The hawk is stationary above the highway. The mundane light post is transformed into a majestic perch with the beaked, mottled, patient bird gripping the metal with its talons. It is looking for prey, but it feels like it was waiting for us.
We always point them out to one another on our drives, and not a word has to be spoken. Silas, we both think. Silas there somehow in the penetrating gaze of the bird, even though we don't really believe that, not in any direct, concrete way. It's not his reborn spirit in there. It's not his soul transformed into a hawk.
Instead, it is a living, breathing symbol that we can hang our grief on. Silent, alien, unknowable, beautiful and free, the creature is a perfect specimen of raw nature and it represents so much of what we don't have from Silas, and so much of what we wanted him to be.
Three hawks today. Yesterday I saw one plummet from the sky to the median between the north and soundbound lanes and then leap into the sky with some squirming fur in its grasp. The hawks are reminders of his life in a safe and abstracted way.
After all, it is hard to remember someone you never got to know.
We remember him as an absence, as a lack, and the hawk serves as a placeholder for everything we still don't understand about why Silas is not here with us today.
At night when the hawks sleep Orion captures my vision instead. Pinpricks of light billions of lightyears away arranged just so, and they pierce me with their interstellar light every time. We chose that name for him, selected that specific connection, and it ensures that every single night that our planet faces that part of the sky I see him and think of him and hold him close in my heart.
Closer yet, though, is the ink in my arm. It is a tree of life darkened with death and sprinkled with the stars of his constellation, surrounded by a ring of "S"s. And it's funny/not-funny how much an "S" looks like a broken infinity symbol.
Silas is gone forever, but I still find him every day in pieces of my life. In the hawk above, in the blazing stars of the Universe beyond, in the very fabric of my skin. I will never stop missing him, even when happy, even when feeling good and right.
His name is engraved on the inside of our wedding rings, just like it is etched on the deepest walls of our hearts. The symbols help us remember him as we hoped he would be, but the pain ensures we will never forget the child we do not get to hold in our arms.
What are the symbols you connect to your lost child or children? Did you create the connection or did some outside force cause you to recognize it? Do those symbols and reminders bring you peace or pain? Have the symbols changed over time?
It feels almost ridiculous to have such a thought. Impossible, really. My daughter isn’t going to be anything. That train has passed. It steamed and whistled and methodically toiled for almost thirty-nine weeks and then, promptly, fell off a cliff. I understand there is no future for her. The potential for choosing ice cream and friends and hobbies and a career are all out of reach for my darling M.
And yet.
Here I am, imagining her doing something with her live self. Something very particular. Something I know almost nothing about, a pursuit I have always found rather boring. And of course, what I imagine her doing could be entirely untrue, a figment of my imagination, a cruel and beautiful mind trick that connects me to her and her to me. It took me nearly seven months of thinking about it until I even told my partner.
I have something to tell you, I told her.
It’s kind of ridiculous.
No, seriously, it’s pretty crazy.
Well, I keep thinking Margot was going to be a volleyball player.
Because of her hands.
***
I unswaddled her as gently as I could, as any parent would have, protecting her head, giving careful attentiveness to each limb, making sure all of my movements were soft against her body. She appeared slowly before me, from head to toe, revealing herself in stages as I unwrapped the blanket round and round her.
Neck, shoulders, chest, arms and elbows. Each was in perfect harmony with the other.
Her hands were folded neatly together over her belly, her left hand wrapped around her right wrist. There was a solemness about the way they were together, a sacred reverence for the tragedy that befell her. They were the first part of her that took me off guard as I unwrapped her. Her hands were simply huge, almost as long as her forearms, too big for her body. Her fingers were long and thick, and seemed to run on forever. Her palms were white and deep, great pools of soft skin and little creases. Folded together, they almost covered her entire belly and chest.
Those hands make me ache for her future.
***
We were recently at the beach, my first daughter and I, on the swings near the boardwalk cafe. I pushed her from behind, counting with each push, tickling her each time she came back towards me. Kids played all around us, screaming and running, playing hide and go seek. Teenagers walked in front of us, down the wooden path towards the low tide. Behind us was a cafe full of families, eating and conversing on the sand. It was much too warm for January and everyone’s mood seemed in tune with the weather.
It wasn’t until maybe the twentieth push that I noticed them, across the sidewalk, less than a hundred steps from the swings. The University of Southern California women’s volleyball team.
There were more than a dozen of them practicing with one another, bumping, setting and spiking white volleyballs around the sand. They were taller than most women, and athletic, with big enough hands to palm a volleyball, and they moved around the sand so gracefully, as if their feet and the sand had a made a deal with one another.
For a good long minute, I forgot about counting, forgot about the kids around me, the conversations at the cafe, the charming weather. I secretly imagined myself in my late fourties, the father of a University student.
I looked for her, my M.
Tall like her father, blue eyes like her mother, great big hands.
Is there something about your child's future that you think about, whether it's about their personality, or their hobbies, career or anything else? Did you have any leanings or notions while your baby was in utero? Or after you saw them for the first time?
The two of them met for a brief moment. One of them was alive, nine days old, seven pounds, four ounces, and still under the lethargic haze of infancy. One of them was dead, four hours old, seven pounds, twelve ounces, and still warm from the womb, from the closeness of working organs and a rapid heartbeat. The dead one was lifted in front of the live one, a surreal sight if there ever was such a thing. She was going to be your best friend, the mother whispered. It was hello and goodbye in the same minute.
They were meant for each other, our two girls, Lyla and Margot, born nine days apart to best friends who live on the same street.
Long before children were on the immediate radar, the four of us dreamed of a scenario where our kids grew up together, close in age and close in proximity. We imagined our babies crawling around together, our toddlers fighting over toys, our pre-schoolers trading sentences. It's only natural, of course, for two couples to wish the sort of closeness between their kids as they share themselves.
The mothers navigated the frightening waters of middle school together, and then high school and then University. The fathers own a business together. We have backpacked through three continents, riding crammed busses and jumping off bridges and sleeping in cars along the interstate. And somehow, despite living in different parts of the world for the better part of six years, our friendship remained steadfast.
And then one day they decided to move across the country, straight into our neighborhood. Then they fell pregnant. It was July when they told us, on a blisteringly hot afternoon.
Almost incredulously, ironically, we conceived Margot on the same blistering day we found out they were pregnant with Lyla. One tiny miracle created out of knowledge of the other. The women who became fast friends at the age of twelve, who have known each other for nearly two decades, were just five weeks apart. The stars were aligning.
In those early weeks, those early months after Margot died, it was hard to even imagine what we needed from our family and friends. It was shock and awe, the inability to focus, night time meltdowns, a mountain of anguish. Friends and family came and went, supporting and helping and listening in any way they can. But mostly we just tried to survive each day, one long minute at a time.
And then, suddenly, without notice, it felt like we were all alone in our grief, as if the veil of sadness had been lifted for all but us. It’s all fine and understandable, but the longing for wholeness became a desperation, to be able to share with someone our whole selves, both the anguish and the joy, however unbalanced these emotions were in our early grief. I found myself fracturing, turning into a splintered version of myself. I would smile and nod and deflect questions and give the world a sad, but more or less coping, version of myself. I longed to be my whole self, with more than just my partner. If we couldn’t share the aching burden of our missing child with friends, how on earth could we share any joy we found out of life?
But there is Brooke, mother to Lyla, friend since middle school, standing with us, kneeling with us, walking with us, crying with us, never afraid of our grief, never afraid to talk about Margot. She asks questions and then asks more questions, always wanting to share in our pain as deeply as she can. When a group of us are at a party, with babies everywhere, it is Brooke who talks about missing Margot, it is Brooke who asks what it feels like. Whenever I post a new vulnerable blog about our grief, it is Brooke who talks about it. She has abided with us, without a timeline, without expectations. And what is most astonishing, is that she has done all of this while in the midst of mothering a child for the first time. If there have been sleepless nights or breastfeeding issues or colds or exhaustion or hard days or figuring out the right bottle or any of those new parent realities, we never hear about them. And the love, the sheer perfect love of a child, that normally oozes out of a new parent, has been miraculously toned down around us. Her abiding grace, under such difficult circumstances, is perhaps the most selfless act I have encountered in my lifetime.
Nearly ten months have passed since our babies passed by one another. For a long time, it was hard to even look at Lyla, the most physical reminder of my Margot. The smiling, the giggles, the sitting up, the pure baby charm. Each little milestone was so acutely felt. But somehow through the months of abiding with Brooke and her husband, through the inevitable time that has passed, I can smile at Lyla now, hold her hand, watch her laugh. I can ask about her. She has become integrated into my pain, fused with it. She is part of the missing and she is part of the remembering. But it is not too bitter. It is sweet. And somedays I wonder, when the rest of the world has forgotten my darling girl, when only her mother and I really miss her, will Lyla be like a marker in time, a beautiful reminder of our little girl, gone for so long?
Were there any children born around you when your child died? How does it feel to watch them grow up? How has your relationship with the parents changed? Are you able to be around the child, or is it too painful? Has this changed with time?
It creeps up on me like the shadow of his absence. I feel him first as a whisper breeze that cools a hot late summer day. When a leaf leaves the tree, I fall with it into piles of grief on the curb. The suddenly incessant crickets every single night: Exactly like his name in my head, every single night. The days tighten, losing light as my heart constricts in anti-anticipation. That moon, that September night, her labor and pain. One by one, the leaves arrange into place. The moon eases in its orbit. The Universe rings my soul like a broken bell when that perfect autumn eve exactly captures the essence of the day he was born. I cannot stand it once again and once again I cannot move aside from the drenching, gusting, cold fall storm that is my face and heart and soul and hands when his birthday is here and he is not.
I have to settle for the fall. For the piles I drive through. For the crickets that sing their vigil. For the cleansing rains. For the chill of our loss on the last bits of summer heat, and the cold nights ahead where we have to hold each other close and let the spark of our souls keep his memory warm in our beautiful and broken hearts.
What does the season of your loss look and feel like? Has it changed the way you view that time of year entirely? Or are there other non-seasonal triggers that remind you of the day you lost your child? And please feel free to offer a poem of your own, if you like.
My daughter had a tiny little coffin. It was small and white. It was also free. They don’t charge for baby coffins in England. How do you put a price on honouring the memory of your child? They don’t charge for baby funerals at all, unless you want something out-of-the-ordinary.
We wanted ordinary. We wanted the ordinary alive baby that other people took home. Instead we had an ordinary little coffin.
We discussed our wishes with the funeral director. She showed us a death catalogue: the caskets, the urns, the cars. She said ‘you can have any car you want, even a Limo.’ We turned away, our shoulders shaking. She left the room, respectful of our grief.
But we weren’t crying.
She offered us the limo and our eyes met. We knew we were thinking the same thing. We were thinking of driving up and down the main drag of our city hanging out the windows of the limo like kids on their way to prom; whooping it up with our little tiny corpse.
We laughed. Because what the fuck else would we do?
The day after we’d been to see Iris for the last time, I was gathering the hot, fresh laundry from our dryer. I held it in my arms and breathed deeply. David said ‘isn’t it nice, having something warm to hold?’ Loaded silence. Hysterical laughter.
We laughed. Because what the fuck else would we do?
We overheard our living daughter and her little friend. They were playing a crying game. They were sobbing huge, fake sobs. ‘Oh boo hoo. Oh boo hoo hoo. We are so sad. Boo hoo hoo hoo. We are so sad that baby Iris is dead. Boo hoo.’
We laughed.
A relative brought a gift for me. A lovely, well-meaning, slightly misguided gift. Iris scented soap-on-a-rope. Because who wouldn’t wash their armpits with sweet babylost memories?
We laughed.
A former colleague bemoaned the lack of sympathy extended to her when her cat had an operation: ‘when Jess’ baby died, everyone was so supportive, but no one seems to care as much about my cat.’
We laughed.
When I was pregnant with my son, we'd high-five after every sonogram: 'Woohoo! Let's give it up for an evident HEARTBEAT!'
We laughed
Today my husband had a bad day. A very bad day. He said 'well... no one died... No, wait, actually she did!'
We laughed.
We laughed.
We laughed.
Because what the fuck else would we do?
What makes you laugh now, following the loss of your baby or babies? Do you find humour in the darkest of places, or are some things Just Not Funny?
The naked brutal truth is that what brings us together here is death. Our particular kind of death is disorienting by its very nature, by the timing of its essential untimeliness. But the other truth, one that can be no less brutal, one that seems particularly cruel in those first disorienting days and weeks, is that we are still alive. And so we have to keep going, we have to keep living. The pain with which every breath cuts? That's being alive, that's living after. But so is the eventual realization that it is no longer so, that breathing, and other things, are getting easier.
If you are not there yet, I am so sorry, and I know it's no comfort, this long view.
But this long view is where I am, four years and one day after the birth of my son, four years and two days after his death. I remember clearly that from the very beginning I bristled at anyone suggesting that this--A's death, our grief, the time then-- that this was something we just needed to get through or "live through," as an Old Country idiom goes. You don't get through this, was my retort, you learn to live with it. And so far, at least for myself, it seems that I was right.
Our one year anniversary fell on the first day of class at my then-new job. I wasn't running the course then, and I didn't even need to teach that day. But I found myself so distracted and wiped out in the days leading up to it and on the day itself, that I eventually felt the need to explain what all of that was about to my then-new boss. (Thankfully, that went well, and whatever I may think of my now-former boss, I will always remember his kindness about A.)
Yesterday, three years later, on my drive to the now-new job, I felt the familiar heaviness, familiar tightness-- the sadness, the longing. But then I parked, and I went to work. I talked about atoms, electrons, orbitals, bonds. My computer froze, and while I waited for it to reboot, I picked up the chalk and went on. I emphasized key points, and held the pauses I needed to hold to get the class to engage, to get someone to risk volunteering an answer. I read confusion on their faces and picked up my chalk again, and I drew and talked them to clarity. I explained the changes in schedule due to the past and future snow days and I joked with the class. It was, as far as they knew, just another day in the classroom. That was probably mostly time, mostly the learning to live with that time affords us as days pack into weeks and weeks pack into months. But it felt like a victory, this ability to do my job well even on this day, and it felt hard-won.
And when the class was over, I had something else to look forward to. A task, it occurred to me as I was walking back to my car, something concrete to do, not unlike that day four years before. Then the task was birthing, now-- shoveling.
You see, our cemetery only has the flat to the ground markers (and the vases that you could flip up, but obviously those are down for the season), so when a snowfall covers a section, all you see above the layer of snow are the wooden poles-- markers that the groundskeepers put in to delineate the rows through the winter months. So two years ago, at the two year mark, the winter had been snowy. It's not like we didn't notice, but for some reason, we didn't connect. It occurred to neither of us that if we went to the cemetery on the anniversary, what we'd likely see would be a blanket of snow. Which is, of course, exactly what we saw when we arrived-- snow about knee high and a few poles sticking out to mark the rows.
At first, we thought we'd just let Monkey go and put the flowers over where we estimated the grave should be. We thought she stood the best chance of not sinking into the snow. But she lost her bearings among the white, stopping a good distance from where I thought the grave actually was. And suddenly JD was following her, and then so was I. I wanted to steer them to what I thought would be the right spot. JD wanted Monkey to not feel like she'd gotten it "wrong," and so there was tension, and it felt right to no-one, and we left the flowers where I was sure he was not. Except for the one flower I walked over to the spot I thought was right, and stuck into the snow, all by its lonesome.
I felt like shit. The primal in me said I should know where my child is, I should be able to get to him. Not, you know, to him, but to his grave at least. To make matters worse, that year the anniversary of his death fell on a Friday, and of his birth-- on Saturday. Jewish cemeteries are closed on Saturdays, of course, so we went on Friday afternoon, after Monkey's school let out. So what I was left with, going into the day that marked his birth, was that awful feeling of loss and separation. Compounded-- sure, why not, right?-- by a nice round of stomach bug that swept through the house starting that very evening.
What to do with that feeling? Where to put it? I had only one answer. The next morning, as I was leaving to run some necessary errands, I also packed a small snow shovel, and I drove to the cemetery. I parked by the side gate, and I walked. When I got to the section, I stepped carefully into the footprints we made the day before. I headed for the lone flower, and I dug, carefully, right next to it. You kinda have to know that if I am telling the story, I found the marker right where I dug. If I didn't, the story probably wouldn't mean the same thing to me, and it probably wouldn't be needing telling today. But I did, and I felt that all was now right with the world. Not you know, regular people's world, but the world where one visits their child's grave in the cemetery, that world was now put right. So I sat there for a bit, and moved the flowers to the right spot, picked myself up, walked out, and drove to run those errands.
Fast forward two years, to this January. In the last three weeks we've had three snow days. It wouldn't take a genius to figure out there would be thick layer in the cemetery. This is where I decided that what I wanted to do was shovel ahead of our planned visit. But with minor snowfalls threatened every other day or so, I didn't want to shovel too early. And this brings us back to me getting in the car after my class yesterday. I had a job to do. I and my trusted shovel were going to make it so we could put the flowers right on the marker this year. An hour, I figured, 90 minutes at the outside.
I know I am not alone in feeling that the day he was born was the best of the worst days. I was thinking about just that after my class on the way to my car. From there I went on to contemplate why, if he wasn't born until well into the evening, the whole of that day doesn't seem so bad. The answer, it seemed, was that I had a job to do that day. I had to birth him, and there was work in that, and single-minded concentration, and anticipation. Not entirely unlike what lay in front of me, I realized. A task, physical and defined, requiring concentration and likely not a small amount of determination. A is buried almost at the far edge of the section, so getting to him is not a matter of swinging the shovel a few times. But an hour, I figured, 90 minutes at the outside.
I began to reconsider that estimate as I drove through the cemetery, snowbanks higher than my car in places. Three snowdays in three weeks. Pulling up to the baby section, it looked grim. But as I got out of the car, I noticed a dip in the snowbank a bit in front of me, where the new addition to the baby section was recently cleared. As far as I know, that whole section, about the same size as the original, only has one occupant for now, at least that was the case when last I looked, in late November or so. The dip in the snowbank wasn't just a dip-- from there led a trail of footsteps, human or animal I couldn't really tell, although if I had to bet my life, I would probably go with a deer. The footsteps, as my incredible luck would have it, went right where I needed to go-- toward the back part of the sections, right to where the old and the new meet. From there, I knew, I could dig my way to A's grave.
To understand why I felt so lucky you should probably know that my worst fear as I planned my digging expedition in my head was that I would accidentally dig a path that would have me walking on other graves. The dead, I know, don't care. But I do. The serendipitous footsteps literally showed me another way. I could dig through the new section without worrying where I dug-- I knew about where the new boy is, and the steps steered way clear of that spot, and in the back of the old section I know the locations of the few graves that are there pretty well-- it should be easy for me to avoid them, I reasoned.
Part way through the project I stopped to take a picture. The wider part is me digging to follow the narrow-- what I found there.
It took two hours and fifteen minutes to get all the way to the grave, and to dig around it wide enough for JD, Monkey and me to stand there together. There is a certain dead baby pride in finding that your aim is still true, that even when the snow lies higher than the tops of the marker sticks, you still know exactly where to dig for your son's grave. When it was over I took off my gloves to find that my hands have been stained black-- apparently the lining transfers. And I quickly realized that my feet were soaked through. Neither of these things registered until I was done. Singleminded much? Just a bit, I guess. Though I did stumble upon a few not entirely useless thoughts.
First, by the time I was damn near done, it occurred to me that it was a shame I did all the digging by myself. I've long maintained that the first few days were harder on JD than they were on me. He'd waited through that whole pregnancy to meet his son, and then his son died, and there still was nothing for him to do except bring me water. I, on the other hand, had things to do--give birth, tend to engorged boobs, tend to other parts. Purpose. All he had to do was sit around and breathe the sharp air. And here I was, four years on, occupied with another purposeful endeavor, again by myself. There is clarity in the snow field in front and a shoveled path behind. There is satisfaction in doing what little can be done on a day such as this. And so I felt bad for having that all to myself, and should we encounter another winter generous in snow, I've already suggested to JD that we go shoveling together.
The second not entirely useless thought is really a rather obvious metaphor. But I am going to say it anyway. Driving up to the cemetery I expected to have to lay my own path. It turned out that I didn't have to, at least not all the way. I found a trail to follow, though I still had to put in considerable work to get to where I needed to go. And that reminded me that though it may feel like it, we are never the first to walk the path of baby loss, and, sadly, we will not be the last. We each have a unique trajectory, but others have passed nearby. Sometimes their presence or their footsteps are obvious, and we find comfort in that obviousness. Other times, the presence of others is but a shadow, a divergent trail going off into the woods, an echo of voices carried on the wind.
And at the risk of clubbing this metaphor into complete unusability, we may not know when or how, but we each make it slightly easier, slightly more bearable for someone else at some point. Whether it is because our words, typed in anger or sadness, or joy, or longing and released to the wilds of the internets hit the spot with someone somewhere, or because we once said something to someone that caused them to be more considerate of others. Or even because if we are so lucky as to become pregnant again one day, we tend to walk tenderly with it, mindful of both the fragility of what we carry in us and of the potential hurt that seeing another's happiness may bring. And so, as we've said many a time to each other, I am so sorry you have a reason to be here, but I am so glad you found us.
How long has it been for you? What traditions have you developed so far? Have there been others who've helped you along the way?
glow in the woods
Bereaved parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion, and the other side of getting through this mess called grief.
Parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion we learn for others, having been through this mess — and see it reflected back at you, acknowledged and understood.
Thanks to photographer Xin Li and to artist Stephanie Sicore for their respective illustrations and photos.
