Love Song for the Grim Reaper #2

I didn’t sleep the night before we went to the hospital when Terra was to deliver our Roxy. I switched back and forth from the couch to the bed. I twitched and breathed. I changed channels. I smoked (I was a born again smoker that day/night). I put my hand on Terra’s shoulder. We didn’t speak. It was such an incredibly terrifying and endless night, that just imagining it now has me shaking in fear that I could be transported back there.

Terror, like I’d never known or ever come close to knowing, at the imagining of what we were getting ready to do: meet our dead child. We were going to see the face of our dead daughter. From the moment on the day before, when we received the news the news (“I’m sorry hon, there’s no heartbeat,” said the ultrasound tech), every panicked darting thought landed on this simple, impossible fact: we were still going to see her, and she would be dead. Having a baby, generally, is kind of scary business. Having a dead baby, however, is like being reborn inside of fear. Your blood is fear. Your teeth are fear. Your thoughts are fear. Your eyes are fear. All sounds are fear. I can still feel it pumping through me almost 6 years later.

There was one, amazing thing though, that this terror did not prepare me for… how amazing it would feel to hold my dead child. How perfect she still felt, in my arms, even as she was gone. It was so calming, just looking at her. Even in death, she brought me some peace that day. She was so familiar to me then, and she still is. Something about her was alive- something that is still inside me. I understood immediately why chimps would carry around their deceased children for days. It really makes no sense to let them go. I guess we never do.

This song is about meeting and holding Roxy, and how the feeling tied in to my first memory of death as a child, when a neighbor somberly walked into our yard with a dying animal in her arms (it actually was a rabbit, not a cat, but well, artistic license and such). All my life, there was something too familiar about death when it showed its face in my life. It sometimes felt and feels like I was being programmed, engineered and prepared for losing Roxy from early childhood. It sounds crazy, I’m sure, but when fate disintegrates your confidence in statistics, I suppose reason goes with it.

The first time I saw you
You walked up from the neighbors
Holding your tabby cat like a
Like a newborn baby
My daddy rolled his eyeballs
Thinking you were crazy
But I had to admit myself, well I
I knew your face right away
I knew your face right away
You were never a stranger
And it felt alright
I carve your name across my wrist
And every day it looks new
I drag my hand along the fence
The way I pictured you might do
And there’s a cat watching
From the other side
Yeah it’s a song I’ve heard
One too many times
I knew your face right away
I knew your face right away
You were never a stranger
And it felt alright

How did you survive your child's delivery? Do you feel you suffer from PTSD as a result of that day (as I most certainly do)? If you chose/were able to see your child, do you feel it brought you any peace?

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Our dog, the world's best dog, is a touch over 19 months old now. We got him when he was two and a half months old, four days before A's fifth anniversary. He was tiny, and mostly black. He has probably reached his adult size and weight-- north of 50 lbs-- by now. He's black and tan, a proper and gorgeous Airedale coloring. He is playful and sneaky and gentle and social. He lets little kids, even kids who don't live here, pull his tail and stick their hands in his mouth. I mean literally elbow deep. A one year old's elbow deep, but still. He even lets selfsame shameless shorties take his most prized possessions, his tasty-tasty cleanly polished bones, straight out of his mouth. 

Monkey says he's a relaxation aid, because it is impossible, according to her, to sit next to that dog, one arm over him, the other hand petting him, and remain tense. Especially after he twists his head up to declare his appreciation. The dog is a saint. 

He is also a damned crazy rat bastard who takes nearly every opportunity to run off for a mad dash around the neighborhood. The woods behind the houses across the street, the back yards of the houses on our side, back and front yards of the houses one and two streets down. As far as we can tell, he never crosses that second street down and never goes farther than one over on the right. He stops by the houses of his doggie friends in the neighborhood for loud and urgent conversations. But mostly he runs, like the wind.

When he's done, he peaceably surrenders to one of us. Next to last time he did this, he actually came to the front door and waited while the search party returned. Oh, did I forget to mention that he's smart? Last year, he dug under the fence so carefully and masterfully that it took us weeks to figure out how he was getting out. Now that we've used that knowledge to close off his escape route, he is reduced to taking advantage of momentary lapses of judgement or inexperienced operation of the front door. But he doesn't run where the cars are (anymore) and he always comes back. 

He bounces when he walks, and his tags jiggle. It's a mood-elevating sound, a reassuring one. I remember the first time I caught him after he escaped, I didn't bring the leash with me as I ran out. So walking back to the house, I had him by the collar. I had to bend a bit to keep a good handle on it. I was supposed to've been mad. But the rhythm of his steps next to me, echoed by the rhythm of the tags, and his whole pleased with himself air-- somehow all of that made me feel mostly amusement mixed with tender gratitude that he exists, that he's ours. 

Mostly, because there was, also, a familiar ping of anxiety. Not, mind you, anxiety that the crazy puppy could've gotten lost or killed by a car just then. No, anxiety about the fact that someday, hopefully a good decade or more on, someday he will die. This doom-preview is better now, though not entirely absent. I think I just got used to it, acknowledged it into background, if that makes sense. Back at the height of its head-messing reign, this thought would loom the largest during the walking of the dog. Possibly due to the limited multitasking potential of the dog walk, the anxiety would expand to fill most of my headspace. One moment I'd be walking this lovely creature, enjoying the sounds of tag jiggle and his happy little bounce, view from behind, and the next I'd get slammed with the complete certainty that one day he won't be here.

It's not that he is the only creature in the household whose existence causes me anxiety. I am, if we are being honest here, a much more anxious person now than I was before. But with the humans, the anxiety tends to ebb and flow depending on what's on life's menu. And with most of them, rational thought is that they will, most likely, outlive me. The dog, on the other hand, is the only one whose death preceding mine is baked in the cake, barring any catastrophic event or illness on my part. With humans, anxiety is about modicum of control, or maybe just an illusion of it. It's about holding on, hoping not to lose them. With the dog, it's about knowing that I can't. 

It's not going to be the same kind of sadness or the same kind of missing. But in getting a dog, we did sign up for an extra dose of that, eventually. I sort of think that living with missing A makes me know that when it happens, I will be ok, terribly sad for a while, but ok. And in the meantime, there's the sound of clinking tags and the consistently high entertainment value of the dog sliding on hardwood as he chases a ball inside the house. And, and, and... 

Do you have pets? What do they mean to you? Has your view of your pets shifted at all after the death of your child(ren)? Did you decide to get a pet after? Or has it made you decide not to get one? 

Are you more anxious now? Or have you found zen of not sweating most things? 

Battle fatigue

We waited for seven months after George’s death before we started to try and get pregnant again.  It felt much too soon to me at the time, as if by trying to have another child we were somehow betraying our firstborn.  If not for fear of the encroaching title of ADVANCED MATERNAL AGE I probably would have insisted upon waiting longer. Fear can be powerful motivation.

If someone had offered me the option of a medically induced coma for the duration of my subsequent pregnancy I would have given it serious consideration.   It wasn’t just the emotional aspect of another pregnancy after a loss and all its possible complications that gave me pause but also the pure physicality of it.   My pregnancy with George was brutal even before things went sideways.  Hyperemesis lasted for nearly twenty-three weeks and then, one week after it resolved, I was in the hospital being pumped with enough cardiac medication to make me long for the days of vomiting only every hour.  Of course, then there were the IVs and the constant blood draws and the headaches and the jabs to my stomach with epidural needles.  By the time I went in for the emergency C-section to deliver our boy I was nearly fifteen pounds lighter than I was before I got pregnant. 

As it turned out I survived the next pregnancy with most of my sanity intact by doing my best impression of an ostrich.  I simply pretended, as long as I could, that none of it was happening.  I assumed that my state of pregnancy was a temporary one and went about my life as if everything was the same as before.  All of those things pregnant people are supposed to do like glow and beam and make plans for nurseries and have baby showers I did none of.  What I did do was take my prenatal vitamin every day, avoided the laundry list of foods and drugs that I was supposed to and I continued to grieve the loss of my son. 

Everyday I was pregnant I fully expected it to be the last.  But somehow my luck held out and after 277 days I gave birth to a living, breathing baby girl.  The moment I held her for the first time the uncertainty of those previous 277 days became completely insignificant.   It all seemed worth it.  I would have chosen to do it all again for twice as long in a single heartbeat.   Perspective is everything and if fear is a powerful motivator than love even more so.

Eighteen months after she was born we looked at our daughter, growing up at the speed of light, and thought that it was time to do it all over again.  She needed a sibling and we needed another baby.   So we took another deep breath, crossed our fingers, and with eyes wide open made that leap of faith. 

It did not come as a shock to me when a few months ago, at 12 weeks, I had a miscarriage.  A routine office visit and an absent heartbeat, it was a scenario I had envisioned happening many times in the years since George’s death.   Then, just last week, a variation of the same story; positive pregnancy test followed by spotting and then heavy bleeding.  An early miscarriage, they say.  Part of me, the part that will be forever in that hospital room holding the still body of my son, will always expect the worst and be surprised when anything other than that happens. 

 

I could rail against the unfairness of it all or shake an angry fist at the universe.  Lord knows I did all that when George died.  I wailed and screamed and cried until I thought I would shrivel into a dried husk.   It was what I needed at the time.  To be angry and indignant was important.  

It has been three and a half years since I began this journey and it has been a battle the entire time.  Four pregnancies later here I am with one son gone away and one amazingly thriving daughter who is currently singing a song about boats.  I don’t feel angry or indignant anymore.  I recognize how lucky I am to have made it this far with one living child.   Yet I still long for another baby and somtimes even dare to dream about a son.  But I’ve grown weary of the battle and wonder when is it time to finally stop fighting.  Is it now?

If you have had more than one loss in what ways has it affected you differently than your first loss?  Was your reaction to it as you expected?  What is/has been your motivation for trying to have another child?  Have you made the decision to not try or to stop trying?  How did you come to that decision?  

So Glad You Were Mine

Every summer, as the days went from wet-warm to dry-hot, the anxiety would begin to bubble inside of me as we approached the August 1st anniversary of Roxy’s birth and death. I wouldn’t even recognize what was happening at first. I’d just be irritable and jumpy, mad at the sun. I compare it to a long-standing pain one might have in their spine… an injury that never left. You forget about the pain. In some ways, you get used to it, but it darkens your mind.

Terra and I established a tradition of escape beginning with the first anniversary of Roxy’s death. We would go to the tree that was planted in a park in her honor, tie our balloons,  lay down our flowers and then we’d swoop up Mason (and eventually, Lila) and run away from home for a couple of days. We’d avoid everyone and everything. We’d stay distracted. It was strategy. We’d survive our grief the best way we could.

As year 5 approached in the summer of 2012, the pattern remained. The heat triggered the slow, silent, terrible build inside me. A 2-month crescendo, ending in collapse with anger and terror tangling further into the fabric of my heart until there was no room for anything else.  The pattern was becoming exhausting. I wanted to change it. With Terra’s blessing, we planned something slightly different.

Our extended families met us in the park at Roxy’s tree. For the first time, we brought Roxy’s photos. I have been viciously protective of these pictures in the past. I was always concerned someone would see only a dead baby, and not the stunningly beautiful daughter that she was to us. Some days, I didn’t even trust myself to look at them for this reason. I was filled with fear heading to the park, but we desperately, finally wanted this day to be about remembering and honoring our daughter and not just surviving our own grief. Or, at least, we wanted to give it a shot.

I could not have foreseen the magic that was coming.

Mason (age 9) very sweetly asked to see Roxy’s pictures and very sincerely wanted to participate in what we were doing.

When we talked to Lila (age 3) about Roxy, she said “was she a girl or a boy? Oh I think she turned into a tree. I’m going to look for her."

We had found and brought several copies of her birth record with her hands and feet printed on them, which took everyone’s breath away. We gave copies to the grandparents and aunts, and it felt so good to be able to give them a piece of her.

We brought helium balloons. We wrote messages to her on them and let them go into the air. Right as we released them into the sunlight, a dragonfly swooped down in front of us. Dragonflies were the primary theme in which Terra had decorated Roxy’s bedroom. I don’t believe in angels or ghosts (well, maybe ghosts), but there was something of her that felt really, truly there with us.

For the first time, I felt grateful for it all. Grateful for having been Roxy’s father. For having gotten to hold her, meet her, even if she had already departed. I finally felt that there was more than just pain there, in my heart where she continued to live. She was more than just pain, and I was so glad she was mine. When I got home that evening, I wrote this song. (I apologize, it’s kind of a rough mix.)

SO GLAD YOU WERE MINE

There were no birds on their branches
And there was nothing in your eyes
I’m so glad you were mine
Your skin was cracked at the elbow
And your blood was the reddest wine
I’m so glad you were mine
I meditate with the spirit
And I’m sheltered in her vines
I’m so glad you were mine
The ritual that brings you comfort
Is the lion that eats you alive
I’m so glad you were mine
August never offers mercy
And September never comes on time
I’m so glad you were mine
The wincing has gone fishing
And now I miss the knife
I’m so glad you were mine
There are no waves upon this ocean
It’s unkind
And the stillness of the water
It is nothing compared to mine
There are so many ways to suffer
And so many ways to die
I’m so glad you were mine
There are so many ways to suffer
And so many ways to die
I’m so glad you were mine

What kinds of ritual(s) do you have in place to remember the child or children you've lost? Have those rituals changed over time? 

the other way

Some scientists say there are parallel worlds, realities stacked side by side like books on a shelf, or piled high in an old, dusty attic.  That seems obvious to me now that I have a whole other life hidden in my head.

The day went smoothly, the birth long but ultimately raw and right and beautiful and true.  Those first insane and breathtaking days when Silas was in our arms and screaming in our ears and staring into our eyes seemed to pass instantly and slowly, all at once.  The uncertainty of new-parenthood was a knot of fear and hope and determination in the core of my being.  I was positive I was the happiest person in the entire world, but then I'd look at my wife Lu as she breast-fed him, and I wasn't quite so sure.  Maybe the happiest man on Earth, I thought, settling for that and into the couch next to their bonded bliss.

Weeks turned to months and already a big baby, he grew fast on mom's milk.  I learned to change diapers, to hear the language of his wailing cries in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the everything.  The middle of everything, that's exactly what he was whether he was awake or asleep, or whether I was, too. He slept well.  He was ahead of the curve.  Naps were long and pleasant.  He weaned easily and ate everything.  He learned to talk early and told us things I could never imagine.

On it goes, that impossible world, each day we didn't live that way seared into my mind as time pressed on.

The not-so-funny-part is that I had to make it all up before Zeph came along, but now I know exactly, specifically, precisely every single fucking detail of everything that we missed and everything we won't have. That parallel world I first inhabited wasn't just a figment of my imagination, it was the only salve to my damaged soul.  Simply accepting this world with all of its not-Silas-ness was a physical impossibility. I fantasized that whole other way as I cried and drove or lay stewing wide awake deep in the night, not hearing the wails of my dead son.

For years I was a shadow of myself, a projection of what I should be, even as half of me was gone within, wading into the deep deep deep waters of grief and anger, of loss and pain, of utter and complete rage that the midwives had failed us, that this is how the Universe rolls, and that it had just rolled right over us squashing us to nothingness and drowning us in tears.

But when Zeph was born, everything began to change in that parallel world.  Instead of feeling split in two, divided equally between the what-is and what-should, I had to focus strongly on the life in front of me.  Silas as his three year old older brother was harder to see than the baby we never had, and now the baby we did.  As Zeph grew day by day and the fantasy vision of Silas's life was shattered on the shrieks and laughter of an actual baby, I felt that other way slowly fade and dissolve, merging into the single path we now tread.

It is a relief to be whole, even with the hole.  Living halfway in a hope that could never be was maddening and exhausting.  Silas is gone.  Zeph is here.  In order for Zephyr to have the joyful life I want him to have, the only thing I can do is to be here with him, all the time.

But that other life is in me, still.  Still I grieve.  Still.

~~~~~~~~~~~

What do your parallel worlds look like?  How much time do you spend there?  Is there a certain time of day or part of your life where you feel the life you never had more strongly? How do you reconcile what you wanted with what you have?