too much (and not enough)

 The one and only true remedy for grief is time.

If today is your first visit to Glow in the Woods
(and I'm so so sorry if it is)

I know that this is the last thing you want to hear
(but there's no way around it.)

Raw and devastated from the loss of your precious child
(still groping in the barren darkness)

Time is the one thing you have suddenly have far too much of
(and none of it is the kind you want.)

Little t-time
(the ever-present-now)
is impossible to deal with when all you want is their living body in your arms.

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

Time is also the one true enemy of memory
(and memory is our only connection to the little ones we lost)

If today is your hundredth plus visit here
(to this warm nook of love and understanding)

I'm sorry for that,
(but happy you've found this place, and hopefully some solace, too)

As veterans of the battle against the loss of memory
(and buried by time)

We know too well everything we don't have
(yet find a way to go on and on)

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

Time's balm eases memory into other forms.
(the stretch of midnight into dawn where no sleep waits)
The evaporation of now into memory makes our impossible lives livable.
(except in the dreams of insomnia where I can never find exactly what I need)
We hold on to one another
(too tight sometimes, too lightly others)
Until we feel life slowly refill our days and lives and hours together
(except for, always, our lost offspring)
who are forever apart.
(and forever a part)
of
(us)

Today is Lu's birthday and this poem is a gift to her, in honor of the beautiful son she carried for us. Please post your own poetry or prose poem or freeform stream of conscious word jam.  Write it to your partner or your lost child or to yourself or anything you want.  Aside from time, writing has helped to heal me the most.  What heals you?

after the fire

photo by bsteele.

When he asked me to help him clean after the fire, I didn’t know what to expect, but I agreed. I grabbed a headlamp, some throwaway clothes, my combat boots. Of course, I agreed. It was my stepfather's ancestral home. And everything was gone.

He told me the story in the morning. His mother and father in their eighties watched from the street as the fire ravaged their home. My stepfather cried when he told me that detail, and I could see them in my mind's eye watching their house engulfed. It is a particular kind of hell to watch a tragedy and not be able to do anything. People asked what caused the fire, and they just didn't know. Fire is random and cruel sometimes. It was this time.

Generations of his family lived in the house, which once served as the General Store and first Post Office in this area of the Poconos. When they closed the door to business, it was the late sixties. And they literally just shut the door, left the shelves stocked, the cash register in its place, the butcher and bakery cases empty but for the metal trays. Unclaimed and undelivered envelopes rested in the postal cubbies. Through the years, they used the space for storage, and so boxes of antiques, china, clothes, magazines, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of family heirlooms and antiques were stacked around the aisles of the store. One day, they were going to go through it. One day, maybe they would even open again. One day, until it was thirty years later and it was gone in one night. Poof. The caveat repeated by everyone from the police officer to my mother to the neighbors, but everyone is okay. Everyone is okay.

Noone looked okay.

They looked like charcoal outlines of themselves, standing devastated in front of what was once the heart of the family. The house where my stepfather grew up, the place where he had Thanksgiving and birthdays, and where he visited his aging parents was half standing, naked, open to the world. His eyes filled with tears as we pulled up. "I have been here every day since the fire, and it still shocks me when I see it." Strange as it seems, I had never been to the house. I was an adult when my stepfather married my mother, and his elderly parents came to our house for holidays. I could see the majesty and beauty of the old stone house in the same moment I could see its ravaged barebones.

I should have gone before. I should have helped him clean it out before the fire. But how would I have known?

Miners lights on our heads, we waded into the blackness. Even with the front door wide open, the charred remains of the room sucked the sunlight into the walls. It was oppressively dark. My eyes adjusted, then sought the comfort of not processing anything, then refocused. I hadn't met Sam yet, or had any of my children, but I missed them. I missed a family in whose health I could feel comforted by in the wake of fire. I missed someone to miss. I felt the swirling chaos of a disaster, the meaninglessness of it all, the loneliness and fragility of my humanness. One day, many years from that moment, I would feel that way again times a thousand.

The gravity and devastation of the fire didn't hit me until I was knee-deep in the soggy aftermath of things that belonged to people. A blackened Stickley chair. A box of wet Life Magazines. A cash register from the 30s. My headlamp rested on a shelf lined with full boxes of untouched Jello packages from the 1960s. Perfectly intact. No soot. No smoke damage. No water damage. Just Jello. The shelf underneath filled with unrecognizable black lumps of nothing. The gelatin spared and a box of letters written during World War II gone. So random. So very cruel.

We pulled the things one by one out into yard, so we could photograph each item. It would take weeks to do the entire house. My stepfather teared up here and there. He cried right and proper when he found a box of childhood toys, trucks melted into the box bottom. A toy he made his nephew when the boy was just two. He remembered the lost things after they were charred and unusable. Like finding them and losing them in the same moment.

I know that feeling now.

My step father pulled out old butcher trays. “You want these, Ang? They’ll clean up. What about this cast iron cauldron?”

“Sure, I’ll take it.” I took everything offered. I scrubbed pots and old antique toys for weeks. I don’t know if I wanted it or anything really, but a pie plate out of context seemed curious, exotic, foreign, important, even. I lived a single life in a two bedroom apartment in the city. I didn't need these things, but I just didn’t want everything to be lying out in the front yard, bit by bit.  A life dissected and eviscerated in front of God and everyone, catalogued for a faceless entity on the other end of an insurance policy. How much is a broken play horse played with by you, your father, and your grandfather worth? Later, we threw the unsalvageable things into a rented dumpster. That brought a kind of oppressive sadness on my chest and shoulders. There it is. There it was. You cannot save everything that is broken.

The smoke smell radiated off me, out of my hair, for days after. I kept remembering standing in the absolute black of the General Store, staring out to the street, the front door open. I watched a butterfly dance through the door and into the rubble. The juxtaposition of it haunting and beautiful. I wanted to call out to my stepfather, a bird and butterfly watcher, but it seemed sacrilegious.  I just stopped and watched it quietly flit around the edges of the room and explore for a few seconds before it turned and flew into the light again.

There is nothing here for me, the butterfly says, but everyone is going to be okay.

+++

I had my own kind of fire. Everything about me was destroyed when she died. I felt all of these things again, except it was me consumed by fire, tornado, war, devastation, death. My charred backrooms left open to nature and the neighbors.  After the fire, some shelves in me were left unscathed. After the fire, I pulled everything out of me one by one to catalogue all my losses. After the fire, some boxes contained full sets of antique china that you could save if you scrubbed them clean of the soot with the perfect amount of delicacy and toughness. After the fire, when it looks like everything is gone, you find a box of expired Jello and a butterfly flits past your miner's light and you think, "Everyone is going to be okay."

When she died, I touched those times where I came face to face with random chaos all over again. I realized those moments reminded me of losing my daughter, not the other way around. I am learning to lay all of me out in the front yard, take pictures, and save what I can. I am learning how to discern what is salvageable inside me. I am learning to figure out what I must throw into a dumpster.  I am learning.

What experiences did you have before your loss that you are seeing with a different perspective? What experiences are you processing now through the lens of loss? What have you learned to salvage after your loss? What things are you throwing out after your loss?

the rides

Our choices, our perspectives, how we handle adversity or celebrate happiness, each instance of decision is another step forward through the twisting path of our treacherous lives.

I should be used to roller coaster by now.  Yet, at the top of a long climb thrilled by the glorious view, I am terrified of the inevitable plunge I know is coming.  When I'm way down low moving fast through a dark valley, I am content with the limited perspective and the absence of danger.

It's easier to get by when there is no place further to fall if things go completely off the rails.

I always hope there's a clicking chain ahead to pull me out of my spiral, but it's never a sure thing.  Not anymore. I thought having Silas was simply another spin around that track, a life-long jaunt that would be scary and exhilarating in equal parts but still all above the ground, always showered in light.

Turns out this ride doesn't have safety harnesses or quality control inspectors to ensure anyone's soul exits fully intact.  There is no promise of perfection. Turns out the free-fall is endless and that The Pit lives inside me, inside my guts, and that once the chain releases there is no stopping the plunge.

This ride is not made with any regard for tolerable human limits.

You don't have to be this tall or this smart or this good or this loving or this honest or this much in love to get crushed by the g-forces this Universe is capable of producing.

I thought I had been in tough spots before, where I was scared and alone and I could feel that weightless churn at the bottom of my belly.  Getting bad news about my mother's health made me sick.  A close call in the car with a tractor trailer late at night on an obsidian stretch of I95 left me shaken and empty more times than I care to remember.

But nothing prepared me for the depth of nausea--of soul-crushing terror and despair--that my son's death shotgunned into my guts.  Now I know it, though, and I hate even the slightest inkling of that awfulness when I feel it starting to hollow me out from the intestines outward.

The rapid breath, the cold sweat, the sour stomach that feels larger than the World and impossible to contain within this measly little body, I feel it and know it and I have to use all of my will and brainpower and strength to stay calm and contained and get out, out, out of whatever awful situation I'm in, or to find a way around the terrible, insurmountable obstacle in front of me.

What I have also learned, though, is that my soul and intellect and heart are capable of withstanding far more than I could have ever imagined.  I would rather still be an innocent but since that is not a choice, I'm glad to know I am made of some material that is ultimately impenetrable no matter how bad it gets.

It seems that I can withstand the crushing forces of gravity as I plunge to the bottom.  Some sense I never knew I had can see through the dark to the love my friends and family radiate toward me.  No matter how rattled this ride makes me, my spine is strong and true and I will never crack completely. 

All of you have that in you, too.

If this journey ends up beautiful and good somehow, I will know it is because Silas was part of my life.  Even only as potential, he has forged my will into something stronger than diamond, more flexible than grass,  more clear of purpose and direction than a planet hurtling around a star.

I will feel that Pit grow to consume me again I am sure.  I have felt it blossom in my innards many times since the day he died.  When I miss him so much I can't breathe; when Lu is immobile with sadness; when the pressure of everything I can't control is more than I can hold; when someone I care about adds another human to this planet and I love them for it and hate that we don't have one of our own; each time I feel my soul in free-fall, within, all over again and again and again.

The Pit opens as I descend and I always just barely slip away to safety before I'm completely consumed.

I hope someday my soul surfs that Pit as my offspring drives away in their car for the first time.  I hope I feel it on their first day of school.  I hope I can keep getting showered with every rising sun and I hope that somehow my son knows how strong he has made me even though he is so far away, on some incomprehensible journey of his own.  Maybe, hopefully, perhaps.

But here is all I can do.  The Pit will always be near, but I can't live in fear.  These are our lives together. I can't help but live as fully as I can and try to enjoy the view I have before I am forced to withstand the next round of cliffs and curves, safety bar or not.

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

How much of that do you believe, too?  How much sounds like so much bullshit?  What do you tell yourself to hold yourself up?  Does your life feel like a roller coaster or something else entirely?

putting it into words

In the time I have been writing for Glow, there is something I have not told you about our loss.  I have not told you about the book.

I wrote a memoir after Zoey and Gus died.  But really, I started it earlier.  Just a few days into our hospitalization, I knew I was going to want to write about it.  Or at least have the option.  So I started taking notes.

I took notes on what the doctors said.

I took notes on what the nurses said.

I took notes on what M. said.

I took notes on how the room looked.

I took notes on how the door handle had to be jiggled in just the right way to open.

I took notes on the torturous route from the hospital entrance to the Labor & Delivery Unit.

I roamed the corridor outside the NICU and took notes on the pictures and plaques and thank-you letters sent by the families of babies who lived.

I wish I had taken more notes.

I took notes on what the ethicist said.

I took notes on what our friends said.

I didn’t take many notes on what the social worker said because she was so unhelpful, but I wish I had, because she was so unhelpful.

I took notes on what we ate for breakfast.

I took notes on the bar and grill where I would pick up our dinner, and on the drinks I forced myself not to steal when no one was looking.

I took notes on Zoey.

I took notes on Gus.

I wish I had taken more notes.

When M. thought I was writing emails, sometimes I was taking notes. 

On our last night in the hospital, after Gus died, after M. was taken away for emergency surgery, and after Gus’s body was taken from my arms, M’s mother spoke to me: the staff was going to need the room now, to clean it.  “If they come, they come,” I told her, but I had to take notes.  Even if it meant the gore had to be mopped all around my feet, I had to take notes.  Besides, my sneaker was already smudged with M’s blood.

I took notes for an hour.

The next day, I took notes about our drive home.

I took a few notes on the funeral.  I took lots of notes on planning it.  At the cemetery, I have taken notes on who is buried near Gus and Zoey—especially children—on the back of an envelope when I had to.

But always I wish I had taken more notes.

---

In the first six weeks after they were gone, I wrote five pages.  Then, on the weekend we went away to our friend’s secluded ranch, I wrote thirty.  By the end, I had written 300 pages and two drafts. 

“It must have been so therapeutic,” people would say when they found out.  “It must have been so cathartic.”  I suppose it was, but the point was never to purge.  It was actually the opposite: the point had been to retain.

In the hospital, when I was afraid and did not know the future, I did know this much: This will have been one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.  And I knew that if I did not do something, I would lose all the details, all the moments, everything that was giving this time its textures.  Everything that makes a memory a living thing.  

So I wrote a memoir to stamp it all onto my mind.  And now I find that I cannot remember much of what happened outside of what I wrote.  The story has become the memory.

The first section of the story is an account of the week M. and I spent in the hospital.  Monday.  Tuesday.  Wednesday.  Thursday.  Friday.  Saturday.  Sunday.  Day-by-day. The next section recounts the spring and summer that followed. 

(Did you know that they died on the first day of spring?)

Some parts were easy to write.  Some were hard.  The hardest task was reconstructing moments where my notes were shoddy and my memory porous.  What did the doctor say when…?  Was that conversation before or after the one where…?  You would think the hardest task would have been writing about the deaths of my children.  But that was easy.  I wrote about our daughter dying, and our son dying, and our shock and our wailing and my many dissociative states quickly and in one afternoon.  After all, I had very good notes. 

---

300 pages.  Two (official) drafts.  And now the book is languishing.

It needs more.  More episodes from my life, and from our life, before.  More memory—but I worry that I have already used all the memory I have.  Even worse, it also needs a new structure.  Something more reader-friendly with a smoother flow.  It’s daunting.  Basically, it’s as if your house needed a new house. 

I worry that I don’t have it in me to write the book I have come to see in my mind.  With Ellie and Ben and a new job, I worry that I don’t have the time—or, more to the point, the focus—to try.  This is not the kind of writing project you can pick away at twenty minutes here, twenty there.

I won’t lie: I could use some motivation.  Encouragement.  Help.  Whatever you want to call it, I could use it.  Not to deal with what happened, not to pull myself out of it, but to plunge back in. 

To write the book this book needs to be. 

What creative outlets did you turn to after your loss?  How did others respond to your efforts?  Are you still engaged in them? 



drunk

photo by ldandersen.

I pull the darkness up to my chin, and curl my knees up under her. The alcohol is a nice way to turn off the refrain. My eyes force themselves closed in spite of the insomnia that has plagued me all my life. I am a lump of unconscious. No dreams. No waking. No dead daughter. Just the mind switched off.  

In my most raw moments, in the early days after Lucy died, I made some very lucid decisions. One was to not drink for a few weeks. I thought booze would tear me open, dump my necrotic organs onto the floor in front of me. Liquor will only make me cry more, I reckoned. It might even make me suicidal. Maybe I will scare my daughter when I am drunk and full of grief, guilt and self-hatred. Maybe there was a demon in the bottle which would possess me and make me more sad than I could possibly imagine. I would be swallowed whole by bourbon, that is what I thought.

The alcohol would not have made it to my brain, I suspect now. It would have kept working on the large, pulsating hole right through the center of my abdomen. It would have been covering it over and over, dulling it slightly, but never leaving it alone. And I probably wouldn't have noticed the drunk.  Still, there was a healthy fear of the unknown--grief drinking seemed dangerous to me.

I started drinking again because I figured it couldn't hurt anymore. I was nigh-suicidal, my organs were on the floor anyway, and it ached more than I could imagine. The wine slipped over me, like an old comfortable lover who knew just where to kiss me every time. I felt normal, like a normal person, not a grieving mother. Just a person enjoying a glass or five of wine with some dinner. Drinking has always been a kind companion for me, not something that drove me into a depression or into psychosis, rather like an old friend, a confessor, listening to my self-pitying ramblings over a glass. We would laugh, sometimes cry. I felt better just having the booze near me.

A glass turned into a bottle. And when it took over my nights, I stopped, because I wanted to get pregnant. And then I was pregnant and absolutely did not drink. But every day I thought, "This pregnancy might be fucking manageable if I could have a bourbon." I would mention nearly every time I was at my midwife. "I could really use a bourbon, Pam." And she would laugh, and I would look at her. "No, I'm serious."

A pregnant dry drunk may be the curse Dionysus unleashes upon humanity. I was a miserable, unpleasant person to be around or know. I embodied anxiety and misplaced anger. I was not the pregnant person that people would approach, hands outstretched headed towards my expanding belly, with the question, "Is this your first?" No, I would stare at people with a thousand dagger stare, "Touch me and I cut you, bitch."

Then Thomas Harry was born. Whew, glad I was done with all that nastiness. I was out of the woods. Everything was happy. Here is a new cute, adorable baby who doesn't cry very much and sleeps great. My life felt pretty complete. My grief, while not absent, felt under control.

"Let's toast," I said. "Let's toast to our good fortune."

I felt like my grief was under control. I felt like my drinking was in my control. And now, I am trying to get sober.

+++

People drink for many reasons. I drank because my kid died and I deserved a fucking drink. I drank because I couldn't sleep. I drank because I like the taste of wine and bourbon and beer and vodka and any other drink with a proof level. I drank because I was sad. I drank because I was happy. I realized, not that long ago, that I really only drink for one reason--because I am an alcoholic.

Drinking problems are usually measured in quantities and horror stories. I know that there is a blackout-drunk-lose-everything bottom for a lot of people.

I am not that person.

I have children. I have a husband I love. I have a life I love. I have lost nothing material. What I lost was any respect I had for myself. I lost peace. I lost contentedness. I lost feeling well. I lost restfulness. I lost hope. I raised my bottom up to a place that was low enough for me. As a mother, I often relegated those things to some day. Some day, I will sleep. Some day, I will take care of my drinking. Some day, I will be happy.

My husband didn't even realize that I drank at night after the kids went to sleep. I have never driven drunk. I have never missed a bill, or woken up to a drink. My kids have never seen me drunk. When I drink, I write.

I shut the door of my office and fall into a world of 75 words per minute. I edit. I paint. I create an alternate reality where Grief and Bourbon are my muses. But I was still miserable. After waking in the morning, cotton mouth, cloudy with a dull headache, I vowed not to drink that night. By 8 pm, I was talking myself into one glass of wine. Just one glass. After one glass of wine, or one bourbon, or one beer, all bets were off. My resolve was gone. I maybe had two more, or four more, or maybe more. I called a hotline one day.

 "I don't know if I have a problem."

"Did you answer the questions on our website?"

"Yes. I think I got an A."

"Ha, yes, I got an A too."

"I used to drink more when I was single. I haven't even been drinking for more than three months. I am not anywhere close to a rock bottom," I tell the woman on the phone.

"You are at enough of a bottom to think you have a problem. And besides, bottoms always have trap doors," she says to me.

"But I don't drink very much on the average, and I am very good at quitting. I am just not any good at staying sober."

"But staying sober is the important part to you, right?"

"Yeah."

"How do you feel when you drink?"

"Ashamed. Pathetic. Weak."

"Pay attention to that."

+++

It has been a seventy days without a drink. I am happier than I have been in years. With Lucy in my belly, I remember saying that I wouldn't drink after she was born. I didn't realize I was a drunk, then, but my brain made some feeble connection that when I drank, I felt bad about myself. Then she died. And stopping drinking was the last thing I thought would help me.

Someone told me recently that Lucy's gift to our family was my sobriety and that I would never have gotten sober if she had lived. That is true. Drinking after Lucy's death immediately was not fun. It was like medication to keep me normal. Or rather the social lubricant I needed to be alone with me.

I thought I was smarter than being an alcoholic. I thought I could outsmart my family's legacy of booze and drunks. What I learned is that the arrogance of thinking that way prevented me from getting healthy. My arrogance prevented me from calling people at my most desperate hour to say, "I need a friend to talk to. I need a friend because my daughter died. I need a friend because I think I am drinking too much." It seemed easier to get drunk, and in fact, it was easier to get drunk, but it wasn't healthier or smarter.

Alcoholism is a progressive, fatal disease. When I began drinking, after my one year old son was born, I didn't immediately drink to drunk. In fact, the last few months of my active drinking, I can't remember feeling drunk ever, even when I would stare at the evidence of having drunk a bottle of wine. I would stare at the empty bottles of liquor clogging my recycling bin, and think, "Next week, this will be filled with Pellegrino bottles. Next week." But it never was. Drinking felt like a choice. It felt like I was handling the bourbon, except that when I tried to quit, I would drink again. I was sober for two days, I would reward myself with twice as much Maker's Mark on the rocks, and drink myself tired again. I didn't know, until I began reading about alcoholism, that this is a pattern for alcoholism.

Despite the fact that I am strong-willed enough to make outrageous goals and challenges (riding one hundred mile bike rides, writing a novel in a month, or posting a piece of art every day on a website) and meet them, I thought drinking was a weakness of mine, and that I was simply a weak-willed person. Looking at alcoholism as a disease has helped me be more compassionate. The moral defect here is simply not seeking help earlier. Some people describe alcoholism as an allergy to alcohol, because alcohol in an alcoholic creates a series of undeniable reactions--I can't say no to another drink once I have had one. If you ate a strawberry and your throat closed, you would not call yourself weak for your bodily reaction. What I have control over is whether or not I eat the strawberry at all.

I used to think that for me quitting drinking was like someone telling me to lose weight by cutting off my left leg. I mean, sure I would lose weight without the leg, but everything would else would be near impossible. I always wanted to be spiritually/mentally/physically well AND have drinking. That is simply not possible for me. And these days of sobriety, I also had to seriously think about why I would look at drinking as my left leg.

Right now, I feel like all the skin has been peeled from my body. I feel as raw as the early days after Lucy's death. And I am scared as hell. It's not that I can't do this, it's that I can.  And now I have to feel the weight of Lucy's death and of my losses without numbing it with alcohol. I am wrestling with losing my medication, my best friend, my confidante, my muse, my partner, my inspiration, my wubby, my safety net, my identity, and my number one enemy. But one thing is absolutely clear, the shame of drinking, the self-abuse I engaged in over every drop of alcohol I took in, that feels lifted. I feel a freedom and a lightness in this place of absolute vulnerability, and that is addictive too.

Due to the nature of this post, please feel free to utilize posting anonymously. What is your relationship with drinking like? Have you sought to numb your grief with alcohol or drugs? Have your habits gotten worse or better since your loss?