all that I left behind

Today we are honored to welcome a guest post by Mrittika. Mrittika is a former journalist, and is now a PhD student and researcher. She writes very rarely on screen and paper these days, but is always writing in her head. She and Som are Aahir and Raahi’s parents. Aahir is four years old. Raahi, born in April 2013, had jejunal atresia. After two surgeries and twelve weeks at the hospital, she came home healthy. She died in her sleep of unexplained reasons eight days after coming home. She would turn three months old two days later.

It is white. Just like a beginning, when one is building a home. Like a blank canvas. And just like when all colors have been neatly folded, and wrapped, and brought home, into this whole. The white of peace. It’s like this nature of ours is building a home, and it’s like she is done, too. It’s strange, how whole, and bare, white feels. The air within the flakes, the space between the grains in the mound, and then as all becomes leveled out in a sea of white, the hollow within its breast. Gently spaced out from each other, a cold air of nothingness hanging between them. As the white lands on the trees, and rests softly on them, there’s a gentle murmur in the branches. The weight of the white, the shifting of shape, the shuffle of wind, and the shifting again. The weight of the bare. The weight of the whole. The subtlety in the tree’s crevices, and the indisputable domination in mounds on the ground. The angularity in the branches, the leveling of the ground. The complete reshaping of a landscape, and yet so floating. The complete persistence of a night, and yet so fleeting. The complete reshaping, and the complete persistence. Just like death. The snow, like a white shroud.

It is a dip, a fall, they say. They measure temperature, something they have named to describe and explain the cold. Something many around the world even use to feel cold. They feel colder, when the temperature is lower. They feel toasty when the temperature is higher. They feel comfortable, shaky, warm, shivering, strong, weak, depending on what weather channels flash on their television, and on their mobile phones. They clean their driveway before it freezes, they light a fire and throw on a throw, and they layer more. The weather, the climate, the environment, the temperature. All the while white, and yet they seem to infuse so much meaning in it. They complain of too much snow, too low temperatures, too many cancellations, too much work shoveling. They feel too heavy, too dry, too angry, too bundled up, too backed up. Too uncertain, about road conditions, phone lines, heating, meetings. They feel too cold. This winter seems too long.

I don’t feel cold anymore. I step out in my corduroy jacket over a sleeveless t-shirt and pajamas and sandals onto the driveway, in what is supposed to be freezing temperatures. My hands are bare, my feet are bare, and I wait for my husband to buckle up our boy before I lean in and give him a kiss again, and tell him again to eat all his lunch. I then touch my husband’s hands, and kiss him. I tell him to drive safe. I then wait for him to start the car and heat it up a little bit. He waves at me to go inside. I don’t listen, and keep standing and smiling. My son waves at me, and they set off. I wait until they have driven two blocks, and turn, out of sight.

I keep standing, and then trudge back. I close the door behind me. The house is quiet, barren, whitewashed white. No playpen in the living room, no rocker. No infant cooing in her crib, eyeing the bright and gentle mobile. Every day, as I close the door behind me and stand at the foyer, I look at the vacuous space around, and think that I could step out only because she is not here. I am back, and she is not here. This is supposed to be my alone time with her. And this is my time alone. Without her.

As I stand there, there is a strange whiteness, in my heart. Her absence, the white of bare. And yet, she is so wholly a part of my life that the white, from all the imaginary colors of her life stacked together, blinds me. No, I did not get the pink of girly cuteness. No, not for me the green eyeshadow from mother-daughter makeup experiments in the middle of the night. No yellow sunny face when her grades came out, or her college acceptance letters were here. No black and grey of rebellious teenage years, or the red her cheeks would be the day she announced that the love of her life had proposed. No, I would not get to choose the purple of her wedding saree, or the golden of her jewelry.

I did not get to walk with her on the colored paths of life, and see how the seasons change. Instead, I have a long, cold, white winter with her, where all colors are heaped in a whole, a sublime and monolithic white in my heart. The whole in the hole. There is white all around in her absence, in the blankness in my life. And there is white deep within, in her permanence in my heart.

As I stand there in silence, I don’t feel cold. My hands are cold, and they often look shriveled, like they have shrunk in size. I have to constantly reach for the hand butter. My feet are cold, and in serious need of a pedicure. My legs, my perpetual trouble zone, are cold too, under the cotton pajamas. My neck, where I diplomatically yet unwillingly house my sore voice, must be cold, as should my ears, which no longer are sharp enough to hear falling snow, and yet are always hearing strange sounds around the empty house. They are all in place in this winter appearance of mine. But I am thinking for someone else, if they touched me now. They would feel cold I know. For me, I don’t feel it. I sense the white. I feel frozen, never to be thawed again. But I don’t feel cold anymore.

Do you associate your loss with any particular color? What in your sensations have changed since your loss? What feelings have you left behind? What new feelings have settled into your body?

The never-ending story

The month after I got pregnant with A, I started a new job, New post-doc, same institution, different emphasis. My friend from the post-doc before this one started a new job that same summer. This semester now is the second of her seventh year at that job. Next fall she will be on sabbatical.

Perhaps it's the oddity of the academic culture in which I stew that seven year increments mean so much to me. Sabbatical, the time to not do what you are normally doing at the institution, but to still be paid your regular salary for the time is not a uniquely academic phenomenon anymore, but it is still mostly academic. It's a nice incentive and a chance to do something you don't usually get a chance to do-- learn something new, experiment with a new approach, or just catch up on everything you normally don't get to do.

In my religion too, though I don't very often participate in its formal rituals, 7 is a big deal. After all, we're the ones who started the whole day of rest thing, as God rested on the seventh day, having done all the heavy lifting in the first six. The idea for sabbatical itself comes from the Torah (Old Testament) rules about letting one's fields and one's people rest on the seventh year. 

Seven. Seven. Seven. It rings in my head with a strange wistfulness. He's not more gone over the precipice of seven than he was before it. So why does it gnaw on me so very much this snowy-snowy winter? Why do I find myself coming over to the fireplace mantle more often these days, just to glance at the little stuffed puppy we have that is sort of our A avatar, just to flick it on its nose, or to gently kiss the same? I miss him insanely, voraciously. I am sad, anew, maybe more now than before, that we didn't get to know him. Is this me missing him as a seven year old boy? I don't think I've felt this way about other ages before. Why now? I was remembering Monkey at seven the other day. She started competing in gymnastics that year. She seemed so very big to me then. The current crop of first year gymnasts seem so little.  

The Cub, the boy who came after A, he's five and a half now. He's grasping at the enormity of our collective loss, of his personal loss. This year, after asking for the upteenth time how and why A died, he got to the very edge of it-- "but we didn't even get to see him when he was big," he said, his voice ringing with indignation at the unfairness he just discovered. Yeah, kid, it's like that. And man, don't we all wish we would've gotten to see him when he was big.  

When we first started Glow, some of our readers were five years or even more out from the death of their children. I was a year and change. Five seemed so far removed, a lifetime or more. I thought that somehow it would be different at five. Or maybe I didn't. I sensed from the beginning that this is a lifetime commitment kind of a gig, at least for me. I remember saying and writing, even in that first year, that I expected to learn to live with this, but never expected to get over it. And I certainly have learned to live with A's absence a lot more now. These days I can get through a whole morning of classes without thinking about him. But then, to be fair, I also don't usually think about the rest of the clan during class.

So is this winter's intense longing just a part of ebb and flow, or was the thought of my friend's sabbatical also messing with my head? I know and I knew that grief can't be scheduled, that it does what it does when it must. But did a small strange part of me expect a grief sabbatical to roll in with the first day of February? I suppose it doesn't much matter except as another instance of proof that my son and my grief for him is, really and forever, a part of who I am.

What milestones have you crossed so far? Have they held any surprises for you?

Would you want a sabbatical from your grief, one that you could schedule or one that would come up on a predetermined schedule?   

balance

It doesn’t snow here very often.   Once every few years will we see the kind of snow that is currently blanketing our evergreen world in dove white.  It is lovely: quiet and peaceful in a way that feels temporary and fragile.  It won’t last more than another day.  It will melt away and ordinary life will begin again.  The abandoned cars, without chains and caught unprepared for the weather, will start disappearing as their operators return from wherever they escaped to when they finally gave up on spinning their wheels.  Muddy rivulets will replace the soft white snow and the brief interlude will disappear. 

But for now…

L-O-V-E-U is written in the snow in front of our sliding glass door.   My daughter is bundled up in a pink snowsuit.  Smoke billows from a thousand chimneys.  Kids zoom down the hills with neon sleds. 

It’s idyllic. 

Other than the ambulance parked outside of a house near ours.

I’m reminded, once again, that even something as beautiful as a winter blanketing of snow also holds its ravages. 

Thanks to books/blogs/stories and murmurs of women around me, I assumed that my pregnancy would be nothing but a beautiful experience.  Yes, there would probably be some nausea and swollen ankles but those would really be small in comparison to the magnitude of the beauty it would create.  I thought I was going to have that glow pregnant women supposedly have, as if the tiny new life inside of me would radiate warm light through my entire body. Pregnancy and birth were going to transform me into an ethereal goddess of life or some crap like that. 

Someone left out the part where it could be a disfiguring sledgehammer blow to the side of my head.

I’ve grown short-tempered with the culture surrounding birth and pregnancy in my sphere of life.   There is too much talk of the beauty and not enough acknowledgements of the ravages.   There is mindset that somehow, through shear willpower and determination, pregnancy and birth can be controlled and mastered.  They can be enlightening experiences through dedication and mindfulness.  I’m pretty sure that no amount of mindfulness, meditation, or breathing exercises could have ever made giving birth to my son only to watch him die twenty odd minutes later a more enlightening experience.  It is a luxury that we live in a culture where the outcome of a living baby is taken so much for granted that things such as birth plans and birthing methods have become of such import.  

Perhaps I’ve also grown too cynical over the last four years.  I know several people in my life that would probably agree with that statement.  Most pregnancies, at least in the world I am fortunate enough to live in, are beautiful.  Few suffer through the ravages that so much of the rest of the world commonly does.  I can’t help but think that if there was more balance given to the two in our cultural mindset that for those times when the sledgehammer swings those of us in its path would not be left feeling quite as surprised by the blow. 

What do you think about the pregnancy and birth culture surrounding you?  Birth plans, birth methods… Do you feel that there is a lack of education about the negative aspects of pregnancy and birth (and I am not referring to morning sickness and hip pain here)?  Do you feel silenced by a birth culture that seemingly puts a greater emphasis on the process of pregnancy and birth rather than the outcome? 

Community Voices: Grief is...

Today we are honored to present the writing of two more Glow readers.

Anne is a dancer, teacher, writer and non-profit arts administrator. Anne and her wife Burning Eye's first child Joseph was stillborn at 35 weeks in December, 2012. Some of her poetry is being published in the upcoming anthology "To Linger on Hot Coals" edited by Stephanie Page Cole and Catherine Bayly.

35/35

My poet’s brain never had much use for numbers and formulas—

preferring the symbolism, the metaphor,

of mass, gravity, planetary orbits, chemistry, heredity,

the tiny organs in that poor frog.

But now, in the aftermath of your short life,

I turn to science for solace, trying to find sense and reason,

or make it. 

I write poems about logic, Newton’s laws, math—

the equation never adds up. 

Still, I can’t stop measuring, comparing, weighing—

searching for meaning among misremembered facts,

proving your life with whatever symbols I can find.

Today, the days of your life rest delicately on one side of the scale,

balanced perfectly by the days of your absence. 

Tomorrow, the scale will start to tilt,

listing as the days keep piling up. 

You will always be more gone than here from now on, forever.

But maybe that perfectly balanced scale is an illusion,

an incomplete equation.

Surely, the scale tipped toward loss long ago—

as heavy as these days have been.

Or maybe your realness, the weight of you in our hearts,

still outweighs the loss of you—

the nothing that can never balance your substance.

This next piece is by Carolyn. Carolyn blogs at hangyourhopesfromtrees.wordpress.com. She writes: Lost my first baby to a miscarriage at 17 weeks. I find solace, as I've always done, in writing, art, and thick, wordy books. Finding hope, now, but still burdened often by my loss.

I dig my toes into the rocky incline. Looking down, I can see clouds hovering underneath me. I am high enough that the place where I began isn’t visible, grey and swirling storm. Up here, as I pull myself further, the sun shines upon my shoulders. The sky is a brilliant blue, hopeful, vibrant. I keep climbing, distancing myself from the stormy ground. I don’t know what the plateau above looks like, but I long for flat ground and stable footing. I reach up and grasp at a root emerging from the rock.

It snaps.

Suddenly, I am scrambling, rocks and dirt begin to funnel down around me, I slide, scraping my skin, dust grinding into my wounds. I am falling, slipping down this slope, wind howls in my ears and I plummet below the cloud cover, into the cold, torrential rain 

I came home from work today on shaky legs. I had a sense of panic. I was on edge. Everything seemed too bright, too real, too harsh. My eyes couldn’t adjust. I squirmed uncomfortably, I felt restless.

I caved. And I cried. 

It’s been months since I’ve broken like this. I can hardly recall the last time I sobbed under the weight of the world. I buckled in the grass, hot tears on my face. I pressed my head to the earth and wept.

I clutched at my firefly necklace and I begged God not to take anything more from me.

I composed myself, wandered inside and climbed into my bed.

I slept, shutting out my mind, retreating into a world of quiet.

I find myself halfway down that steep incline, wedged into the rock, covered in blood and gravel. I manage to crawl up onto my knees, rocks and grit piercing my wounded skin. My head reels, my vision weaves, distorted. I breathe deeply as the pouring rain pounds my soul. I breathe in this storm until my mind clears, my heart slows, I regain balance. I pull myself up to my feet, digging my hands into the dirt above. Slivers of blue sky are revealed to me, far above this tempest.

I reach up and begin the climb again.

These are the last two Community Voices posts for this round. We want to know what's on your mind, readers. We want to hear your voices. What questions are you asking yourself in the wake of your loss(es)? What questions are you asking of others?