Coming Home

Sapphira's first child, Shoshanna Clementine, was born at 37 weeks on March 23, 2011. She suffered from pre-eclampsia and went to the hospital to be induced.  After a placental abruption at the cord upon pushing, Sapphira ended up having an emergency c-section.  Shoshanna died three hours after delivery. She shares about herself, "I don't have a blog and hardly write, but I am so grateful to the Glow community that I thought to submit something as an expression of my appreciation and love." In April 3, 2012, Sapphira delivered her second child Julia Zahara. Please welcome Sapphira to this space and join the conversation below. —Angie

"Metaphor is a kind of mental changing room, where one thing, for a moment, becomes another, and in that moment is seen in a whole new way."  —Dr. Mardy Grothe

After Shoshanna Clementine was born and died, I tried to digest what was happening in my life by trying on all kinds of metaphors to explain, understand, or reframe events and emotions surrounding our loss. Different ones worked at various times.  For a long while, I was Indiana Jones jumping from stone to stone, feeling secure and strong with each step, but the earth was furiously shifting up and down, right and left, underneath me, as I ran endlessly to safety.  But none of these metaphors felt lasting, and none of them truly captured what was going on.

Then, one day I was painting with a friend, and a visual metaphor started to emerge, although I only saw it a day or so after the picture was complete.  I painted grass at first—the solid ground.  The pond that was to be next turned into a sea.  The sky followed, vast, taking up more than two-thirds of the picture.  I had to put in a moon, of course, a nod to my father who I always think of when I look at the moon.  As I stared at the open space of sky to the right, a teacher at the studio where we were painting came up to me and suggested I add birds to the scene.  With my permission, he lightly made some squiggle lines, and there was my metaphor.  The three birds were Shoshanna, Seth, and me.

Shoshanna is the largest one—indicating she is closest to the viewer, the one closest to shore, the one leading us back home.  "Let me show you the way," she encourages us.  It is dusk, and I am grateful she is taking us back—back to our home that we love so much and back to our hearts--to find that the broken heart we endure is actually more whole than ever before with her help.

I feel like I have been out to sea—away from the world—far, far away.  With all the navigation systems we have now, I've been able to stay in touch (emailing and texting, lunch dates and movies), but it has been isolating.  And yet Seth and I haven't been alone, really, because there are other people out here on this sea—on the waves with us, flying with us in the sky.  Others who have lost a child too. And while I've felt so far away, I have heard the cries of friends and family from the shore and the whispers that have traveled across the waves to let us know that someone else's heart aches too, that someone else misses Shoshanna besides us.

I'm waiting for this metaphor of coming home to shift and no longer apply, another one to replace the next emotion, the next phase.  But, maybe if I also look at my painting as going the other way—that Shoshanna is behind us, as we lead her out to sea—then I can give myself the permission to come and go as I please, that I can come home when I need to and go out and cry into the ocean when that is what I need.  For isn't that what being home means?

What does home mean to you? Do you have a painting, song or other metaphor that represents your grief and loss? What is it and how has it shaped your understanding of grief and your life?

Mile markers

When I first went to see what would become Monkey's school, I was visibly pregnant, with A. At the open house I chatted with the then-head-of-school, partially about how she thought it was really nice to have a girl be older than a boy in a family because sometimes girls mistake their brothers' age-related competencies for gender-related ones and begin to believe they can't do things their brothers can. I hadn't thought about a dynamic like that before, but for some reason it stuck with me. A couple of months later, after we applied to the school, Monkey had her own interview there. By that point I was huuuuuuge and rather a slow-moving vehicle. I remember plopping down on the bench in the lobby, grateful for its existence, uncushioned hard surface and all.

That bench is still in the lobby, in that exact same place. But A is not. He was dead barely a week after that interview, more than five and a half years ago now.

Monkey loves her school. Not likes, loves. We love it too. And most of the time we are very happy with it, too. Most families at the school send all their kids there. Which, all of it, is making this a tough fall for me.

We have so many hopes and dreams for these little people. Some are general and vague, like that big one, that they be happy. Others are more concrete. We taught Monkey to swim and to ski, and I had some ideas that we would, some day, splash in the water together, A included, or race down black diamonds, me trying to keep up with the rest of them. Hazy, but not too hazy. No date and time certain, but I would've guessed something like that would be happening by the time A was five. There are no guarantees, of course. The boy could've broken a leg, ending a season before it began. He could've even, gasp, hated the whole exercise of skiing and refused to partake. Worse things, too, could've befallen him and us. But statistically those dreams are more likely to come true than not once you hear the heartbeat. And, you know, certainly by ten full weeks past viability.

And then comes The Day. The day their little hearts stop, the day we learn that we will not get to bring them home. All these dreams, visions, plans-- they all come tumbling down that day. We may be too shell-shocked to realize it right away. We all know the big one's gone. But it may take us some time to pick up the pieces of all these other dreams, to name them, and in naming them to mourn them. In that big pile of rubble it may be hard to find the individual pieces. It may be hard to tell whether the shard you are holding is from the play with cousins dream or the holidays at the grandparents' dream or even from the often underappreciated until it's out of one's grasp my family, all under one roof, fed and content dream.

Whether we choose to bag the whole pile and put it on the curb for the next garbage pickup, or to spend the time carefully looking through, from time to time, an errant glimpse of a shard or some semblance of it is likely to catch our eye and pierce our heart. I remember sometime during my first year, there was a post from a babylost blogger who was a good bit further into the process than me, about how she got stymied at a video store by a gaggle of teenage boys picking out a movie. Because suddenly, at that moment she knew with ridiculous clarity the many things, big and small, her son had missed out on because he died-- growing into a boy and then a teenager, and a young man, friends, messing around, movies. You can't plan for these. You might guess what landmine will get you one day-- I fully expect, for example, to some day fog up my ski goggles because of something that will inadvertently unearth a shard of that dream, but you don't know when or exactly how it will get you.

Then there are the perma-mines, the baked-in-the-cake grief mile markers. When we get up in the middle of the rubble, some of these are staring us right in the face-- you know, the family affair where you were supposed to show off the new addition; some are regular and predictable, clearly visible amongst the suddenly bare landscape-- the monthaversaries, the anniversaries, the hangings of the Christmas stockings, if that's your thing.  And then there are the one of markers-- the ones that were there from the beginning and never moved, even if they were, then, too far away to see.

I had a tough time coming up on the fourth anniversary. For some reason, four was shaping up to be qualitatively worse than three, and I was not doing well. The whole month was dreary and difficult, dragging and draining. It sucked, ok? And yet, in the middle of that slow dance of misery, in one bright moment of realization I knew that as bad as this buildup to four was, it was going to be a soft landing compared to what would have been A's first day of school. See, Monkey loves her school. We had decided she was going there before A died. Which means that unless something extraordinary would've happened between his birth and this fall, A would've started Kindergarten at the same school right after Labor Day, about five weeks ago now. In that very same moment of realization when I first saw the start of school marker staring me in the face, with 18 months or so still to go, I also knew, I just knew that on that day I would throw up.

Coming up on the school year I was a wreck. It didn't help that the Kindergarten class has three siblings of Monkey's classmates in it. It didn't help that I knew it would before Monkey ever started at the school, five plus years ago, thanks to the unthinking remarks from a mother of Monkey's then-future classmate. I didn't want to meet new families at the school-- the K class was oversubscribed, and I know that my head would keep reminding me that one of these families wouldn't have been at the school had A lived.

The first day of school came. We brought Monkey to the school, and we hung out, and I didn't throw up. I came close a couple of times, but I didn't. And now I think I wish I did. Maybe then I would be able to walk through the lower school and carry on a conversation at the same time. Maybe then I would not want to shut my eyes every time I see the K teachers lead their charges down the hall. Maybe then I would be done with this, the almost-final perma-mine.

This was the almost final "for sure" marker. I've hit a few of these before. From here on out, I think there is only one more, and the date is less than determined. Had A lived, sometime on or shortly after his 13th birthday, he would've had his Bar Mitzva. I know that will nail me too, probably at Monkey's ceremony first, and then on A's anniversary that year. And maybe a few more times for good measure.

Have you encountered any grief mile markers? Of what variety have they been and how has it gone for you? Are you from a family that celebrates Thanksgiving together every year? Or is it more that you have been stung by sudden recognition? If you can see a marker looming in the distance, how do you prepare? Or do you?

A name to every fixed star

I am reduced to tiny acts of motherhood: birthed her, held her, dressed her, burned her.

Named her. I named her.

I rubbed her name into my belly, whispered it to my bedroom ceiling: Baby. Hello baby. I think I know you. I think. I think. I think you might be Iris. Hello my love. Hello. Iris. Iris. Iris. Hello baby Iris.

I whisper it now and tap it out. She is letters next to each other, keys compressed in order.

I R I S

photo by mbecher

In Greek mythology, Iris was the rainbow. She brought water to the clouds and made the sky weep. She was a messenger goddess: tangible divine.

Iris makes your eyes pretty; soul’s window, shining iridescent. She’s purple and gold and upright in florists’ buckets, she’s blousy and overblown in an English country garden.

She’s a naked young woman running into the sea under a slate-grey sky, laughing, laughing as her friends  huddle on the cold sand in woolly hats and wellies. She’s an old lady with paper skin and a soft, powdery scent, peering at a vast, textured canvas in the National Gallery. She’s a bookish child with thick glasses and dimples, reading in the warm spot of her mother's bedroom floor.

She’s my dead baby. But she’s more real to some people than my living children. Others forget her for a time. But soon they remember.

When I say her name.

How did you name your baby or babies? 

raven

I am wearing a pink gown, the opening in the front. I am grateful for that small gift--back openings makes me feel so vulnerable and undignified. There is a paper blanket covering my legs. My shaking hands fumble with the thinness. I tear a hole in the thigh. It is not meant to keep me warm, I remind myself. There is a blood stain on it, already. I lean back on the table. There is a skylight over the stirrups. The rain falls like a war drum, hard, without rhythm, but persistent. The wet leaves cover the bottom of the skylight.

 

Nature keeps falling, water and leaves. Dead things that look alive. I stare at the counter. Purell and ultrasound gel. A pap smear kit, and non-latex gloves. A black bird flies over the building. It looks like a shadow of a happier bird, something predatory, but special. I know the baby is dead before he tells me. I have imagined the baby dead in all the moments I am not actively thinking she might be alive. But I wait for him to say it aloud.

 

The doctor tells me it looks like a miscarriage. I am twelve weeks pregnant, but with the labwork and the bleeding and the ultrasound without a heartbeat, an empty sac, perhaps, the baby is gone, or was never there. A paradox I may never unravel. My uterus growing and believing, even while I am stunted and cynical.

 

The doctor convinces me to go for another ultrasound because of the trauma of Lucy's death. He thinks I should see there is no heartbeat again. He said, "Just so you know, deep within you, that we did not make a mistake." And I tell him steadily without tears in my voice that I held my dead baby and I still thought it was a mistake. Her skin was torn and growing colder, and I thought she would live again. I thought there was some system-wide error, that she could still come back, if someone did something other than mourn. I thought I could puff my lungs up, cover her nose and lips, and breathe life back into her, as though the doctors and nurses hadn't quite thought of that yet. "She just needs some air," I wanted to explain. "We just need to remind her to breathe."

 

Sometimes I still think that perhaps we cremated her too soon.

 

I watched a hawk chase a raven, diving and attacking. It was a spectacular show above us as we hiked through the woods to a waterfall. We all stopped and gawked. I bent over in the first bangs of unbearable cramping. The ravens have been around me all this month, waiting for the death in me to escape. The ravens swoop low, cross in front of my car, reminding me that I can lose once, lose twice, I could lose them all. It has been an unkindness of omens--dead baby birds on my front steps and ravens, stopping me in the street, daring me to hit them. Maybe I should call the nevermore baby, Raven, the blackness, the hole within me.

 

I received an email just as I began bleeding. "Your life is beautiful, so beautiful now. Do you appreciate it? I think you do. I appreciate it, but I can't bear it. I have to look away. It is painful how beautiful it is." It is beautiful, even though our daughter died. I made something else out of her death--a life I always wanted to live. I understand if someone can't bear it. Joy reminds me of grief too. Happy reminds me of sad. And besides, two children is something, I get that. Two living children cover the holes where the others were. You'd never notice if you didn't search for the spaces where others were supposed to be, if you didn't read our stances and our smiles. It would be hard not to believe the lies we are telling in our photographed smiles. My dead outnumber my living now, but still two children is not all of your children dead. I do appreciate it.

 

What I wanted to say, though, is that we still suffer. We have a beautiful life, but we still suffer.

 

They search my womb and they don't find the baby. The technician says the baby is dead, even though she is not supposed to say it aloud. Words I needed to hear. In moments, I begin the process of miscarriage, passing clots and tissue. As though my body was holding onto her, until someone could speak the truth that she died. The little dot inside of me that was growing once is gone now. The children would ask me how big she is every day. And I would tell them the size of an olive, the size of a lime, the size of a peach. But she was no size, just my womb grew, making space for an unkindness. She is an empty space now. A hole of what could have been.

 

I thought I could slip under the radar with one more quick baby, like Fate could turn her attention somewhere else for a quick nine months. "The last time. The only time. One chance," I said to my husband. "One more chance at one more child, then nevermore."

 

photo by Brian Auer.

I know what I know and I still got baby greedy. I still thought somewhere in me that things would end differently. I am not ranking my sadness, but this is a small grief compared to Lucy. Lucy died, and I held her. I felt like I knew her, she was in my womb for 38 weeks nary a thought of life without her. I never imagined her dead in those 38 weeks. But my little raven died and I only ever imagined her dead. (It didn't help the pain.) 

 

Perching on the fence in my backyard, like the raven, Grief waits for the physical pain to subside to invite himself into our home again. I reacquaint with Grief, another stodgy old raven wearing black. He is silent, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, sitting by my office door, whispering, "Nevermore."

 

 

Have you experienced a miscarriage before or after your loss? How did the grief differ? How was it the same? Did the expectation of loss help with the reality of it? If you have only suffered from one loss or none, how do you abide with others in this community who suffer from multiple losses, or who have not suffered from multiple losses? How do you feel Grief stalks you? Like a raven or a hawk?

Silas' Symbols

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?