after the fire

photo by bsteele.

When he asked me to help him clean after the fire, I didn’t know what to expect, but I agreed. I grabbed a headlamp, some throwaway clothes, my combat boots. Of course, I agreed. It was my stepfather's ancestral home. And everything was gone.

He told me the story in the morning. His mother and father in their eighties watched from the street as the fire ravaged their home. My stepfather cried when he told me that detail, and I could see them in my mind's eye watching their house engulfed. It is a particular kind of hell to watch a tragedy and not be able to do anything. People asked what caused the fire, and they just didn't know. Fire is random and cruel sometimes. It was this time.

Generations of his family lived in the house, which once served as the General Store and first Post Office in this area of the Poconos. When they closed the door to business, it was the late sixties. And they literally just shut the door, left the shelves stocked, the cash register in its place, the butcher and bakery cases empty but for the metal trays. Unclaimed and undelivered envelopes rested in the postal cubbies. Through the years, they used the space for storage, and so boxes of antiques, china, clothes, magazines, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of family heirlooms and antiques were stacked around the aisles of the store. One day, they were going to go through it. One day, maybe they would even open again. One day, until it was thirty years later and it was gone in one night. Poof. The caveat repeated by everyone from the police officer to my mother to the neighbors, but everyone is okay. Everyone is okay.

Noone looked okay.

They looked like charcoal outlines of themselves, standing devastated in front of what was once the heart of the family. The house where my stepfather grew up, the place where he had Thanksgiving and birthdays, and where he visited his aging parents was half standing, naked, open to the world. His eyes filled with tears as we pulled up. "I have been here every day since the fire, and it still shocks me when I see it." Strange as it seems, I had never been to the house. I was an adult when my stepfather married my mother, and his elderly parents came to our house for holidays. I could see the majesty and beauty of the old stone house in the same moment I could see its ravaged barebones.

I should have gone before. I should have helped him clean it out before the fire. But how would I have known?

Miners lights on our heads, we waded into the blackness. Even with the front door wide open, the charred remains of the room sucked the sunlight into the walls. It was oppressively dark. My eyes adjusted, then sought the comfort of not processing anything, then refocused. I hadn't met Sam yet, or had any of my children, but I missed them. I missed a family in whose health I could feel comforted by in the wake of fire. I missed someone to miss. I felt the swirling chaos of a disaster, the meaninglessness of it all, the loneliness and fragility of my humanness. One day, many years from that moment, I would feel that way again times a thousand.

The gravity and devastation of the fire didn't hit me until I was knee-deep in the soggy aftermath of things that belonged to people. A blackened Stickley chair. A box of wet Life Magazines. A cash register from the 30s. My headlamp rested on a shelf lined with full boxes of untouched Jello packages from the 1960s. Perfectly intact. No soot. No smoke damage. No water damage. Just Jello. The shelf underneath filled with unrecognizable black lumps of nothing. The gelatin spared and a box of letters written during World War II gone. So random. So very cruel.

We pulled the things one by one out into yard, so we could photograph each item. It would take weeks to do the entire house. My stepfather teared up here and there. He cried right and proper when he found a box of childhood toys, trucks melted into the box bottom. A toy he made his nephew when the boy was just two. He remembered the lost things after they were charred and unusable. Like finding them and losing them in the same moment.

I know that feeling now.

My step father pulled out old butcher trays. “You want these, Ang? They’ll clean up. What about this cast iron cauldron?”

“Sure, I’ll take it.” I took everything offered. I scrubbed pots and old antique toys for weeks. I don’t know if I wanted it or anything really, but a pie plate out of context seemed curious, exotic, foreign, important, even. I lived a single life in a two bedroom apartment in the city. I didn't need these things, but I just didn’t want everything to be lying out in the front yard, bit by bit.  A life dissected and eviscerated in front of God and everyone, catalogued for a faceless entity on the other end of an insurance policy. How much is a broken play horse played with by you, your father, and your grandfather worth? Later, we threw the unsalvageable things into a rented dumpster. That brought a kind of oppressive sadness on my chest and shoulders. There it is. There it was. You cannot save everything that is broken.

The smoke smell radiated off me, out of my hair, for days after. I kept remembering standing in the absolute black of the General Store, staring out to the street, the front door open. I watched a butterfly dance through the door and into the rubble. The juxtaposition of it haunting and beautiful. I wanted to call out to my stepfather, a bird and butterfly watcher, but it seemed sacrilegious.  I just stopped and watched it quietly flit around the edges of the room and explore for a few seconds before it turned and flew into the light again.

There is nothing here for me, the butterfly says, but everyone is going to be okay.

+++

I had my own kind of fire. Everything about me was destroyed when she died. I felt all of these things again, except it was me consumed by fire, tornado, war, devastation, death. My charred backrooms left open to nature and the neighbors.  After the fire, some shelves in me were left unscathed. After the fire, I pulled everything out of me one by one to catalogue all my losses. After the fire, some boxes contained full sets of antique china that you could save if you scrubbed them clean of the soot with the perfect amount of delicacy and toughness. After the fire, when it looks like everything is gone, you find a box of expired Jello and a butterfly flits past your miner's light and you think, "Everyone is going to be okay."

When she died, I touched those times where I came face to face with random chaos all over again. I realized those moments reminded me of losing my daughter, not the other way around. I am learning to lay all of me out in the front yard, take pictures, and save what I can. I am learning how to discern what is salvageable inside me. I am learning to figure out what I must throw into a dumpster.  I am learning.

What experiences did you have before your loss that you are seeing with a different perspective? What experiences are you processing now through the lens of loss? What have you learned to salvage after your loss? What things are you throwing out after your loss?

SAHG

Two months before my world went supernova, I got laid off from my job. At the time, we laughed about it. We were just married and just post parent-cancer-scare. Brian was himself post-operative (hernia), and my pregnancy was troubled. Oh, and it was Christmas. So of course I lost my job. Ha, nice one, Universe! What else have you got for us?

We found out, of course.

But then I was so grateful to be out of work. I couldn’t imagine going to an office every day – facing other human beings who knew who I was, and what had happened. Who, God forbid, needed something from me. Lilly, my stepdaughter, was the only person on the planet allowed to need something from me then. I appeared in public only at her school recitals and soccer games, wearing Liz Taylor sunglasses and carrying a bag of knitting projects to bend my head over.

I tried to imagine myself in dress slacks with an armful of file folders where a baby should be and felt nothing but relief at the idea of letting my career slide into oblivion. I collected unemployment. I found freelance work. I stayed home.

* * * * * * * *

There are mile markers on this grief trail. Anniversaries, firsts, a certain number of good days in a row. They exist, I think, to light my path towards some sort of normalcy, and to let me know I’m not out here on the road alone. But when I see one of those markers coming up I just think: No, no, no, fuck no! And I try to slow myself down, but it’s no use. The clock ticks, and my body zips by.

But my heart is torn out all over again—it’s back there in the dark behind me, heels dug in, staring down that marker, refusing to budge. No way. No, sir. I am staying right the fuck here. Because who wants to move one single inch, one single second, further from the last moment they held their baby in their body, in their arms?

So I curse and cry and stomp around for a few days. Eventually, mysteriously, my heart lets go and, in slingshot motion, snaps back into my body, and forward we go. Because, oh hell, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway, and someone’s got to get dinner on the table.

* * * * * * * * *

I did not want a job. I wanted to be home with my baby. With that option gone, I stayed home with my grief for two years. What do you call that? Stay-at-Home-Griever? So when Brian showed me a job listing over Thanksgiving, my reaction was: No, no, no, fuck no! Mile marker ahead.

Photo by mirimcfly.This was a job I could probably get. And if I got it, there would be no reason not to take it. The hours and pay were good. The commute was short. The organization did nice things, like feed homeless people. And it had been almost two years, after all. So I began:

Resume updating (reluctant). Phone interview (heart with heels firmly dug in). In-person interview (denial: I don’t think they liked me). Call back for second interview (Dammit, tears). Job offer (There’s a recession on, so who I am to turn my nose up?). First day (Actually, this could be good).

Thus I have a new job. It’s part-time, with some hours from home, which suits me nicely. The place is chaotic and full of well-intended people who know almost nothing about me, which suits me too. There are no dress slacks to be seen, but I do wake up and put on my game face, and pour a to-go mug, and schlep out into the snow to get some work done in the service of another cause. And it’s kind of fun.

I do worry about my bad days—about being productive through tears, about looking like a mad woman, about one day waking up and being unable to get out of bed. Failing them spectacularly at some critical juncture seems inevitable. And I feel a little guilty—like I am putting my daughter into Griever’s Daycare.

But overall I thought this would be harder. I thought taking a job meant I was putting more of her behind me, or trying to get back to a time before she existed. Then again, I always think that sort of thing when I pass a marker. My heart panics, but when it catches up with reality, everything becomes clear: she is still with me, she is still gone. No more, no less. Wherever I put my heart and my energy now, it is because of her and what she has made me. She can’t possibly be left behind.

* * * * * * * *

How long did it take you to go back to your job (or, unpaid work like volunteering, helping your church/synagogue, sitting on boards, etc.)? How has loss changed your relationship to your work? Has work been a respite or a burden? What your strategies for coping with grief at work?

enlightenment

I felt holy after she died.

What I mean to say is that I felt disemboweled, ripped open and gutted, my innards in a heap before me.  I, Prometheus, chained to a rock, punished for stealing a daughter for nine months. Grief swept down as I was chained to the cliff, feasting on my liver, or perhaps more like my sanity and sense of justice, as I watched desperate. But still, in that torture, not because of it, I felt holy. Holier than before her death.

It was a short-lived holiness. Anger unchained me from the rock, and became my closest companion in the days that followed. The expletives that came from me were inhuman and ungodly--a hymn of the self-pitying. But for a moment, maybe a week or two, I felt holy, and I have been riding its coattails, cursing it, making sense of it, meditating on it and writing about it since it happened.

Lucia was stillborn. I found out she was dead. And two beats later, I found out I had to birth her. Dead.  I wanted them to cut me open and pull her out. No, wait, I wanted them to knock me out, cut me open, then pull her out. I wanted them to do anything to prevent me from suffering more. I squirmed at the idea of having to push. I felt definitely entitled not to push. I wept for the injustice of having a dead daughter in me. I wept for me.

"Why us?" I shrieked. "What did we do?"  We have this common wisdom, or maybe it is a kind of whisper down the alley between women, that giving birth is the hardest, most profound pain you can endure. And then the other thing, losing a child, is the most profound psychic pain you can endure. I don't know. Giving birth to a dead child and then living with the fact for the rest of your life is the longest suffering experience I could imagine. I felt like I would enter into a stasis of labor. I would hold onto the pain and suffering like it will connect me with the brief time I had with Lucia.

During the time between finding out she was dead and birthing her, I was hooked up to wires, and sitting in a bed with contractions trying to make some fucking sense of what was happening. I opened the grief package they gave me. Front and center, in the middle of the page, there was a poem. I began reading it, and I recognized the words.

Where do I know this poem? I have read this before.

I skipped to the bottom of the page. I recognized the name immediately. It was written by one of my colleagues' husbands. I live in the sixth most populated city in the United States. I was birthing in a hospital that gives birth to over five thousand babies a year. And yet the first other person I encountered after finding out Lucy died was someone I already knew. Tears were streaming down my face before I realized I was crying. And I wept for her loss all over again, and for her husband.

As the waves of contractions pulsated through me, I realized that I was not the first person to go through the pain of labor, nor was I the first person to go through the pain of losing your child. I am not even the first person to go through them both at the same time. I was wrapped up in my suffering, feeling this narcissism of grief settle into my old bones. "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 seeing her grief and her sorrow. It oozed into us all in the office. 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 then that reading the email about her loss made me cry for the first time in my career in front of my colleagues? Did I tell her that every Mother’s Day I thought of her baby? Did I even say anything to her? Was I the person to her that I needed now?

No.

I am deeply flawed. It was humbling. I felt so completely human, and like such a complete fucking asshole too. But I felt so part of human suffering and the human experience. A wealth of compassion washed over me. And I suddenly remembered this Buddhist folktale called Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed. It is also about a babylost mother. I read it in many forms throughout the years, but about two weeks before Lucia died, I read it out loud to my daughter for bedtime. Back then, I read folktales and Greek mythology aloud as she fell asleep. They were more for me than her. I didn’t cry for Kisa Gotami when I read it. I didn’t cry. I didn’t see myself in her.

 

photo by quinn.anya

Kisa Gotami's only son died one night as there was a thunderstorm raging. Kisa knew something was wrong, because the thunder would have woke him. She ran to his bed and he was dead. Throughout the night, she prayed to all the gods, and then to all the Devils, it is written, but not one brought her baby back to life. And so she went to every doctor, chemist, snakecharmer, and charlatan in town. Everyone pitied Kisa Gotami because she was a good woman and she was losing her mind. Some told her that the boy was dead, others went along with the delusion that there was help. She finally made her way to the apothecary across the market. People told him she was headed his way, and so he was ready for her. He regretted that he didn't have a cure for her, but the Buddha, he said, who was once a physician, did. She ran to the temple and interrupted meditation. The monks grew impatient with her, as she was carrying her rotting dead son, covered with maggots, asking him to be cured. But the Buddha sat and considered her plea. He told her that he did have the cure she sought. And he said it was quite simple. She should leave her son with him, then she just needed to bring him one thing--a mustard seed. Not any mustard seed, though, it needed to be a mustard seed from a family who has not experienced death. As Kisa Gotami went door to door, each person said, "Of course, I have a mustard seed, but my father died this year." Or my wife, or my uncle, or my sister or even my son. When she returned to the Buddha, who had cremated her son in her absence, she came back humbled and enlightened. Death and suffering escapes no person. She became one of the Buddha's monks.

In my lowest moment, the poem, and moments later, that Buddhist story, took me out of my own suffering to feel compassion for another person's loss. When I left the hospital, I grieved for Lucia, but I also grieved for and with everyone in the world. I saw people as the embodiment of their suffering. Funeral homes on every corner felt illuminated, suddenly, with a kind of healing light. Every person grieved, like we grieved.  When someone would offer condolences in the first weeks, I would immediately tear up and say, “No, no, I’m sorry.”  Sam grew livid at that habit, as though I were apologizing for our baby dying, or apologizing for receiving condolences, but it wasn’t that. Even the anxiety and fear people had to approach me, I felt compassion for 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.

It is an incredibly healing way to imagine the world—compassionate, empathetic, vulnerable—but it was so disparate with what I had just experienced. 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, but only see her beautiful newborn son. 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.  In the holy days, I understood this. I accepted it. I felt this amazing sense of connection with the universe and all sentient beings because of it. This calm emanated from me, and around me for two weeks. I sobbed often, yes, 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.

And then it I felt it slip away from my body, the same way my daughter slipped from my body, growing colder and more distant. I am actually embarrassed to write this, because I lost this connectedness with everything and everyone. I squandered wisdom. Holiness was replaced with anger, bitterness and resentment. Rather than feel connectedness, I felt only alienation. I remember my Buddhist therapist saying to me, "So, you lost your daughter and then you lost your enlightenment?"

I hadn’t thought to call it enlightenment, but I suddenly grieved for my enlightenment. So many losses, I mused. I can't endure another. I felt enlightenment's absence more after I realized its preciousness. Then I doubted it I ever touched that place. Maybe holiness, I reasoned, was really the numb of early grief. Later I realized that wisdom, like Lucy, never belonged to me.

I sit cross-legged now, tap the gong and settle into my bones. I once touched a sense of everything by having nothing. It is the koan I meditate on now. When I had nothing, I held everything. The anger falls off me again in that moment. I can only ever borrow enlightenment and wisdom, because I will always wrestle with my human flaws. It is a true lesson in wretchedness.

Did your loss help you feel connected or alienated to other people? Did it connect you with a universal sense of suffering? How did you see your suffering in relation to other suffering? Did you gain any wisdom in your grief?  If so, what wisdom?  Or does the whole idea of wisdom and gain make you uncomfortable?



something old, something new

I'm sure somewhere -- here, there, in a comment -- during the past three plus years I wrote something to the effect:  "If I could just fit into those old jeans.  It would be like getting the old me back."

As if a smaller ass would magically mend my heart.

:::

When I moved to this house I was pregnant with Maddy, so I packed up all the old clothes -- the ones that fit a few months earlier, and the really nice tiny ones that fit before Bella -- thinking someday, certainly someday, soon, I will slink back into these.  (Clearly I wasn't taking the timeliness of fashion into count, which I suppose says a lot about me and the way I dress and is subject for another much more hilarious post.)  As it was, I gained almost 20 lbs more with Maddy than I did with Bella, in large part because I couldn't exercise during the pregnancy, and in no small part, because I didn't eat nearly as well.  In retrospect I'm pretty sure I was stressed out and likely depressed during that pregnancy.

Anyway, you're all familiar with the rest:  Baby is born, baby dies, can't breastfeed the pounds off, and don't feel like subjecting myself to fresh air.  Flab stays.  About four months after Maddy died I went into a running frenzy thinking I would just blow the pounds off in a matter of weeks, and wound up blowing up my plantar fascia.  The pounds stayed.  

By the time I got pregnant again last year, two plus years later, I was still 20 pounds over where I wanted to be.  In some fit of nonsense, I went on a closet cleaning purge last March (while almost eight months pregnant), and tossed out everything.  I was tired of opening the closet and seeing the old clothes mocking me.  That was the old me.  The really old me.  If I ever got down to that size again, I'd buy new clothes.  (Hell, you should buy new clothes anyway for the love of mike -- who wears those anymore?)

With three exceptions:  Three pairs of pants.  Two jeans, one pair of cords.  All designer labels, all bought after losing the Bella weight and feeling good about my bod again.  Maybe, I thought, maybe.  I hid them in the back behind all the loose fitting skirts and blouses I had purchased to hide the fact that I had another baby that wasn't around to help legitimize my midsection.

Right now, as I'm writing this, I'm wearing a pair of those jeans.  They're a wee bit tight, especially the top button that hits uncomfortably right in my three-baby pooch.

Does that make me feel better?  Yes.

It is not, however, Nirvana.

Huh.

I put them on, stood back and looked in the mirror, and waited.  For what, I don't know -- lights?  Peels of electric guitars?  Suddenly clear skin and shiny hair? (wouldn't that be cool?)  Would my brain melt into a pile of lilac scented goo,  would I crave positive thinking and trot downstairs to announce, "Christmas has arrived, y'all!  Joy to the World!"

I sat and stared at the person in the mirror wearing five-year-old jeans and realized:  I am never going to be the old me.  Which is stupid, I suddenly realized, of course I'm not.  I mean, forget tragedies for a second:  I'm never going to be the old girl I was in High School again (thank goodness), or the young woman I was in grad school.  You can't go back.  You can't be the person you were before you had kids, before you met X, Y, or Z, before a certain job, or place or event or music album.   Even seemingly trivial things can shift your worldview.  How on earth I ever thought I could somehow morph into the person I was before Maddy sounds a bit wacky to me now, almost four years later.  I'm a bit stunned, to tell you the truth, that I spent so much time and verbage yearning to get back to a place and mindspace that I obviously would never return to again.  I like to say I didn't experience the station of "denial" in my grief, but today touching this denim again I think I realized I've been living in it rather heavily.  Jeans are not going to transport me back in time any more than they're going to raise the dead. 

The new me is old.  The new me is almost four years older than the old me, and that's four people years which are measured not quite as badly as dog years in grief time, but close.  There are a few gray hairs, bags and wrinkles around the eyes, extra skin around my neck.  My skin now shows the blotchiness of not two, but three pregnancies.  There's the pooch, that I'm sure some people can work off (Heidi Klum!  Call me!), but even for those of us half-way in shape, is hard to budge -- muscles have moved and atrophied, and skin has buckled around them.  I'm not sure a million sit-ups would conquer that mound.  

And then there's the inside, the stuff my fancy jeans can't possibly hope to distract me or anyone else from:  I'm more cynical (hard to believe that's possible), less trusting, less trusting of medical technology.   I'm occasionally sad, which I never can remember being.  My psyche still feels as though it's a bit bruised and achy -- no longer bedridden or uncontrollably bleeding certainly, but not one-hundred percent either.  It approaches corners cautiously, and peers around them before putting a foot forward.  I still clutch my family.  If Bella were asked what her mother says most often, after "shit" it would be "Be Careful."  I still love my friends who stood by me and think of Maddy and speak her name, and still resent the people who were silent, or worse.  Although the anger is less a hammer and more an itch.  

I still love her, I still miss her.

I realized today  this incredible seismic shift followed by modest improvement since that horrible February has nothing to do with weight loss, or the subsequent baby who helped with said weight loss.  It has to do with the simple, uncontrollable passage of time.  I'm going through my fourth Christmas without Maddy in a few weeks, I'm attending my fourth candlelight memorial service for her this Sunday.  In two short months, I will be walking through her week for the fourth time.  

I'm still changing, it turns out -- not backwards really, but forwards.  Not all great as my hair will attest, but not all bad either.  

It happens less often, it hurts less.  It has nothing to do with my body and everything to do with distance.  But it will always be there, I am firmly on this side, and I can't go back.  Despite my hemline.

I know a lot of us talk about being that person we once were -- what would you most want back?  What do you think would help get you back to that place?  Have you managed to get anything of the "old you" back?  How does it feel on this side of things?   Is there anyone else far enough out that they can see how time is helping somewhat?  Or is something else helping you move forward?  Are the ways you changed after the death of your baby/ies changing yet again as you move farther away from the event?

still here

The recent Kitchen Table klatch here on Glow revolved around being online. Occasionally the contributors also touch base and assess how we feel about our online presence, here and elsewhere. I thought I'd put mine out, long-hand.

After Maddy died, for what seemed like an eternity, the internet was my lifeline. For the longest time I felt no one in my real life (save for my husband and therapist, and even then I sometimes wondered) understood me, and the only people who got what I was saying and had meaningful things to contribute were the faceless, sometimes even nameless people in my computer. I couldn't wait to climb on in the morning and read and feel and bathe in the comfort of like-minded people. I found it hard to turn away, and to turn it off when it was like a soothing balm, a reminder that this sadness wasn't my own and wasn't unique. Other people felt it too, this desperation, this nausea, this hopelessness, this disgust and ugliness and outright sad. I clung to them like lifejackets, and swallowed it all, whole.

I remember reading in one of the timely little books I forced myself to read that "integrating" this event into my life (they never used the words "getting over") would take two to five years. Years. I remember two months out wondering what a year even looked like, I could barely close my hands around the shape of a day. It seemed an eternity, and I wanted nothing more than to Rip Van Winkle myself to the end, or failing that have a lobotomy. I couldn't possibly wait that long, that much time couldn't possibly roll under my feet -- certainly not smoothly, or uneventfully, or dare I say quickly.

But somewhere along the way, it happened. The months went by, the years ticked off, and I find myself here, three years later  -- oddly enough, like the book said, more or less with this grief "integrated" into my psyche and flesh. It's hard to describe this feeling, of feeling better (better is relative, after all, and who wouldn't feel better than that?) but not complete; of feeling content . . . with what I have. What I have is obviously less than what I had, or what I wanted, but I've somehow managed to make my peace with it. Wow, even that sounds off, who can make peace with something that ugly and still medically unknown? Who can make peace with the horrible video replay that still occasionally kicks into my consciousness? Maybe that's not the right phraseology, but somehow I've come to accept? acknowledge? that my daughter died, she could've never lived, and there's no getting her back. There's only the street ahead of me -- and not that it's lined with fruit trees and arced by rainbows, but it propels me forward.

It's somewhat easier to point at the symptoms, the outward ramifications of this grief transmutation than it is to describe exactly what happened: Primarily, I no longer have that gnawing hunger to be online. The daily sense that I had something to dump is gone. I used to feel as though I was tripping over words, I had so many thoughts and themes to express. Grief was my job, and I don't regret making it so or dealing with it as much as I did. But I no longer write nearly as frequently I'm assuming because over time I've had less to say. It's obviously (see para above) hard to put into words exactly what I'm feeling now, which I'm sure is a large part of it, but the incessant sadness and emptiness and loneliness has dissipated gradually, and greatly.  Grief is no longer my job, at least not my full time one -- maybe it's that volunteer thing I pop into now and again. My life which I never imagined could be full of anything but tears is now full of stuff to do, and that crowds out my online time for better or worse. There will, I have no doubt, always be something to write about this grief and missing, it just won't be daily, and it will be more ephemeral and slippery as time goes on.

But I find it hard to turn it all off and shut it down and walk away completely. Probably because I still find it meaningful, and I don't think I'm done.

I wish I could give credit to the person who made this analogy, but I've long forgotten where I read it so my apologies: I believe online grief support is somewhat like a group that meets for an addiction. That is to say, there will be people who find the stories too close, too nerve wracking. The constant reminder will, instead of help them, draw them back in -- back into sorrow, into shame, into fear, or god forbid, into guilt. Eventually, they will decide this type of group help is not for them, this sharing and listening on a frequent basis -- it is more harmful than good, and to them I say: I'm grateful you saw this about this particular type of support, and about yourself. Treat yourself kindly as you go, leave and be well, and know the door is always open if you want to return with no judgment.

Then there are those who revel in the group experience, who speak and listen, where the stories reaffirm and validate, and the trust bolsters and strengthens. It all seems lighter going back out the door than it did walking in. And sometimes, sometimes, after listening and speaking for a while, you feel you have the strength to be mentor of sorts, to take your experience and sit across the table from it, and hopefully offer someone else an ear or a shoulder or an arm. And that activity of turning the ugly thing into something that possibly helps other actually turns out to help you, too.

I feel I'm at that point, where I can see the inseams and lining and do so without completely breaking down. I can stand outside myself in a way, and turn it around in examination in order to make a point with someone else. So I keep writing here, and keep commenting where I'm able in order to let others know simply, they're not alone in this. Not at all. That at the very least, I am here. And I will help in any way I possibly can.

And I keep writing on my blog, even though it's often sparse and in-between because that's how the grief is now, sporadic and hard to predict. Sometimes it's gentle moving through, a light breeze that raises goose bumps; and other times it's an unforeseen storm that suddenly turns and changes direction and finds itself right over me, dumping buckets and howling winds. The thing is, it may be an integrated part of me now, but it's not gone. Maddy's anniversary dates can still make me tense and sad. A throwaway thought from Bella can sometimes make me giggle at the macabre, or drop me to the floor. Sometimes just glancing at her picture can bring it all flooding back -- the sleepless nights, the dark hospitals, the unbelievability of it all.

Which is why I read, and why three years later I still write.

How do you feel about online support? Does it -- so far -- seem helpful or are you a bit skeptical? Do you think your view might change as time goes on? How far away are you from your grief and have you come to a place where it feels "integrated" rather than like some foreign appendage you need to try and come to terms with? How long do you envision yourself online -- reading, blogging, commenting, writing, sharing, listening?

on breaking habits and freeing arms

Today's guest writer, Mrs. Spit, was amazed to find herself pregnant in June of 2007, and heartbroken in December, when her son Gabriel died.

Choosing to move a step forward in your grief is such a personal, such an individual thing. It comes on its own time line, with its own rules. When you chose to get out of the habit about blogging about, about talking of your grief, your dead child, its a hard thing to understand.

The story starts with a story teller - Stuart Mclean, host of CBC's Vinyl Cafe. I wrote to Stuart this past December, telling him that we would be at his Christmas Concert, and we weren't there two years ago because I was delivering a child that died. I didn't have any particular reason to write, I wasn't really writing to tell him I enjoyed his radio show, I wasn't really writing for anything, and yet, I still wrote.

He wrote me back the loveliest of emails. He talked a bit about perinatal death, but he talked more about the process of finding your spot in life again. He used a metaphor of a wood pile, they put wood in front of you, and eventually you get back to chopping and stacking wood.

For a long time, a terribly long time, I needed Gabe to stay with me. As I lost pregnancy after pregnancy, bleeding and bleeding, I needed Gabe. And if I did not have the warm living body of my son, I had his memory. As I sorted my way through the grief of his death, and then 4 more miscarriages, I needed to hold him close, for comfort, for peace and for hope.

I started a new job about the time I went to the Christmas Concert, and it was time to change my focus. To talk less about Gabe, to carry him in my heart, but give my arms a break. Some of this has been quite conscious - I pass up opportunities to talk about pregnancy, about childbirth, about perinatal loss. When people ask if I have kids, I answer quickly - "No". I am breaking habits. I blog less about Gabe as well, if only because I blog more about everything else. The now.

When I was in high school we turned a wooded area into a soccer field. We took the trees down the old fashioned way - with axes and buck saws. We chopped them down, and then we sawed them up. It took all of my junior year to chop those trees down, and all of my senior year to clear the brush.

photo by zach bonnell

Perinatal death is a forest, laid upon the ground. Trees that are no longer trees, but not yet useful wood. Ratty old lodge-pole pine, a bit of poplar, sticky spring sap still coming off. Torn up ground. Rents, when whole trees have been dragged away to chop. Underbrush and mud, with leaves ground in. Alberta wild roses, full of prickly thorns, winter-berry. The smell of decomposing green matter, cold fall days, freezing winter. Cold, bleeding hands, bruised shoulders, broken toes. Perinatal death and half chopped up forests are not places to linger. They are places of purpose, back-breaking, soul-wearing work.

Like everything, work ends. Four years after we started, grass in, the field level, bleachers and junior girls playing soccer, I stood on the sidelines. But for memory, I would not know field was forest. But for this story, you would not know.

Stuart wrote about the process of living, grieving, wanting, wishing. He made a point: there's wood in front of you. You give yourself over to it, testing the sore parts, not sure if you can trust your knees to carry. You start a bit slowly, then you are more able to carry on with the sore bits, and the truth is, it hurts less. One day, the work is done. Then, you find others, in their torn-down forests, and you tell them the dimensions of a cord of wood."Start there", you say. "That one is small. You can manage that."

Do not misunderstand, my classmates, we talk about that forest-field. Once in a while we get together and we reminisce. We share a secret, we know what you see in front of you was not always there. We know that memories fade. Oh, not the fact: the how, all those awful days or work. All that remains is field from forest andthat transformation is good and right to talk about. But only sometimes.

You understand the description I have given you, even if you have never, by the strength of your back, wrought field from forest. You who understand transformation, raw power, hefting, struggling and bleeding - you understand those dimensions that I gave you, you understand 50 cords of wood from forest.

I can talk about what was, what could have been -  but most people see what is. My stories of Gabriel here and gone make no sense, people who have not built field from forest cannot reconcile heartbreak to the composed woman in front of them. Of the power of transformation, they know not.

Most of the time people, they say "Oh, look a soccer field."

Perhaps one day they will realize that soccer fields don't make themselves, perhaps one day you will need to come along and show them how to make one. Or not. Most people live in the ever present now. And truly, now is not such a terrible place to be. Sometimes you wish your now was different, always you wish it included just one more person. Somedays, when you are tired, when you particularly remember, you remember neither the wood or the soccer field, but that horrible place in between.

Most days, you just nod. "Yep", you say, "that's a soccer field".