Colors of his home, by numbers

We moved recently. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Moved. One breath gets it out.

Though isn't it one of the three biggies of upheaval (in the course of a normal life, that is)? Getting married, changing jobs, moving? Yes, I believe it is. So not a small deal for anyone. But to me... to me it was a huge deal.

We found our first house right around the time I was finally pregnant. Two years after tossing the birth control pills, and nearly at the end of my fucking wits, finally pregnant. Not for long, though, not for long. A miscarriage, a fucking bloody mess. By the time we signed for it, some months later, I was pregnant again, just a touch further along than the gestational age when the miscarriage happened. On progesterone this time, pretty sick, but cautiously optimistic. We didn't move in for a few months still-- the old owners rented from us for a bit, and then we renovated. And then we moved and had no furniture, and my family came for the first Thanksgiving in our new place, and Monkey kicked in a way that could be felt from the outside for the first time the day before they showed up, so JD got a day of it all to himself before the hordes came and wanted their turn. It was good time. Busy, crazy busy, but good.

We hosted New Year's at the new house too. And I spent some hours of that night in my office with a couple of friends giving me tips on the thesis defense presentation I was preparing. And then my parents came again, and I defended, round and needing to use the bathroom, and I passed, and I was a PhD. And the next day I bled bright red in the mall and ended up in the hospital on bed rest. Partial placenta previa. It was scary again a few times, but in the end she was born safe and sound on her very due date, and we went home two days later.

The house was never huge, but by the time I was pregnant with A it was starting to feel cramped.  That Thanksgiving, our sixth in the house, we moved Monkey out of the tiny baby room into what was previously a guest bedroom. We painted and bought her a bunk bed. She was looking forward to her baby brother's arrival, and she wanted him to share the room with her just as soon as he could. So I spent some time agonizing over whether to buy the girly bedspreads for the bunk beds or more neutral ones, and a friend told me to go with girly because I can always switch to neutral when he moves into the room, or even let each have their own. We painted our bedroom then too-- a lovely deeper green. I was very proud of choosing both color schemes.

A's room didn't get painted until a week before he died. It had to be painted, you see, because light purple and yellow that Monkey had in there didn't look boyish enough. The same friend (my best female friend from college, my color guru, and a few other things besides) helped me pick the blue and the new shade of yellow.

When we got home from the hospital, empty-wombed and empty-handed, I shut the door to that room. The morning of the funeral, before walking down the stairs and out of the house, I opened it, and cried in the doorway. I shut it again after, for a few more weeks. We didn't use that room much until the Cub came to fill it more than eighteen months later. But at least after a while I could walk in there.

What did change though was my feelings about the house. Where before it was starting to feel cramped, now I couldn't imagine leaving. This was the only house in which my son lived in me, the only house my son was ever supposed to live in. This was the house that stood ready to welcome him. I couldn't leave that house now.

Three and a half years later I still couldn't think of leaving. But by then the house was really starting to put a squeeze on us. Toys were everywhere, and the moment you didn't pick up and put away one little thing, a pile of things big and small grew around it. And yet, I couldn't think of leaving. Then one day a house down the street, literally three doors down, went on the market. And then JD asked wouldn't it be cool if we could buy it and move there and have my sister and her husband (and their baby on the way) move into our current house. Turns out that was the only way that I could really deal with leaving-- if we were not entirely leaving.  Things went very fast from there. We saw the house, we liked it, we put in an offer. Two weeks and much negotiation later, we had a deal.

It was logistical insanity, pure and simple-- trying to move us and then my sister before her due date, in the middle of my first semester of solo teaching, in the middle of trying to apply for other jobs. It was insanity. But now it's mostly done, and I am typing this in my comfy chair in the family room of the new house. Neither we nor they are completely unpacked, but my nephew is here, and we walk to each other's houses. Which was the whole point. But not the whole story.

When we first saw the new house, one thing was very clear-- the room that was to be Monkey's would have to be painted. It was pink. And not the kind of pink that is a bit off white. The kind of pink with conviction. One wall in particular, but the other three only slightly less so. And Monkey was by then years past her pink phase. She wanted blue, and by rights couldn't possibly be made to live with pink (and neither could I, so it's all good). But we thought that was the only room that would need painting-- some of the other colors in the house were not my favorites, but certainly not something that needed to be fixed post haste. Even the baby room, the one that would be Cub's, when we first saw it looked like it was a nice subtle shade of forest green, and we thought that was kinda nice. But when with a few weeks left to closing we went to measure a couple of rooms, the owners have started moving out. And without the crib and blankets in the room it turned out that the walls weren't forest green-- they were dirty beige.

Suddenly I wanted to paint that room. And the minute I knew I wanted to do that, I also knew that there was only one set of colors I was interested in-- the very same blue and yellow of the room that was painted for A nearly 4 years back.

I thought I would be fine, see. We'd be just down the street, and family would still be in that house, in that room. His cousin now, like his brother before. My dad was coming, to do a bunch of work on the house for my sister, but they weren't going to paint the baby room. That warmed me up, made me grateful-- all of our boys, see, they would all have that room, those colors in common. And I thought that would be enough.

But it wasn't. I knew now I wanted to take those colors with me as well. I knew how to get that done too. We weren't going to use the same kind of paint this time, but I had high hopes for the awesome powers of color matching computers. The way paints are mixed in the stores is by adding correct amounts of primary colors to white and mixing. You know, in those giant paint-mixing drums they have. And the way they match any color you want is by scanning a sample and having their computer figure out which primary colors go into that one in what proportions. So we brought the cans with leftover paint to the store and asked them to match. I am sure the nice men in the paint department that day had not a clue why I needed to match the colors so very precisely. But I spent a long time there, checking and rechecking and checking again. In the end, I had my new paints. I thought the yellow might have turned out too bright, but the blue was spot on, and somehow of the two that one was more important to me.

And even then, with hours spent in the paint store, even then I thought it was mostly about how yucky that beige was. With some amount of bravado I told my sister about the new plan, and added that she didn't need to psychoanalyze this decision-- I knew what I was doing, and I wanted to do it anyway. It turns out, I was only half right--what I didn't know was how desperately I wanted to do it.

The way I found out was that JD suggested not taking down the border previous owners had in the room-- it was kinda cute if rather monochromatic, but it did have elements of blue, and JD thought it would work with our colors. And I felt my throat close. Anxiety. Cold, shaking anxiety. I walked around with it for about a day and then told him no, I can't handle it-- the border has to go. No problem. The border went. And I exhaled, a little.

My dad painted the Cub's new room, like he did just short of four years before for A. Just like he laid the hardwood in the Cub's room while we were in NICU-- because I wanted there to be a change between the boys, but a small change, and changing the old yucky carpet for (fake) hardwood fit the bill. I saw the room take on the colors, and I remembered that when A's room was first painted, the yellow looked too bright too. I smiled.

A while ago I told Angie in the comments here that because of the peculiar dynamics of my family, I couldn't wish for A to hang around my house, that that would feel like tying him down, like making him comfort me. But what I realized in the process of moving and painting was that I wanted to feel like A still had a home with us, that if he wanted to, he could hang around our house. And I know that has nothing to do with whether we kept a space that was recognizably his, but somehow it makes it more tangible if we do.

Our first night sleeping in the house, I lit one of my giant candles in the jar, and I thought "Welcome home, little one."

Of course, in a sort of funny throw-your-hands-in-the-air coda to the whole thing, when my brother in law went to touch up the baby room in the now-his house, he discovered that time isn't often kind to paint, and that nearly four years will sometimes do uncool tricks. The touchups were so clearly seen on the walls, especially on the blue, that it no longer looked like the same room. We showed it though-- dad used leftover paint from the new house to put a layer over those touch ups. The colors were matched after all. So now the cousins, have the exact same shades in their rooms. All sorts of fitting, no?

 Do you have signifiers of awaiting your baby in your home? What are they? Have you moved since the death of your baby? Are you thinking about it? Have your feelings about a potential or real move changed? If you are firmly in the same place, can you imagine leaving it now?

milagros.

photo by emdot

I search through the cases of milagros. Through silver hands, patina-ed trucks and copper lungs. Medals of disembodied legs and small praying men with hats held in hands. I settle on a sacred heart, flames rising from its fold, and, at the last minute, point to a pair of eyes for Santa Lucia, for my daughter. I seek ritual now. The repetition of the familiar helps me touch my childhood, reminding me of comfort. When I get home, I dig out my antique wooden Virgen de Guadalupe. I place her over a handwoven fabric, light a candle and pin the ex-voto to the cloth. I am trying to remember a roadside shrine I found once on the Ruta Puuc, the road that follows the Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

It was a decade ago that I followed the road with a rental car and a day pack. When I passed the unadorned shack on a road from the ruins of one Mayan temple to the next, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe caught my eye and I quickly pulled the car off the road. Lit and unlit candles dotted the ledges and floor of the little alcove in the middle of nowhere. Pictures, letters and thousands of milagros, little metal folk charms of body parts or saints, surrounded the statue of her. Each symbol imbued with its own individual and very personal meaning--some a prayer for healing, others a call for fortune, a change of luck, a dream of love or a need for strength. I hardened fast to the spot in front of the makeshift altar, enraptured with something primal within me, my indigenous roots suddenly alive to magic and the gods. There is a way Latin American culture, my culture, seamlessly ties together the ancient, Pre-Columbian with the  New World; the pagan and the Catholic; the profane and sacred.

A decade later, after Lucia was stillborn, I recreate the same shrine in my living room. I wanted all those things in my grief--a miracle, a prayer, a call for fortune and a dream of love. I set the Virgin up in the center. They call her the "Mother of the Apocalypse." Apocalypse, indeed. I add a sugar skull, a picture of St. Lucia, a rock, some water, a drippy candle, a Buddha and a mizuko jizo. A bit of heaven, of earth, of water and of fire, the altar seems to touch an ancient secret in me I have only just  remembered during the ritual. I whisper it to myself, "We have all grieved." Humans, that is. Humans have always grieved.

Humans have always pleaded with ancestors and visions of saints and demons and volcanoes to alleviate that which aches within us. We have invented religions around it. We have knelt in front of shrines to Coatlique, or the Virgin, or Demeter, and asked her to heal our broken hearts, to give us back our children. I feel connected to this sense of universality of babyloss. Maybe it is the only religion I have now, the only thing I really believe--that babies die and parents grieve. It has happened for so long and so often, in the first stories of the universe, that I bend my head in shame for being surprised that it happened to me.

:::

My mother reminds me again that I should have had a funeral for Lucia, so that she can have some closure. "It is different in my country. The whole town would come to help lead Lucy to heaven. She will be stuck here." And I instinctively look around my house.

Please let her be stuck here, I think. Maybe in that space between the couch and the wall. I could kneel on the cushion and peek into that spot, 'Hello, love,' I would say. 'I miss you.'

My mother says that in her country she would have the baby's body interned in the house. In the living room. They would set up chairs. The people would come, she says, the local village ladies who always pray rosary for the dead. They would coo about how beautiful Lucia looks, and everyone would see her as a baby instead of something unmentionable after a long pregnancy. For a week, every night, the women and her family would pray rosary over the dead. Light candles. Her sisters would sit. Every once in a while, a cousins would come before going out drinking that night.

"My sisters will cry when they are moved to cry. They will fix black coffee and plain soup. Her soul goes to heaven that way."

The silence of disappointment sits between us.

"You eat soup? At the equator?"
"It is tradition to not make anything spicy or interesting."
"Huh." My mother stares at me, as I stare at my chewed fingernails.
"It helps, Angel."
"But you don't even really believe in this stuff, Mama." I protest.
"What does believing matter? It helps. Those rituals are important. Maybe you just need a funeral for her for you to heal. Believe me, at the end of the week, after sitting and praying the rosary every night with those women all covered in lace, you accept the death. We all walk to the cemetary after the week is over. The vultures fly around and stare at you. You don't expect anyone to walk through the door after that. "

I never expected Lucy to walk through the door.

Though I have seven living aunts and three uncles, forty-seven first cousins and double that in the second cousin category, I have no aunts in this country anymore. Very few cousins, respectively. There are no village ladies. There is no way our baby can lay in our living room. I live in suburban New Jersey. My neighbors, while kind people, don't pray rosary at dusk for the souls of dead babies and grandmothers, or make huge vats of tasteless soup so we can mourn properly. My husband and I made decisions for our mental well-being, but I didn't quite think of my mother, or how American our decision seemed to be to my entire Panamanian family. It seemed right to have Lucy cremated. To fold her into the fabric of our daily grief.  To spare everyone a funeral the day before Christmas. I feel like I have always had my feet in two worlds. Panamanian and American. Brown and white. Joyful mothering and grief-stricken mothering. The living and the dead. And some days I feel like I fail both sides of each of those coins.

:::

After Lucy died, I ask my mother how to translate stillborn into Spanish. "We don't use that word 'stillborn' in my country. No one talks about it."  And I remind her that no one really talks about it here either, but we still have a word for it. She sighs and reminds me that she was eighteen when she came to the United States and she doesn't know all those adult words. The only thing she knows is nacido muerto, born dead. It is much more blunt than stillborn, which has the sort of poeticism to which I am drawn. But truly, Lucy was born dead. Beautiful and dead. Nacido muerto.

We have a long tradition of storytelling in my Panamanian family. Of hyperbole and tall tales over liquor and candlelight. Magical and wild tales of my grandparents and their parents are woven with both the vivid and proper. My family has stories of stabbings and sex. Music and cigarros. Affairs and guitarras. We even have stories of lost babies, found again decades later on the arm of a son, and affairs that end in our legacy. I weave my own tales, some days, about my daughter's afterlife. I tell them to no one in particular. I whisper the words, "Mi Lucia nació muerto." Then I set the story in a place of my invention, a dirt road cut through the jungle, pyramids rising in the distance and roadside shrines dot the way. The air is thick there with humidity and rainforest perfumes. And they sit, my Indian grandfather with his Seco and milk, his arm around his round wife, mi abuelita. My great-grandmother Isabel plays guitars and sings bawdy Catalan songs of death and sex. Lucia spins, her skirt flaring around her like a flame, as they clap for her young, beautiful spirit.

Did the cultural traditions of your family bring you comfort or conflict? Have you used rituals in your grief, and if so, how? Have you found yourself attracted to the traditions of another culture or religion? How have you adopted rituals into your grief and search for comfort? Have you integrated different cultural or religious rituals into your life?


Dear Friend,

I'm so sorry you thought of us when your friend's newborn died this week.  I'm sorry for your friends and their lost child most of all, but I'm sad for you, and for us, too, that we are now experts at this.  But fear not, you contacted the right people.  We can help you help them.

First of all, start cooking.  Do laundry, clean the house, take charge.  Keep it up for at least a month, with the help of other friends.  Right away, order her to bed and give him a beer or nine.  Yeah yeah yeah alcohol is dangerous and addictive and all that, but I swear to whatever god is out there, delicious malted barley and fermented hops probably saved my life in those first days.  Way better than the anti-depressants or valium they'll probably want.  But let them have them, too, for a little while.  Obviously, not together.  But a little bit of numb is fine.  They are in shock-panic-disaster-mode.  All their alarms are going off and nothing makes any sense at all right now.  Let them grieve, but help them be calm, too, if you can.

And frankly, yeah they are probably a little suicidal and a little crazy and definitely extremely lost.  Their souls have just been shredded by the Universe itself.  They are fucked up and they need help.  That is why you have to hold them tight and keep them close.  Do it in shifts.  Be with them, but don't overwhelm them with people.  If anyone manages to make either of them laugh no matter how dark and awful the humor, that is an extremely good sign.  Don't bring in clowns, but aim for a little bit of black humor if they are the type that needs that.  I did and my brothers did me right.  Those moments of dark levity were less-awful-spots in a terrible, incomprehensible time.

Don't make them have to make decisions.  In the first days after Silas's death I could only think a few minutes into the future and not all that successfully.  "Should I get up?  Should I eat?  Should I bother even thinking about any of that?"  I felt alien and awful in the outside world.  I'll never forget my first errand out to the bank and a Walgreens after he died.  I returned worn out from a ten minute ride up the street.  I was crazed with grief and overwhelmed by the fact that the world just kept on going even though mine had come to a complete stop.

Do anything you can to make them have less to think about.  Right now they are trying to figure out what the fuck they are supposed to do with their dead child, with their demolished hopes, with their annihilated lives.  Don't make them have to think about chores, too.

And yeah, she's worse off than him right now in a more immediate, physical way.  But then the other way around, that also makes it worse for him, too.  His disconnection from the physical bond mother and child shared is also a loss for him.  Mentally, emotionally, chemically, he was preparing to meet and bond with that child, just like the mother, but now he has even less than what she had, in a way.  Really all I'm saying is he's working hard to stay strong and upright for her, but don't mistake courage for strength.  I always felt like I was on the verge of a bottomless, endless void.  Stand there and face it with him if you can, and don't let that void consume either of them.

A death like this can be a poison to their souls.  It will take a great deal of patience and time for either of them to even begin to fake normalcy.  Shower them with love.  Talk about their child, use her name.  Look them in the face and the eyes when you discuss the absurd awfulness of their plight.  Tell them how much you miss her.  Do not be afraid to be direct and honest and clear with them.  The death of their child is like a blazing nova of utter blackness and its awful light reveals everything about their lives, their hopes, and about their friends and their families.  Do not be afraid to stand directly next to them and face directly into that palpable pain if you want to keep them alive and keep them protected and keep them as friends.  Those that cannot handle what they are going through won't stay around long, and they will know very quickly who they can count on.  Be someone they can always count on, because right now they can't count on anything at all.  The Universe itself has turned on them.

Never say that everything happens for a reason.  Never try to mollify them with talk of angels and meant-to-be's.  Never say that God works in mysterious ways.  Never compare a trivial loss in your own life with what they are going through.  Don't talk about babies.  Don't talk about hope and somedays and futures.  Help them deal with the immediate dilemmas of everyday life (ie what show to watch, what time to eat, that it is okay to not shower) and don't even consider trying to tell them anything about the true nature of reality and what good might someday come.  Any of that is just dressing up a shit sandwich with rotten tomatoes and wilted lettuce.

I'm sorry.  I love you.  I miss your child.  I'm here for you.  Let me do that for you.  Those are the only things you need to say right now and each and every one should be followed with a tight and true hug.  Cry with them.  Be silent with them.  Talk with them if they can find any words at all.

Lastly, don't forget to take care of yourself, as well.  Work with your friends to always keep someone close, but make sure to sustain your own life so that you are strong and ready when you are with them.  They will be strange and sad and difficult, but if you love them and are patient you just may keep a flicker of light alive in their souls.  But don't worry about sanity right now, that's a lost cause anyway.  Just leave breadcrumbs on the trail back and help them be a little bit okay for a little bit of one day, each day, every day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

They are on a whole new timescale now.  They are now counting the moments since they lost their child, and nothing will ever be even remotely the same again.  They need company in this new landscape, though, and that means you need to help them find their way step by step.  But don't call them baby-steps, they just might punch you in the face for that one.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What else everyone?  What advice can you give to the friends and family of someone that has just lost a child?  And what do you disagree with from what I said?  This path is completely different in so many ways for each and every person so I'm sure my advice is anything but exactly right for everyone.  What did I miss or get wrong?

not the enemy

Tash's post reminded me of how easy it is to get caught up in the bullshit of everyday life and how difficult it is for couples in our situations to communicate well.  Taxes, taxing situations, too many to-dos and no desire to do them can turn a simple afternoon sour.  Suddenly we're sniping and sneering.

Slamming doors.  Seething rage.  Eventually I realize that I'm not mad at her at all.  Well, maybe a little, but the quiver and clench, they are not her doing.

That tension and anger, it's a force that fills me when I realize how impotent I am to change the past I hate, or alter the immovable fact I cannot stand.

All I can control is my perspective and my response.

 

I attempt to embrace calmness despite adrenaline and energy.  Over and over, every day of my life now, it is an exercise in calmness.  There are too many triggers that click and spark the gunpowder in my soul.  There are too many holes that should be filled with moments with my son.  I fall into those voids suddenly so I've tried to learn how to fly.

Most of the time I fall.

That's the pit in my stomach.  It is the sensation of endlessly falling into another day that is filled with the absence of what I want most.

I fill those voids with anything I can think of and I try to stay calm even when I'm falling and all I can do is yell for help.  Luckily Lu is strong enough to pull me back when I start to shout because she knows all I'm really doing is looking for Silas.  Even when I'm yelling at her.

Inside I'm panicking because I can't find him and then I remember that I have to try and stay calm.  Lu helps me like I help her when it's the other way around because quietly, silently, and straight out loud shouting we both know that Death is the enemy.

Worst of all:  it is nothing we can fight or do anything about.  This immovable fact.  This hole that is a wall that is our son that is impossible.

That impenetrable barrier silences me when I get too pissed off about the daily bullshit that's easy to fight about.  We'll argue about some dumb thing, some mis-communication and then that spirals deeper, past our petty disagreement to the true source of our sadness and anger.

Suddenly I see that we are sharing that space and my anger is gone.  I'm not mad at her.  She's my rock and my partner.  Lu is my biggest fan and best friend.  Whatever fight we're having it has nothing to do with what is really going on.

The problem is that what is really going on is nothing we can fight, not even together.  There is us, here.  There is Silas beyond reach.  And there is his death between us all.

I fight against that every day, even without realizing it.  By getting up and going out.  By facing the day and whatever it brings.  By attempting to excel at whatever is before me, in each action and step I am battling the enemy that could all too easily consume me.  The Void, his absence.  Death.  I feel it in my stomach, in my heart, in my skin.  But I brush it off, again and again, determined to live bright and true.

Still, sometimes I have to shout.  I need to shout to get it out of my throat and still it sticks there, his death lodged in my soul like a vein coal.  I trace it like a labyrinth, round and round, all the way down, calmer by the moment as I see that it spells his name and that I will never be without him, even though I will always be without him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What calms you?  Are you able to pull back from the anger and sadness of your loss when you turn that on the people around you?  What do you do to fight against Death, against the absence of your lost child?

gratitude

It’s gut wrenching how much I long for her these days.

A whirl of small brown leaves flies against the windshield of my car as I drive by their tree, almost bare.

Hello, Beautiful…

I feel her close, I really do.

And also, deep in my gut, everywhere in my heart, in all of me – the awareness that my child in her body is missing.

For about a month, we’ve had her picture close by in the dining room of our new home. It’s in a temporary frame… I’m working on something much more grand, much more beautiful. But her sweetest face is there in all its 8x10 glory, peeking out at us as we eat, draw, do homework, putz around on the computer, talk. As I write this.

There she is… and yet that’s not her. It’s just her photograph. Sometimes I feel her there. Sometimes she is in the leaves. Sometimes in the occasional milkweed seed that reminds me of the oh-so-sad-so-terribly-incredibly-painfully-sad week we spent in the mountains after we said goodbye to her. Sometimes in the red tail hawk that flies above Cincinnati, though much less frequently than she did in San Francisco.

When I look at that photograph, I just miss my Baby Girl… in the flesh.

I am reminded each time I look at it just how beautiful she was. And how much she struggled with each breath. That’s when the tears come, when I remember those days in between,

She’s doing surprisingly well… this is what she’ll need in order to come home,

and,

She just can’t get enough air into her small fragile lungs, even with all this support.

That’s when I imagine what it would be like now if things hadn’t turned, if she had come home on oxygen and continued to get stronger.

*****

I know how lucky I am that I got to know her when she was alive. I know how lucky I am that I got to hold her, to kiss her, to sing to her, to touch her soft skin, to look into her eyes as she looked into mine. I know we didn’t all get that in this community of deadbabyparents… I wish we all had. I wish all of our babies were still here, in the flesh, alive and well.

Maybe I have more photos of my baby, but it doesn’t make it easier to have lost her. Nothing can make it easy to lose a child. Easy isn’t a word I identify with anymore. As a word, it feels trivial and doesn’t serve me much. But hard… that feels too simplistic. Sometimes it isn’t hard. Sometimes it just is.

Strange feels more like it these days. Strange because I can simultaneously feel acceptance and disbelief. So many days that is my normal. I still say to Tikva, several times a week, silently or out loud,

Oh Baby Girl… you died. You died.

Then a voice within me will remember, will insist,

But you lived, too. I won’t ever forget that you lived. And for that, I am grateful.

It may have been a blink of an eye, like a daydream… but I wouldn’t trade it in for forgetting the loss of you. Not ever.

*****

I was terrified last year at this time to spend Thanksgiving with our family. I was terrified to be up close and personal with Tikva’s cousin, who was born during the weeks in between my daugther’s birth and her death. I was so scared of being face to face with the reminder that my baby wasn’t there, that he was here and she was not. The fear became something bigger than itself, and I almost spent Thanksgiving separate from my entire family.

But in the end I went. And I sat with this beautiful little boy on my lap, felt his newness, looked into his big brown eyes that reminded me of Tikva’s. And I saw his bright soul, felt his pureness. The ease of being with an uncomplicated soul that a baby is. Connected to him as his own self, not as a reminder of what I didn’t have. He had no idea that he had a cousin who died shortly after he was born. One day he will, and forever he will remind me of the age Tikva would be if only…

But in that moment he was just pure love. And I let myself take that in.

And I looked around at my family all over the house, watching football, taking one more bite of pie while talking and drinking coffee. And I felt so deeply grateful for every single one of them who had held me together before, during and since Tikva’s life. The loss of the months leading up to last Thanksgiving didn’t take away my gratitude for all that remained.

I felt I was still here because of them. Because of my husband and my incredible and brave older daughter, my Dahlia. Because of my sister and my father and my family and my friends – my community. Because of my city, my ocean, my park to walk in, my hawks flying above. My yoga classes to cry silently in. My work to go to for a day’s worth of distraction from my thoughts, and time to read a babylost blog when I needed to go in.

And because of this place I stumbled upon in the early months after Tikva’s death. Where I breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn’t alone, and soon felt the uncomfortable mingling of that relief with the realization that the only way I could not feel alone here was for other parents to also have lost their babies. Where you just get it without my having to explain.

Thank you.

*****

I’m not much for holidays honoring consumerism and the massacre indigenous peoples. I’m not a huge fan of turkey and the gluttony that accompanies this holiday, especially when I know that many of us aren’t blessed to eat every day, much less such a feast. But I do get swept up – just a little – in taking pause for gratitude.

For me, gratitude after loss is different. It’s too simple to say that because of all I have lost, I appreciate what I have so much more. It has something to do with the impossible-to-shake-now-and-probably-forever recognition of just how fragile it all is… that all I really have, no matter how much time I get here, together with those I cherish, is this moment I am in. That understanding just doesn’t let go of me, and neither does the gratefulness I feel that seems to go hand in hand with it.

Because if all I have is this moment, then I better kiss my Dahlia one extra time today, better eat that last piece of dark chocolate waiting for me in the cookie jar, better call my dad to tell him I love him, better tell my husband one more time just how proud I am of him… and I better be kind and gentle with myself.

*****

Thank you, Tikva, for awakening me to the present moment more than anyone ever has. Because with you, I could do nothing greater than be completely present – unconditionally – for as long as we would get together.

And beyond.

.::.

How does gratitude feel to you now? Is it there? The same? Different? If you do feel it, what makes you feel grateful?

I heard the news today, oh boy

My baby died.

Our lives entered some state of suspension, bits of grief floating in gelatin, still, timeless.

Everyone else, though, rushed -- and rushes -- on. Breathless. And there is news.

I suppose in the old state, there was good news and bad news, but filtered through the prism of Maddy, the news onslaught all seems painfully blinding. The good reminds me of what I am not, what I lack, what I was. The bad piles on, pours salt in the wound, kicks me while down. All news hurts because it means time progresses, the earth continues it's orbit, while ours sits stagnant. Others actually have news while our news remains the same, day after day, week after week, month after month. My baby died. Our child died. There is nothing else to report.

Anonymous events filter in: typhoons, random accidents turned fatal, economic shit storms, another soldier killed by a roadside bomb. This celebrity is pregnant, that celebrity had twins, yet another lost all her pregnancy weight in two months. A great new movie, a shiny new car, a championship won, a true love uncovered. Headlines can be scanned and papers recycled, televisions muted, and websites clicked off.

But the news of family and friends is not so easily negated with a remote. There are pregnancies and births, weddings and divorces. Someone discovers cancer, someone wins a three-week vacation. An elderly relative dies, a friend adopts a puppy. Someone loses a job, someone crashes a car, and lo! Someone lands on their feet -- walks away unscathed, and starts the employment of a lifetime with a corner office a week later.

Somehow, it's all a punch in the gut.

Herein lies the conundrum: if all news hurts to some extent, do I want to hear about it? And if so, how exactly do I want to hear about it? And what does my current state of griefdom mean to the messenger?

Because unlike black and white type on paper or a stately correspondent talking in a flat voice, this type of news is typically told to us, orally or in writing, directly from someone else -- someone with a link to us, someone who knows. I wonder, how hard is it for someone else, someone not in our immediate situation, to tell us their news? To tell us of someone else's news? Because we're not the same anymore -- we're different. There's a fine line somewhere in there between "Please don't forget my child, please be gentle when you tell me" and "Please don't treat me like I'm fucking batshit." And perhaps I should give people more slack in the line when they're hemming and hawing and running through how exactly to word what it is they're about to say given our new status, but part of me thinks . . . is it really so hard?

Because sometimes instead of just coming out with it, people decide it's easier not to tell you at all. It's easier for them. There is no awkward moment, no watching you break down into tears. No need to remember that horrible awful thing that happened or even bring it up peripherally. And I suppose to convince themselves of their righteousness on this point, they assume that you're fragile, weak, sensitive, outright crazyloco. Can't handle it. Maybe they think they're doing you a favor by not saying anything! This is helpful! Aren't they being wonderfully in touch with your needs!

What news are you being deprived of? Are you sure you know everything that's going on? Are you being apprised?

Because in the end, we found out. And discovered that everyone had run circles around us for the better part of a year. And now it's not the news itself that hurts me -- oh no. It's the realization that everyone thinks I'm bananas, and can't deal with other people's lives. It's also the realization that people around me don't care enough about me or the reason behind the new me to be uncomfortable for a few minutes. To take a risk that I might sniffle and need a kleenex. That I won't heed the warning not to harm the messenger. It's the understanding that Maddy is an inconvenience to them -- that I am an inconvenience to them, and why would I want to continue in their presence if they feel they can't freely speak about their news? The way their time is flying by and events are occurring at breakneck speed? None of it is possible if I'm in the room with my big technicolor elephant at my side.

How hard is it really, to just begin a sentence: "I need to tell you something. It may hurt to hear it, and for that I'm sorry, and I understand how it could -- but I didn't want you not to know."

We found out about the pregnancy, after the birth. And truth be told, the idea of a healthy newborn doesn't hit me nearly as hard (if it does at all, anymore) as the idea that I am a pariah, a leper, a fragile freak. Maddy is nothing more than an annoyance, my grief a nuisance in the daily ongoing of hands moving around the clock. It is easier, not to speak with me, not to bring It (capital I) up. Two and half years later, I am once again alone, sitting arms akimbo in my still pool of gelatin, while time whizzes by -- this time laughing, pointing, and gawking at me.

Have you discovered family and friends hiding news from you after your loss? How did it make you feel, and how did you deal with it? When family and friends delivered significant news that might effect you differently now, how did they do it? How and what do you want to be told -- if at all?