The Answer

The intersection of grief, creativity, and writing remains a place of such deep beauty and personal horror, I stand in awe of people getting their hands and souls dirty in it, exploring it with art, music, and writing. Kenny is a songwriter and musician from Bloomington, IN, whose band Gentleman Caller, has just released their fourth record, Wake (Mariel Recording Company). This record meditates on the loss of his daughter, Roxy Jean, who was stillborn at thirty-eight weeks on August 1, 2007. His music breaks me wide open in such an important way. I learn more about my own grief. Kenny agreed to join us at Glow as a regular contributor where he will be exploring his grief with his wise insights, brutal honesty, and dark humor, and of course through his music and words.  —Angie

In the year following Roxy’s death, I was just hunched, squinting and holding on.  I tried to outrun my thoughts, but they were in every hiding place I ran to.  I self-medicated with booze for a few weeks.  Became an expert on panic attacks. Sometimes I just waited, counting days away from the day she died. There was more comfort in math than hugs. I held on and flailed, as quietly as possible, inside my hollowed-out flesh-cage. I went to therapy, took anxiety meds and tried to get to know and understand my new, messed up self. 

During that god-forsaken year, 3 friends also died early, tragic deaths.  One by house fire.  One by drowning.  One by aneurysm.  All three under the age of 40. It seemed unreal and impossible at first… then, inevitable.  Remember, in The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo snaps “NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS!” before successfully flying through an asteroid field?  My life, the lives of my friends and family… ours had become the exact opposite of that.  We weren’t beating the odds, but being destroyed by them, and those odds were giggling.  

Hollowed out by losing my beautiful, dark-haired daughter, and managing my anxiety with medication (prescription and other), I was sliding down and increasingly absent of hope. I started recognizing patterns in the memorial services I was attending. The hollow, crying eyes of the mother, the trembling, shaking hand of the father, all while speakers talked about what the deceased loved, how they loved and who they were… and there was always a song. I was so embittered by all the loss, and death just seemed right around the corner for everyone I loved. I was certain I would not live to be an old man. I felt that no one I knew would. 

So, I decided to write my own funeral song.

I wanted a song that would just tell the bleak truths of my life… a song that wouldn’t put a bow on the end of my life, but a thudding and appropriate period. Somehow, it felt like the bravest thing I could do.

It happened immediately upon returning home after the last memorial service I would attend that year. It took literally the amount of time to write that it does to sing it. It remains, easily, the quickest I’ve ever written a song. It also remains the most cathartic:

THE ANSWER

I did not find the answer in church
I did not find the answer in church
I did not want a god that would not spare the rod
I did not find the answer in church
I did not find the answer in my home
I did not find the answer in my home
I was a stranger to my kin
I was a stranger to them
I did not find the answer in my home
I did not find the answer in school
I did not find the answer in school
I was sucker-punched and thin
I was not like the other kids
I did not find the answer in school
I did not find the answer at the bar
I did not find the answer at the bar
Beneath the stale embrace
I was always out of place
I did not find the answer at the bar
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I took every pill they make
But I was still awake
I did not find the answer in prescription drugs
I did not find the answer in your eyes
I did not find the answer in your eyes
Not your hands and not your lips
We were always passing ships
I did not find the answer in your eyes

 What songs, if any, have been a comfort to you since your loss?  What songs can you no longer listen to? What would be your funeral song?

glass words

I am so honored to welcome this month's guest writer. Merry's support and love permeates all the nooks and crannies of this community.  Merry describes herself as a "38 year old mother of four girls who came before and then Freddie who was born and didn't breathe but then did and lived for eleven days in SCBU before dying of pneumonia. In January this year we had Ben, our rainbow baby born 21 months after Freddie died." Merry writes at Patch of Puddles.

When I say the words, they remind me of the twinkling, polished nuggets of pretty glass that surround his memorial tree. Smooth, splendid, finished, perfect.

"He's their second brother. We had another little boy but he died when he was very young."

"They did have another brother but we didn't get to bring him home."

"We had another one who spent some time in SCBU. No, he didn't come home unfortunately."

"I've had six children... I have five children."

"He is number six. I have four girls at home."

Sometimes I phrase it so I don't have to say the words. Their brother died. My baby died. Our son died.

I've perfected the words so they skitter around like handfuls of decorative glass pebbles held high and dropped, bouncing in the sunlight.

photo by dalvenjah.

I'm guilty of an art of careful word architecture that parcels up our family pain and speaks it in a way that acknowledges but protects. I sometimes worry I phrase it in a way that make people think we weren't allowed to keep him rather than had him brutally taken. By the time I spit those artfully shaped words out they have been shaped to make them glisten and slide from my lips, not rip . I'm guilty of trying to make it palatable. I worry people think it means I have got over it.

I worry he hears.

+++

The world at large says words back at me that my world in miniature says politely.

"At least you have the others."

"The girls must have helped you get through."

"Thank goodness you didn't have to bring him home for a while. At least you never got to know him before he died."

As if the eleven days bent over his cot, praying to every god I don't believe in to grant a miracle didn't count. As if having four healthy children makes a difference to the pain of losing one. As if, at the birth of a good to go child, someone could say "Do you mind if we keep him and you just pop off home?" and the answer would be "Well of course, it's not like I know him yet!" As if, knowing his sisters, loving them deeply, makes his loss more bearable and not the yawning, gripping pain of knowing exactly how wonderful and beautiful a person we lost.

"It must be so much easier to cope with losing Freddie now that you have Ben."

Out pops a pebble, a shiny glass pebble.

"Yes, it helps. Of course it helps." Treading a path neatly between the socially acceptable and my listening daughters hearing and thinking he became expendable and forgotten. I break my teeth on another palatable pebble.

+++

It's because of my daughters that I had to give up fighting for Freddie. With disability and long term care looming hard and fast, I vomited up the words that we had to let him go. Losing him was not better because we had living children, it was made bitter and bile filled by the knowledge that I could ruin six lives by fighting for him or let him go and save us all.

"It's time to stop."

There was nothing polished about those words, they were molten and then jagged and my cheeks and tongue and throat are throbbing and scarring still.

Don't let anyone tell you that having other children makes it better. Different, but not better.

+++

Just 30 minutes holding the body of my son without wire or tubes.

With the image of my frightened and barely whole children waiting for news burned into my head, I watched my son die, packed my bag and went home to comfort them, to break the news, thank the people who cared for them - and have lunch.

Home to an eleven year old standing at the top of the stairs and sobbing "Is he dead? It's not fair."

Home to a ten year old who took one look at our faces and turned and walked away, the brother she had longed for gone before she ever held him. She never let herself cry.

Home to a seven year old who screamed "You shouldn't have had him! You had too many children already! Have other one now!"

Home to a five year old already shattered to pieces by her parents having been absent for eleven days, who had kissed the bump every night and made him a space in her heart and loved him as only a five year old can and who sat in our arms and seemed to understand and two hours later asked when we would go to get him and bring him home.

Who asked repeatedly, "Is he still alive really?"

All our grief, laid out and raw in the faces of the children we loved. Our children dragged through the splintering, wounding carnage alongside us.

My children, crumpled and bewildered and somehow supposed to filled the gaping hole in my heart, who listened and watched my every move, weighed up my love, weighed up my grief, looked to see if I would last. Looked to see if I could still be mummy.

Home to gymnastics sessions and maths that needed doing and laundry and presents waiting to be given to a new baby brother. I spent the first night after his death not in my bed and my husbands arms, but on a mattress on the floor of a pink bedroom, each of us with shell shocked girl lying either side of us. There was no hiding in a darkened room for me. There was no going to pieces. The greatest betrayal was that we had to put Freddie neatly away ourselves and carry on - go forward - to keep our living children safe.

Life goes on.

Don't let anyone tell you it makes it okay if the babylost have other children.

Sometimes what hurts most of all is accepting I was one of the luckiest of the unlucky people. That my pain is a little more bearable because of my children. But that my pain is magnified ten thousandfold by seeing them hurt.

+++

When I think I can't be any more sad, I hear them speaking pebbles. Polished, perfect pebbles that drop and scatter as they dance the linguistic dance of having two brothers but only one that anyone can see.

That is a special kind of heartbreak.

Look what I did to my children. I wanted another baby, who died, and I made my children learn to speak the language of the grief stricken. I daren't look inside their mouths. I am too frightened to see if there are scars from the glass. I'm horrified, but happier, to see the pebbles.

How do you use word architecture when speaking to others about your child's (or children's) death? Is there one phrase you use consistently? Do you use different words or phrases depending on if you are talking to a stranger, the casual acquaintance, close friend or family member? If you have older children, how to teach them to talk of their sibling's death? Do you overhear them mirroring your words?  What kinds of things do you overhear them saying about death and grief and their family since the death of their sibling?

questions and answers

photo by wakingphotolife.

What is Lucy made of, Mama?

She is made of people ash with bone.

She is white, almost. Sometimes grey.

She had no knuckles, she was too young, I think. So there are no knuckles bones. So she is the other bones with people ash. That is what her body is made of, daughter.

But the important part of her is made of whispers and prayers and paint fumes on a spring morning, a candle lit to push away the stink of it, and a moment we took advantage of. The wind blows the chimes in the dining room.

She is made of chimes.

She is made of sprouts and nests and small mites writhing in hay. There is a chipmunk who sits on the roof of the garage. I wave to him every morning. She is made out of him.

She is made of wood blocks and printing ink. She is made of porcelain and  papier-mâché. She is made of vine charcoal and 90lb. paper, shredded and waterlogged with seeds embedded in its pulp. She is made of summer and fiddleheads. Yoga and smoothies with berries and almond butter. She is made of long flowing skirts, and a purple dress that made me look like Barney, but feel like a goddess.

She is made of email fights and heartbreak and broken clavicles, too. I try not to talk about that part of her, because I used to believe that the dark parts of her making killed her. Sometimes I think that is what made her live so long. It gave her tenacity. She is made of strength.

She is made of the moon. Further, she is the moon. Hanging effortlessly over our nights, disappearing gradually day by day, and then appearing again, brighter and closer than ever. She is also made of winter solstice. She is made of icicles and darkness and sad songs about sunshine and being taken away

She is made of atoms and stardust and self-sacrifice. She is made of nothing, but everything.

How old is Lucy now, Mama?

She is as old as the trees, my love. Her roots are so far into the earth, they are lava and rock. She is the Anasazi. She is the crone. She is the baby whose bough is breaking. She is as old as the canyons and young as the idea. She is a moss-covered age, one with ferns at her base. She is sixteen and driving erratically. She is eighty and hunched over in secret lives never lived.

She is three and two months old. Younger than you, but also ancient, like the gods, and at the same time, she is always newborn.

What happens when we die, Mama?

Our skin grows cold and turns ashen. Our body becomes stiff. The skin around the fingernails recede making every fingernail longer. The skin hides away and reveals something animal about our humanity. The meaning of life is gone then. The carnal meaning, I mean. The impulse for more is gone. We are just skin and bone. We are carbon, filtering into earth. It nourishes something lovely, we like to think. That also is transitory. The spark leaves our eyes and enters other people's hearts and burns brightly. So brightly it feels like fear. I want to tell you that our body is a shell, as cumbersome and heavy as a turtle. We figured out how to carry it, but it is not comfortable. The part that rots and makes a home for other creatures of the dark, that part is not us. It is something else. It is soil. It is life in its death. We do not have a soul, baby. We are a soul and have a body. I read that once. I believe that.

But what happens to our soul, baby, is not my privilege to know. I just sense that we become part of every person and everything, like a raindrop falling into the ocean. Can we separate the raindrop again? Never, but we still are water.

What do you think happens when we die, baby?

I think we go into trees, Mama. That is why it is very important to hug trees.

+++

What round about answers are you giving these days? What kind of questions do you get asked, either by children or adults, that stump you? How do you answer them? What kind of questions do you ask? Are your answers concrete or esoteric? Have your answers changed over time?

or alternatively, you can just tell me what your child is made of...

The Older Sister

Sometime this weekend, while she is playing, or reading, or sleeping, or eating, or attending that second live concert in one weekend, or having tea with a real live writer (her aunt knows the coolest people), or working hard at improving her full turn or her free hip or her tuck, sometime in this weekend packed with so.much.fun she will cross a threshold she is not aware of, but I am. Sometime this weekend my daughter will have lived more than half of her life as a bereaved sister. I could calculate it exactly, down to the minute, really. But I don't let myself. I don't want to know that precisely.

This is a kind of thing my mind gets hung up on. I remember coming up on living (then) half my life in this country, and it seemed a big deal. My sister, who's eight years younger than me, and so reached the same point that much earlier just sort of shrugged-- she was so far past that place herself that it was no longer a thing for her at all. Thinking about that I wonder whether this will ever seem like a big deal to Monkey. I know she is not thinking about it now, and I don't know whether she ever will. She is, by nature, a storyteller, not a mathematician or scientist. And so it is not clear to me that even looking back from any place in her hopefully long and eventful life this invisible line will matter a diddly to her. She was so very marked by her brother's death itself that it might never matter to her that there was a time before it, or how much time that was.

She grieved. Oh, she grieved. Out loud and quietly. In her first language, the one we speak at home, and then, as she started school and her English improved and they started learning Hebrew, in two more. Like all of us, she is no longer in that acute all-encompassing phase of early grief. But neither has she dispensed with it. Which is, of course, as it should be. And, at the same time, as everything about this, it's too fucked up for words-- the kid's not yet ten, and she's lived with grief for half her life.

There are things about her that are undoubtedly shaped by her experience as a bereaved sister. It's not that she is somehow an expert at other's grief. But she has a fine sense of what is and isn't about her. She understands the shades of sad. When a beloved teacher in the school died suddenly and unexpectedly in December, she was sad, but she also understood with piercing clarity that hers was a sadness from a distance. She and a couple of classmates spent some time that afternoon writing letters to dead people, including the teacher. She let me read her letters.

She wrote four letters total-- one to the teacher who died, one to her brother, one to my grandfather who died before she was born and in whose honor she is named, and one to my grandmother who died in May and whose funeral was the very first Monkey ever attended. There is no sentimentality in any of these. There is no cuteness. There is no mixing of her issues in with the sadness of others. And that is why these letters (I kept them) get me still. She is not even ten, and she has this understanding that we all wish more adults around us had.

To her brother she says that she misses him still and loves him. She notes the age he would've been, and how she thinks her younger brother would've liked to have an older brother too. And, still, still, still, she says she wishes she could see him. Me too, kid, me too.

To my grandmother she says that she didn't really know her (true-- dementia is a horrible thing, and by the time Monkey could remember things well, my grandmother wasn't herself anymore; they did have a lot of fun earlier in Monkey's life, though, and for that I am glad), but that she knows how much her daughters miss her.

To my grandfather, and I must say that it surprised me that she wrote this one, she says that she is named after him and tells him that though it is very sad, his wife has died recently, and also that he is still very missed.

To the teacher she says that she is now very sorry she never really knew her. She was a middle school teacher, but she also had been involved in many things at the school. It was remarkable to me that Monkey understood the difference between how she knew the teacher and how the teacher's students knew the teacher. Monkey says that she is sure her daughters miss her (of course), but then she doesn't say that about the students. She describes, instead, what is happening near the teacher's room in the school-- there is a bathroom across the hall, and Monkey writes that the lower school kids are not allowed to use it because her students are in there-- they are crying and washing their faces, and crying, and washing, and on and on. I cried when I read that. I have tears coming up now as I write about reading that.

The mindfuck of this is that it's not that she is naturally fearless in the face of pain. She is sweet and she's always been kind, and she has a good deal of empathy. But she is not, and I know it is strange to say about a kid who hurls herself at the vault table and flies to execute her bar dismount, she is not naturally the most courageous person you've ever met. She is cautious and risk averse. And as we all know, death is a scary thing, and raw pain of a grieving person is perhaps scarier still. So the fact that Monkey is better than most at handling other people's grief is mostly about her own biography, her own story. It sucks. I am glad she is the way she is. I hate that she is that way because her brother died.

I heard it said about the senior rabbi of our congregation that because his father died when he was very young, he is drawn to comfort the grieving. Like a proverbial firefighter, he runs towards the grieving family when others are tempted to run away. Monkey is not like that. She doesn't run towards the grief. She might even hesitate, as she did about whether to attend my grandmother's funeral or about whether to visit her kindergarten teacher recently as she mourned the loss of her own elderly mother. (This was the teacher who helped Monkey find her voice in both English and Hebrew, the latter because at the time she was saying kaddish, Jewish mourning prayer, in the classroom every school day for her father, and entirely without prompting and without telling us Monkey joined the ritual.) But even in those cases, it takes but a short conversation, a few sentences really, for her to change her mind and be there for the grieving.

On the way back from the visit with the kindergarten teacher Monkey asked why the teacher'd said that visiting the grieving was one of the most important and difficult mitzvot (good deeds). As I think about the conversation that followed now, we focused mostly on the "important" part, discussing how visiting with the grieving lets them tell you about the person they are missing and about how that itself brings comfort. We kinda skipped the whole "difficult" part of the statement. I guess we both know there are harder things than that.

If you were lucky enough to have older children when your baby died, have you marked any significant grief-related milestones in their lives since? Do you see them as bereaved siblings? Do they see themselves that way? If you have younger children, are there things about them that you see as grief-marked? Are there other children in your life that are connected to your baby who died for you? How do you see their milestones?

i'm gone and i'll never look back again

Laying flat on my back on the couch surrounded by the darkness in my heart is how I have spent many bright days and long cold nights over the last three years since Silas died. I was not new to the idea of sadness and loss and hardship, but it was a revelation to be consumed by it so completely.

After all, there is nothing as completely devastating as the loss of your son or daughter.  We know our parents and grandparents are not immortal, but it seems like a given that our children will outlive us long and strong, healthy and true.

But now I know.

Silas's death transformed my guts.  I used to shit perfectly.  Once in the morning, once at night. Solid, honest craps each of them.  But now I'm erratic.  Sometimes the toilet sucks, and I know I'm not good when I'm not looking forward to that daily event.

Do you know the gurgles?  When laying flat on said back completely annihilated by how painful it is to miss my son I feel the slow crawl of tension mixed with terror sleazing through my innards in the dreadful, lonely night.  Lu is next to me so I'm not alone but the loss is endless.  Like the night will never end.  Like the gurgle slip-slithering through my insides will never end in a solid shit.

It is the gut-pit we all know.

It seems clear to me that all the sorrows of all that is known can fall endlessly into the despair that parents feel for the loss of our little ones.

Based upon my own experience, it really is that fucking bad.  You can't hyperbole the shitiness of this shit.

Our arms are made to hold them close, even when they are not here.

Here he is, though.  Absolutely present in my life.  My son Silas.  He exists more concretely in the typing of his name than in his physical existence.  I held him briefly hooked up to tubes and then later when it was only us, but I've held him even closer in the way I think about him, the way I write about my life without him.

I've learned to think in a certain way that seemed invaluable to survival.  Music was my first refuge.  I fell in love with music that made me feel Silas's absence with crystalline clarity.  After music it was laughter.  My brothers helped to remind me that bitter laughter is better than none at all.  And if I could find my way to open my mouth to speak or yell or maybe even laugh, then food and drink would surely find it's way in.

Look at me!  I'm a normally fuckitioning human.  Yeah that's right.  Fuck you functioning.  Good as fucking new.

Slowly I re-learned how to present a relatively normal facade, but always at the center of our focus was creating Silas's sibling.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I write to you now from the other side.  Stop reading if you are angry about not having a child, or if your loss is so fresh everything is enraging.  Read that top part again, and keep fighting.  Don't let anyone stop you from being exactly who and how you need to be.  Do not stop.  Do not stop.  Get up, stand up, throw those fucking hands up.  Push out the night.  Hide from the daylight.  Embrace your endless, enraging tears for your child, your daughter, your son, your big sticky stinky shitting fucking life.

It's true, it really does suck this much, and it always will.  Always always always.  It will always suck exactly this much that you and me and my wife and your grandparents and our siblings lost a life that was going to be amazing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stop reading if you're not pregnant yet with your next child, of if you're in your pregnancy and are freaking out all the time like we were.  Stop reading if you're me a year ago and I couldn't stand to read about the next, bright part of people's lives.

I'm on a futon in the living room and Puck is digging his furry, feline head under the folds of my sleeping bag.  The detritus of baby surrounds me.  In what used to be my bedroom: my wife, the other cats, my second son Zephyr, all sleeping & feeding & crying & pooping as babies do, and sometimes moms and kitties, too.

I stopped believing in hope and now it's my full-time fucking job.  I hope he's okay.  I hope that rash is no big deal.  I hope he's not crying because he's deathly ill.  I hope I get to see him more tomorrow.

I have to hope, and I've trained myself to stop that silliness and deal instead with exactly is right in front of me.  Except now, what is right in front of me, in my arms, is a son I feared to hope for.

The gurgle is in my heart, now.  The gurgle is in my brain when I see Zeph's little-old-man-new face staring back at me, absurdly alive and utterly clueless to how powerful he is. He has annihilated time.  It reminds me of when we first lost Silas and day or night meant nothing at all.

It is so much better now.

I didn't want to write this part.  Lu thought it was necessary, though.  She wanted people to know that there is still always hope of some kind.  We were the worst kind of unlucky to lose our son Silas, but we are profoundly fortunate to have Zeph with us now.  She never let go of that possibility while I continued to prepare for exactly what was, every day, over and over again, no matter how shitty.

She's in there right now using her breasts to feed and grow our son.  I'm out here on the futon writing about our insanely brutal and beautiful and sad and hilarious lives as Airbag blasts from little speakers, my toes tucked into the sleeping bag and Chumby our cat curled up on the couch.  I will sleep tonight completely enraptured by the endless darkness of Silas's absence and the now-ever-present force that is my other son Zephyr who is brilliantly alive and utterly confounding.  How do we do this now?  How does anyone?

Okay, I hear tears.  Maybe time for a diaper change or midnight dance-party.  Different day, better shit.

What physical aspects of your life changed when you lost your child?  What have you reclaimed since then, what is forever altered?  Has the lack of physical connection with your lost child forced you to find other routes to feeling close to them?  What are they?  What else do you want and how will you get it? 

the language of loss

A colleague of mine lost her son last month. His car went off the road on a beautiful Saturday afternoon and he passed away from his injuries.  Another friend lost her 8 year old niece recently in a similarly unexpected and tragic accident.  Their deep sadness echoes within me and I've spent many moments living in their skin when I think about their grief. Or maybe it's the other way around.  Maybe it's that suddenly I could see them wearing the same stretched skin and hollow eyes I know so well.

I hated seeing it on them and in them.

I never knew Silas as a grown boy or young adult.  I never knew him as anything more than the potential of everything we were about to become.  I felt his kicks and saw him grow behind the veil of Lu's bulging belly, but I never had him all to myself, not even for a moment.  My friend knew her niece, saw her grow and develop.  My colleague had 23 amazing years to share with her son.  All three of our experiences are terrible beyond words, and I'm certain none of us would like to trade with the other, for any reason at all, ever.

How do you qualify for being one of us here at Glow?  What are the parameters for Medusa-hood, for babylost?  Those people were their babies even though one was a man as well as a son and the other was not her offspring but still her child in so many ways.  Does a miscarriage at 10 weeks count?  How about a father of 80 who buries his son of 40?  Or by that time does the father already know that the Universe is far from fair and things like that just happen?

I went to Tommy's memorial and heard the amazing things his friends and family said about him.  As I absorbed the stories of this wonderful friend, brother, son, man, I wondered what people would have said about my son.  And then I wished I would never know because he would have died after me, after a long life together where I could nurture and cherish him and teach him to be a good person and a great friend like my father taught me.

The twisted layersof 'what-if' and 'what-should' and 'what-isn't' were nearly overwhelming. At the end of the memorial that was 400+ people strong, I gave my colleague a long, deep hug and told her how sorry I was that her son was gone.  I could barely even look at his younger brother, the loss and shock etched into his face was terrible and so all I could do was tell him to hang on and hold on to his parents and just hold each other up, any way they could.

A few weeks later when I saw my colleague again I gave her another huge hug, but I didn't ask her how she was doing.  I always hated that question in those first days and months and years after losing Silas.  I know it is just something people say because they have no idea what to say, but I still hated it so I didn't ask.  Instead I just told her how we have been thinking about her and her family and that I hoped they were holding up as best they could.  And then later that day we talked.  We talked about how some people we knew well were quick to pull away in our times of loss.  How people we never expected were able to stand right up next to us and hold on tight.  How getting up and taking a shower could be counted as an enormous accomplishment, to say nothing of getting back to work, back to the World, back to the everyday experience where our offspring were not.

I could look her in the eye and hold her in my heart and I was not at all afraid of what she had become or what she represented.  This wasn't some theoretical possibility in my life.  In some way that transcends Tommy's age or Silas's even briefer life I knew to the core of my marrow the filthy chaos and shocking confusion that gripped her tight despite her ability to stand there and talk about her son that was gone.  The pit that was hollowed out within me nearly three years ago is so deep and black and awful that her pain just slipped right in and swirled around comfortably.  I hoped that by standing there with her and using his name and letting her speak about her new awful life that I could lessen her burden minutely, if only for a moment, perhaps until the conversation ended, if that.

For so long, the despair I felt seemed larger than me, something I could never contain.  But somehow I've managed to grow and now it fits into my life without overwhelming me.  It doesn't seem less, not at all.  Instead I had to change the shape of my soul so that everything about losing Silas is in me and a part of me.  Speaking to my friend about her son Tom, I realized that I could stand with her and listen and absorb a bit of her grief because I know how to digest the truth of death.  That sick, awful feeling is to be expected, that it will not destroy me, and that hopefully this loss won't destroy her either.

I hoped that I could serve as a signpost along this path of sadness, that somehow by engaging people in their time of grief that I was doing right by Silas.  It is always better if he were here, but since he's not I have to find scraps of good and use them to the best of my ability.  I will never shy away from people when they are confronted with death because I know how important it was to me when people would talk to me and listen to me and help me to pretend that I was not losing my mind during my worst times.

I can talk to people when they are stricken because I know this language, all too well.  It is a terrible gift from Silas but if it helps one other person pull back from the brink I am more than happy to make use of this awful knowledge.  Even though it feels like we are each all alone with our absent child, the fact is it is all too common.  The death of a child, no matter how old, is always exceptionally shocking and wrenching.  It is something no parent should ever have to experience.  But as we know, 'should' doesn't count around here, just what is and what is not. 

Silas isn't here, and now Tom and my friend's niece are absent, too.  And so for those of us left here, devastated and alone, we have to help each other face each day and grow into people that can survive what we should have never had to endure.  We can only do it together because no one can withstand this alone.

Are you able to speak with people that have lost children or relatives?  Is it something you encounter often, sometimes, never?  Do you feel specially qualified to engage in these types of conversations, or do you prefer to keep your grief and experience private? What words do you use?  How do you speak to people when they are raw with sadness?