On writing

source

When I was in the first three years of my grief, when the loss of my second daughter was acute and ever-present, her “absence… gone through me / like thread through a needle” (W.S. Merwin), I wrote all the time. I wrote in a journal first, trying to remember every detail of the days before she died, the day she died, the day we waited, the day I delivered her, the day we came home without her. I wrote letters to her. I bought a fancy Valentine’s card on the one-month anniversary of her death and wrote her a Valentine that I sealed and stowed away in the box of her things. That writing helped but it was never enough. I needed something else. I needed recognition, acknowledgment, needed to be seen by others who knew.

I remember my first post here: holding a tentative hand out for help, sharing just a few sentences of my bewilderment and pain, I was pulled up gently into the community of mothers who were one or a couple or many steps ahead of me. This is a safe place, they said. You belong here, they told me. We hear you. We know. 

I started a blog. I was never a blogger before she died. I remember the way my heart pounded as I hit publish on my first post. I remember the rush of gratitude so strong I felt sick when I received my first comment. I wrote so much. Sometimes every day. Usually several times a week. I found a community. Mothers who read each word I wrote and I read every word of theirs. We held each other up. We loved each other’s babies. We cried together and we were so, so angry together, and lots of times we laughed together, too.

It tapered off slowly, the writing. I’d find myself starting a new post with the bemused observation that it had been two months since I’d last written. Then it had been three months, then five, and now I might write twice a year. The last post was for her birthday. January. The only post this year.

It’s been a crazy year, this one. But still, I wonder what happened to time when I passed it all writing. Where did I find it that time? What did I ignore or neglect or simply cease to notice while I was writing? How is grief so all-consuming and then one day… it’s not?

I don’t not think of her now. I think of her all the time. Today I tried to notice each time I thought of her. Walking past the hummingbird candle at my mother’s. Watching a cloud drift from one shape to another in the ferry line up while the kids complained about the wait. Driving across the city, through our old neighbourhood, memories surging up: the hospital where we first saw her on ultrasound; the park where I played with her big sister and where we dreamed together of all the things they’d do; the coffee shop where I waited, hand on my belly, willing her to kick that last morning; the corner garden where Big Sister and I watched the daffodils bloom the first spring she was gone, and then the next and the next.

But then we get home and, after we wash our hands really well, we unpack the car, and water the plants, and sign in to Zoom meetings, and start the laundry, and cook the dinner, and give the kids the baths we’ve been putting off for way too long. Where did the time go? Where did I used to find it? How do I steal some back?

And what about all those mothers and babies? The ones who pulled me into the community and the ones I pulled in after me? They’re also unpacking cars, cooking dinner, giving baths, worrying about their loved ones, worrying about their jobs, washing their hands, wondering where the time went, washing their hands again (and again and again). Is anyone still reading? Some days I feel the gradual loss of that community as another kind of grief, a secondary bereavement. I think I miss them more than I miss the old friends, the ‘real life’ friends who, after Anja’s death, excused themselves into the background of my life and then gradually faded right out of it. Some of that community of mothers are an email or text away, Anja still in their hearts as their babies are in mine, but as with the writing, the urgency has faded. At one time, we were all metaphorically huddled together, ready at any time to respond to a blog post, to reply to an email, to cry and rage and laugh in the spaces we created for ourselves out of our pain and need and love. Now, we mostly move outside the huddle, carrying on in ways we couldn’t imagine when we needed each other so badly. When we write, we ask ourselves: where is the time? How did we get here? How is it possible that we miss the urgency that was, after all, caused by terrible pain? There is comfort and loss in every connection.

Writing is still a way of connecting. Committing to writing here every couple of months is a way to carve out time, to make a little space for Anja, for me, for grief, for love. Sharing the writing is a way of keeping Anja in the world, I think, of reminding the world she was here. In those early days, I was screaming it: SHE WAS HERE SHE WAS HERE SHE WAS HERE. She was here is mostly now a gentle sigh, like that gentle wind that drifted the clouds across the sky this morning.

She was here. I write it, still, and hope that maybe these words will reach someone new to this space who needs to know that someday the acute pain eases, the absence goes through, and then settles, makes itself at home, works its way in, finally, with a sigh and some release.  It happens in the huddle. It happens through community. It happens with connection. Hand in hand, pulling each other along, grasping on to those who are ahead of us in the chain, helping up those who are just joining, finding our way together. Slowly, slowly the front end starts to let go, the middle of the line takes their place, and the last in line, who never thought they’d be able, turn to outreached hands and gently murmur, you belong here, this is a safe place, we hear you, we know.