eight short words

Three years ago.

It was three years ago today I left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest.  I'd been airlifted in during winter's last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it.  I felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

We drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one I'd climbed as a child every time we visited.  My legs were weak and I walked gingerly.  I was not in pain, per se...just timid, afraid I would break.  The tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer.  I stood in front of it, staring, as if I looked long and hard enough I might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

She did not materialize, that former self.  And I realized, viscerally, that she never would again...that there was no going back.  I had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

I turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour.  I climbed a little, until I was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds.  And when I was sure I was far enough away that no one could hear me, I spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he'd died.

i had a son.  his name was Finn.

It was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops.  But I knew it might be a very long time before I had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound I had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby.  I knew too that I needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here. 

My tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
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It was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me.  On my blog, I began to carve out a space in which I could say his name, lay out sides of my parenting experience that I had no way to speak in polite company.  I felt exposed, but freed, too.  And in finding ways to incorporate Finn's story into my own narratives of myself as parent, I slowly became, once more, a version of whole.

Of the six of us here, I am the furthest out on this road of grieving and healing, the one whose loss is the furthest removed in time.  I am the one whose firstborn died, who went home both a mother and not a mother.  I was utterly changed by the eleven hours of my son's life, but the disconnect between the internal sea change of becoming a parent and the external lack of anything to show for it...that sparked its own particular grief and isolation.  I am the only one, yet, who has had another child born since my loss, and perhaps the only one who has had another loss in the interim.  I am proof of survival. And I am grateful to be in the company of these woman here, sister Medusas and friends, all of us with our stories.  

My name is Bonnie.  I had a son.  His name was Finn. 

Welcome.

No words

I have no words for you. No words.

I imagined I might be more eloquent, having experienced the loss of my baby. But no, I have not become more eloquent. I know that pain of loss; I understand that yearning, but I still have no words. Not for you.

I overflowed with words after F died, and I poured them into my journal, then my blog. So many things to say, so many words fighting to get out of my head, wanting to be transformed from sounds to black words on the blank screen. So I wrote, and wrote, and wrote…

I thought I would have filled a whole bulging notebook by now, of things I can say to comfort. To let you know that you are not alone. That our children are always remembered, held in this bond forged by loss and love. That crying is ok, and that anger and profanity is fine.

I thought, I could fill in that pause for you, when you stop to search, to grope for that word that will speak your pain. I thought, I could make an outline for you, make a shape, and show you, "Yeah, it looks just like this." But no, I have tried and failed. I am still trying to find that edge, so I can feel around it, so I can frame it and really look at it and study it. 

I thought, as a thread in this quilt of grief and pain, words would just come to me. I would so flawlessly express the ache that every heart wishes to articulate. But, that is not the case.

I thought I would have a magic balm made of soothing words, that once applied, will take away your tears. That will at least the pain in your heart ameliorate. That can make hurt go away, at least for a little while. And to calm that throbbing heart that stings with pain.

But no, I have no words to put into that balm.

I thought by now I have mastered those ingredients of that special recipe of sad soup, that once drank, will course through your body and gather all those pain and sorrow, and then the soup, saturated with sadness, will sweat through your pores and vanish into thin air. So perhaps for a night you sleep in peace, forgetting mournfulness and grief for a few hours. And then, in your dreams, you will hear a song, sang with sweet words of knowing, to soothe that ravaged heart and sore body.

But no, I have no words. Not for that sad song; not even for a card.

I thought, after I have spent so much time banging on my keyboard, looking for the letters and stringing together words to express my own grief and angst, that I can just open my mouth and let my words reach across and touch you. To form a protective shroud around you to comfort you and bring you some light.

But no, I have no words.

Everything I can think of is either lame, stupid or plain clumsy. Everything I can think of comes out wrong once I type them. Everything I can think of, however much heartfelt, is not going to take away any pain or grief or hurt.

I have no words. No words at all.

I can only think of you, and your babies and children. I can only work hard to believe that because they are loved, they are in us, with us, and will never ever be forgotten. In this special space of bereaved and loss, our lost little ones have a special place. I see them. I do believe in my heart, deeply and desperately, that they are here, so close yet so far.

But I am sorry, I have no words.

Only when I read Sukie Mille’s book did I understand this. I have been writing before F was born, and after he died. I wrote and wrote, spewing out pages after pages of words. Only after I read her book did I realize that it was because there is no language for the discussion of a child’s death that I had to search so hard for words, to find that pulse that throbs in agony for being unspeakable.

Conspicuous, and not

"Does Monkey have a brother or a sister?"

I consider the source, all three some odd feet of him.  Jake, the skinny kid from my daughter's pre-school, all eyes, the kid who seems to be carrying a torch for her, still, nearly a year after she said her pre-school goodbyes on her way to discover the bigger world that is kindergarten while he stayed for his final year, prisoner of his inconveniently young age. He noticed me where I was crouching into my chair, awaiting my pickup order in the neighborhood Japanese place while he and his family were wallowing away time having already placed their sit-down order.  He asked me first where Monkey was, then something else, and then, finally, THAT question.

His parents, having followed him over to my corner of the universe, now tense preemptively. They are nice enough people, but I can't tell whether they tense because they feel bad for me or because they are afraid I will answer truthfully. I don't know what it is Jake wants to hear either. He might be looking for a validation of a memory he can't explain, or he might just be asking about something just about every other kid he knows has.  Or he might remember something, Monkey talking about her soon to be born brother maybe, or maybe about her brother who died. Jake wasn't even four then. Can he really remember? Does he know what death is? I decide, eventually, that it is not my place to introduce him to the concept if he is not, by chance, familiar. Monkey's good friend and the daughter of our close friends didn't know what it was, and was trying, so hard and for so long, to construct an explanation that didn't suck this very much. So I decide it's not my place to educate, and I answer "No."

The truth is, of course, that Monkey has two brothers. A, the baby who died fifteen months less one day ago inside of me, and this new boy now in my belly. Jake's parents glance at my midsection, or maybe I am just paranoid. Either way, I am not about to make an announcement while I await my order. I am simply not in the mood. But it also means my sons, both of them, remain invisible, and my daughter, in her apparent only-childness, remains conspicuous. After the big ultrasound, walking down the street and chatting, me wrapped in my voluntary pregnancy disguise device, aka my big shawl, looking for all the world as a mother and her only child, Monkey, in response to nothing I can any longer remember saying, said with the air of a huge discovery and equal measure of happiness "But mama, you have three children."

Yes, yes I do. As jarring and scary to accept as that simple statement is, in my heart, I very much have three children. In the eyes of my religion, too, religion which allows full burial rites and full rites of grieving for fetuses over 20 weeks gestation, and which, therefore, has to acknowledge my younger son whatever happens with him from now on, I have three children. Even in the eyes of the law I have three-- as of nine days ago, same 20 week dateline, this new baby can no longer be considered a miscarriage.  And yet, I know full well people in general don't think like that, they don't understand. Even allowing myself to own this statement is terrifying, for it opens me up, somehow more realistically, more viscerally than before, to having to accept the possibility that things visible might remain the same, that we may lose again.

Medusas, though, medusas understand. Here I don't have to keep looking over my shoulder, wondering how others see me. I can both talk about allowing myself to love this new baby, despite not knowing whether he is coming home, and about not wanting or accepting congratulations because I can not let this part of the guard down, and I can't seem to want to let the people who think pregnancy automatically equals full-term, happy, healthy, live baby off the hook.  Here, in the woods, among my snake-haired sisters, I can take these steps I am discovering I need to take-- tentative and contradictory steps into inhabiting this mother of three persona. I need to learn to be her, whatever her visible score is. 

So thank you for being here. I am sorry you have a reason to come by.  What I learned in the last fifteen months is that we need each other, for sanity checks if nothing else. To rant and to rave, and to listen. To drink, to pour. To sit in silence. Welcome to the woods. Stay a while, will ya? I hope you do.

It's All Fun and Games Until the Baby Dies

Just so you know, this was my submission for this blog's name, but I was overruled by the less cynical.  Hmph.  

But truth be known, it's not really accurate -- in my case anyway.  My pregnancy with Maddy was hardly fun and games.  A subchorionic bleed from weeks 6-18w, low-lying placenta through 28w at which point they discovered the echogenic bowel, which disappeared by 32w, all overclouded by extreme exhaustion brought on by selling my house in a volatile market, moving to another state, and continuing my role as the primary caretaker of my then 2-year old.  I should’ve been daintily sipping water, fingering fabrics for a unisex nursery (Maddy was a surprise, to say the least), going to the gym for mild exercise every few days.  Instead I ran off to the emergency room a few times when blood gushed down my legs, spent every two to four weeks on my back under the ultrasound wand, and daily implored my toddler to please, please just lie down for a few minutes so mommy could have some “quiet time.”

Maddy was in fact my third pregnancy; my pregnancy in 2002 ended in miscarriage around 8w.  So Bella wasn’t exactly fun and games either, even though hers at least kept the blood and ER visits to a minimum.  I go through pregnancies tentatively, cautiously optimistic that things will work out fine, but knowing full well that often they don’t.  With Bella I managed to remain detached enough to question the return policy on her nursery furniture – delivered when I was 36w; with Maddy I decided not to even set up the room.

One of the smarter moves I’ve made in my life.

In retrospect, I missed a lot of signs -- falling anvils, blinking red lights, screaming horns, black cats --  during Maddy’s pregnancy that perhaps were the universe’s way trying to tell me things would not end well.  A lot of bloggers talk about the “I knew I’d never really have my child with me” syndrome, but I guess I wasn’t that prescient, or I had my fingers in my ears, or had read enough mystery novels to blow a lot of it off as red herrings.  I kept waving my “perfect” amnio results around to bat away the bizarre plague of locusts.  But I kept my distance, and hindsight is 20/20 and all that:

There was the overwhelming amount of blood.  Which they repeatedly told me was not unheard of, and the baby was always fine, heart ticking away.  Which they told me in the post-mortem might’ve been my body trying to rid itself of the pregnancy and failing.

There were the little things that began going wrong in clusters, not just the echogenic bowel, but the car stalling out on New Year’s Day.  The washer/dryer collapsing around 35w.  The plumbers screwing up the installation of the new set.  The newly set deadline at my husband’s job, days before the due date.  Going to bed that week, praying for the baby not to come while her daddy was far away.   Going over my due date.  Going a week over my due date.  The sink was broken in my delivery room, and a plumber worked on it as I tried to sleep through the gaps of my induced contractions.

Not wanting to jinx anything, but letting it slip to a few people that this was absolutely my last pregnancy.  Never again.  I was never going through the stress and exhaustion again.  Period.  My husband always wanted three children, I always held up my hand and said “we’re stopping at two.  And I hold the trump card, dear.”

I didn’t want a shower (I didn’t with Bella either), but no one sent anything.  With Bella, a few people finally caved when things got close.  Not this time.  Maddy had nothing waiting for her on the other side.

Standing in my lush yard on a warm autumn day, examining my new forever-home, marveling at my lovely, gracious neighbors, and telling my husband I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.  And then placing my hand on my swollen tummy, and asking out loud, “what if the baby is the other shoe?”  He smiled and said nothing.

Never being able to look beyond the date of the baby’s birth.  That day to me was my goal, my dream.  Everything from that point would be all right.  I could finally put down the Doppler, and allow myself to accept the pregnancy as successful.  I never fantasized an older baby, a toddler, a child.  I dreamed only of getting the baby out of me so that I might better control things on the outside.  So I might spend two weeks, with my husband ensconced at home caring for my toddler, curled up with a newborn alternating between feeding and sleeping.   Sleeping.  I dreamed of rest for myself.  Peace in my head.  Relief.  Exhalation.  I never dreamed of the baby.

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I’m always so impressed?  bewildered?  slightly perturbed?  by women who tell others of the their pregnancies when the second line turns blue, create a registry after the first OB appointment at 10w, pick names after the big scan at 20w, hold showers at 26w, enroll in their Lamaze and breastfeeding classes at 30w, and then pre-order their announcements, stock their freezers, and paint and decorate their future baby’s room.  Frankly, if none of this had ever happened to me, I don’t think I’d be one of those people anyway, not my style.  But now I’m so thankful I’m not.  I’m constantly heartbroken when I read women’s stories of canceling their showers, wondering whether and how to return gifts, and perhaps most gut-wrenching of all, dismantling their child’s room.  If you had prepared like this and then were clocked upside the head, I’m so sorry.  I feel as if I had it easy, that somehow I knew, that somehow my mind was telling me to create some distance, just in case.  I had very little to deal with materially after my child died. 

I knew things could go wrong, just not how wrong.   And I missed a lot of signs.  I did dream of this baby, without acknowledging it.  I did pick names, even though I never dared speak them aloud.  (The one we most wanted adorns her death certificate.)  I did figure out which room in my house would be hers, even though I never moved furniture or lifted a paint brush.  (It’s now an office.)  I did, eventually, around 38w, run some clothes through the washer/dryer and buy some diapers.  (They are all, diapers unopened, in plastic blue bins in my basement.)  I think I did know something was wrong, something about the way things were going, that it couldn’t possibly turn out well, that eventually the testing and the scans and the blood draws would come home to roost.  It was fun and games, my entire life until that day, I just didn’t know it until the day had passed.

what's in a name

When well-intentioned people ask about the twins' names, I hestitate for a moment, then say, "I didn't give them names." Which is true, as far as it goes. But like most truths, it only goes so far.

As a child, I pored over books listing baby names and their meanings. First, it was to find names for my imaginary future children -- two boys and a girl, I decided -- whose names changed over the years from Alana to Aislinn to Augusta and from Bradley to Brennan to Bartholomew. Later, it was because I liked learning that Deborah meant bee and David meant beloved and Dennis paid homage to Dionysus, the god of wine. And still later, I justified my obsession as a kind of historical/sociological study, as I worked my way through the Social Security website, with its list of the names given to babies born in the US, arranged in order of popularity, for every year back to 1879.

In college, at the very end of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, I read and was haunted by the phrase: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. I had barely enough Latin to translate it as meaning something more or less like: all we have left of the rose is its name.

In other words, as Peter Abelard* said, long before I came to vaguely understand it, even after all the roses are gone, we can still say "there are no roses." The name persists even after the thing it names has vanished; we can speak of what is lost and of what never was. Remembrance lives longer than what it remembers.

But when the time came to give names to the twins, I finally saw the double-edged nature of Abelard's words. It was unendurable to contemplate that nothing more than their names would survive, that, for the rest of my life, I would hear the names over and over, and, each time, be reminded with a twisting pain that that was all I had left.

The first twin died before he was born, so, according to the laws of the state where I live, I didn't have to give him a name. The second twin, however, lived for four hours and because of those four hours, she had to have her own birth certificate and her own death certificate. The nurse in charge of providing such information to the bureau of statistics called me again and again as I lay in my hospital bed, doped up with magnesium sulfate and grief. Finally, tearful and exhausted, I told the nurse to just write down her own first name.

A few months later, I took the train to city hall and stood in line with smiling parents carrying babies or pushing strollers. After I finally convinced the dubious clerk that, yes, I needed a birth certificate and a death certificate, I got the official documents and walked out into the cold bright day.

I unfolded the papers, and, for the first time, I read my daughter's name. It was a name I would never have chosen, would never have even considered. It's a name that I never want to see or hear again. But it was the right name, the perfect name, the only possible name. And if you read this post carefully, paying close attention to the empty spaces between the words, you'll find that you already know what it is.

*The 12th centrury philosopher and logician, remembered mostly, if at all, for his affair with his student Héloïse and his subsequent castration by her uncle.

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where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
oh, where have you been, my darlin' young one?

- A hard rain's a-gonna fall
Bob Dylan

I used to daydream, in the dark early days, that i could see him in the faces of little boys i saw in stores, or playing in the park.  I'd never paid much attention to little boys, before...but suddenly the veil of my disinterest lifted and they seemed to be legion, be everywhere, all knees and ears and motion swirling on the periphery of my world.  Other people's boys.  They brought me up short, made me catch my breath with wonder and longing.  Would he have tilted his head like that, held his arms just so?  Would the dark fuzz of his baby hair have grown into cowlicks, like that one's?  Would he have had a husky laugh?  Would he have come running into my arms pell-mell like the little fellow who nearly knocked me off my feet one day at the mall, racing towards his mother, squealing?  Would he have liked my stories, my tune-challenged guitar-playing?  Would he have had a crooked smile?

Every boy I saw, I wondered, and I ached.  Too late, I had discovered the beauty of boyhood for the first time, and I could not tear my eyes away.

That was a long time ago.  It's rare now.  Occasionally, if I meet a boy of a certain age, or if I catch my younger son and his cousins with their heads bent over a sandbox or a train table, three boys together, the shadow of a dark-haired fourth looms before me, almost waving.  It's bittersweet, now, this presence in absence...it is the closest I get to the sense of him being with me.  But that shadow is still - and forever - painfully indistinct, compared to those could-have-beens, those other boys.  They are technicolour...and he?  He is only ashes. 

What I believe, I suppose, is that we will all be ash and dust someday.  That he has gone ahead, though quite possibly into nothing.  I do not believe in angels.  Am ambivalent about souls, hopeful but ultimately unsure.  Thus his potential nothingness, his erasure, is the hardest aspect of grief for me to reconcile.  He was my child.  I believe that he mattered, that he was someone, a boy all his own, even if the world never got to unwrap what he carried latent in that small self, that tiny body broken by birth.  I believe this, but I do not know how to believe the rest...the what he is now, the where he might be.  My unbelief wounds me.  I fear that I long for something that is utterly gone.  And I fear that he is not utterly gone but out there alone, somehow, needing his mother.  I fear that I am failing to mother him, and I fear that I am trying to mother something that is only a memory, not even a spectre.

And yet I knew him, though I will never lay eyes on the boy he might have become.  I knew him, knew the kick of his feet inside, the wild, soaring leap of him when I placed headphones on my belly.  I knew, when he was born, the shape of his brow as my own, his small feet as the twins of his father's.  And I knew from the fierce grip of his tiny hand on my finger, reflex though it well may have been, that he knew me, smelled me, sensed my presence.  If he is only shadow now, he was not, not then. 

All those other boys out there who wove in and out of my peripheral vision for so long, taunting me with what might have been, what I had lost...they have faded with time, become the shadows, blurred.  They were never mine, only other people's boys.  Whereas that little body that housed my son and the boy he might have been, ashes though it is, is burned on me brighter and deeper than all their myriad of laughing faces.

Wherever he may be, I hope he knows.