The Sound and the Fury

I am a sharp and pointed thing. My tongue is quickly poison-painted. Fighting talk? My words are weapons, and I’ve used them to wound. There is a cruel satisfaction in leaving a barb in an opponent’s tender places.

I am not proud of this. But it is my truth.

photo by sedeer

Over time, I have learned to wrap my rage in cooling sheets and camomile. Now I am a real-life-card-carrying-grown-up-woman-lady-with-responsibilities I practice caution. Hurting people is not Nice, you see. It is Unkind. I want to be loving and nurturing and other good things. I believe in Kind. ‘Kind,’ I say to my living children, ‘be Kind.’ That’s the most important thing, to be Kind.

But sometimes all becomes hot. My rage bubbles and boils. Kind evaporates rapidly, and all that’s left is the salty residue of Mean. And that’s when I unleash the wicked tongue. And it is merciless.

I often thought that grief would make me good. But it has just made me more of who I am. Damn it.

I see a counsellor. We talk about the Mean. We talk about the way that seems to be the essence of me when all the rest is boiled away. We talk about a special, stop-shouting-at-hapless-acquaintances strategy.

‘TRY THIS’ she says (she is very loud my counsellor)

‘WHEN SOMEONE DOES SOMETHING THAT YOU FIND UNACCEPTABLE, THINK “ASSERTIVE” NOT “AGGRESSIVE.” YOU SIMPLY FRAME IT LIKE THIS:

‘WHEN YOU.... ‘(insert description of provocative behaviour. Note I said  description. Not judgement)

‘I FEEL .....’ (insert feeling. It is OK to have feelings. It is OK to name your feelings. But do not blame.)

‘NEXT TIME I WOULD PREFER THAT YOU....’ (give a suggestion or a solution. Something constructive.)

‘Thank you so much’ I say ‘What a delightful and pleasant way to interact. That would be a better way to deal with my rage. I shall try it as soon as I am given the opportunity.’

And so, I do. And in situations that do not involve dead babies, I promise you I am being the MOST constructive, assertive, shiny-eyed Kind person I can be.

But then...

But then...

Then all becomes hot. My rage bubbles and boils. Kind evaporates rapidly and all that’s left is the salty residue of Mean.

‘WHEN YOU...  appropriate someone else’s dead baby tragedy to illustrate what a heroic, selfless paragon of virtue you are for taking round a frozen lasagne once and then never speaking to them again...’ (Judgmental, moi?)

‘I FEEL... like stabbing this pencil up your nose and into your brain.’ (What? I’m just naming my feelings.)

‘NEXT TIME I WOULD PREFER THAT YOU... did not bring the worst of yourself to dance all over the most painful part of my heart, but rather fucked off and bothered someone else with your solipsism.’ (Well... it IS a suggestion. They don’t HAVE to do it.’)

And there I am. Mad mama of a lost baby. Raging, raging at an unfair world where lasagne doesn’t make it better and all the assertiveness training I could have won’t take that that salty Mean away.

Are you angry in your grief? Do you ever boil over, or does your rage simmer quietly? What soothes your temper, and where can I get some?

the back nine

When Brian and I were engaged, we used to joke about “the back nine.” Lilly, his daughter who lives with us, was nine years old when we met. Since she would (in theory) leave for college at 18 that gave us nine years of raising her. He called it playing the back nine together.

The back nine also meant the second half of our lives. We were ridiculously, giddily in love, like teenagers in the movies, but aware of our middle-agedness. When we married, the question of more children was on the table, but not well discussed. It was possible that we would simply make a family of three. Later we could launch Lilly into the world and ride off into the sunset—still healthy, only in our 50s, just the two of us.

Little did we know that when I walked down the aisle, I was already knocked up. And then we were so happy at this new plan for our future. And then we were broken.

Over this Christmas break, Lilly went to her mom’s for a week, and Brian and I took a mini-honeymoon at home. We cooked grown-up food, read books in front of the fire, and watched football naked under fleece blankets. We ate on no particular schedule, drove no one to soccer practice, and attended no parent-teacher conferences. For a few days, we looked like a carefree couple with no responsibilities. We looked almost like that original vision of our back nine.

I let myself try it on: the relaxed schedule, the freedom. It was nice. What if we stopped trying for another baby? What if we walked away from the whole IVF project? What if we looked at each other and said, Okay, it’s just you and me? We could do it, you know, we could pull the plug.

Photo by katerha

But I am afraid of becoming a bitter, childless old woman, mired in grief, ruining my husband’s golden years. I almost ruined our little vacation this week. One moment I was saying, “The sun is out, let’s go for a walk!” And three breaths later I said, “The pain of missing her is so bad that I wish someone would hit me with a two-by-four.” How romantic.

Our baby’s death has cheated us out of so many things, including the ability to dream our own future. If we hotly pursue interventions or adoption, I want to do it with my whole heart, not because we got screwed. If we choose to raise no more children, I want to embrace that path fully, and appreciate the time and freedom we would have, instead of always mourning for what could have been. But inevitably that road will be second-best too.

We could have had such a wonderful goddamn life, if she had never come to us (terrible mother!), or if she had never died. I am turning 39 in a few days and feel no peace about the second-best life we’ve been handed. Instead, I feel my advanced maternal age.

I remember a few years back, when I was single, sobbing in my mom’s car outside the Rochester airport. It was a pent-up cry that I’d been holding in for days. My flight was leaving in 45 minutes, and I was holding us hostage, wiping my snotty fingers on her lambskin seat coverings.

I wish I were 45 instead of 35, I wailed. I just want to know already if I’m going to have a family or not. And if not, then I just want to be an old woman. I hate this middle part.

Skip ahead. I now have a wonderful little family, but I still hate the middle part. I want to peek ahead ten years, to find Brian and I deep in that back nine, and to see, is there a new little grade-schooler out there on the greens with us? Or just the two of us holding hands, with a baby in our hearts?

The future doesn’t feel like a choice anymore, only a mystery. There’s nothing for us to do but wait.

* * * * * * *

As we enter this new year, what does your future hold? Have any of your dreams and plans for your future remained the intact through your loss(es)? Where does family-building figure in your future plans? If you could magically jump ahead in time to gain perspective on your life, would you do it and to when?

roots

photo by George L. Smyth

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for a tree.
-- Rabindranath Tagore

I am roots and he is my soil. He nourishes me. If you pull me out of this marriage, I would choke on the dryness of his absence, writhe in the shadow of his turned head. And when he walked away, my roots would become little withered limbs curled from the sun.

I mourn my marriage some days. I mourn it right alongside my daughter. I mourn the marriage we should have if it weren't all knotted around grief and dead baby. I mourn the lovers we could have been without Grief as our demanding mistress, calling obsessively at all hours without saying anything into the phone, but simply breathing.

I am still here. That breath wordlessly says. I will still fuck you.

No matter how fast we hang up that phone, the ringing echoes around our marriage. A few months ago, I thought about this look my husband used to give me before daughter-death spirited our smiles away. Just pure love--all googly eyed and out of his right mind, his mouth in a kind of large wide grin that makes me feel like the only girl in the whole world. That smile is home. I wept those months ago, head in my hands, shoulders heaving. It took hold of me suddenly like a tempest and I cried for just my marriage, not for Lucy or any of the other things that come with our daughter's death, but for this one huge loss of a marriage without grief. It had been so long since I had seen him look at me this way. I felt suddenly bereft without the look. I felt suddenly uprooted.

Our marriage has never been hysterical or dramatic. There are no epic fights. There are no thrown dishes. No nasty words to stew on for days. There are no resentments built in the walls between us. We just forget some nights to say 'I love you' or truthfully, even "Good night." And months later, after having our third child, I looked at him unsure if I even really knew what he had been going through for the last six months. Our grief changed subtly, almost imperceptibly, and our reactions to it changed too. It wasn’t the constant meltdowns of the early months. It settled into a general malaise, a suffocating ennui and a survivable, yet altogether uninteresting melancholy.

I have read how men and women grieve differently, and I used to think that about us. I used to chalk our silence and awkwardness up to sweeping gender differences. But I have come to realize that it is the exact opposite of that--we grieve in much the same way. Our similarities prevent us from being the first to cross the gulf that separated us in grief. We are both proud, capable introverts trying to privately grieve our loss in a room full of the other person. We went into our corners and licked our wounds, and nodded as we passed each other on the way, unable or unwilling to articulate the obvious. My husband's father died three weeks before our daughter. So, he mourned his father, and then his daughter, and some days he would cry unsure of who exactly he was grieving. He was left in a month's time a fatherless father in an undaughtered land.

Marriages are a long negotiation in needs and wants. When your best friend needs you, it most often is not at a time when you are in need too. Until you are. Until both of you lose a child at the same time. Early in our grief, we were rocks for the other. Somehow balancing the rawness and the strength. We clung to each other. Sometimes being the trunk to lean upon, arms outstretched for shade, providing the strength, and other times taking it. But we often would say nothing, except an "I know." Finally we let go of each other, and walked backwards, staring at each other in silent accusation, "Why do you need to need me right now? I am reading something interesting on the internet."

My best friend's daughter died. In me. And my best friend's father died without me being able to give him the focused sympathy and love he deserved. I sometimes feel that I failed him. He doesn't begrudge me. His best friend's daughter died too, sometimes he feels he failed me as well.

Grief does such a number on all those little things that make a marriage great. Giddiness, laughter, sex, lightness, playfulness.  Rather than husband and wife, we became World Wrestling Federation partners, tag teaming each other out of parenting when one of us got too tired or caught up in grief. Impatience would echo in our house, and the other would come in the room, slap hands and take over. Parenting and discipline takes so much psychology, higher brain power, and patience some days, especially with a toddler mostly oblivious to Death's visit, I sometimes did not feel up to the task. Other days, he did not. All our emotional energy was spent keeping grief from engulfing our parenting.

Even though I often feel weak and sad, I am sure I would not be nearly as strong and happy as I am if he wasn't standing beside me. Even in our most stark distant times, I felt more alive in his soil--our roots coiling together making one important tree. We laugh a great deal in our home, which feels like rain after the dry season.  He can always draw a long chuckle out of me with his irreverence and constant flirting. Other days, he will stop and listen intently and mirror my indignation at life, thoughtless comments, other people and mortality. That is enough for me. Probably the uncoolest thing I can say about my husband is that I miss him when he goes to work.

At eighteen months from our daughter's death, when we sat together and quantified our grief and our marriage. I had read Tash's piece on marriage. I felt suddenly aware that our distance wasn't okay. And so, we sat together and expressed our fears. We ranked our marriage, at that time, squarely at fair to middling. We made the decision to go back to counseling to find the lighter side of our marriage buried in the ash of grief and death. It wasn't easy making that first call, but it was easy walking in there. We dropped our children off at my sister's house. We flirted in the waiting room, and laughed about our past and who we have become. We held hands and told our story, realizing as we talked that we have problems very similar to most married people with or without dead children. The mere act of seeking help made us feel okay, like trying was all we really needed. We asked the therapist if it would be okay to bring a bottle of wine, stinky cheese and a crusty loaf of bread to our sessions. Everything suddenly felt sexy, even in the least sexy of places.

Sometimes it surprises me that we have only been married for four years and together for five. I have jeans older than our marriage. We have been through the birth of three children and the death of a two grandparents, one parent and one child. We bought a house and traveled to a few third world countries. We have endured accidents, sickness, house renovation, fear, surgeries, biopsies, many bottles of wine, one movie, many corny jokes and a lake of tears. When people ask, we sometimes tell them we have been together 28 years, counted in grief years.

It wasn't long ago that I began taking photographs of my family again in earnest, no longer seeing only our grief. As I edited them, I was taken by surprise by the ones of my own husband. There was the look. I studied it. Definitely the look, I decided. And I began frantically searching through the folders, the months and years, of photographs. There it is again. And again. Since Lucy died, every picture I took of him, he stared at the camera, me on the other side of the lens, giving me the smile, his smile, of unconditional love. I couldn't see beyond my own long, grief-colored nose to see that his love has been there the whole time.



How long have you and your partner been together? How do the years prior to your loss or losses help you navigate grief? What does your relationship look like after the months or years of grief? What do you take for granted in your relationship? How much of your relationship issues do you attribute to grief and loss?


Dear Friend,

I'm so sorry you thought of us when your friend's newborn died this week.  I'm sorry for your friends and their lost child most of all, but I'm sad for you, and for us, too, that we are now experts at this.  But fear not, you contacted the right people.  We can help you help them.

First of all, start cooking.  Do laundry, clean the house, take charge.  Keep it up for at least a month, with the help of other friends.  Right away, order her to bed and give him a beer or nine.  Yeah yeah yeah alcohol is dangerous and addictive and all that, but I swear to whatever god is out there, delicious malted barley and fermented hops probably saved my life in those first days.  Way better than the anti-depressants or valium they'll probably want.  But let them have them, too, for a little while.  Obviously, not together.  But a little bit of numb is fine.  They are in shock-panic-disaster-mode.  All their alarms are going off and nothing makes any sense at all right now.  Let them grieve, but help them be calm, too, if you can.

And frankly, yeah they are probably a little suicidal and a little crazy and definitely extremely lost.  Their souls have just been shredded by the Universe itself.  They are fucked up and they need help.  That is why you have to hold them tight and keep them close.  Do it in shifts.  Be with them, but don't overwhelm them with people.  If anyone manages to make either of them laugh no matter how dark and awful the humor, that is an extremely good sign.  Don't bring in clowns, but aim for a little bit of black humor if they are the type that needs that.  I did and my brothers did me right.  Those moments of dark levity were less-awful-spots in a terrible, incomprehensible time.

Don't make them have to make decisions.  In the first days after Silas's death I could only think a few minutes into the future and not all that successfully.  "Should I get up?  Should I eat?  Should I bother even thinking about any of that?"  I felt alien and awful in the outside world.  I'll never forget my first errand out to the bank and a Walgreens after he died.  I returned worn out from a ten minute ride up the street.  I was crazed with grief and overwhelmed by the fact that the world just kept on going even though mine had come to a complete stop.

Do anything you can to make them have less to think about.  Right now they are trying to figure out what the fuck they are supposed to do with their dead child, with their demolished hopes, with their annihilated lives.  Don't make them have to think about chores, too.

And yeah, she's worse off than him right now in a more immediate, physical way.  But then the other way around, that also makes it worse for him, too.  His disconnection from the physical bond mother and child shared is also a loss for him.  Mentally, emotionally, chemically, he was preparing to meet and bond with that child, just like the mother, but now he has even less than what she had, in a way.  Really all I'm saying is he's working hard to stay strong and upright for her, but don't mistake courage for strength.  I always felt like I was on the verge of a bottomless, endless void.  Stand there and face it with him if you can, and don't let that void consume either of them.

A death like this can be a poison to their souls.  It will take a great deal of patience and time for either of them to even begin to fake normalcy.  Shower them with love.  Talk about their child, use her name.  Look them in the face and the eyes when you discuss the absurd awfulness of their plight.  Tell them how much you miss her.  Do not be afraid to be direct and honest and clear with them.  The death of their child is like a blazing nova of utter blackness and its awful light reveals everything about their lives, their hopes, and about their friends and their families.  Do not be afraid to stand directly next to them and face directly into that palpable pain if you want to keep them alive and keep them protected and keep them as friends.  Those that cannot handle what they are going through won't stay around long, and they will know very quickly who they can count on.  Be someone they can always count on, because right now they can't count on anything at all.  The Universe itself has turned on them.

Never say that everything happens for a reason.  Never try to mollify them with talk of angels and meant-to-be's.  Never say that God works in mysterious ways.  Never compare a trivial loss in your own life with what they are going through.  Don't talk about babies.  Don't talk about hope and somedays and futures.  Help them deal with the immediate dilemmas of everyday life (ie what show to watch, what time to eat, that it is okay to not shower) and don't even consider trying to tell them anything about the true nature of reality and what good might someday come.  Any of that is just dressing up a shit sandwich with rotten tomatoes and wilted lettuce.

I'm sorry.  I love you.  I miss your child.  I'm here for you.  Let me do that for you.  Those are the only things you need to say right now and each and every one should be followed with a tight and true hug.  Cry with them.  Be silent with them.  Talk with them if they can find any words at all.

Lastly, don't forget to take care of yourself, as well.  Work with your friends to always keep someone close, but make sure to sustain your own life so that you are strong and ready when you are with them.  They will be strange and sad and difficult, but if you love them and are patient you just may keep a flicker of light alive in their souls.  But don't worry about sanity right now, that's a lost cause anyway.  Just leave breadcrumbs on the trail back and help them be a little bit okay for a little bit of one day, each day, every day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

They are on a whole new timescale now.  They are now counting the moments since they lost their child, and nothing will ever be even remotely the same again.  They need company in this new landscape, though, and that means you need to help them find their way step by step.  But don't call them baby-steps, they just might punch you in the face for that one.

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What else everyone?  What advice can you give to the friends and family of someone that has just lost a child?  And what do you disagree with from what I said?  This path is completely different in so many ways for each and every person so I'm sure my advice is anything but exactly right for everyone.  What did I miss or get wrong?

not the enemy

Tash's post reminded me of how easy it is to get caught up in the bullshit of everyday life and how difficult it is for couples in our situations to communicate well.  Taxes, taxing situations, too many to-dos and no desire to do them can turn a simple afternoon sour.  Suddenly we're sniping and sneering.

Slamming doors.  Seething rage.  Eventually I realize that I'm not mad at her at all.  Well, maybe a little, but the quiver and clench, they are not her doing.

That tension and anger, it's a force that fills me when I realize how impotent I am to change the past I hate, or alter the immovable fact I cannot stand.

All I can control is my perspective and my response.

 

I attempt to embrace calmness despite adrenaline and energy.  Over and over, every day of my life now, it is an exercise in calmness.  There are too many triggers that click and spark the gunpowder in my soul.  There are too many holes that should be filled with moments with my son.  I fall into those voids suddenly so I've tried to learn how to fly.

Most of the time I fall.

That's the pit in my stomach.  It is the sensation of endlessly falling into another day that is filled with the absence of what I want most.

I fill those voids with anything I can think of and I try to stay calm even when I'm falling and all I can do is yell for help.  Luckily Lu is strong enough to pull me back when I start to shout because she knows all I'm really doing is looking for Silas.  Even when I'm yelling at her.

Inside I'm panicking because I can't find him and then I remember that I have to try and stay calm.  Lu helps me like I help her when it's the other way around because quietly, silently, and straight out loud shouting we both know that Death is the enemy.

Worst of all:  it is nothing we can fight or do anything about.  This immovable fact.  This hole that is a wall that is our son that is impossible.

That impenetrable barrier silences me when I get too pissed off about the daily bullshit that's easy to fight about.  We'll argue about some dumb thing, some mis-communication and then that spirals deeper, past our petty disagreement to the true source of our sadness and anger.

Suddenly I see that we are sharing that space and my anger is gone.  I'm not mad at her.  She's my rock and my partner.  Lu is my biggest fan and best friend.  Whatever fight we're having it has nothing to do with what is really going on.

The problem is that what is really going on is nothing we can fight, not even together.  There is us, here.  There is Silas beyond reach.  And there is his death between us all.

I fight against that every day, even without realizing it.  By getting up and going out.  By facing the day and whatever it brings.  By attempting to excel at whatever is before me, in each action and step I am battling the enemy that could all too easily consume me.  The Void, his absence.  Death.  I feel it in my stomach, in my heart, in my skin.  But I brush it off, again and again, determined to live bright and true.

Still, sometimes I have to shout.  I need to shout to get it out of my throat and still it sticks there, his death lodged in my soul like a vein coal.  I trace it like a labyrinth, round and round, all the way down, calmer by the moment as I see that it spells his name and that I will never be without him, even though I will always be without him.

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

What calms you?  Are you able to pull back from the anger and sadness of your loss when you turn that on the people around you?  What do you do to fight against Death, against the absence of your lost child?

As if losing a baby wasn't loss enough

Well, it's official.

According to today's "Motherlode" blog at the NYT titled "Breaking Up After Miscarriage" (sign-in may be required), a Michigan Study (discussed here and) published in Pediatrics  (Abstract) claims that couples who experience a miscarriage are 22% more likely to break up.

More pertinent to those who read here: Those who experience stillbirth (they say nothing of neonatal death or late-term termination as causalities, but I imagine the same applies) "had a 40 percent higher risk of their relationship ending."

Impressively, the study ran for 15 years, and contains information for 7,700 couples. It concludes that "for a miscarriage, the risk persists up to three years after the loss. For stillbirths, it persists up to nine years after the loss, according to research data."

Yikes.

:::

My husband and I are one of those crazy couples that met the first week of college. We dated (at times long distance) for eight years until we moved in together, and another five until we got married. This summer we'll celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, and our 23rd year as a couple.

Our miscarriage way back in '02 didn't threaten our marriage. At least not in the immediate "holy shit" sense. The almost two years of infertility that encompassed the miscarriage was a bit . . . well, let's say it wasn't all rosepetals. We remained quite candid with each other about what was going on, and I guess we always thought "If we can pregnant once, certainly . . . " That is to say: there was hope. Even when the timed sex and timed vacations and the constant onslaught of pregnancy announcements filling our mailbox got old, we felt we were in it together and eventually, with enough time or money or pharmacology, it would happen.

And it did.

So even though Maddy's pregnancy rather sucked, as a couple I felt at the time of her birth that we were fine. Sure, he had been overworked for months, and I was at the end of my rope with exhaustion and longed for him to be home for a few hours, but that would come now with the baby, right?

We went through Maddy's week on earth with the same simpatico used to renovate our kitchen or purchase art together: an occasional opinion might sail slightly adrift, but eventually the other person followed. There were no raised voices, no conflicts, no epithets -- at least at each other. More often than not, we were exactly on the same page, if not the same sentence. In fact, when the doctors said they wanted to take a tissue sample of Maddy while she was alive, I wanted to ask a question and couldn't get a word out of my mouth I was choking so hard on vomit/tears. My husband simply turned to the doctor and asked, "Is there a risk she could die while she's under?" which is exactly what I was going to ask. I have no idea to this day how he knew what I was going to say. Deciding whether and when to take her off life support was less a decision than a shared feeling. Not just the same sentence, the same words. It was time.

I thought we were strong going into this, we had never had problems, and I wouldn't have described our marriage as anything other than strong and happy. And yet about ten days after Maddy's death, I made a phone call to a therapist for the both of us. I could no longer speak. I could no longer get off the couch. And given everything I had ever read in popular literature or seen in a movie or a bad Lifetime tv special, we were doomed to fail. Hell if I was going to lose my husband along with my baby.

In retrospect I don't think therapy saved our marriage. Was it good for our marriage? Absolutely -- it's always good to have an hour set aside to discuss what's eating you with a neutral sounding board in the room so you don't end up throwing the piles of poo at each other. I think we're just one of those couples that came in with fairly good communication skills and a rather solid marriage and needed some reminding and nudging and support. Not to mention four walls, an uninterrupted hour, and a sense of safety and security discussing the worst thing that had ever happened to either of us, as individuals let alone as a couple.

I guess I'm one of those people that looks at this study and on the one hand, I'm thinking I should probably not be so naive as to not check my husband's email or text messaging some time; and on the other I'm not wholly surprised nor am I afraid. I think I feel that your mutual experience of a trauma as a couple is only as stable as what you bring into it. That is, I'd like to see if these stats are much different for couples who experience financial ruin, for example. And that if you're not communicating horribly well, it probably takes far less than a miscarriage to start to fray at the edges.

Sadly though, according to this study, there's still time. Six more years, in fact, of an increased risk for hubby and I. So I can either wring my hands, or fling myself into it. We can continue to talk -- or not. We often find ourselves -- humorously -- asking each other how we "feel" about certain things, in our best therapist voices. But even though it's brought up with a smile, we are asking the question, aren't we? I feel as though we've been tried by fire, and made it through.

At least, so far.

How would you describe your marriage before and after the death of your child(ren)? Are you a couple that's finding it difficult to work through this particular tragedy, or is it one of those things that you feel will make you stronger? Did you do anything as a couple after babyloss that you feel helped you (or in retrospect, do you wish you had done something)? How far out are you, and does the above study's extended timeline of risk worry you? Please reply anonymously if you need to.