Here. But where?

A scream. A bloodcurdling, earthshattering scream.

A stare. A lost, opaque stare.

A shudder. A stranded, unforgetting shudder.

The first emerged – is there a word in any language to describe what it did? – on a July morning last year. It came from a flight down from where I was. It came from the center of the earth.

The next has stuck, to walls, floors, ceilings, grass, roads, the sky, and often even my face, every single day of this past year. It is plasticky, and has a shape. It is not colorless either. It seems to be drawing things in, but actually wants to let things go. Everyone. Everything. Go. Go. Go.

The last, a bodily movement. Like a snake in unsuccessful hibernation, wriggling its way out of crevices and holes after a winter of painful alertness, unsure of where to go. It is an earnest attempt to remember, and a desperate attempt to forget, all at once, all in one.

These are expressions. Or their absence. That have come from, and crept in, my husband of twelve and a half years. A bereaved father of a year.

He found her dead. He laid her to rest. He goes to the cemetery. He works. He reads to her big brother at night, and tucks him in. He takes care of me.

He screamed. He stares. He shudders.

The words I cherished the most from my husband for the entire nineteen years of knowing him were not “I love you,” or “Will you marry me.” They were “Come here.” He whispered these benign, almost mundane, words to me in a moving train, lying on the lower bunk, half asleep, as a cold January day in 1997 broke outside. Teenaged college students, we were on a clandestine trip to another part of the country, escaping our reality that had been rattled by the sudden death of two beloved friends. We needed comfort, and a change of scene, so my mother secretly sent us, then friends and no more, to my cousin’s house near the west coast of India. The thrill of leaving friends and family in the dark, and the excitement of what lay ahead was a heady, almost unbearably explosive feeling. And yet, on that first morning, as the train blazed through the countryside, all was quiet. Unknown, unborn. I woke up in the rocking train, and made my presence felt by reaching down and touching his arm. He opened his eyes, and looked at me as if from a million years away, and yet within a finger’s distance. “Come here,” he whispered with a fluttering smile.

“Come here!” He screamed.

Those exact words. The words that had been sacred, pure, so fragile it almost scared me to remember them. Eighteen years later, on a July morning in 2013, the same words that once weaved our lives together hurled back to me again, to unravel it, strand by strand. They sounded like a visceral grunt, a roar, a call for battle, for disaster. They were the stricken groan of a hunted animal, moments before its fight, its life, is over. The words, the scream hurtled me into space, and I, with my life holding on to my heels, came tumbling down the stairs. The day was breaking outside, and all was quiet again. Known. Dead.

Over the next few hours, and then days, all I would comprehend would be my husband’s words. And his eyes. The same eyes that brought our lives together by asking me to come to him. Forever glistening in a dusky face, and often bloodshot when tired, those eyes have been my Polaris. They were the first thing I now saw in the hospital room after the police officer drove me there. They were red. I saw Raahi, in a pale white bundle, on the distant bed. I collapsed.

“No more knives on her,” he said, declining the autopsy. In the room they took us to, as the ER nurse still held my hand, I remember his words. Back at the hotel, his invisible arms were around me, as I lay in bed and he talked. To social workers, policemen, funeral home people, friends, family, and most of all, he talked to our son. His invisible arms. The invisible umbrella.

He decided that two days later was the day. She would turn three months old that day, it was another Thursday, her birth day. I could not decide if I could go. Again I remember his words, telling me not to, as if they came from a faceless crevice. A gurgle of invisible but omnipresent waters, flowing underneath the rocky surface, the jagged edges. They flowed, the words. And yet they were stilted, like water entering, and then flowing out of, fissures. They sometimes disappeared into the hollow of his mouth. During one such act, I began, “But how can I not …”

Now the waters roared. They poured out with a conviction only those set free but wanting to be contained can enforce. “No, you will not go. You don’t have to, and you can’t. Stay right here. Stay with how you know her. That is not her. Look at me. I don’t have a sense of smell or taste anymore. I can only smell her from the CPR. I can only taste her.” The bloodshot eyes, dead, and all-seeing. The waters of clarity, the powers of a storm, gushing at me, pulling me in, holding me in place. Bobbing, bouncing, but in place.

What place was that! What was the “here” my husband no longer wanted me to leave, as he drove our daughter’s tiny casket to its resting place? Just like I had touched his arm from the top bunk of a moving train, wanting to be one with him, he now took me in by placing his palm on the glass windows of the car as he stopped at the driveway for a moment. I stood up from the chair on the funeral home porch and floated a few paces, holding out my hand. Our eyes met. Our hands met. He did not ask me to come, he wanted me to stay. Stay away, stay apart, stay far from the abyss that he was creeping into, all by himself, alive, wide awake, wildly alert.

And yet, we were together. In a new place, unmeasured by distance. Our last “here” with our daughter. We couldn’t ask her to stay. She didn’t ask us to come.

Over the past year, Raahi’s father and I have grieved differently, at a different pace, in a different way. And yet every week, there comes a time when he carries an invisible me, unable to walk, but eager to be borne, to a patch of grass, and sits with me there, our new “here.” He observes and memorizes how the grass is growing into and becoming one with the surrounding ground. He tends to it, planting a pinwheel, organizing a few sticks to mark the space, feeling the wind he always wanted her to feel.

Back home, he shudders often, as if his body disperses his horrific memories into the air around him, and his mind, invisibly, forcibly, desperately, gathers them back into the broken shell he now is. He stares blank with the same eyes, now blunt and lifeless, their brightness inherited by, and forever gone with, a beautiful dusky little girl. His facial muscles taut, his posture gaunt, and his hair standing on its roots, my daughter’s father walks on with me, carrying our two children on his shoulders.

Come here. Stay here. He’s here. But where?

How have you rediscovered and redefined your relationship with your partner after losing your baby(ies)? Have your perceptions of each other changed or grown stronger? Do you grieve in the same way, or differently? Do you both have specific roles and responsibilities around your loss, or is it undefined? Are there specific words, phrases or incidents in your story that have assumed a new meaning or dimension after your loss(es)?

the fourteenth again

Jen’s second daughter Anja was stillborn in January 2012. Anja has an older sister, E, and a baby brother, M. Jen wrote this on the 22-month anniversary of Anja’s death. She blogs at March is for Daffodils, where this post first appeared. We are so grateful Jen is here at Glow today as a guest writer.

This morning on the walk to kindergarten, E and I talked about how we would buy flowers after school, flowers for Anja on the 14th.

‘Anja is an angel, Mommy,’ E said, full of the authority of a nearly-five-year-old going-to-schooler.

‘Do you think so, sweetie?’ I asked, non-committally.

‘I think so. But, actually, Mommy what is an angel exactly?’

‘Well, some people believe that there is a place called Heaven, which is where you live after you die, and when you are there, you are an angel,’ I explained.

‘Do you believe that Mommy?' 

‘I believe that Anja’s spirit has gone into all the living things,’ I said. ‘I believe that she is in all the beautiful things we see around us.’ (Do I? Do I?)

E thinks about this for a while, smiling. Then she looks up at me and says, ‘Mommy, I really hope Anja is not a zombie.’

Christ, kid, what are they teaching you at school?

‘She’s not a zombie, love. I know that for sure.’

‘How do you know?’ E is genuinely worried.

‘Because zombies are just a story. Some grownups like to tell stories about things that scare them, but they’re not real.’

‘OK, Mommy.’ We hold hands and walk down the tree-lined block. At the corner, we run into a little boy from her class and his mother and baby sister. E and Z start talking excitedly to each other. For some reason, the topic of zombies comes up again, and it turns out there is some movie character(?) zombie who is funny(??) and can talk to dead people(???). E and Z start chanting, ‘I can talk to dead people. I can talk to dead people.’ Z’s mom smiles at the zaniness of children; I try not to grimace. My poor kid. She wishes she could talk to dead people; she knows death in a way that it is obvious very few of her peers do. ‘I know, Z,’ she says, ‘let’s go to a place where people get dead and we can talk to them.’ I wonder what she would say? I wonder where she thinks that place is? I wonder how her nearly-five-year-old mind reconciles the real death she has experienced and this fascination with death that so many of her friends are exploring.

We go into her classroom, hang up her coat and switch her rubber boots for indoor shoes. The classroom is cheerful and noisy; her teacher is happy to see her. Every morning, for the first fifteen minutes of the day, families are welcome to stay and participate in what the teacher calls ‘Noisy Reading.’ I love this time of day. We find a cozy spot and E picks out a book called ‘Chestnut Dreams.’ I open the book and start reading… Anya. The little girl in the book’s name is Anya and she has curly chestnut hair and green eyes and E looks at me in wonder. ‘Her name is Anya. Maybe that is my baby sister. That is what she looked like if she didn’t get dead.’ We read the story. I say the name Anya over and over and over again and it feels good. To have an excuse. To use the name without worrying that I will make someone uncomfortable, without being made to feel morbid or strange.

The special helper rings the book bell and it is time to put the books away and say goodbye. E says ‘hi’ to her friend, I, who is absorbed in saying goodbye to her mother and doesn’t respond. There is a flash of hurt in E’s eyes, but she runs over to another friend, D, and says, ‘D, do you want to sit next to me?’ D crosses her arms over her chest, her face furious, and yells in E’s face, ‘No!’ That is it for E; she comes back to me, her face crumpling and reddening. She buries her head in my lap and sobs.

And I wonder, as I always do, how much of it is what we see on the surface – rejection by friends; the start of a busy day – and how much of it is what she knows and keeps secret when she is out in her world – the death of her sister, the sadness in her family?

I offer to take her outside, for a hug and a chat, but she rallies, wants to stay and finds someone else to sit beside. She waves and smiles as M and I go.

M falls asleep in his carrier on the walk home, so I veer away toward the water, get a coffee and walk under the red and yellow trees by the seawall. The ocean is glassy, grey, still. It is a beautiful morning. I turn back up the park path toward our building. I look into the red leaves of the Japanese maple trees. I think about how I told E that her sister is in all the living things. I try to believe it. I practice: I say, tentatively, quietly, yearningly, ‘Hello, sweet girl, my love, my baby.’ I whisper it to the tree, to the sky, and finally, the tears come.

Where do you believe your baby is now? What do you want to believe?

If you have living children, how do you explain death and afterlife to your children?

One blushing shame, another white despair

We are in a cafe. I blush and stutter. I look through my eyelashes at our neighbours, laughing into their lattes. I murmur, fearing their ears.

We are at my house. I breathe in and unseal my lips in a tiny gesture of anticipation. We are friends, confidantes. You are unshockable in the presence of my grief and rage. But now I am aware of the couch we sit on, the bedrooms above us.

So perhaps it is better that we are in neither of those places. You are there. I am here. This is silent noise. You can adjust your features so that they appear neutral, impenetrable. No one need know that this is what you’re reading. Unless you blush too.

Because here is the thing, the topic, the theme, the issue, the matter at hand. Here is the subject of this post. It’s... it’s... it’s... sex after loss and there is no pretty or dainty or literary way to say it other than that:

Sex after loss.

And what a complicated and difficult subject to address. In grief you yearn. You yearn for a little body, a milky mouth, a tiny foot in the palm of your hand. Is there room for that other yearn, that other want? To need, to desire: they have different meanings now. And now sex becomes about another baby, or not another baby; about bodies that don’t do what they’re supposed to. Bodies mean pain, or sick, or tired. Bodies are small and covered in wires. Bodies are still and cold. Bodies are not the colour of your lover’s skin, but mottled and blue.

Some people are drawn together and some are wrenched apart.

We were wrenched apart, but still we came together. We wanted our baby and so we were naked in our nakedness. And so another baby came. But that is not a given for our kind. There is no guarantee of fertility or of the end result. The end result: the one that seemed so certain to me all those years ago as I stomped up the stairs of the sexual health clinic in second hand army boots, for condoms and pills and other armour.

We are all different. You might believe that my kind of sex neither takes its appropriate form nor serves its appropriate function. You might have stomped up stairs for the same reason I did, or you might find that abominable. You might have loved it, or not. You might have shared it with many people, or with one. It’s political, it’s personal, it’s universal, it’s fucking everywhere. There’s fucking everywhere. In the same way that in those early weeks after Iris died every woman was pregnant, every commercial was for baby paraphernalia, every goddam Facebook status update came with a fuzzy ultrasound photo. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, until sex WAS loss and its expression evidence of the distance between us.

I pause and exhale. My hands push in to my eye sockets. I wish we were in that cafe, or at my house, or better still at a bar with an infinite  line of tequila shots and a cute bartender, and I would shout ‘SEX!’ too loudly, and everyone else would blush,  and we would cackle instead of cry.

But instead you are there, and I am here, and now I have to ask: how was it for you?

Has sex changed for you in your grief? Why? How? In what way? Be frank, be euphemistic, be anonymous, be however you want to be, but please tell me.

Family Assortment

If I had noticed them, standing there, standing by, I would have felt sorry for them. But I only had eyes for my girl. I should have felt sorry because, being my family, they couldn't run away. They couldn't pull that conjuring trick of disappearing for six months, a year. Then coming back with a forced smile and pretending that none of this had ever happened. That there was no other baby. Vanishing her with a slick sleight of hand. A grandchild, a niece. Here and then gone in a puff of smoke.

When I did finally look up, they were still standing there. Three decades of looking to them for succor, for consolation, for aid and I felt as though I had taken a hammer to them, smashed their bones, set a snare or a pit fall trap. "Come with me," I'd whispered in their ears. Luring them towards a place where they could only be hurt. Coaxing them along with me to a place of death and illness with false promises of chubby babies and matching outfits.

Until the day Georgina died I hadn't hit my younger sister for at least two decades. Our days of tussling and hair pulling long behind us. But that day, I felt as though I had delivered a sucker punch to that face, so dear to me. When I handed her the dead body of her niece with such maternal pride, I ripped at her flesh, pinched and pulled and bruised. In one fell swoop, I took all her security, all her potential pleasure and joy in her own pregnancies and babies, all her calm, all her peace and crumpled them up. I only hope that she has managed to smooth them out again and, whilst they will never be as they were, that they are still usable, that they will serve. And I am so sorry, more sorry than I can say. I was supposed to protect her, to show her that this was easy and lovely.  

But she didn't run, she didn't fall silent, she didn't refuse that body, its smallness, its deadness. She didn't flinch or look disgusted. And, if it were possible, that made me even sadder that my daughter had lost her own sister. And she'll likely never have another.

***** 

I sometimes feel that I was the bystander, the observer. As I watched my daughter's twin sister die. Because it is not in my generation that her absence will echo longest. After all, I managed to live nearly thirty years without her. I expected her to carry on living, long after I had died. But her siblings, they could have had a relationship with Georgina that lasted throughout the entire course of their lives, it could have been their longest connection, their most lengthy friendship. And nobody might have known Jessica better than her twin, kindled into being alongside one another, nervous systems and heart forming together. Georgina could have been a confidant, a supporter, a source of worry or trouble, a mortal enemy? I'll never know and Jessica will never know either. With luck I expected to fade out of Georgina's life at the half way point. But Jessica, she lost the potential of a lifelong companion. And sometimes that seems so much worse, so far greater a loss, than my own.

***** 

I have always been easily hurt. When I was a child, my father tried to toughen me up. It didn't work. I am, I have concluded, un-toughen-up-able. I am still what the kind would call sensitive and the unkind, a wuss. When Georgina died I felt as though all of my skin had been flayed off. That there was only the thinnest line of defence between the outside world and my churning, flinching internal organs. A couple of lines of cells perhaps. Not much of a shield. 

And then those words come. Those words. You don't need me to spell them out because you've all heard them already. People have said them to you, about your baby or your babies, about your grief, about how this all makes sense only you can't see it, about how you are too angry or too sad, about how you need to be like this or like that, about your self pity or self-absorption.

Like needles, piercing my onion skin remnants as I tried to clutch them around me, stabbing straight into my guts. When these words come from a nobody, a passerby, the needle jabs in and comes straight out again, a clean strike. But when they come from somebody close, someone you love, the needle can go in and explode. Like a dirty bomb. Spinning out fragments that scratch and remain. Thin pieces of metal that can encourage infection or which linger, healed over but never entirely integrated. Irritating your flesh. 

And I began to understand how family feuds begin, how people can chop those they once loved off like a diseased tree limb, never to be spoken of again, fit only for burning. Some of those words are not easy to forget. Sometimes I question whether, by forgiving them, I have somehow allowed my daughter to be set aside, considered less. Because I am afraid to make a fuss, to call them out, to say "no, you may not speak about her in that way. Do not dare." 

Photo by wwarby

But then I remember. All those other words, the words that wrapped me and my little girls up so tightly. That told me that she mattered. The dead one. The tiny, broken one. That I mattered. That what had happened was sad but that it was not my fault. The hands that held me and washed me and smoothed my hair. That cooked my meals and filled my car up with petrol and made sure that the mortgage got paid. And those binding, wrapping words, those kindly hands, are so much more important to me. 

It doesn't matter that the hurtful and the helpful often came from different individuals, some consistently jabbing at me with exploding needles, others always handing out tea and scones. Because it is easier to deal with being wounded with someone's arm slung around your neck. And, having lost one, I didn't want to lose anyone else, even those wielding pointy needles. Or perhaps I was just too much of a coward to risk making a scene. 

But here's the thing about family, be they the family you call your own by blood or the family that chooses you and that you choose in return, when others run away, they might just stay. If you're lucky. When others are silent, they might continue talking. When I was walking around like an open sore. When there were no right words because the only words I wanted to hear were something along the lines of, "oh this has all been some major administrative error and obviously should never have occurred. Our apologies and please do reclaim your daughter. Just fill in this form." When they had to talk on a subject that was painful and uncomfortable to them for hours and hours because I would not countenance anything else? Well it's inevitable that somebody's feelings are going to get hurt. It's hard to talk about grief and death at length, especially with someone who is as easily jabbed as I am. 

I found this quote on the internet a while ago, my sources tell me it's a Swedish proverb. These words remind me of my family.

'Love me when I least deserve it because that is when I really need it.'

+++++

And your family? Your friends? Did they run? Did they flinch? Did they say the right things? Or the wrong things? Or nothing at all?

If they hurt you, did you manage to resolve it? Did you cut any family members or close friends off entirely? And how do you feel about that now? Regretful, remorseful? Or glad and relieved?

Nine Days

The two of them met for a brief moment. One of them was alive, nine days old, seven pounds, four ounces, and still under the lethargic haze of infancy. One of them was dead, four hours old, seven pounds, twelve ounces, and still warm from the womb, from the closeness of working organs and a rapid heartbeat. The dead one was lifted in front of the live one, a surreal sight if there ever was such a thing. She was going to be your best friend, the mother whispered. It was hello and goodbye in the same minute.

They were meant for each other, our two girls, Lyla and Margot, born nine days apart to best friends who live on the same street.


Long before children were on the immediate radar, the four of us dreamed of a scenario where our kids grew up together, close in age and close in proximity. We imagined our babies crawling around together, our toddlers fighting over toys, our pre-schoolers trading sentences. It's only natural, of course, for two couples to wish the sort of closeness between their kids as they share themselves.

The mothers navigated the frightening waters of middle school together, and then high school and then University. The fathers own a business together. We have backpacked through three continents, riding crammed busses and jumping off bridges and sleeping in cars along the interstate. And somehow, despite living in different parts of the world for the better part of six years, our friendship remained steadfast.

And then one day they decided to move across the country, straight into our neighborhood. Then they fell pregnant. It was July when they told us, on a blisteringly hot afternoon.

Almost incredulously, ironically, we conceived Margot on the same blistering day we found out they were pregnant with Lyla. One tiny miracle created out of knowledge of the other. The women who became fast friends at the age of twelve, who have known each other for nearly two decades, were just five weeks apart. The stars were aligning.

In those early weeks, those early months after Margot died, it was hard to even imagine what we needed from our family and friends. It was shock and awe, the inability to focus, night time meltdowns, a mountain of anguish. Friends and family came and went, supporting and helping and listening in any way they can. But mostly we just tried to survive each day, one long minute at a time.

And then, suddenly, without notice, it felt like we were all alone in our grief, as if the veil of sadness had been lifted for all but us. It’s all fine and understandable, but the longing for wholeness became a desperation, to be able to share with someone our whole selves, both the anguish and the joy, however unbalanced these emotions were in our early grief. I found myself fracturing, turning into a splintered version of myself. I would smile and nod and deflect questions and give the world a sad, but more or less coping, version of myself. I longed to be my whole self, with more than just my partner. If we couldn’t share the aching burden of our missing child with friends, how on earth could we share any joy we found out of life?

But there is Brooke, mother to Lyla, friend since middle school, standing with us, kneeling with us, walking with us, crying with us, never afraid of our grief, never afraid to talk about Margot. She asks questions and then asks more questions, always wanting to share in our pain as deeply as she can. When a group of us are at a party, with babies everywhere, it is Brooke who talks about missing Margot, it is Brooke who asks what it feels like. Whenever I post a new vulnerable blog about our grief, it is Brooke who talks about it. She has abided with us, without a timeline, without expectations. And what is most astonishing, is that she has done all of this while in the midst of mothering a child for the first time. If there have been sleepless nights or breastfeeding issues or colds or exhaustion or hard days or figuring out the right bottle or any of those new parent realities, we never hear about them. And the love, the sheer perfect love of a child, that normally oozes out of a new parent, has been miraculously toned down around us. Her abiding grace, under such difficult circumstances, is perhaps the most selfless act I have encountered in my lifetime.


Nearly ten months have passed since our babies passed by one another. For a long time, it was hard to even look at Lyla, the most physical reminder of my Margot. The smiling, the giggles, the sitting up, the pure baby charm. Each little milestone was so acutely felt. But somehow through the months of abiding with Brooke and her husband, through the inevitable time that has passed, I can smile at Lyla now, hold her hand, watch her laugh. I can ask about her. She has become integrated into my pain, fused with it. She is part of the missing and she is part of the remembering.  But it is not too bitter. It is sweet. And somedays I wonder, when the rest of the world has forgotten my darling girl, when only her mother and I really miss her, will Lyla be like a marker in time, a beautiful reminder of our little girl, gone for so long?

Were there any children born around you when your child died? How does it feel to watch them grow up? How has your relationship with the parents changed? Are you able to be around the child, or is it too painful? Has this changed with time?