wild is the wind

photo by KevinGrahame

On the west coast of New Zealand overlooking the fierceness of the Tasman Sea, the trees growing in the rocky crags of the shoreline jut sideways. The branches on the sea side are barren, twisted. The force of the wind changes their structure, the way their nature demands to grow beaten into submission. The limbs bend permanently off to the side pointing towards the land. "Go this way," they point. "Go away from the brutal sea." They morph from the relentlessness of the coastal wind. Their shape is the shape of the wind. It is the shape of abuse. Sometimes when I think back on how captivating those trees were, how haunting, how few pictures I took of them, yet how often I think of them, sometimes I think that shape is the shape of love.

Let the wind blow through your heart, for wild is the wind.

All the love songs are written about Lucia. All the heartbreak songs. All the songs about loss and want and ache. All of the songs. I want to write about her too, but I can't seem to find the words. I know nothing about Lucy except that she isn't here. And the cadence of her not being here is like the wind beating on me, changing me. I relent. My branches bend over, growing uncomfortably sideways, damaged, impossible. I bend from the love. The love disguised as sadness and grief. Sometimes I get confused by that, thinking that I am bending from the hurt, but it is love that bends me, that points me away from everything else. I look debilitated. I feel debilitated. Until, suddenly, I realize that it has become so much a part of who I am, I am not uncomfortable anymore. And until it became so much a part of who I am, the way I was, unbending and sure of the world, makes no sense anymore.

You're Spring to me, all things to me.

I never thought I’d survive the death of one of my children. That is what I used to say when I would hear a horror story about stillbirth, or infant death. "Oh, I would never survive," I would muse. I thought I would turn into dust and ash and be carried off, a bit of me left everywhere until I was nowhere at all. I'd close my eyes to banish the thought of it. Cross myself. Throw salt over my left shoulder.  Touch wood.  Hold my breath.  Make a wish. Knock on wood.  Throw salt over my shoulder. Whisper on the wind.

Let me fly away with you.

Maybe I really thought I would never survive it, or that is simply all the further I could think of such a scenario. It seemed so horrid, I wouldn't dignify imagining how it would really be. Maybe I said things like that because I thought I was not the kind of person that babies die inside of. I remember that feeling of talking myself out of the anxiety of the stillness. I felt silly for being afraid. I felt silly. I used to think I was a humble person. Confident, perhaps, but humble. Humility, in fact, was my religion. That seemed the key to a spiritual existence. Humility and compassion. Hand in hand. Then I thought I was humble because I lost so much. Before that, I thought I was humble because I didn't think I was the prettiest, smartest or most talented person and that realization didn't floor me. My philosophy of life was simple: "I am not anyone special. And neither are you."

I suppose now I see humility differently. Humility to me is accepting that I am not capable of transcending my humanness. My child died in me not because I am bad, or good, or humble, or arrogant, or I deserved it or didn't deserve it. She died because I am human. I am not a terrible person, just a person. And I am changed by the grief. My branches own the hurt perhaps further are the hurt of simply being human and loving so much.  

Wild is the wind. So wild.

Though I thought I'd never survive my child's death, I survived it. What did I think I would do? Kill myself? Expire from lack of wanting to survive? After living through the death of my child, I realized that surviving isn't the hard part. You can live despite yourself and in spite of yourself. You can punish, abuse, disengage with you, you can cut yourself off from everything. You can try to will life to stop, but it won't. You wake up everyday and remember what happened again. And your arms bend a little more.

It is the thriving that feels impossible. It is the hope that gets choked, the loneliness that settles onto your bones like an old wet wool coat, useless and bulky in its wetness, and uncomfortably heavy. It is the juxtaposition of the old, wet, wool coat, and the wind that blows through your heart. And the wind that blows through the holes in you. Your arms tire. Everything is tired. But you still live.

My love is like the wind.

There is a hole in me that seems bigger than any one person could have ever filled, especially someone so little and dead. The wind blows through her tree this morning, moving the tiny Buddhist bell and the flags that send a prayer off to the corner of the globe. That prayer can never be answered. And still I pray for the impossible--a moment with Lucia again. A moment. One tiny wisp of her. The grief that whirled in me after she died touched all the other grief in me. I can see that now. That is why I am defined by grief now, because we are all defined by grief. I am not special because of that. And neither are you.

I am more beautiful, though, because of Lucia. More beautiful because grief debilitated me until I grew into the shape of grief and into the shape of love. I am sideways and ugly and in that way, I suppose I am beautiful.

For we're creatures of the wind and wild is the wind.

What ways has grief shaped you? What parts of you feel leafless and empty? What parts of you are heartier? What ways have you grown more beautiful because of your grief? In what ways have you thrived? In what ways have you merely survived?

gone

We'll, I've just about done it.  Seems it has been my goal all along without even realizing it, but now it is as clear as day.

I've been trying to disappear completely and I'm almost there.

Since Silas passed away I've been step by step letting go of everything that can't help me.  Friends that can't handle my sadness, gone.  My previous car: rear-ended while I was not in it, and then subsequently totaled by the insurance company.  The future I expected as Lu grew grew and grew, utterly and completely altered, that specific path annihilated forever.  Even money itself.  We've never had much and I've worked hard to not focus on money as a source of completion and happiness.  Instead I've tried to just put my head down and work, roast coffee, get new customers, and just do everything as best I can, figuring the money will follow if we just stay true to our core values.  It's worked and we're growing as a business, but the bills always pile up.  In my mind, though, they are gone, immaterial, unimportant.

I've got creditors coming after me, but there's nothing for them to get.  We rent.  My most valuable possessions are my wedding ring & my Droid.  My brother in IT gave me the laptop I'm typing on right now.  My father got the loan for the used car I drive, and I pay him back month to month.  And then last night I took the final step and inadvertently cut all remaining ties to regular-world-life by somehow leaving my car unlocked, and my wallet exposed within.

I'm still not quite sure how I was so completely careless when I am usually exactly the opposite, but there it wasn't this morning when I got in my (father's) car to drive to work.  I hardly ever have cash on me, but last night I did and now it's gone.  I intended to use it tomorrow to pay for the sperm-freeze which is one step of our 3rd IVF attempt, but I'll have to find another couple hundred bucks to make that happen.

Thankfully, one of the things I do still have is a great family so they are going to help, but at this point I think it's more that they have me than I have them.

No license.  No ATM card.  No insurance card.  I've never lost my wallet or had it stolen.  Not once in my 37 years.  I cannot believe I was so stupid to let that happen, but obviously it's not the first mistake I've ever made.  Not by a longshot.  And compared to what I have already lost in my life, a few hundred bucks is essentially absolutely nothing at all.

Perspective is everything, I guess.

My perspective is unlike anything I ever expected.  I'm through the looking glass here.  Everything is gone except the love of my wife, my friends and my family.  I am finally here, all the way through, all the way emptied of objects, of possessions, of expectations, perhaps even of hope.  But it's not even that I'm now hopeless, more that I am completely status quo.  I am now.  I am this.  I am here and alive and I won't ever let that go, but all the extra and all the bullshit and all the everything I can't control it's gone gone gone and that makes me feel good.

My slow coast to this rocky bottom took long enough, but I'm glad to finally touch the bedrock and feel its cool, impenetrable heft.  There's more that could be taken from me, it's true.  Loved ones, my life itself, the clothes on my back, shelter, food, but losing those would destroy me altogether.  The gone-ness I feel is really a slow choice I've made to only hold onto these essential elements.

In order to survive I must love and feel loved.  I must eat and drink and laugh and sleep and shit and piss and cry and breathe.  My heart must pump.  My eyes must look forward and my feet must move me forward to whatever comes next.  But money won't save me.  A bank account won't protect me from the ravages of life.  A flimsy piece of folded leather and an ID tucked within won't hold back the disintegrating Universe.  It's gone, anyway, all of it.

I'm unlabeled, untethered, unincorporated.  I lay on my back on the bedrock of the bottom and look up, far up at the distant sky and streaming clouds and it doesn't matter that I'm on top of a mountain of grief.  My eyes are still open, my heart still beats, my soul still rages with anger and love and anticipation and fear, and nothing can stop Time's hold on my life and the inexorable rise of tomorrow's Sun.  It'll happen even if I don't look at the clock, or at the watch I don't have.

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

What were some unexpected repercussions of the loss of your child?  What have you let go or held onto since their death?  Do you feel like you're at rock bottom?  What helps get you up?

Live and learn

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? 

Coming up

As my very busy December freight-trained on, once in a while I would pause, briefly (very briefly), to note that this fourth time around it didn't seem bad. In fact, it seemed downright ordinary. The first snow didn't put me in the hole, the cold didn't chill beyond the bone. It was just winter, a season that I used to love, and that, it seemed, I could love again. As I did my little jig for being all kinds of functional, I did wonder, in that whispered way you sometimes wonder to yourself, whether it wasn't just because I was so busy. End of term is never a time for tea and scones (except if said scones are eaten out of a paper bag in the car as you drive from one place you had to be to the next... um, but if you find yourself in such a position in my city, I can tell you where to get the scones), but the end of your first semester of solo teaching? Definitely not. And yet, it seemed more than suppression. It really seamed my grief season hadn't started, as it had been doing, at the very cusp of the first winter month.

It's not that I wasn't missing A. I was. I am. All the time. It's just that I wasn't knocked back on my ass, the way I usually am this time of year. That is, until I was. New Year's Eve, the day that has been especially hard in past years, tapped me on the shoulder but otherwise kept its distance. And then January 2nd gut punched me, dropped me to the ground, and sat on top of me for a while, apparently thinking deep thoughts. "Four weeks and counting, beyotch," it said, strolling away.

It's grey out. That's more a statement of mood than of actual observation. These days when I venture outside and encounter sunshine, I am surprised. I shouldn't be-- it's winter, not polar twilight. In the meantime, things are happening, most of them even good. I have classes to teach for this semester, and even in the area that doesn't require a lot of prep, so there's hope for family time. Monkey is making progress in some important ways. The Cub is speaking, and turning out to have as wicked a sense of humor as we sort of expected based on his pantomime gags back from the mostly-nonverbal near past. And maybe that's what it's all about-- as always, as in the early days, time stands still for no-one. No matter how much I may want it to pause, to stay, to let me catch my breath, it marches on.

And then there are the new twists. Despite my own firm beliefs and repeated statements to the effect of grief being something that changes with us, something that doesn't really get that much better, but something that we can learn to live with better, despite all that once in a while I surprise myself when I realize that this, whatever this happens to be at the moment, this I did not expect. That is, I keep stepping on the same rake-- the one where it turns out that I do have expectations, even as I tell myself and the world that I do not.

This year, this seems to be the reading of tea-leaves that is momentary and fleeting imagining of what he would've been like now. That's not exactly it-- I can't imagine it, I know I can't. Because, and this thought is not in any way new either, that's what is particularly sucky about our kind of loss-- we know jack squat about these children of ours. But usually, and by that I mean vast majority of the time over the last almost 4 years, I haven't been able to or even tempted to go down that road. He's dead, you see, and so he can't be alive, and he can't be one, or two, or three.

But suddenly now, suddenly I am straining for a glimpse of what he could've been at four. I catch myself straining when the Cub is interacting with older boys, especially the youngest son of our friends, the kid who was supposed to be A's best friend. I catch myself straining when Monkey and the Cub are raising a ruckus inside or laughing like maniacs sledding down the little hill in front of our house. It's only for a second, less than that-- a fraction of a second. But it's there, and as I swat it away, I also wonder why now? Is it because the Cub is speaking? Is it because Monkey was four the year I was pregnant with A? I don't know. All I know is that this is new and newly painful. But also reassuring in that way where the hurt is too real for him to have been a dream.

I am also changing. On January 2nd, as I sat in front of my laptop with tears welling up for no particular reason, I chatted a friend to ask for help. This is not something I usually do, especially not something I do when the reason for needing help is grief. But I took a deep breath and jumped. Not today, I said, but sometime this month, can we have coffee? I am going to need some TLC. She's a good friend, and there's a coffee in my future. One I am looking forward to very much.

How far into this are you? How have your significant dates been for you so far? How have the periods coming up on these dates been? How has all of this changed for you with time? Are there new facets of grief that you are discovering? What are they?

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?