At the kitchen table: introductions and an invitation
/
At the kitchen table posts are a long-standing tradition on Glow in the Woods. In these posts, the contributing writers gather together to answer a series of questions. This time, the questions give us a way of introducing ourselves together as the current cohort of writers here. As Kate recently explained, after years spent tending this space, she’s passed the Glow reins on to Emma and Jen. It’s our turn now to set the table, put the tea and coffee on, and invite you to pull up a chair. At this kitchen table, you can tell your story if you want, or just listen. Here, your grief is welcome, in all its variations, its beauty and ugliness, love and anger, hope and bitterness. Here, you’re not alone. We’re so glad you found us.
Can you introduce yourself and your child?
Jo-Anne: There are times when someone asks this question and I answer without hesitation: "Braydon," I say. My living child. But here, this place, where masks are stripped I say Zia. I am Jo-Anne, mother to a tween Braydon, and Zia. Zia died at 33 weeks on 16 July 2013. She would be eight this year.
Emily: My name is Emily. My son Henry was four months and two days old when he stopped breathing at daycare. He was rushed by ambulance to the children’s hospital, but never regained consciousness. We decided to donate his organs and he was taken off life support a few days later.
Kathy: My name is Kathy, and I really wish I weren't here, but my daughter Tinsley was stillborn so I'm glad I'm here. Tinsley died at 32 weeks because her lifeline, her umbilical cord, formed a double true knot the size of her little fist. I help tie shoes for my sons, Charlie (nine), James (six), Henry (two) and George (baby), and sometimes knotting up their laces sends me into a wistful or rageful tailspin of what could have been.
Nori: I’m Nori. My firstborn child, Olivia, died when she was one week old, after suffering brain damage during a traumatic labor. Just typing that sentence still brings me to tears. She was a big, beautiful baby and I miss her so much.
Emma: My son Jesse was stillborn at 38 weeks gestation in September, 2017 after a long-awaited and completely normal pregnancy. We chose not to have an autopsy and I still don’t know why, medically, he died; it’s one of those terrible mysteries that keeps me circling back to the impossible questions, the great why of my life. I am also five years out from my first miscarriage and three years from my last (damn you March!), so I am carrying those losses as well. I have two living daughters; my eldest is eight years old and my youngest is two.
Samantha: My name is Samantha and I lost my daughter, Alana, two days before her due date in 2013. It was my picture-perfect first pregnancy and everything had gone swimmingly for nine wonderful months - she was the first grandchild on both sides of our family and eagerly awaited by her many uncles, aunts, and large extended family. Imagine our surprise when we showed up at the hospital in labor only to discover she no longer had a heartbeat. That was the moment the world spun on its axis and I, as I was, ceased to exist.
Jen: There have been a lot of Jens on this site over the years. I’m another. Jen, mother to Anja, who was stillborn in 2012. She was a beautiful baby. Her death was never explained. I have two living children, a daughter who is twelve, and a son who is nearly eight. Between their births, I had three miscarriages. It’s so hard to imagine Anja as she might have been now, at nine, in grade four. She’s always my little gone girl, gone off on a dark January night; in those early days, I could almost feel her in the huge forest, the mountains, the night sky outside my window at the edge of the city. Almost, but not quite.
How did you find Glow in the Woods, how long have you been coming here, and what has it meant to you?
Jo-Anne: I was pretty much broken, desperate for help, for connection. I live in South Africa, in Johannesburg, and the support groups were aimed at "real loss". Mine was real. It was raw. I was tired of hearing it was her time. About God's plan. So I turned to Google, asking if anyone felt as alone as I did in babyloss. And GITW found me, as I always say. I posted on the forum, just a few lines and I found my home, kindred spirits, women who like me had lost a child, women who understood. Men found us along the way, grandparents, it's been such an amazing experience, devastating, but amazing nonetheless.
Emily: Once I started to come out of the numb haze of the early days, I searched all over the internet for something, anything I could feel a connection to...and my search led me to GITW. It was a breath of fresh air and felt so welcoming. Whenever I posted in the forums, I received such an outpouring of unconditional support.
Kathy: One of my best loss mom friends introduced me to Glow so I could also share and commiserate in the unfiltered, balls-out version of what it's like to have a dead baby - not what it's like to "lose a baby" or "send a baby to heaven.” Glow was and still is the place where my love, grief, and madness can roam free.
Nori: I found Glow a couple of weeks after my daughter died, when I was searching the internet for any stories that shared similarities with mine. All I could think about or talk about was my daughter and my grief, and Glow was a place where that was OK, even normal. No euphemisms, no pressure to find a silver lining or to pretend that you had “healed” after an appropriate amount of time. Now that I am pregnant again, I find myself poring through the forum archives when I need reassurance that I’m not alone in the complex emotional minefield that is pregnancy after loss.
Emma: I found Glow thanks to a wonderful friend-of-a-friend (turned mentor and friend) who had lost a baby four years earlier than me. She sent me an email with resources that had helped her and said that she would come with me to support group meetings if I ever wanted. It was such a lovely offer, and being here, writing and editing, feels like a small way that I can pay that support forward. This place is the one that stuck for me, the place I kept coming back for more solidarity and inspiration on what is often a very lonely journey.
Samantha: I found Glow in those early dark, desperate days when I was still in absolute shock over what had happened to us and trying to make sense of it all. We had been completely blindsided - we didn’t know stillbirth even still happened in this day and age, until it happened to us - and I was hungry for stories of other families who had survived this unthinkable nightmare. I typed “stillbirth blog” into Google, and proceeded to read all 90-something (at that time) pages of the archives. It was such a lifeline.
Jen: Weirdly, I found GITW before Anja died. My first baby was born by emergency c-section in 2008. They called it a miracle and in the weeks after she came home, I needed to process not only what had happened, but what could have happened. In 2008 there were lots of blogs written by parents whose babies had died, and there was Glow in the Woods, and some random googling led me to all of it. I read for a week or two, realizing what could have been our reality until I felt I had no right to be in these spaces because E had lived. She was fine even if I had been so scared. Fast forward three years, to the moment I learned there was no heartbeat and that I’d have to prepare to deliver my baby’s dead body. I knew exactly where to go.
What other resources, besides GITW, have you found that have helped you?
Jo-Anne: Not many. When I found my tribe, I settled. GITW is so welcoming and compassionate, I have not found that elsewhere and in those early years, I looked.
Emily: I read a lot of books about grief-I have a whole bookshelf dedicated to them now. I reached out through blogs to other loss moms and emailing with them helped.
Kathy: Star Legacy Foundation has given me an outlet to show my love for Tinsley though peer support, fundraising, events, etc and connected me to other moms who understood me and my pain. Megan Devine's It's OK That You're Not OK is top row on my grief bookshelf. I also spend time in the Stillbirth and Infant Loss Support Group on Facebook.
Nori: Being around other parents in my community who have lost a child is when I feel the most seen. Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir of her son’s stillbirth, An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination, resonated with me more than any other.
Emma: When I lived in California, I had one parenting after loss group that was really helpful. I don’t know if after COVID I’ll try to seek out any in-person groups now that I’ve moved away. Around the same time I discovered Glow In The Woods and Kate Inglis’s writing I found Megan Devine’s work and her website (refugeingrief.com). Her Writing Your Grief workshops were incredibly helpful for me both as a writing practice and a way to find a larger community.
Samantha: I was lucky enough to find a local support group and later a group of activist loss moms where I met some dear friends who “got it” in the way only another babyloss parent can. I would not have survived without these connections, so I always recommend people try a support group (in person or online!) or volunteer outlet, even if it doesn’t seem at first like something you’d be interested in. I’m also a huge fan of the incredible support resources from Return to Zero: HOPE and my #1 stillbirth book is Unimaginable: Life After Baby Loss by Brooke Taylor (one of my all-time favorite loss bloggers). And I’d be remiss not to mention Kate Inglis’s breathtaking Notes for the Everlost!
Jen: I also went to an in-person support group. I was never a joiner of groups, but that group really helped. I started a blog and wrote on it actively for several years; the community around these types of blogs was amazing in those days. I miss it. In the first years, I wrote constantly. I read too. Everyone else’s blogs, everything on this site, every grief book I could find. I also loved Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir. More recently I read Kate’s book; it came at a time when I was feeling disconnected and lonely and it helped soothe those feelings, reconnect me. Brooke’s book, mentioned by Samantha, is on my list.
Where are you at these days in your grief?
Jo-Anne: Honestly, it may seem like a long time, eight years, but I'm still that 29 year old that walked into the hospital smiling, but anxious and walked out lost. The color returned to my world over the years. There was darkness, so much of it. But, I no longer walk around like a body without a home. It's there, the void, the place a little girl should have been. A sister, daughter, who knows what but it's not so painful anymore that I can't breathe. As I write this, I wonder what her laugh would sound like, I do. I am in survival mode constantly I suppose, since the pandemic, protecting the child I do have, but always, always missing the one I don't.
Emily: I’m eight years from my loss. I feel like I have more good days than bad, but grief is tricky. It always has a grip on me, it just feels a little looser these days.
Kathy: Which day?! A little more than three years after her death, and I'm dumbfounded by how quickly I swing from acceptance to rage. Gentle to sharp. Sweet to bitter. Finality to eternity. But I’m learning I’m capable of carrying both joy and grief at the same time. The weight of my grief sometimes, though… it could topple mountains.
Nori: I’m just approaching Olivia’s anniversary days, almost two years out. This is the time of year when my grief is more present, when the flowers blooming are the same ones that bloomed when she was born. I still can’t tell someone what happened without crying. At the same time, I realize that I’m functioning much better in my day to day life than I was last year.
Emma: I’m doing ok, most days, well enough to parent and write and work a bit if with a little less energy and ambition than before. I would like to feel that I have integrated both Jesse’s existence and his loss into my life more but I have not found any rituals or memorials that speak to me, other than writing. I can mention his existence now to people without breaking down. His life and death are now solid facts in my ongoing life, but sometimes seeing three year old boys living normal little kid lives or getting Christmas cards from kids who would have been his preschool companions can pierce me all over again.
Samantha: One of the hardest parts of this journey for me was not being able to picture, early on, how my life could ever recover from this devastation. A soul-wrenching despair and excruciating sense of guilt defined my every waking moment after my daughter’s death, and I did not understand how that could ever get better or how I would ever be able to feel anything resembling joy again. I’m happy to report almost eight years later, though, that somehow, life is beautiful again - perhaps even more beautiful than before (certainly richer and more meaningful). Though I miss my daughter every day, the dominant feeling when I think of her now is love and gratitude for all she has brought to our life and our family. At one point, I did not think that could ever be possible. And that’s why I write about grief - because I well remember what it felt like for hope to nothing but a distant dream that was laughable in its absurdity, and I am so indebted to those writers who showed me that they had survived the pain to find beauty again, and that love never dies.
Jen: It’s been a long time for me. I try to remember how it felt when I first came to GITW to hear from mothers as far out from the death of their baby as I am now. It seemed inconceivable then, impossible to imagine 9 years. Impossible to think that in 9 years I would still be here, needing this space, writing my grief. I’m sure I must have known I would always grieve, always be missing Anja. Now there is so little time and space in my life for Anja and for grief, and I find that GITW is where I carve out that space. I miss her, every day, but not like I used to. Sometimes I really deeply miss those dark, all-encompassing, no-holds-barred days of early grief; in some ways, those are the times she felt closest to me. And then the days of burning hot anger. I had a lot of energy in those angry days. Now, everything related to Anja is quiet, still. There’s a vase full of daffodils on my kitchen table today, though - daffodils have always made me think of her - and I’m glad for these small, quiet moments of her presence.
Thanks for being with us. It’s your turn now, if you like. Tell us about yourself or answer any of the questions that speak to you. Maybe there’s something you’d like us to talk about in future kitchen table posts? Please let us know. This place belongs to all of us.