am I okay?

Please help me in welcoming Gretchen to Glow in the Woods. Gretchen writes at Lost Boys and Bearings about the loss of her infant son Zachary, as well as the earlier stillbirth of her son B.W., and the compound grief these two losses have brought her, her husband B, and her living son, C.T. Her writing is raw and honest, and speaks to the stark emotional landscape we wander through in our grief. When I read her writing, I find myself nodding, yes, yes, yes, recognizing some aspect of my own grieving self in each piece. It is this ability to see ourselves in each other--no matter how hard the story may be to read--that helps us stumble through this dark woods to find refuge among the other medusas. Here, we do not feel so alone. We are honored to include Gretchen's voice now among Glow's regular contributors. —Burning Eye

It has been almost fifteen months since Zachary died…, and somehow, eight and a half years since B.W. died.  

My desperate, irrational pleadings for Zachary, for anything but this again, have softened ever so slightly in the last month or so.  My inability to cope with the horrific details of how his health deteriorated so violently and unexpectedly has lulled to quiet missing and mourning and the occasional outburst of anger.  Which is not to be confused with acceptance.  I seem to function pretty well with the very basic, daily tedium of life, especially when I am careful to protect myself from obviously triggering situations.  I allow myself to grieve, often.  I try to keep busy.  I hide or avoid when I need to.  I try not to let the insensitivity and ignorance of others lead me down a path of fury and resentment.   Still, I sometimes fall apart with the reality of his death.

I wonder if I’m doing okay.      

Now, well into this second year after Zachary’s death, the undercurrent of my grief seems to have morphed into a dull, aching feeling of wrongness.  It’s a heaviness that I drag around with me all day, every day.  I hold it up against anything good, anything perceived as important or worthwhile, and then I inspect the combination to see if the net effect is still negative, still meaningless.  As of now, it usually is.  Someone will say something very casual, something like gosh, it’s such a beautiful day today.   I nod and agree, because it’s just not worth it to disagree with such benign small talk, but the words, the sentiments built into the phrase, mean nothing to me.  I still can’t comprehend why or how nice weather should feel good when Zachary is dead. 

Sometimes the unrelenting heaviness feels worse than the initial shock, disbelief and horror - I suppose because it now feels more real and permanent.  Zachary really suffered.  He is really dead and not coming back.  I know it in my bones now and it feels oh so wrong.  I have to live with the flashbacks, the regret and the anger.  He will never again learn and grow and experience the love we have for him.  I will never again have the privilege of witnessing and nurturing his development, of delighting in who he becomes.   People really aren’t going to say his name regularly.  They don’t feel the heaviness; they aren’t tormented by the wrongness.   Their day to day lives were not affected, not permanently damaged, because my son suffered and died. 

I wonder if I will ever learn to really live again, despite his death.    

I don’t know what I need from my support network of family and friends anymore.  It’s apparent that many are tiring of my grief and my need for solitude. They are frustrated that I don’t have the heart to care very much about, or participate in, what’s going on in their lives.  I can feel it.  They rarely ask how I’m doing anymore.  When they do ask, I find that, for a variety of reasons, it’s not usually an ideal time to respond in a way that honors my grief.  I end up having a lot of surface interactions and I’m left wondering if people even still recognize how much I am hurting and just how much we have lost.  On the rare occasion that time and space are intentionally dedicated, and I am able talk about Zachary and my grief, I am well aware that most listeners are going to have a hard time understanding and relating.  When I open up, I see that my words aren’t hitting home, that something, the thing itself most often, is almost completely lost in translation.  They try, and I try, and it continues to be difficult. 

I wonder if I will always feel so alone. 

I’ve been trying to occupy some of my free time with a few new pursuits.  I left my long-time corporate job just before Zachary was born, and now here I am with no real desire to go back to the stressful job I had and no Zachary to take care of during the hours that C.T. is in school.  My mother-in-law and I worked together on a few sewing projects over the course of the last eight weeks, one of which was a valance for my corner kitchen window.  When we installed them, she affirmed over and over again how pretty they looked, what a difference they made in the room.  I was proud of myself for fighting the apathy I feel and following through, but even with her prompting, I had trouble drumming up any real enthusiasm for the final product.  There was a letdown, some strange sadness, about finishing a project for the house that Zachary never came home to. 

I wonder if I will ever be truly passionate about something again.    

I still fantasize about running away from my life, away from the good schools and thriving downtown and family fun and recreation of my Midwestern suburb.  I know it would be impossible to escape my grief, but my new reality just doesn’t fit here anymore.  While other families were dressing in pastels for family photos on Easter, I was despondent, thinking how cruel it would be to ask C.T. to pose for a photo with our two memorial lily plants, his makeshift brothers.  My instinct to “include” B.W. in this kind of holiday photo-op came more easily when it was just one dead brother, but it is just too awful, too much, now that Zachary is dead too.  I don’t know how to tell Zachary’s story, on top of B.W.’s story, amidst the happy-go-lucky who call this place home.  I find that I’m drawn to imagining myself living in a place that is less idyllic, where life is not so nauseatingly easy and wonderful.  If it weren’t for my living son, C.T., by now I probably would have convinced my husband that we need to give up everything we’ve worked for to become aid workers in a third world country. 

I wonder if this sounds crazy.   

*****

I do the best I can to cope with my grief.  At times I’m discouraged, maybe even a little ashamed, at the lack of hope, optimism and enthusiasm I am able to muster, when I compare myself to other bereaved parents I know or read about.   I remember when their narratives, the ones I perceive at least - of rising from the ashes, with some adjusted or renewed form of hope - was more closely aligned with my own.  Now I have lost a whole other son and I’m not finding I am as agile or eager to adapt to a new life again. 

At this point, I just want to know I wouldn’t be characterized as totally beyond repair.

Are you okay? What grief undercurrents exist for you, now? What do you question or wonder about your grief?  

Time

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot drawing near …

Andrew Marvell, urging his lady love, to seize the day and love right now, love like the end of time, the end of life, is imminent. Andrew Marvell, among my favorite Metaphysical Poets, inscribing in burning letters, the fears of mortality in my consciousness, in my 19^th Autumn. And so, as my entire class, in their final teenaged year, erupted to seize the day, the insecurity that lay securely in the inevitability of oblivion, gripped me.

At nineteen, I stopped hearing the call of the wild. I could not hear the ringing of bells, or the sound of music. I could only hear the hooves of approaching horses, against the cracking earth, as the dust behind them covered what went before, and what would come after. I could hear time. I could hear it ticking like a bomb.

And since then, everything I have felt, e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g I have done, has been axed into shape, paired in perfect unison, with my panic for my mortality. “We will all be dead someday, and we will become strangers. I will NEVER see my loved one again. My Mom, my husband. They will all become strangers. Like we never knew each other.” I would hear these words, and those hooves, over and over again, as I tried to show affection, make calls, write notes, pack lunch, submit papers, walk after a c-section, wake up to breastfeed – all with an urgency, and all with tremendous commitment. Like it was my last chance, the last time.

Until it really was the last time. And I did not know.

For once in years of reflexes built on the acute consciousness of time running out before I thought, did, showed, spoke, and wrote enough, time did not talk to me, as my instincts drowned in an hour-long slumber that July morning. No longer did its winged chariot kick up blinding dust, as my daughter’s tiny heart stopped beating. As it screeched to a halt, a spiraling, yet irreversibly motionless halt, time stopped along with it. 

And yet, over this past year and half, I have been made aware of time’s role, its character, on various occasions, in myriad ways. The healer, they say it is. If not directly, they indirectly refer to its motion, in asking me if I am better, in wishing me well into my 38^th autumn on earth, in trying to remind me how I used to weave thoughts into words because I believed in posterity. My friends, my well wishers, are all reliant on time, faithful devotees in prayers to its power to "heal" me.

At home, I am aware of its motion still. It does not move for me, but it does for a little boy, who emerged from my ripened belly five years ago tomorrow. As he is now able to count “up to a hundred,” and measures everything in hundreds, he often asks me how big he will be when he is four hundred years old. Will he be too old, he wonders. If he is growing a few inches every year, he may even touch the roof when he is hundred! And always, always, he is sad that he is growing up. “Why is there no end to counting,” he asks me. He thinks we count on and on, and we live on and on. That death is not inevitable, it seldom happens at random. The son, the only living child of a once-mortality-fearing paranoid woman, he does not know about mortality yet.

And then there is the new year. A friend gets married on New Year’s Eve, there is a party, everyone is hugging and kissing their loved ones, as they almost visibly, almost palpably, step on to another capsule of time. In their midst stands an odd family. They don’t hug. They huddle. They somehow measure time in distance, that time-space singularity maybe? They see the year as one step farther from 2013, the only year their smallest member lived. They do not understand anything more. They don’t think it’s a fresh start, a new beginning, another walk on earth. They know as the clock strikes twelve, that they have now completed a full calendar year without her. In this new year, just like in the one just gone by, they just want to be spared.

Over this past year and half, I have realigned my strained relationship with time. I have questioned why I am suddenly not aware of its relentless motion, and yet I feel I am sinking deep into its pit every moment. I have wondered why I sometimes feel all of it is lost, and sometimes I believe I have all the time in the world. I have reassessed all my thoughts and actions in relation with time, wondering how much of life is contained in the amount of time it takes to live it. And how much life is carried in the amount of time one did not get to live it.

A collection of moments. A wreathe of the past, present, and future. Often linear. Oftener cyclical. Flying on a winged chariot, sucking into a shapeless hole. I have sought its meaning, wondering why it has not “healed,” nor made me “feel better.” I needed to know why it has forsaken me.

And then I did. Find. An. Answer. I saw that the future, that ongoing journey of hope and brightness, should be my daughter’s walk. She is my future, she is the meaning of time. After I have had my children, my time is with reference to them. I am 38 because my son is going to be five. I am tired because my son is getting bigger. I need to brush up my math because he is beginning to count. I should have been thirty seven when my daughter walked, and thirty eight and half when she talked. I should have been a fifty-year-old mom to a fourteen-year-old daughter, and a seventeen-year-old son. Now, THAT would be some meaningful time.

Instead, she is not walking, or talking, or wearing lipstick at fourteen. I am walking into time, without a reference to my life. My parents, my past. My spouse, my present. My children, my future. Half of my future is gone. I am scared to dream of the other half.

The winged chariot is drawing near still. But it is slowly creeping up on me. I am no longer aware of it, no longer scared by it, no longer instinctively a seizer of the day.

I am instead a floater, a sinker, a directionless thinker. A lost painter in the wilderness of time, merely trying to etch a permanent path between the moments I had with my daughter, and an eternity without her.

What does time mean to you after the loss of your child(ren)? What have you heard from others regarding time's power on loss, and how do you think about it?

here (again)

Twice-bereaved mother Gretchen, of Lost: Boys and Bearings, is our guest writer today.  After her first son B.W. was stillborn in 2006, life was shattered and then slowly and arduously rebuilt.  In January of 2014, Gretchen's third son Zachary was born prematurely but almost fully expected to survive and thrive.  On Zachary's eighth day of life, he contracted a bacterial infection in the NICU environment.  At fourteen days old, after suffering tremendously and having graced his family with more love than they ever imagined, Zachary died. It is our distinct pleasure to have Gretchen writing at Glow today.

It is strange and surreal and brutal to be here again. Now, after having lost our son Zachary, on top of having lost our son B.W. more than seven years previous, here is at once eerily familiar and completely foreign.  

I remember this flavor of devastation so intimately. The raw, desperate longing for my son. The instantaneous shattering of all that was, of long-held, treasured beliefs, of an entire imagined future. The unmistakable reinforcement that the universe will dole out some horrific shit, with no regard for merit or implication. The deep, aching sorrow, the guilt, the anger, the inability to make sense of any of it. And over the course of several years, the clawing back, the attempt to create a new meaningful life despite the tremendous and permanent loss.      

At the same time, I don’t recognize at all where I am now. In the aftermath of watching Zachary unexpectedly suffer and die, the devastation on top of seven-year-old, scabbed-over devastation, the absurdity of what I’m living now, is a nearly indescribable low. Two of my three children are dead.  Just as I had learned to really embrace life again, Zachary died. I am doubled down with grief, mocked and shamed at having hoped again. The grief work I did to assimilate B.W.’s death into my life feels absolutely irrelevant. Wasted. The patches I created and tended to in those years after B.W.’s death don’t even begin to cover the newly broken and reinjured places. 

I don’t think I can (or dare to) muster the same resilience this time, after Zachary has died. What’s the point when I fully expect to be violently pummeled again? The loss of one child felt random, but I find that I can’t relate to the concept of randomness anymore. The loss of my two children, to two completely different set of circumstances, no longer feels random. I glance around in terror now, paranoid and panicked about a target on my back or on the backs of my husband or living son.   

I can’t fathom who I am, can’t imagine what my future looks like, anymore. What I used to think of as my after—the me who emerged in the years after B.W.’s death—now looks as unfamiliar as my before looked, just one year ago when Zachary was still alive.    

*****

Every Tuesday, my living son C.T., comes home from school to report who will be the next Top Banana in his first grade class. The name is drawn randomly out of a bowl and the selected student, the Top Banana, is to prepare a poster about himself, his family, and share it with the class the following week. This is not an unfamiliar exercise for us, having participated in a variation of the idea in both kindergarten and preschool. Preparing for it has never been the effortless, mostly fun activity that I assume it is for most other kids and parents. Nonetheless, we have always found a way to incorporate B.W. into C.T.’s poster and into his somewhat rehearsed comments about his family. 

Before Zachary died, C.T. would say that there was a brother he never knew who came before him. That B.W. was a loved and cherished brother and family member, even though he was dead. He would mention one of the special things we do in B.W.’s memory each year. He would share how we light a candle for him every night at dinner. It was never easy, never painless, and always a bit anxiety-inducing for the three of us. But, each year up until this one, we walked away from the experience with a bittersweet sigh of relief, satisfied that C.T. was able to share honestly about his family, and this one sad thing in his life.

I just cannot fathom how we will do it this year when C.T. is chosen as the Top Banana. As open and innocent and curious as children tend to be, there is no way we can feasibly pretty this up for presentation. Not anymore. How will C.T. get up in front of his classmates and explain that he is now flanked by dead brothers? Only dead brothers. After watching Zachary suffer and die this year, his two week-old brother, his only living sibling, yanked from his life so cruelly—really, HOW will we paint an acceptably positive picture of this, for C.T. to share with his class? 

After Zachary died, C.T. has said how sad and angry he feels to hear his classmates talk about their living siblings. He knows what a massive mockery it is to be here, to have lost Zachary too.

Is your grief reminiscent of, or compounded by, other devastating blows in your life?  Where do you find yourself in your grief journey?  How do your living children cope, when sharing about life/family is required?  

a house named grief

Today's guest post comes from Samantha Lyons. She writes, "I am a 25 year old childless mother. I was expecting my first son, a healthy boy grown in a healthy pregnancy, March 23rd, 2014. I delivered him March 27th 'Still.' Cord accident." Samantha blogs at Life After Hayden.

There is a house named Grief filled up like hoarding with all that I cannot have,

which will never belong to me.

Under every floorboard soft blue bonnets and neatly folded sleepers.

In every crevasse crumbs of poignancy.

In every window stains of steamy crying and hot tears.

If you listen closely you can hear the young woman wailing.

Stacks in every room from floor to ceiling of your graduation, your first step, kindergarten finger paintings and that first birth cry I never got to hear.

You can’t walk through the halls you have to hover, there is no room left for feet.

I boarded up the tiny closet, inside the words “No Heartbeat”.

On the front porch an old wicker chair is rocking. It waits for you, it wants to put you to sleep at sunset.

Nothing grows in the garden, and the trembling Weeping Willow on the lawn is me.

On the door there is a frantically painted red mark. I screamed in the night searching for the animal, the offering.

I pleaded and bargained and offered trades of all sorts.

Please not this, anything but this.

I am too late.

It has already taken the first-born son who lived here.

What is in your grief-house? What have you done with the things--the clothes, the rocking chair--that were to belong to your baby who died?

the mother, the spectre and the bargaining crone.

This post is a reflection on my sense of self before baby loss and after and the effect that Freddie's death has had on that. I was a stay at home parent of young children before I had him and my life therefore revolved around the trappings of that life. There is some mention of how I was shaped by ordinary pregnancy and birth as well as infant loss. Please bear that in mind before reading if you are in a sensitive phase of loss.

Once it defined me, my knowledge, my experience, my hoard of stories, grim and detailed.

Once I huddled in gaggles of mothers and gossiped  - heartless midwives, empty threats of dead babies. I thrashed through birth trauma, postnatal depression, botched, unsatisfactory deliveries. My ill-used body, caught in the nets of a harried medical system that sucked me in, processed my heaving body, signed me out alive, with scant regard for my soul or sanity.

Those things, the worst that could happen, consumed the centre of my wounded being. All encompassing, damaging, poisoned.

All talked out, gradually growing around and through the pain, I became something new.

****

Once it defined me, my knowledge, my experience, my hoard of stories, gritted teeth and battles won.

Once I huddled in flocks of mothers engrossed in motherhood - failed breastfeeding, sleepless nights, babies born with challenges (I will not call them small, not even now) to be overcome. We loaded laundry and knew not the value of the little people in our care. The minutae of the tedium was our currency of connection.

I had no idea how lucky I was. I do not hold myself responsible for that.

And, all talked out, we grew, moved on. Stories rolled and rubbed and took on the sheen of a well fumbled pebble, soft, smooth, snag-less.

****

I became something new; lacking nonchalant patter, I formed an armoury of parenthood, my tales the scales of my skin. A persona grew, I became the mother people love or hate, who fought the battles, won and lost and emerged confident, skilled and with all the answers I needed. I believed in me.

I do not begrudge myself that confidence. It was good while it lasted.

****

And it all came tumbling down. In the screaming silence of the birthing room without a cry, I lost every opinion I had ever had about birth and babies. In the humming heat of SCBU, I lost everything I knew about parenting. I couldn't help him. I didn't know the language, couldn't do the procedures, couldn't choose when to hold him, might hurt him if I did.

No time to learn.

My outer shell smashed and washed away, all my conversation, all my wrath and passion, all my innocence and ignorance. I didn't know I had that.

****

When I lost my son, when I crumbled him to dust, consigned him to a memory, I also lost myself, my role, my place in society. A core was left, naked and bruised.

****

No one wants the baby lost mother. We are not welcome. We are the spectre - festering and infectious. Who would want my knowledge? It is tainted by Freddie's death, despite the four before him. I would run a mile from me. Who would chat to me about birth and babies, fearing to see me cry,  hoping that "please god, she doesn't mention HIM again!"? Who would believe my nappy choice might be right when I let my baby die? Who would believe I had knowledge about breastfeeding when I couldn't even tell he was sick before he lived.

I see the recoil even if it never comes. I see the blank weariness as they wait for me to find a reason to mention him. I see myself, hovering in their joy and deserved naivety, spoiling the thrill of the moment. I imagine myself tainting their hope, excitement. I imagine them making the opposite choice to mine, hoping to ward off the devil.

I cannot ever re-enter that world. I will distance myself even from my daughters when their time comes, hoping - irrationally - to not remind them of the brother who died.

****

So, crone like, my gift is to the girl I once was, to all mothers who never walk a harder path than tired out drudgery.

I will try not curl my lip at those with no reason to know better. I will not belittle them because their path has not been strewn with ashes and they know not that ashes can arrive in a tiny box with an etched brass plate. I will not deride them for a merry life with smaller hurts and smaller mountains to climb.

I envy them. I'm glad for them. With gritted teeth I will smile for them and the rose-tinted life they lead. I do not want them to know this pain. And I will barter my forgiveness of their lack of understanding for the gift of no future grief in this family.

If I could. If only I could.

How do you feel about the person you were before loss arrived in your life? Do you miss that person? Would you have that person back? How do you feel about people who have not experienced loss and their world view? Has it changed over time, have you become  more or less tolerant about ignorance of loss?