mother with darkness and light: a conversation

Today's guest post comes from Z's mum. She writes, "My son Zephyr made me a mother in December 2013. He was stillborn. Since the day he left my body I have taken pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. Writing is not a cure-all, but it has certainly been my walking stick as I journey through grief." We are honored today to share this piece by Z's mum, a sort of play/poem that echoes the internal monologue we babylost often have with ourselves. 

Stark naked and stripped of all she believed in, Mother stood alone. Her arms aching empty.

Mother: Who are you?

Darkness: I am darkness.
 
Light: I am light.

Mother: Who am I? Where am I?

Darkness: You are here. I have enveloped you.

Light: You are now. You are yourself. You are slowly finding your way.
I am here. We are all of us here. Dark will always be, but so will I.

Mother: But I...

Darkness: Ha, you fool! You'd been heading at full pelt towards eternal sunshine.
Your broody bright grin, emitted pure joy of motherhood, glowing from within. Didn't you know about me? About death?

Mother: I... I thought I was becoming a mother.

Darkness threatened to overwhelm. Mother's shivering body crumpled to the floor. She sobbed incessantly, uncontrollably. Light reached over to her, Mother spoke falteringly.

Mother: I had imagined...

Light: I am not the light you'd imagined, I am not the source that you were drawn towards. I am sorry that your son isn't here to giggle in the blissful radiance of your smile, that you have been submerged in motherhood without.

Darkness: You once shone as warm and iridescent as sun herself, now you are too weak to face exposure to her rays. Your boy ignited in death's fireball. Your life disintegrated in an instant.

Light: Your life has not disintegrated beyond repair.
I am so sorry...

Darkness: 'I am so sorry' uttered the gentle-eyed doctor, as I crept in amongst tatters of the fallen meteorite. I slithered across the floor like filthy truth, whilst she failed to find your child's beating heart. I'd loitered in the shadows of affectionate happiness (as I do in every life.) In midday heat of glorious expectation I'd have burned, but the moment it all fell apart I found you. I lodged myself inside your pregnant body, next to the torso of your burned out dreams. I wrapped myself around you, smothered you.
 

Mother looked down at her body in disgust. The soft touch of light lifted her from her thoughts.

Light: Though your hearts were broken, though your dreams forlorn, though your tears threatened to plummet heavily into everlasting winter, don't you remember the moment he was born? He was born to you, Mother.

As she looked up, a smile began to appear on Mother's tear stained face.

 Mother: Yes.

Darkness: No.
I am the darkness that was born
I am the night sky that fell when he died.
I am doubt that lurks within.
I am grief that silhouettes your future.
I am sorrow, that swallowed you whole.
I am shadow of blanketed hope.
I am death.
Death
I am undeniable
death.

Light turned to Mother, and offered her a small torch of hope. 

Light: Death is undeniable, but so too is life.

I am love that was born
- and you are still mother
I am sun that continues to rise
- though you don't always welcome me
I am fierce power within
- as you draw from the darkness
I am breath to your future
- if you choose to inhale
I am brighter, more vibrant
- than you've ever before known
I am horizon of hope
- when you're ready to look out
I am light, life, living
- and you are undeniably
Mother.

Mother: I am changed by my child. I walk in darkness of his death, and light of his life. I live for him, live because of him, and I love him.
Yes, I am Mother.

What helps you remember you are a mother or father to your baby(ies) who died? What brings hope and light? What calls down the darkness?

it's okay

We are honored to have Christine's mom as our guest writer today. She writes, "My daughter Christine was stillborn almost two years ago, in March 2013. For me, a big part of this journey has been learning to let myself feel whatever it is I am feeling in connection with her stillbirth and my life without her - the anger, the sadness, and, when I can find it, the quiet calm. It has taken me a long time to do this, to let go of timetables or expectations for my grief, and simply experience it for what it is. This poem tries to capture part of this journey, as well as what I think I needed to hear in those early days of my grief."

Okay

I needed someone to tell me
It’s okay.
It’s okay to feel this way.

I needed someone to tell me
It’s okay to feel angry that this happened.
Angry that this happened to me, to us, to our little family.
Angry that we didn’t get to keep her.
Angry that we rode the bus home from the hospital that day
Carrying a box of mementos instead of a baby.
Angry that no one on that bus knew.
Angry that as our hearts shattered, the world kept right on turning.

I needed someone to tell me
It’s okay to feel angry at others.
Angry at the people who said nothing.
Angry at the people who said the wrong things.
Angry at the people who forgot, or who just didn’t know,
How deeply it all hurt
And how long the pain lasted.
How it still lasts, and will never really go away.
Angry at pregnant women,
Blissfully ignorant that horrible things can happen,
So carefree and certain that all will be well.
Angry that for so many of them, it is.

I needed someone to tell me
It’s okay to feel the pain.
It’s okay to wail, to cry,
To scream out in horror that it is now my lot
To live the rest of my life without my daughter;
To have to live with this hole in my heart instead.
It’s okay to repeat, silently and out loud,
That my baby died, that it’s not fair, that this shouldn’t have happened.

I needed someone to tell me
It’s okay to love her,
Okay to miss her.
It’s okay to be her mother, even in death.

I needed someone to tell me
It’s okay.
It’s okay to feel this way.

Did anyone tell you it was okay? What advice did you get after your loss(es) that was helpful to you? What unspoken gestures helped you cope?

Time

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot drawing near …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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