Ghouls

Iris reaches a pale hand out to press against the walls of my womb. She tugs on my umbilical cord and then she’s gone.

Don’t haunt me, baby. You are too small to move things around and make the lights flicker.

I see her in the corner of the mirror and her head lolls forward to display a bulging fontanel.

This is not a pretty thing at all, this grief. She was not a pretty thing. Dead things are not pretty, they are cold and the colour of oil on tarmac.

I sit in meetings and push my thumb against a sore on the knuckle of my right index finger. I am alive and my body relishes its welts. She hovers and reminds me of the other hurt. She is a gasp.

She is my breath. She has no breath. Gasp. Inhale. Exhale. Irisssssssssssss. She rustles the paper in my hand.

I want to write something for you. Something that will make you feel less lonely. My heart squirms like a chicken foetus in an egg.

There is no way to say the things that must be said. I am not wise, I tell ghost stories to the internet.

I should be sold next to pumpkins and plastic skeletons. Do you like to be scared?  Come and sit next to me. Hush. Be very quiet. Do you hear that nothing? That’s my daughter laughing.

If you don’t have something nice to say... then say it here. Do you ever find your grief a bit gruesome? 

at the kitchen table: ghosts and rituals

The holidays around the change from summer to fall are rife with ancestor worship, death, and touching the spirit-world. Samhain. Halloween. All Souls’ Day. Dìa de los Muertos. Something about the end of October conjures the thinness of the veil between the land of the living and the land of the dead. In many cultures we invite the dead into our homes, places of worship, and communities. We show lost loved ones a good time, with feasting, sweets, games, and offerings. And we prepare for visits from the unloved as well—the restless, unhappy, malevolent spirits who might pop by to instill fear, extract revenge, or just toilet paper our lawns. Frightening costumes are donned to “Boo!” them back across the veil. Communities light bonfires, or pumpkins, to fight the darkness, and to guide the path home for our beloved dead.

Even in this secular community of grieving parents, we use October to remember our children, grieve our losses and remind the world that we are still here. October 15 is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. 

This month, we are sitting around the kitchen table talking about ghosts and rituals. Our answers are here. Want to join in? Post the questions and your answers on your own blog, link to us here at Glow in the Woods meme-style, and share the link to your post in the comments below. If you don't have your own online space, simply post your answers directly in the comments.

+++

1 | Do you believe you can communicate with people in the afterlife, or they with you?  Do you believe you can do this with your child?

2 | Do you believe in ghosts?  Has this changed since the loss of your child(ren)?

3 | Have your feelings changed about Halloween?  How do you respond to Halloween humor such as zombie and ghost costumes or macabre gravestones as decorations?

4 | Does your religious or cultural background have a day or holiday where the focus is honoring the dead? How do you use this experience to honor your own child(ren)?

5 | Do you ever reach outside of your spiritual/religious framework for comfort from other practices/religions?

6 | Is there a season or holiday, other than your child(ren)’s birthday, that inspires you to perform a ritual in memory of your child(ren)?

7 | Is there a ritual you perform everyday? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?

8 | Do you perform any public rituals (in real life or online) on October 15? How do your friends, family, or community respond to your acknowledgment of loss?

 

(to comment and partipate, please leave your answers and/or link on this month's at the kitchen table page)

special powers

In the early days of shock and tears, my husband reached his last straw in trying to comfort me: she loves us—she would want us to be happy. I couldn’t believe him. It sounded so strange and wrong. She was dead, and a baby. How could she want anything for her parents? But he believed it. He felt her with him.

I haven’t heard from her in a long time. I could tell you that we once had a long talk, or that I saw the spiritual path her soul is on. But now those communication lines seem dead, so I fall back on logic. I say I don’t believe in signs, that my baby does not have special powers, and that she can’t communicate with us.

So have I become a rational creature now? Or are my feelings just hurt by the silence?

* * * * * *

Other parents see signs. In a precious moment, they notice clouds or rainbows or lightning bugs and think, this is for me from him or her, or my child has something to do with why this is so beautiful.

I envy that belief, because it eludes me. If I could see my daughter in the trees or hear her on the wind, maybe I would not be so lonely and angry. But it doesn’t work for me anymore. My child can’t be trying to contact me, because she is a baby. Not an angel. Not a fairy. A baby.  Her little fingers can’t operate the paranormal phone system. She can’t align the stars or send me a butterfly. She’s too little.

I don’t like hearing that she wants me to go on or wants me to know she is okay; that only points to my massive maternal failure. All she should be thinking about right now is snacks, cuddles, toys, and trying to pull herself up to standing. Not how to make Mom feel better. If she were alive, she would not want the best for me. She would want me to find her damn pacifier right now. That’s how I want it too. I want me to be the mommy, and her to be the baby. Still. Even though she’s dead.

And please God, or whoever is out there, do not let my baby be a ghost, wandering between this world and the next. Please let her be someplace safe.

* * * *

On the other hand, I have had messages. And I’ve imbued her with a very special power: the power to leave me.

In the hospital I began, irrationally, to worry that she did not like me very much. Her little face was so frowny, her lips so pouty. She looked mad. (Maybe they all look that way?) Holding her in my arms, this is what popped into my heart:

She needed unconditional love. Something bad happened to her, maybe in a past life, and she needed to know that Brian and I loved her absolutely purely. She wanted love untainted by the scoldings, power struggles, and tears that come with being a human child. By leaving us so early, she was assured of our white hot love forever. It would heal her, so her soul could go on. But it would break me, and I would have to accept it.

I had one visit from her after that. A friend did a spiritual healing on me a few weeks later; the smell of strawberries wafted through my living room on a cold March morning, and we both felt it was my baby saying hello. I could envision fields of the spindly green plants heavy with fruit, and how much my girl would delight in them. Later I planted a pot of hearty alpine berries and got a strawberry tattooed on my ankle, her name hidden in the leaves.

Since then, there has been silence. She feels utterly gone to me, and I feel rejected. I may say it is not her job to comfort me, yet I sit here like a spurned lover, hoping for the phone to ring. This is my deep dark secret—that I am kind of mad at my baby for dying. That I am kind of mad she never calls.

Photo by VanCityAllie

* * * * * * *

Why did I make up this terrible story about her needing to leave us? For a while it felt like a message from her soul, or from God or the great beyond. As the days have worn on, without answers, without comfort, my faith in most things of a spiritual nature has dissipated. Now I think it was just my brain trying to make sense of an incomprehensible event.

I’m not sure this was the best story to tell myself, though. It gives her the power to choose death over life. The power to abandon her parents. The power to hurt us intentionally. All of which is insane. She was a tiny baby inside my body. A very bad thing happened to her, and we don’t know why.

Maybe that’s just too much for my heart to take. I would prefer to think that she never wanted to be here, than to think she is out there in the dark crying for her mommy. I’d rather say that we do not get clouds and hearts and stars from her, because she’d rather be free. That’s easier to face than the plastic bag of ashes upstairs.  

Most of all, I need to believe that this experience is far worse for me than it is for her, because I just can’t stomach any other option.

So some days I try hard to think of her as happy. I try to see her as part of everything, reveling in the universe, sending love to our family every day. Usually I can’t. So instead I absolve her of all responsibility—it is one way communication down that parental, paranormal phone line. If she’s anywhere, I hope she can hear that I love her.

* * * * * * * *

Have you received signs or messages that help you connect to your child(ren)? Was there a particular window of time when you felt most connected that is now closed? What are the stories you tell yourself to help make sense of your loss(es)?  

ghost story

The growl cuts through our nighttime routine.

Beezus and I stop, my heart beating wildly at a sudden, unnoticed danger. We glance at each other then the dog, then at the direction the dog is staring, poised in attack mode. Blackness envelopes the children's bedroom, and the dog stands just outside the door. The hair on the scruff of his neck is raised. As the dog bares his teeth again, my daughter scurries behind my legs.

"Mommy, the dog is barking at a people."
"Honey, there are no other people in our house. It is night. We are the only ones."
"Mommy, the dog is barking, because he is scared because we are the only people."

It was the perfect night for ghosts. You know, in the most clichéd of ways, it truly was a dark and stormy night. The wind rattled our windows. Ominous had been defining my mood for weeks. The chill of a harsh January winter had taken residence deep within me. I was waiting for something to happen. My husband was pulling an overnight shift at the hospital, and I was too pregnant with my son to fight a break-in.  I stared into the dark room allowing my eyes to adjust to the light.

Oh, please just let it be a ghost. Please let it be her.

I tiptoed gently into the room, the dog staunch and rigid at my right leg, the girl behind my left leg. And my eyes rest on a balloon hovering at person height, not quite enough helium to stretch to the ceiling, and not empty enough to fall to the floor.

I know how you feel, balloon.

I swat the balloon into the corner. "It is only your balloon, love, scaring the dog because it looks like a people." And I walked back sullenly. Why wasn't it Spectral Lucy? It is so terribly sad to yearn for my dead daughter to haunt our house, slam doors, drop papers, blow the curtains around when there is no wind. I want her to rock on the antique chair my mother-in-law gave us for the late night feedings.

photo by Paulo Brabo

Sometimes in the most earthly, normal way, I get a whiff of my grandfather--that distinctive crotchety old guy bouquet of overly applied cologne with overly applied aftershave mixed with some Bengay and peppermints. I will be reading a book and the smell of him will drift through the room, like he just walked into the room asking me to check the score of the game. And I don't care if my memory neurons just misfired, or if my old neighbor with a penchant of Old Spice just walked by our house, I take the moment to sit with my dead grandfather for a moment.

Hello, Pop. I miss you.

:::

"Mama, Lucy is stuck behind the red couch!"

My head shoots upward from my crumpled, intense, and near-sighted writing position. I stare at the door. I am immediately rigid in my office chair, as though I have been injected with very cold water right into my spine. Then I look back at my computer screen again, rereading the paragraph I had just written.

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.'

I was working on the final edit of my last post Milagros while Thor napped and Beezus played. I wasn't quite sure how I wanted that paragraph to read, but I could visualize myself kneeling on our red couch, next to the antique secretary where Lucy's ashes sit in an urn, peering over the back of the couch, whispering to my dead daughter, "We are leaving now, love. Be back soon." As soon as we'd get home, I'd make a cup of tea, tell her about our day. It would be like having a portal to Lucy behind the couch, because I never did the rosary for her.

"Mama, Lucy is really stuck behind the couch!"

I am a rational woman. A cynic mostly. Someone who wrestles with my belief in God and in the afterlife. I sometimes believe in a little of everything and, other times, in absolutely nothing at all. I am the kind of person that devoted her entire undergraduate degree to studying religion and still consulted a five dollar psychic to find out what happened to my daughter's soul after she was stillborn. I desperately want to believe that the things that go bump in the night are my daughter, but I mostly find balloons where ghosts ought to be.

"Mama, Lucy is really really stuck behind the couch. Come quick."

I don't know her. I don't know what color eyes she would have, what room was her favorite.  I don't know what perfume she would have chosen for herself, or what chair would have been her favorite. I have no sense of who she would have been. I construct who I thought she was in my head, but as I watch my six month old son grow, it reminds me that even the things I did know about her would have changed, like her eye color and hair and her perfect little nose. So, now it feels like I don't know anything about her except that she died in me.

I mourn getting to know her well enough to sense her presence. Like my grandfather, I want to smell her spirit when the right combination of memory neurons fire. But Lucy is just a blank hole, a girl-shaped cut-out in my memory. The negative space of Lucy would have been filled if she had breathed or laughed. It was a room in my heart and brain that I saved for just her. I lack the ability to imagine a newborn ghost as anything but a tiny thing that couldn't lift its own head, let alone walk the halls at night. Maybe that is what I would ask a prophet or psychic or the Oracle of Delphi, can you talk to the stillborn? Can you have a real conversation if they only gurgled if they lived? Can a stillborn child haunt your house? Can she fly through your hallways and slam doors and blow out candles and scare the dog? And if she can, can you ask my daughter to haunt me?

"Mama! Lucy is stuck! I can't reach her."

I try not to focus on signs, and ghosts, and hauntings, and yet, God, I want Lucy to haunt my house. Far beyond scaring me, that would comfort me, wrap me in warmness. I would call to her. I would whisper to her. I would find myself photographing dark rooms searching for one tiny orb of Lucy and post it to the family along with the pictures of the other children with ice cream smeared across their face. I would get to know her. "There's Lucy." I would point to the photograph. "She loves that rocking chair and the smell of candles blown out."

I walk tentatively into the front room. I am savoring the moments of having my daughter call to me about Lucy. Just hearing her name said without tears and heartbreak some days is enough. As I walk closer, I grow afraid, suddenly, of finding her urn behind the couch, something that only occurs to me as I walk into the room and find Beezus kneeling on the red couch, peering over the back. It is the same exact position I had just written myself into a few moments before.

"Lucy is stuck, Mama." And her little finger gestures behind the couch as she blinks back tears in the over-exaggerated emotion of a toddler separated tragically from her favorite doll. I see the rest of our peg family lying all over the couch, except Lucy. 

This is the moment I crave, the one I just wrote about, having her here with us in spirit, feeling her ghost in our daily lives, having a portal to Lucy. Maybe Spectral Lucy forced the Lucy doll down there, just so I would know. Maybe she is watching after all. I stop myself and look around for her. I sniff the air. Listen for the wind chimes. It is so ordinary a moment I doubt the extraordinary-ness of it. I wait for the punctuation mark that never comes. I feel nothing but massive coincidence, even though all these weeks later, I can't quite shake it. The Lucy moment passed, if there ever was one, and I am back to being a toddler mama reaching a little peg doll from behind the couch.

I saved Lucy. That is the thing about naming inanimate objects your dead daughter's name, you get the extraordinary task of saving them, putting them to bed, depending on how maternal your toddler is, or just saying her beautiful name in regular life without cringing. Beezus ran off again in the other direction talking to her peg family about their adventure of being stuck behind the couch. I think about the paragraph on the computer again, lean over the back of my couch and close my eyes.

"Hello, my love," I whisper. "I miss you."

Do you believe in other-worldly encounters? Have you ever had any ghostly or supernatural experiences with your child? Do you feel your child around you? Have you ever had any extraordinary experiences in your grief that have comforted you? What kind of signs do you crave from the other world?


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?