glimpses
Today's post is the first from a new contributor to the Glow in the Woods family: Jen of There's a New Monarchy in Town.
Jen is a transplanted Canadian living in London, England, and a first-time mama in the first raw months of life without her daughter Sadie. She came on board as the 7th full-time medusa after writing to us to say 'thanks for being here', and 'I've completely lost my writing mojo' ...at which point we ambushed her to join our motley crew.
Please join us in giving Jen a glowing welcome--we're grateful to have her voice in our midst, and we hope you are, too.
I look back at photos from our four days in Vienna last month. Austria is damn nice, yes. And who knew it was so good at wine making? I loved the cathedral concert at dusk: Mozart and More. The end note of each song hanging in the air like it was up for grabs.
I like the tucked-away bar we stumble onto. The music is good here. The ceilings low, arched, stone. Peanut shells on the floor, wine savvy staff. We decide to sample the local stuff only.
Let’s have another.
.::.
We sit in a tiny room on tiny pastel sofas surrounded by four tiny white walls. Three, if you consider the one behind me is all windows. The view is the Thames and Big Ben. If you were in a restaurant you’d be pleased. Here, it’s nothing short of stifling. If you were me, across from the specialist who took care of her in those last hours, you’d want to scream back. He takes off his glasses to look at me squarely, Australian accent thick, and I wonder if he barely remembers. His words are clinical. I’ll bet the farm his own babies are alive and well.
“I don’t care if you believe it would have happened anyway. I would have taken however many more hours or days or weeks we’d have had with her if that nurse hadn’t moved her.”
It’s what I want to say.
Instead, I rock, shuddering through my sobs, conscious of the three sets of eyes fixed on me as I struggle to recover. I yank two, three more tissues from the box beside me angrily. I stay silent. I feel weak and my voice has forgotten how to work.
.::.
I am comfortable enough now that my confidence has grown as steadily as my indignation. I am here to work. Why are you looking at Facebook? Why are you complaining about someone else before you’ve even proven yourself? Why can’t someone give me the answer?
I smile. I put in 11 hour days on occasion. I think about the possibilities. I dream of what I was meant to be doing.
.::.
She would have been six months old on August 20th. I tried in vain to not imagine what she’d look like, what milestones she would have reached. I am okay, then I’m not, and then I am again. Okay being a different, different place these days. Grief, like an unwanted tagalong, saunters alongside me daily. She is vindictive in the way she chooses the most inopportune times to surface. I thought Sorrow was only a word used in love poems that include, ‘hither’ and ‘unrequited’.
Not so much.
If you have ever wanted to see what damaged goods look like, look no further.
.::.
We have been sitting in the garden for five hours or more, and the table is now a sea of glass, empty and full. I look from my brother to my friends and back to my husband. I laugh heartily and often, and realize in the back of my mind that this is where hope lies: among family and friends, new and old. I am grateful and then in the next breath I am homesick.
I am the luckiest unlucky girl.
.::.
While I took the four hour round trip to Luton and back to reclaim my passport, he went to our favourite place. Waited for me, had a beer in the pub that was once a jail. He is proud and a bit secretive of the contents of his shopping bag. I am always in awe at how much this process pleases him.
Later, he serves a stunning plate of monkfish wrapped in bacon. I fold my pajama’d legs under me and tuck in. Tastes like lobster. Baby squash, peppers, asparagus sauteed next to the sweetest new baby potatoes I’ve ever tasted. I wonder if there are two people in the room who have missed their calling. He raises his glass.
‘Cheers. To the future, whatever it may hold.'
.::.
Fleeting moments of "happiness" continue to catch me off guard. Do you remember the first time you laughed, or felt hope for the future, after your child's death? Did you feel guilty for allowing yourself to do so?
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It is so, so strange to enter the world of the 'normal' again. Coming up for air is weird enough - simply getting through a day without crying - but it's much weirder to actually find yourself laughing.
And here you are, going through all that on top of considering another try, drumming up faith... it's such a tangle of emotions.
But you have your friends, and your partner, and you can still taste good food. This is a start. This is something.
I'm so glad you're here, Jen. xo
xo
Laughing came quickly for me. In fact, many of my memories from my hospital stay are of trying not to laugh. Everything seemed funny- the ever increasing portions of peas in my hospital dinners, the slapstick comedies we watched to pass the time. Of course, in the few days following a C-section, laughing was physically excruciating, and maybe that's why it came so easily. Almost as punishment.
It was one of the only times in my life that laughing was paired with unhappiness.
But true happiness, that's still elusive. Hope is fleeting. Like you, sometimes I'm okay, then I'm not, then I am again. I can function to a point; my day to day life is moving along, but it feels like I'm detached from it, merely going through motions waiting to feel again.
At the end of July I went out for drinks with some girlfriends. It was warm and busy and alive, and we ran into some old friends from university. That night was special. It was a flashback into years past, and it felt natural, real. I was happy that night, but it immediately vanished as my car weaved home, back into the present. I didn't feel guilty. I felt like I was living two parallel existances.
I have hope in hope though. That someday I will hope again. Right now the future is too daunting, too scary.
But joy has been more elusive. Last month I wept as we TTC for the first time since Duncan died. Even though I am fertility-challenged, I felt certain during that TTW I was pregnant on the first try, because the univerise, it OWED ME ONE. Turns out I wasn't, but during those two weeks, the possibility of joy, the hope of it, kept peeking out, and I kept struggling to reconcile my ongoing grief over the loss of one child, and the blessings of the arrival of another.
To answer your question, the first time I really laughed was probably on my second day in the hospital. My coworkers came over and they lifted my spirits, but it hurt so bad because my muscles hadn't yet recovered from the c-section. Although I laugh, I don't feel completely happy. I have moments when I think that everything will be ok, and then Grief strikes and suddenly all is hopeless once again. I do have hope, hope that I will be happy again; hope that I will have a living child. But right now I'm too terrified for all things that may not happen, or things that could go wrong, to give into that hope.
I agree that laughter and joy are not the same. During Noah's entire life and since he passed, my pain is interuptted by laughter. I am human, you eventually have to laugh or you would never survive the traumas of life. Joy is elusive to me. Pure joy does not come easily for me. Joy is always tainted with sorrow in my world. When I am most happy and proud of Monkey, the sorrow creeps back in. There should be two.
Guilt is something I live with daily. When I am with Monkey or out with friends and I realize that I haven't thought of Noah, I feel it. I have not learned how to let the guilt go. Noah doesn't want me to feel this way. He wants me to feel joy for his twin's life and the life he lived. I am working on it..
welcome. we're better for having you.
I laughed on the evening my daughter died. I'd spent the evening in a special room with her, allowing family to come in and hold her and say goodbye. The last family members to come in were my two sisters; one of whom was pregnant. Unfortunately she'd partaken of pizza before coming in to see Jordan. When she held Jordan she started sobbing...her sobbing caused her to retch and I had just enough time to shove a near empty box of tissues under her face whilst my sister swooped in and slid my little girl out of her arms before she started vomiting. Crying and vomiting.
Unbelievably, shamefully... I laughed but only because I knew she was suffering morning sickness. When my sisters heard me laughing...they laughed. And it made my poor sister retch again. It was ridiculously inappropriate.
It was a bizarre moment that I will never forget.
So odd, I've spent the entire day trying to convince a political blogger I read that it is possible, and even a survival technique, to laugh when dealing with death...and most of them on the thread didn't believe me. They think everyone involved should be stern and solemn and prefer to think of grieving parents as eternally wearing black, all delicately crumpled up in a heap at their feet.
But never ever laughing.
I got through most of my losses by making really really sick jokes, in between screaming and crying and being angry. Laughing helped me feel better. For just a moment. Dumb jokes, bizarre observations, strange things. Anything.
It wasn't until my next daughter joined the family that I truly found myself laughing and meaning it, smiling and wearing it by choice, and enjoying life again. It was a long four years until I could get there. Of course I find that grief sticks tightly around even after most of the wound heals. And the pain I call phantom (like from losing a limb) never goes away. I still have days where the happiness leaves and lets me dwell in my sadness for a time and there I can feel it all again. Times when the laughs and smiles slide from my face and shatter on the floor, but thankfully I can say they are fewer and further apart and I can easily find new ones when I need to. At times I still feel like I shouldn't be laughing because it isn't me, but I need to for the children I have that are here now and needing a mother who laughs, smiles, and plays along with them. I'm glad they've given me this chance to truly be happy again.
I realized fairly shortly afterwards that laughing did not equal joy, and eating did not equal taste. Because my husband and I deal with life through humor, it was rather inevitable that we fall back on it here. Even though it often rang hollow, and was the epitome of gallows humor, and often made the other burst into tears through the hic-ups of laughter. But Joy? I can honestly say I'm not sure I've experienced true, unadulterated joy of any sort in 19 months. The kind that makes you swell and smile inside instantaneously. Happy? Yes. Joy? Still looking.
It was a very bitter laugh but I still think it's funny (I'm still bitter too!). Happiness and hope for the future come and go since then and I never feel guilty for feeling happy. I know I will become depressed again so I enjoy the good times thoroughly!
Yes, I got caught off guard, felt guilty for laughing. But those laughs were more a "vent", a coping mechanism, more than it is a true expression of joy. I feel lighter now, and less guilty, because I do not think my son wants to strangle me from joy forever, It's all up to me, whether I choose to be happy or not. I do not want to make him that taint on my quest for happiness. I did experienced so much joy and grace and beauty when carrying him.