Grief, suspended. Grief controlled?

My grandmother died two weeks ago. A few hours shy of two weeks actually.

The phone call from my sister broke time in a way we are all familiar with. It really shouldn't have, probably-- it had been a long time coming. She wasn't well, as a matter of fact she wasn't herself. She had Alzheimer's. But physically she was relatively strong. She'd had bouts of infection and a few other things, any one of which probably could've killed her if not for profound attention her daughters paid to every little change. Some weeks before she died a blood test revealed that she probably had some kind of cancer, but given her condition nobody wanted to put her through invasive tests to figure out exactly what kind it was. Her daughters signed her up with hospice. About six months was their prediction. Even that was hard on the daughters. In the end, her end was a lot gentler than her last several years.

The last several years were awful. Watching a strong person diminish is never easy. Watching a strong person lose themselves, lose their understanding of who surrounds them, lose all their bearings in the world is a particular pain, made worse when you are the caretaker. My mom and my aunt kept trying to relate to their mother, and their mother wasn't there. That made it worse.

My rabbi visited us in the hospital, when I was being induced. My son still in me, we talked about funeral arrangements. She explained the Jewish custom of quick burial by quoting from sacred text: "[y]ou can not be comforted while your dead lie before you." I've thought about this a lot during my grandmother's decline. Removed somewhat from the situation, I could accept a lot earlier than my mom could just how little of the woman we knew remained in the woman my mom was faithfully caring for.

My grandmother, in her time, took care of her own sick and dying mother for many more years than what her daughters ended up doing for her. But my great-grandmother had a stroke and lost her mobility. She was still herself, and so she died when she died. In contrast, I can tell you when my grandmother's body died. I can't tell you when she left, not really. It's been a long time since she recognized anyone. Yet mere weeks before she died, she had a good day when she seemed to know who everyone in the family was. One good hour, really.

So over the course of the last four years, my family had to slowly let go of my grandmother. Expectations, understandings. Memories. Things that bind us together. Bit by bit. Two weeks ago the definitive, indisputable end. Before that? Strange state of suspended grief. Her daughters didn't have their mother anymore. But I don't think they knew how to grieve that, and they didn't really have time for it anyway-- they were her dedicated caretakers, after all.

This story is the opposite of most perinatal death stories. We rarely get any warning, and even those of us who do are never prepared-- we're supposed to be raising them, not burying them. My grandmother had a hard life, full of pain and loss. But she also had a rich life, full of joy and love. She was in her late 70s before her mind started going. My daughter knew her, and even if she doesn't now remember most of their interactions before the onset of the bad part of the disease, she has a sense of her great grandmother. We chose her casket because that color and even the spare details on it was the kind of wood furniture she liked. We knew what she liked. The opposite, you know?

We now know that she realized things were going wrong, and to cope, while she still could, she wrote notes to herself. That makes perfect sense-- too proud to tell anyone, but determined to manage.

My grandmother came to visit us along with my parents and aunt and uncle for Monkey's fifth birthday. That was less than six weeks after A died. While here, she asked to see A's pictures. I now think of that as the very last thing I can confidently say she did as fully herself. After she'd seen them, it seems she let go. Even during that trip, she was not the same after the pictures that she was before. I think she must've written a note to herself about A, about asking for the pictures. Either that or she willed herself to stay fully with it until she did. Task completed, she could let go of the enormous work it took to hold on. (She did not disappear completely after that, but she was less present, and for less time. And for a while after, she remembered A-- she'd talk to my mom about how sad it was.) That's the kind of backbone that defined her. And it took one hell of a disease to be stronger than that.

We took Monkey with us to the funeral and the burial. We didn't take her, less than five years old at the time, with us to A's. She still tells us we were wrong in that decision. She probably always will. She's never been to a funeral, in fact. I think my grandmother's was a sort of a proxy for her. She got to see the casket put in the ground, the kaddish recited, she got to see and hear the dirt hitting the casket-- the hollow sound of finality, of indisputable end. From the safe distance of four plus years and her great-grandmother's eighty three and a half, she could imagine her brother's funeral. The rabbi and the funeral director were incredibly kind to her, and that helped too.

She's perceptive. She gets the difference. She knows great grandmothers die, and it's sad, but it is how life works (though she is not exactly happy about this). Little brothers shouldn't be dying, but hers did, and it's a different kind of pain and grief. And yet, she also gets that sometimes the differences matter very little. We were talking about the different kinds of sad, and that though it is how it is, it is still sad for me that my grandmother died. "It's [my grandma]'s mom" she said, as her eyes got bigger with recognition of the enormity of the loss for someone else. Yes, she was.

Have you encountered death since your child's? How has it been for you?

Kindred Spirits?

A month or so ago, in the space of about 10 days, two women I know lost step-children to gun violence. In two completely separate instances (in two different states), two teenagers lost their lives in broad daylight for no other reason than being in "the wrong place at the wrong time."

When I say I know these women, I should clarify: I've never had either over for coffee. But I see one almost daily, weather permitting, and we chit chat about weather and kids and such; and the other I see in her professional setting when I happen to be there and we are on a hello basis. But it really doesn't matter how near or far I hold these women: children died.

I don't claim to know what it is they're going through -- I have no fucking idea. One woman I hugged, said I was sorry, asked if there was anything I could possibly do, asked to please express my condolences to her husband. I felt trite and superficial and wondered if I should have said something deeper and more meaningful. I wondered what on earth that something could be. For the other woman, I attended a memorial service for her daughter. I hugged her tightly twice, and told her as briefly as possible that I understood the very outer parameters of what she might be feeling, and could relate to much in the service. She said she'd like to call me.

These deaths have made me feel extremely small, and extremely . . . lucky. I at least got to set the terms of my daughter's death (to a degree), and she died in my arms.  She did not die violently, she likely felt no pain. I said what I needed to say to Maddy even if she likely heard not one word of it. She did not die in view of the world, in the headlines. These parents have none of that peace.

Since Maddy died, I feel a strange sort of connection to parents whose children die in war, or die in gun violence, or die in car crashes. Or jump off bridges, or accidentally step off cliffs, or fall victim to being on the wrong Duck Boat on the wrong afternoon in the middle of the Delaware River. Just this past weekend, the local headlines blared the death of a child in a house fire. We are not remotely the same these parents and I; I can't claim to have any idea what it is they might be feeling.

And yet. What used to be some otherworldly Shakespearean-type tragedy glimpsed peripherally between the day's political news and the comics now hits very close to home. I now stop to pour over these stories, and the language is so similar -- the grief so familiar in it's outline. These parents hang on to times and places. There was the man who kept his son's watch set to Iraq time. Time. That bastard. It doesn't stop for us. It keeps going. Even where your child fell for the last time. The mom who sat in a lawn chair, simply being in the presence of a cold piece of granite bearing her child's name. Parents who try desperately to have something positive come out of their most horrific experience through scholarship funds and concerts and road races. The pictures, the shrines, the tears.

I don't know. I can't possibly. And yet once, while listening to a program about mothers of fallen soldiers who congregate at Arlington cemetery, I had to fight every fiber in my being not to whip my car in a U-Turn, hop on 95, and drive three hours to see if they were there.

As a historian who spent a fair amount of time studying war, I've always felt I at least understood Memorial Day and observed it to the best of my ability. I realized after Maddy died that I didn't have a fucking clue. Three Memorial Days ago, the remembrances in the paper and solemnly on my radio -- that I absorbed on my way to a family picnic -- broke me in two. I asked my husband, who was driving, if he felt like continuing on the road to a small Pennsylvania town where the son of the man speaking on our radio was buried. He said he did, but we had another commitment. We did decide that we both needed to do something more on this day, now that we at the very least could hear what people were saying.

We have yet to formalize our observance in any significant way. But this holiday now strikes perilously close to home for the both of us. We do spend time thinking of it's meaning. And all of the parents who who received the worst possible news and then spent the remainder of their lives tending gravestones instead of grandchildren.

I'm loathe to call such new awareness a "gift" because Maddy's death was simply a tragedy and I've come to decide I don't need to peel any good away from it unless it beats me on the head. I certainly don't need to look for it in order to understand it. But it left me with a new frame of reference, a new vocabulary, new metaphors, fluent in a language that I now recognize instantly. Because I may not know what they're going through at all, but I understand what they're saying. About missing, and promise, and a future without. About having a child permanently frozen in time as a child, never to progress.  About mourning dreams. About having to move through time (that bastard!) while the milestones rain down like an avalanche of boulders.

In the memorial service I attended for the young woman, people spoke about continuing the speak the child's name, associating her death now and forever with a season (Fall), and not wanting to find joy in what was left, but simply wanting her. I have never been good at languages, finding all the rules too easily malleable and forgetful. Here, for perhaps the one time in my life, I felt I grasped everything said while everyone else sat rather uneasily, shifting in their seats, trying to comprehend the sounds and locate sympathetic similes within their life stories.  I got it all.

And yet, I have absolutely no idea.

I just felt horribly sorry for the parents, and wondered what on earth one said to another at a time like this.

How do you feel when you encounter other parents -- either in person or via the news -- whose older children have died? How has it made you feel about your own grief and circumstances? Do you find their situations -- with children older than babies dying by means other than usually discussed here -- completely foreign or somewhat comprehensible? Do you feel a strange camaraderie with these parents, or do their vastly different circumstances leave you fumbling for words and feelings? (Is it possible to feel so similar, and yet so wildly removed?)

FAIL

This has been a hard post to write. I've carried it around for weeks now, turning every which way, thinking of how to start, how much to say, what to call the thing. The title didn't materialize until last night, and when it did, it wanted to be "Deadbaby FAIL." Which, really, is ridiculous. Because isn't having one of your babies be dead a big fat FAIL all by itself?

And yet, here it is, the topic that's been messing with my head ever since I heard that the nice lady rabbi, the one who came to the hospital the morning I was in labor with A, the one who officiated at his funeral, the one who then officiated so very graciously at the Cub's bris, is pregnant. It's not really about her being pregnant-- I sincerely wish her nothing but safe and easy pregnancy and delivery (which, man-- she's going to lead High Holidays services at 7 months plus, so the easy part is not bloody likely). What it is about is that in a class the rabbi is teaching for new parents and parents-to-be, she said they are not telling anyone, including their children, the sex of the baby she is carrying because they realize that it doesn't always end well, this pregnancy business, and this is the way they are trying to soften the would-be blow for the kids, by limiting how much they would bond with the baby prior to birth.

My first reaction to hearing this was the nearly instantaneous appearance of a big giant head of steam. It has since chilled into a not exactly set in stone decision to go talk to her, to gently caution her that this not bonding through not revealing the sex thing might not work all that well. Not that I want her to ever find out. Or think that she is likely to. But she's talking to people in a class setting, and it's possible that someone some time might find out.

I've also been thinking about whence came my head of steam in world record time. Seems I am not the sharpest tool in the deadbaby box, 'cause it took me a little while to figure out the steam was really about what I now believe to have been my, ours biggest FAIL in the wake of A dying.

Coming up on the two year anniversary, I was obsessed with pictures, with having taken too few, with them being of what I will generously call below average quality. The whole thing was spurred on to some degree by how many pictures of the then-four-months-old Cub I had by then on my computer-- hundreds and hundreds. I had to remind myself, more than once, that no, I couldn't have had my digital SLR at the hospital to take the pictures of A with because-- duh-- we didn't get the digital SLR until nearly a year later. Duh indeed.

And then, not six months later, my daughter taught me what the real FAIL of those days was.

Monkey wasn't even five when A died-- five and a half weeks short of five, to be exact. I know because his due date was the day after her birthday, so yeah, I know. She loved him fully and without reservations. She loved him from the second she asked if there was someone living in my belly, and I said yes, from before we knew he was a he. If I am entirely honest, she probably loved him from before she knew he existed, so much did she want a sibling. A sister, preferably. Which she admitted, honestly, after the sonographer said "it's a boy"-- "I wanted a sister," she said. But barely ten minutes later, coming out into the lobby, she was all about her brother in there.

But she was so little, so very little. And so we didn't bring her to the hospital. In fact, we didn't tell her until we got home because we didn't want it to be anyone but us telling her. And then we made the decision to not take her to the funeral. It was a selfish decision, in that it allowed us to focus entirely on ourselves and our own grief on that day, instead of having to help her navigate hers. But to be honest, there was also a lot of pressure to not take her from my mother in law.

We showed her the pictures when she asked for them, and we still do, when she asks. We took her to the cemetery later, and we still take her when she asks. But she never had the tangible experience of holding his physical body, or seeing the casket-- of having a physical object into which to pour her enormous love. And last summer, slightly less than a year ago, it all came crushing down with an enormous meltdown. An epic meltdown, with sobbing and crying, and the talk of how she wishes we didn't have to bury A, of how she wishes she could've gotten to hold him and then bring him home, so she could keep holding him. We got through it, somehow. Though even now, when I think back on it, my heart hurts and beats faster, and there is a knot in my throat, and another in my gut.

So there it is-- my biggest deadbaby FAIL. Also, probably, my biggest parenting FAIL to date. I don't feel guilty about it-- it was the decision we made at the time, with what we had to work with, with what we knew, with who we thought we all were then. But I do feel sad about it, deeply, deeply sad. And what I want to say to the lovely lady rabbi is that while everyone's mileage may vary, when it comes to dead babies, less is definitely less, and one day a bereaved sibling may decide that it was just too little.

What are your regrets about events and decisions you made in the aftermath of your baby's death? Are there are people in your life who wish to have been more involved? Less? How do you feel about it all? 

Ti(ieieie)me is going by...

I made coffee on the first day of school. Right into my shiny new travel mug. It only takes a few minutes in the morning-- pop pod into the machine, put mug under spigot, wait for green light, press button; meanwhile, get milk out of the fridge, pour into a glass, pop into microwave (milk jug back into the fridge), start; after the coffee is done, add Splenda, wait for milk, pour that in, stir, screw the travel mug's top on, and done. As it turns out,
that day I made the coffee only to forget it on the kitchen table.

Not the first time, and not the last, of course. But as the emotions started to overtake me later, in the school auditorium during the first day of school assembly/introduction of new teachers/may this be a good and challenging year thing, it was that mug of coffee I was missing, blaming my sudden desire to weep, my sudden out of place and out of time feeling on its absence. Logically it's far more likely that the culprit was JD's absence-- away on business, and thus a lack of a hand to squeeze and eyes to exchange meaningful glances with. But logic was absent that morning. As was my coffee. And I was convinced that had I only had the coffee, things would've been better, each sip providing a grounding, and the mug-- a place for my hands to be.

So I was already wound up by the time we made our way from the classroom to the assembly-- by the commute, by lack of coffee, by lack of sleep directly related to the what the hell have I gotten myself into crazy busy work schedule I was in the middle of, take your pick-- when in walked another mom in the class, with a biggish toddler girl. I actually saw the toddler first, heard her say something, registered a fleeting thought about how I don't know her and wonder who she belongs to. Just then seeing who she attached herself to answered that question, and made me wince (on the inside, I am pretty sure I kept my actual face straight).

I was right-- I'd never seen the kid before. But the last time she was called to my attention stang. It still stings, through no fault of hers or even her mom's. She was still in utero then, two years and some months ago, during a meet and greet for Monkey's future kindergarten class. It was there that another mom in the class (one with whom I'd actually had a bit of a history) during the go-around-the-circle introductions said of her three months old baby "...and this is X, future [name of school] incoming class of 2012, classmate of Y [pointing at another family's brand-new baby] and [pointing at the belly] Z's baby." I knew she didn't know, but that didn't help. To be honest, neither did the history. Or that JD wasn't there then either, to, you know, provide me that much needed hand to squeeze and eyes to exchange meaningful glances with. (Um, yes... seems I'd had a hard time at all three significant school events he's ever missed.)

So there I am, realizing who this little girl is, and starting to fall apart on the inside. I can't even tell you exactly why. She's younger than A would've been, and a girl. I think about it, and decide that it must be because she marks time, the ordinary, predictable, uninterrupted passing of time. And popping like that into my world, fully formed whirling and chatting dervish, she reminds me, abruptly and three dimensionally, of what it is exactly that I am missing. It happens to me once in a while (usually when it's a new age-appropriate skill that I am suddenly observing, like when I saw that clueless mom's baby X run on the playground)-- I realize, with one cutting, blinding image, that the age-old saying of the bereaved parents is true. We don't just lose our babies, we lose also all the other ages they might've grown to be.

Time, for me, makes some blows softer. But not all, and not predictably. Something like ten days after that first day of class thing we took the Cub to his trial baby gymnastics class. It's at the place where Monkey spends inordinate amount of hours each week, and I thought we could spend one of those letting the Cub explore all the wonderfully climby things he eyes with envy every time we drop her off or pick her up. There were two girls in the class, both obviously older than him, older than two. I should've figured it out, seeing as the class is for kids under 3, but I didn't. I didn't give it much thought at all, I guess.

Towards the end of the class there was the tumbling run game, and the coach was giving different instructions to each kid/parent combo, depending on what skills the kid needed to work on. The Cub was trying to walk on the springy surface while holding my hands without falling. The girls were each assigned some form of a jump attempt. The coach said something to one mom, she answered, the other mom misheard and reacted, and that resulted in the moms spontaneously exchanging their daughters' birthdays-- February 23rd and March 16th. They were both surprised to find how close in age the girls were. I was surprised that the dates, neatly hugging A's due date on either side, didn't knock the air out of me, as I would've expected them to do even just a year ago. (In the interest of full disclosure, though, we haven't been back to the class yet. I tell myself it's because of how our schedule had worked out so far, and it is. But will we go now that there's no scheduling conflicts on the horizon, and now that the Cub is walking confidently on his own? I guess we'll see.)

On the other hand, Monkey this summer has been dealing with the whole issue of never. Never getting to see A, to hold him-- the past. But also the future-- not having him around, not seeing him grow up. That doesn't get easy. Watching her work it out, offering her support and love, but no shortcuts, no platitudes-- that shit's hard.

Time also appears to move at different speeds for me and in my understanding of the world outside. I think of A's death as not long ago, even if no longer yesterday. But it seems I don't have that firm a concept of how long it's been, really. One day this summer we were shooting the breeze at work, talking about issues of professional concern, including retention of women in graduate school and academia in general. Things that come up in these conversations always include maternity leaves and day care situations, inevitably causing conversations to cross into personal experiences. I mentioned the unheard of benefit of three months paid paternity leave JD had and took advantage of when Monkey was a baby. In response my officemate, her eyes filling with tears, said that when her brother's wife lost a baby, his boss was calling him about a client meeting the very next day.

I didn't want to do this in front of the others in the group, but later, back in the office, I asked her how far along her sister-in-law had been then, how long it's been, whether her sister-in-law had support, and about how they were doing. She had to think on the how long ago question, and worked it out to bout two and a half years. Pretty good while, said a voice in my head, and I let it go as we talked about other aspects. I went to the bathroom a few minutes later, and as I was walking it occurred to me that our own monthaversary that day was 30th-- two and a half years. Huh.

When the part of the first day for which parents were welcome to stay was over, and the now-second-graders headed off to their classroom, I was relieved as I walked out of the school. I thought about the route I might take to work, the tasks still left in the day, the lack of coffee. The route, I decided, would take me past the two-tailed mermaid's castle of caffeinated salvation. I saw that latte as stress relief in a cup, size venti. The first sip sent the wave of ahhhhh through my entire body, wave that told me I was not wrong. Triumphantly holding the key to my much improved day, I headed for the car. And then, at the intersection I drive through at least twice a week and know like the back of my hand, I promptly got on the highway headed in the wrong direction.

How have you experienced time since the death of your baby? Has it been a while, or just the other day? Are some things harder than others? Do you have your tricks for dealing with time's curve balls?

don't hold me and burn me

"What, honey, what did you say?"

"Mom, I don't want you to hold me and burn me."

We were in a thrift store. Me and my two living children. I was sifting through the racks, tired from desperation. I needed to find something I can fit into. Something that could accomodate my flabby post-birth body and my swollen grief. Then I heard my younger daughter, then four, say those words--

"Please do not hold me and burn me."

I had to ask her to repeat a few times because I was not sure what she was talking about.

And then suddenly, under that fluorescent lighting of the store and amidst the smell of pre-owned clothing I suddenly realized what she was talking about.

Of course.

They were with us when we looked at Ferdinand and held him for the last time, before his cremation. She saw me holding him, pressing his hard, frozen body wrapped in a blanket against my chest, saying goodbye. We sang to him together, in that little tiny room without any windows. Then, we drove behind the car of the mortuary guy to the crematorium and they saw him being put in a container and then we said goodbye one more time, and he was cremated.

She was afraid that as my child, I will do the same to her- hold her and then burn her.

I cannot even begin to tell you the feelings that coursed through my body upon the realization. How I held on to the shopping cart to stop myself crumbling to pieces and then leaned over and hugged her and assured her that of course, I would not do that. I told her that we had to cremate her little brother because he was dead.

::

Children and death. It seems they deal with it with grace and ease, and then it seems they get all tangled up in the concept and get confused.

My daughter was four then. Not having witnessed the process of death with her own eyes, death was a very abstract concept to her. While we immediately treated Ferdinand's death in an honest and factual manner, she did not understand it. When they came to the hospital to see him after his birth, his battered body wrapped up in a blanket, with an oversized cap pulled over his head, all to make him appear as "normal" as possible, she asked me to show her his hand, the rest of his head, and she asked if he has a tongue. Since she did not see him alive, ever, she did not understand why he is dead. What makes him dead? Will he still have a tongue, a hand, a head?

Then, I guess as she tried to figure it all out in her head, she asked me, weeks after, to not hold her and burn her.

What keeled me was the thought that she felt that I had the power over her. I could hold her and burn her, if I wish to. Except of course, that was not the case. I was also afraid that she thought that I killed her baby brother. I held him and burned him, reduced him to but a small bag of ashes. I spent the days after telling her over and over again that we did not know why Ferdinand died, but he did, and after a person die, there are different ways of dealing with the body, and cremation was what we chose.

:::

Now, she is a few months shy of becoming six. I think she sort of gets it now. She asks about whether I will bake a cake for Ferdinand this year, as we did last year. She talks about him being dead but still close to us. She no longer asks that I not hold her and burn her. Recently they both had to draw some pictures of our family as they fill in a family tree. She drew her brother just like any other "normal" person she would draw, while her older sister drew him with wings, the way she always envisions him- flying in the sky above us.

::

I wish there is an easier way to explain death to children, but it is really so abstract. And another difficult thing to deal with after our baby has died. We read some books about death after Ferdinand died, but I think the one we liked the most and found the most comfort in was the book Lifetimes. It explains about life, living and death in easily understood terms, and at times I find solace, comfort and strength in these ideas. Not always, but at least, some times.

How about you? Did you have to explain death to younger children, or to children of friends and family? How did you do it? What reactions did you get? What made you keel? Was there anything out of children's mouth that had comforted you? Do you have a book you can recommend for children to talk about death?