truly beautiful work. I was impressed with us. Go Philly.

Then, we decided to hit the American collection. I had forgotten that the Gross Clinic had become part of the permanent collection, and was excited to see the other Eakins. We walked into a room filled with quintessentially American furniture, and glassware, and I walked around. Wide-eyed, taking it in, and then BAM, there it was. Rachel Weeping. And the room began spinning, and I searched for an exit. My niece, age 7, stood next to me, and said, "Is she dead?" and I was faltering, "Yes, I think so. I have to go." And I turned around, past my family, past my husband, just saying, I need to walk, I need to walk. and the tears were streaming down my face.

I couldn't pull it together. I couldn't reign it in. I was just simply a wreck. Why didn't I notice these paintings before? Or the songs, or the poems, or the anything...how ignorant I was. I felt such a pull of two emotions. One screamed like an insane women, "Get me out of here. Get me out of here." And the other wanted to pull each person to this painting and say, "See how sad she is. This is how sad I am too." Of course, these incidents always remind of how universal this is, how very human losing my child to stillbirth is, but that doesn't make it any fucking easier. Sure, I feel very very human and very very fragile.

Yesterday was such a beautiful day, a day I have been waiting for since Lucy died, and I was a mess. When we got home, everyone wanted to head to the playground, while I just lay in bed and sobbed. It took all of my energy, all of my everything to get up when I heard them, and try to make it look like I hadn't been crying for an hour and a half. Last night, I looked up the painting on line, because I was ready to look at it. I was prepared, unlike the chance encounter we had in the American collection. And when I found the painting on a blog, it said, "Rachel Weeping, by Charles Willson Peale. Above is a painting by Charles Willson Peale of his wife Rebecca weeping over her dead little one. This painting is a poignant reminder of one of the blessings of modern life: the drastic lowering of child and infant mortality."

Fuck you, blog writer.

Folktales

Once upon a time, my husband and I used to sit there at night, after lights out, and take turns talking about our day with our 22 month old daughter Beatrice. I would generally start, and tell him every minute detail about what Beatrice and I did.

“This morning, we woke up, and came downstairs. Mama got some coffee, and Beatrice got some milk in her purple cup. Then, we decided to eat breakfast. Beatrice wanted toast instead of cereal, even though Mama had already poured the milk. After we ate, we went upstairs to start our day. Then we sat on the counter, and brushed our teeth, but Beatrice didn't want to brush them, so we decided to count to ten together and only brush our teeth until the count was over. Then when we were done, we clapped and talked about how easy it was...”

You get the picture, nice and drawn out and booooooooooooring…then my husband Sam would tell us about his day, in very easy and nice terms, because you see, he works at a pediatric hospital as an anesthetist, so he sees sick children, abused children, sad children...but we would talk about how Daddy helped the sick kids get better. And then, well, you know what happened. My daughter died. And the day we came home and put her to bed, we decided we absolutely could not talk about our day anymore. Our day would consist of Mama and Daddy crying. So, I grabbed a book I read sometimes to Beatrice when Sam works a twenty-four hour shift. A book of fairy tales. She would fall asleep after one, and Sam and I would go into our room and talk about just how very twisted fairy tales are. It just reads as though every child in fairy tales is abused, and every one ends with the little girl becoming a princess, or dying in the process. Does marriage really have to be the end of every girl's story?

Anyway, after a few days of this nonsense, Sam and I took little Bea to Peddler’s Village, which a constructed, fake little village in Bucks County with quaint shops and a water wheel. It was an unusually warm Sunday in December, only a week after Lucy’s birth. We wanted to get out of the house, try to function in normal society. At Peddler’s Village, there is a beautiful independent toy shop. I searched through their book section for something to replace the fairytales. There was only one folktale book, so I bought it without reading one word. It is called The Girl Who Only Dreamed Geese. It is a collection of Inuit folktales. One night, not too long after, as I sat down, I began the story called Uteritsoq and the Duckbill Dolls. The story starts, “Who had the reputation for being the most stubborn man in all of the coastal villages of Greenland? It was a man named Uteritsoq.” What a great beginning! Something to tease Sam about before bed. Uteritsoq is a stubborn man, but a good provider. He never accepted any help. Then we get to the part that took my breath away, and stopped me in my reading.

Now it happened that Uteritsoq had a beautiful wife. But she was very unhappy. She has wanted a child so badly, and just a few days earlier she had lost a child before it had lived even a day! There was great sadness throughout the village. Crying, weeping, sobbing, Uteritsoq’s wife went into mourning. One by one, the other women in the village came to her house to sit and weep with her. According to traditional rules, she was not to do work of any sort—no sewing, no fish cleaning, no mending, no cooking. Nothing. Mourning was enough work. Weeping was enough work. Dreaming about the lost child was enough work.

This story came up a week and a few days after Lucy died, and I was sitting at home with my husband all day, my breasts bound, weeping, sobbing, feeling entirely alone. Here was a story that understood. And old story passed down from woman to woman, family to family. It keeps going, “However, Uteritsoq felt crowded by the weeping in his house. He watched his wife’s quaking shoulders, her tears, how we tore at her hair, her constant frown—it all made Uteritsoq restless and confused. He wanted to flee from his own house. So he did.”

Now I am sitting cross-legged on the floor of my daughter’s bedroom—the bedroom intended for both Bea and Lucy. Tears are streaming down my face. I need to know. What happens? What happens to this family? Uteritsoq finds his kayak torn, and tries to make his wife mend it, though she is in mourning. Though she refuses because she is in mourning, stubborn Uteritsoq makes her, thus upsetting the Moon Man and his dog, who controls the tides. This then upsets the hunting. He goes on a long arduous journey to the moon. While he is gone, the wife’s mourning period ends, and the moon spirit goes to her and helps Uteritsoq’s wife make many duckbilled dolls. As they sit there sewing them, Uteritsoq watches her and overhears her complaining about him and his stubbornness. When he returns home, all of the duckbilled dolls become children. And they are all stubborn, which the villagers get a kick out of. The story ends thus, “Sometimes he laughed; sometimes he cried. And through it all, he caught a lot of fish. He had very, very good luck.”

We just don’t have these stories in our society. We just don’t make stillbirth part of the human experience. It is something to be whispered about, something told about you after you leave the room as though explaining the sadness in your face. I love this story for many reasons, but not least of which is simply because it exists.

Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed

As I waited to birth Lucia, I decided to open a grief package they give to parents who have lost a child. In it was a pamphlet of what to expect after birth, and a local grief support group's newsletter. The newsletter contained poems written by parents who had lost children through stillbirth or miscarriage. On the front page, a piece entitled “A Letter to Alex” caught my eye. I had read this before. It was written by someone I knew. She was my colleague at the job I had before becoming a stay at home mom. They had lost their son four years ago. He was born prematurely, and died three days later. When I sat in that bed, feeling waves of contractions through me, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I am not the first person to go through this pain. Here I was all wrapped up in my suffering, getting incredibly sort of narcissistic about my grief. "Why did this happen to ME? What did I do? Why did MY baby die?" Me. Me. Me. And here was this person who also lost her baby. A person I knew. The fact that I knew her humanized her. I remember her grief, and her sorrow. I remember running into her in the bathroom at work and crying with her. Did I tell her enough how sorry I was? Did I tell her that reading the email about her loss made me cry for the first time in my career in front of my colleagues? Did I even say anything? Was I the person to her that I needed now? No. I knew the answer without asking. But then it reminded me of a story I once read called Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed. It began obsessing me. I was anxious to find a copy right there in the hospital. But I just remembered that suffering affects everyone, in their own way. It calmed me. It made me strong to think of this story.

When I finally got home from the hospital, I googled the story of Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed. I am paraphrasing here, because it means something to me that might not be the true story that Buddhists have studied for years. It is a new story for me now. Kisa Gotami was a wise and kind woman. She married a man who was rich, though she was not. I cannot tell you why I remember that part, just simply perhaps, that it was because she was a wise, compassionate and kind woman, and not because she was beautiful, that she married a nobleman. She had one son with him. On a night while a storm raged, she realized that her baby wasn’t crying. I always remember this part, because it is exactly those types of details that us who have lost our children remember. He should have cried from the thunder, but he didn’t. The thunder. The fucking thunder.

When she realized her baby son had died, she prayed. She prayed to every God she could think of. She prayed to the devils too. She prayed all night, but still, her son was dead. So when morning came, she went into the marketplace with her son in her arms to find medicine to bring him back to life. The people took pity upon Kisa Gotami, because she was such a kind woman.

“Your son is dead, Kisa Gotami. There is no medicine to cure him.” The merchants tried to tell her the truth, but she couldn’t hear them. The entire city felt sorrow for her. Some even suggested killing her to stop her suffering. I like that part. Perhaps because it is morbid, or so unbelievably kind, depending on your perspective, that people would think to do that. Finally, she arrived at the apothecary who was expecting her. When she asked him if he had a cure, he pretended to think for a long time. I always imagine him scratching his chin, and looking up at the ceiling, maybe taking off his glasses, then and putting the stem in his mouth. He told her, “I don’t have the medicine your son needs, but Gautama (the Buddha) used to be a doctor before a monk. He can cure your son.” She took off at once, still carrying her son in her arms.

She ran and ran to the monastery where the Buddha was lecturing to the monks there. She ran in screaming, and disturbing the entire scene. She said, “Please, I was told you can cure my son. Please help him.” The monks chattered amongst themselves. Someone said, “Take her out.” Another said, “Have compassion, her son is dead.” She stared at him pleading. She said to the Buddha, “Please, my husband is amongst the wealthiest men in the city. He will pay you any price. Anything you want.” I can just see this scene in my head, though I am undoubtedly influenced by Hollywood movies.

The Buddha stared at her for a long time and said, “Yes, I know the cure for death.”

Of course, everyone gasped. I’m sure a thought passed through each of the monks heads that they were following a charlatan. I would think something along the lines of, “Sonofabitch, I thought this dude was the real deal and not another snake charmer.” She said, “I will give anything.”

He said, “I only need one thing. A mustard seed. One mustard seed. But it cannot be a common mustard seed. It must be a mustard seed from a family that has never known death. If you bring me that seed, I will prepare your cure.” Of course, she was enthusiastic. He then told her to do this alone, and leave her son. He said that he would prepare the rest of the cure while she was on her mission.

It was the first time in two days that Kisa Gotami did not hold her son, and as he lay there in front of the Buddha, they all saw that he was rotting and had maggots. After she left, they cremated the child in her absence.

That part always makes me shudder. It is so real. I actually thought after I birthed Lucy that I wanted to just keep her. That I didn't care if she was dead, I was going to carry her around with me. As morbid and gross as it sounds, it occurred to me as I was holding her that she would disintegrate and rot, like it occurred to me suddenly that this was just her body. Like that Magritte painting, "This is not a pipe." It is a picture of a pipe, but it is not a pipe. That thought calmed me, strange as that might sound. It reminded me that I couldn't hold on to my daughter's body forever, because it wasn't my daughter. It was the shell that housed my daughter.

She began her arduous search for a seed. She was thorough. She went to each house and asked each family for a mustard seed. The first house she knocked on the door, “Can you spare a mustard seed?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, wait, has your family ever known death?”
“Yes, my father died last month, Kisa Gotami, don’t you remember you were there?
And on and on, “My brother”
“My daughter.”
“My husband.”

Kisa Gotami exhausted her search through the city, and knelt in the mud crying, “My son is dead.”

She went back to the Buddha and he asked her if she has a mustard seed for him, and she said, “No. How selfish to think only I could be spared from death.” And I am going to quote one of the versions that I read, the Buddha says:
"Your observation is accurate in every way, Kisa Gotami. Neither those wise nor those foolish are immune to death. However great a father roars, he can never waken a dead daughter. However much a mother begs the gods, a dead son will never cry again. One by one, Gotami, we each die. "

After reading this story, I traveled about the world for the next few days looking at everyone as though they weren't "Bob" or "Michelle", but they were their suffering. Like Bob had become Prostate Cancer, and Michelle had become the one whose mother just died. Even those who were not grieving, I saw people that were insecure, nervous to talk to me, and I saw them simply in their suffering. I remember saying often in the first weeks, “I’m sorry” after someone would offer condolences. My husband Sam thought it was crazy, as though I were apologizing for our baby dying, or apologizing for receiving condolences, but it wasn’t that. They were suffering. I could hear it in their voices, I could smell it emanating from their bodies. Some of those people felt genuine grief at my daughter’s death, and some had felt genuine fear at having to talk to me. I was sorry for them too.

I also began seeing everyone as someone’s child. I remember having a glimpse of that when I gave birth to Beatrice, but this was different. I felt so kindly towards everyone. It is an incredibly healing way to imagine the world—compassionate, empathetic, vulnerable.

I often thought about my sanity, and if I was sane or not. I thought of Kisa Gotami not being able to see the maggots on her son, but only see her beautiful newborn son. She did not know she was gone. She only knew one thing—save him. I recognized that if I wanted to remain sane, I had to accept this world for what it is, not what I wanted it to be. People die. People we love die regardless of their goodness. Humans are fragile beings. We must be kind and good and compassionate and gentle with ourselves and others when we are not, people die, become wounded inside and out. People ask how us non-religious people move forward, how we deal with death. We deal because we do not pretend that someone will right all this suffering. It simply is. It is sometimes unjust. It is sometimes just. I didn’t much linger on the thought of “Why me?”, because the logical flipside of that coin is, “Why not me?”

I felt this amazing sense of connection with the universe. This calm emanated from me, and around me for two weeks. I sobbed often, but for all of our suffering. Sometimes thinking about my husband’s suffering made me cry more than my own suffering. It was one of the most spiritually profound periods of my life. I just saw everyone as their suffering, and I felt an amazing amount of love and compassion for every living thing. It lasted for two weeks or so. And now, some days, I can touch that again, (just writing about it makes me feel that warmth in my stomach) and other days, I feel like a Neanderthal. "What did I do to make Volcano Gods angry? Must sacrifice goat."