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.

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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?

Vices

They squeeze me.  Thousands of them.  Millions.  Billions.  Tiny, invisible, impossible little clamps on every molecule of my body compress my form making me dense and heavy.

The twists are powered by hopes halfway and memories the other.  The leverage of those screws cannot be denied. They press me into myself and I fall into bed leaden.

How often do you feel like the only person in the World that feels like you do?

How often do you cry?

My dreams are a mystery and a refuge.  Sometimes I wake up thinking I was just where I should be, not here.  Not this.  Not again.  Nonetheless, yes.

No, not none.  Me-the-less.  This World-the-less without Silas. I'm still not sure how it is possible, that I can still be missing him.  That he needs to be missed. That cognitive dissonance disorients me every day.  It fucks with my soul, it complicates friendships, it makes family distant and uncertain.

Silas didn't do that to me, but his absence has.  And there is absolutely no way to miss him more, but I've been missing him for so long now that it feels like more.

Deeper and deeper this longing has wormed its way into my being.  Each day without him and each day without another child compresses me, packs me tighter into myself.  This pressure of reproduction is devastating.  Staying positive and letting go and having faith in love and science and sex all sounds so easy and right, but all of that is almost impossible to contain in these tightly packed cells of mine.  I have room for so little beyond survival of my psyche sometimes, but sometimes my dreams take me deeper.

In one dream I am driving and it is pitch black.  Black so black the light of my headlights that I know are on are swallowed only inches from the paired glass at the front my speeding car.  I'm certain the wipers are working, but I can't see them because the windshield is obsidian except for the brief flecks of white that must be snow.

Downhill I drive, the car faster than I want it to be but I have places I need to go down the road, just beyond this hellish storm.

My hands are white and bloodless on the steering wheel.  A deathgrip.  I'm breathing only through my nose.

And then it happens as I knew it would.  The car just goes.  Out from under me it goes.  Wheels suddenly spinning, loose and free, sliding frictionless through the snow-flecked darkness I feel the whole machine lose purpose and coherence around me.

The steering wheel is jellied spaghetti.  There's no turning back because I'm pretty sure I'm airborne, spinning and spiraling into disaster and I remember something I heard from my brother I think: That if you're in a car accident that the reason the fucking drunks are always okay is because they are so trashed they don't tense up and so they don't get as fucked up when physics take over.  All that in an instant I remember and so I go loose.  I relax as the car spins through the air, through the endless darkness, through the blizzarding, blowing snow.

And then it's over.  The car catches back onto the road.  Not airborne.  Not crashed.  Torque and control return in an instant and as I clutch and slow I see the destination up ahead.  It's a road-house of some kind.  A way station and restaurant and hotel maybe out in the middle of no where, but it's where I was going.

I get out of the car and it's really snowing now.  I find some people that live or work or play there and I asked them about Lu and everyone I was supposed to meet.

Surprised and dismissive they tell me I'm wrong.  Not the place I'm looking for.  Not where everyone else is.  Not my destination at all.

Up that way, they tell me, and point back up the road I almost died on just now.  An hour, maybe two, someone says and I feel the clamps of inevitability twist another turn on every cell of my body.  I'm sputtering, distraught.

You can't stay here, man, he says to me.  You gotta go back up that way, back out of the storm up the road.  Back exactly the way you came.  I want to tell them that I can't.  That I almost died there.  That the path I just came from is impossible for me to traverse again.  I open my mouth to speak, but they're gone, there's no one for me to talk to, no one to argue this impossibility into nonexistence.

So I do what I must, as always.  The door shuts me into the car like the vices I feel in my skin.  My mind tightens to focus on the road ahead.  My hands clamp the wheel, I accelerate into the darkness, uphill and snowy.

Lu is that way, so I've got to go.  No point staying where I'm not supposed to be.  No point in being afraid of death.  After all, when I die someday far along down this dark, snowy road, maybe Silas will be there.  And if not, maybe someone will know which way he went.  And wherever that is, anywhere in the many brutal & beautiful Universes of this World, someday I'll find him no matter what the weather, no matter how long I must be without him.

Lu will be with me I'm sure, but I've got to go get her first.

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

What are your dreams?  Where are you going?  How do you describe the pressure of your loss and grief?

Change

Every day I make an effort to have a nice time out there in the World.  I'm not aiming for the stars, not trying to seize every single moment with fervor and gusto, I'm just gunning for good.  Good is enough if you can do it on a daily basis.

I sleep later now, every day.  I need an hour or so of semi-wakefulness to gear up and get ready for the chill and sunlight and this relentless, active life. I guess I still can't believe, every morning, that this is the Universe I live in.

I take a shower and I love it.  As hot as I can stand it.  Sometimes I reflect on how lucky I am to even have a hot shower that I can stand in as long as I like.  Sometimes when it looks like a tough one in my heart or my head, I stand there a little longer.  I shouldn't because of the coming Water Wars, but sometimes I can't help it.

Guilt is gone.  I've banished it.  I do what I need to get by and I don't worry about perfection.  Except in the coffee I roast.  And in the driving.  They both need to be perfect but for completely different reasons.  Coffee because it feels good to do it right and it's my job, driving because anything less is disaster.  I am not down with any more disasters.

The day Silas was born was supposed to be the best day of my life and instead it was by far the biggest disaster I have ever experienced.  Nothing like that should ever happen again.  But obviously, since we're all here together, Should is a word we all know doesn't mean a damn thing.

So Should is out now, too.  Expectations are a fool's game, and I choose not to play anymore.  I declare that as if it is something that can be de-selected.  Mostly I try to do exactly what is right in front of me and I avoid worrying about what I think should happen next.  Maybe it is the not-thinking that keeps me up at night.

3am has become my thinking hour.  I know it is going to be 3:11am when I open my eyes.  For a while that brief, nightly insomnia upset me, but now I look at it as a special time, just for me.  Lu asleep next to me.  The cat is tucked tight between us, not even purring anymore.

Usually it's a song that wakes me up.  Whatever I happened to enjoy the most that day is usually the one that's still running through my brain.  The same refrain, whatever it is.  The song-worm, it infects me.  I don't even think about who Should be waking me.

If you break these moth's wing feelings, powdery dust on your fingers or undecided undefined undeterred yet undermind and then it's the steady, static hum of my soul trying to reconcile another day without my son.

It doesn't stop, I'm sorry to say.  Not so far.  Not 2 years after he was conceived.  Not a day goes by that somehow isn't all about him.

The ultimate reason for that is because in a way, I have become him.  Silas doesn't get to do this Earth so I've got to do each day for him, too.  My everyday experience has been utterly transformed, and I do not at all feel like the person I was before Silas was here.  Two years since we started this journey and our lives look exactly the same, but everything has changed, inside and out.  And like Julia said, it is still happening.

I live my life the way I do as an expression of how my parents raised me, of how I have come to know the World, of how Lu's love and presence have become intertwined with mine.  Today is our 5 year wedding anniversary and despite the sadness of these past years it still always feels right that we are together.

Living extra for Silas--any way I can think of--feels right, too.

His brief life has transformed me in ways I am only beginning to understand.  I suppose all parents go through this, but it is especially difficult for people like us because we can never hug them and thank them for everything they help us become.

All I can do is hold on to every day, every little treat and happiness.  I do what's right in front of me and watch and listen for the beauty that appears.  I keep going forward for Silas, for myself, for Lu, and for whatever it is that happens next.  I know what that Should be, but I can't worry about that anymore.  I can only face what Is and somehow deal with everything that Isn't.

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How have you changed?  Do you have expectations of how things should turn out?  Do you get the ear-worm of music?  What are your refrains?  Do you manage to have nice days, despite your loss and sadness?

Still

Just before the turn on the year Angie asked for one word. One word from each, to make a community poem, to kick off the year of still life 365, the art blog by and for the community. I didn't have my word until it was too late, until the submission deadline was past. I had two, actually, but they were connected and I even knew which I would pick if I had to pick just the one. But deadline was past, and so the choosing was academic. Except that my next thought was that surely both of my words must've made it in by someone else's hand, being so obvious and all.

The poem came out beautiful and stunning, and heartbreaking. Just like you would hope it would. However, and this was a bit of a shock to me, my first choice word? It wasn't there.

The word was still. I meant it in terms of time, as in ongoing, continuous, in progress. Although, of course, the other meaning, the one the describes state of being, defined as "calm, motionless, quiet," didn't escape me either. I kinda liked the double meaning.

I miss him, still. I am not the same, still. It hurts, still. I am sad, still, at times. Of some things, I am less forgiving, still. Of others things-- more, now. I love him, always.

The week building up to A's third anniversary days was busy. And mostly normal. That was ok, comforting even. I thought, at times, that the busy was preventing me from getting ready in some sense I didn't fully understand myself and couldn't really articulate. At other times, though, I've thought that the busy was protecting me from really looking at what it was we were moving towards.

Three years gone. In its approach, it felt to me like an anniversary significant in a whole new way. It's not the first, the towering marker at end of that first overwhelming year, last of the firsts when you don't begin to know what to expect. It's not the second, the first after the first, when maybe you are starting to recognize the outlines of the thing. The third felt, if this makes sense, like the first of many. Like maybe I should have this figured out by now. And for most of the weekend it seemed like maybe I did. Until last night.

What took hold of me as I climed into bed last night wasn't gentle. It wasn't the missing, to which I cop freely any day of the week. It wasn't the sadness-- I know sadness and this wasn't it. No, the thing that made me cry the full-bodied cry like I haven't in long-long time, the thing that made me howl, the realization that felt physically like what I imagine getting kicked in the chest by a horse might feel, was unexpected and it was brutal. I realized, suddenly and inescapably, that I don't just love A, and I don't just miss him.

I realized that I want him, still.

It's not that I thought of him as unwanted until then. He was certainly wanted. It's just that in a universe governed by laws of physics continuing to want him now doesn't do one a whole lot of good. And it's not that I was suppressing this wanting, at least not in any way that I was aware of. I just didn't know that the wanting was in the picture, you know, still.

The realization did nothing to my perception of reality, by the way. That internalized understanding of the futility of my wanting is exactly what made me wail with impotent sorrow. Time is still unidirectional. And A is still gone, and always will be.

I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and it still took me the whole damn day to write this post. Processing, integrating, thinking, feeling. I woke up this morning feeling tender, like I went a couple of rounds with something much bigger than me. I guess I did.

How long has it been for you? What, if anything, has been surprising so far? If you've been at this for a while, how have the anniversaries treated you?  

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?