New Meanings

"When a loved one dies, the process of grieving is a completion that allows us to honor that person's life and claim the wisdom we have gained through the relationship. As we receive the gift of understanding, it transcends time and space, simultaneously gifting the soul of the one who has passed over. Grieving is more than learning to live without a dear one. In many cases we are also required to forgive them and ourselves as we bring the story of the time we spent together to a meaningful completion."

--Joan Borysenko, Pocketful of Miracles



Felix and I went on a lovely, sunlit walk today. The air was November cold, but the sun felt warm and there was no wind. We were headed for the creek, but I decided to stop at the neighbors' houses we were passing to collect goods for the Food Bank. Jon Gerster down the street, in his thoughtful way, hatched the idea of doing a neighborhood food drive when he read in the paper that our local Food Bank was short on donations and inundated with need.

After only four houses, my load was already too heavy with generosity for the stroller's carry basket: I expected I would receive a can or two, perhaps a box of mac and cheese, but everyone gave so much that I needed to drop it off at Jon and Chris's house right away.

I knew what I was going to write in here today after I stopped at Matt and Michelle's house: blessings. It just so happened that Michelle had sat down to read this blog when I stopped in. Strange cosmic mind meld! While Matt entertained Felix by giving him a simulated overland jeep ride in his stroller, Michelle gave me a warm hug and we both teared up. She told me about a woman we both know who decided she wanted a change after years in Bozeman and moved to Pittsburgh. In the weeks leading up to her departure, dozens of friends came by, threw her a party, and gave her farewell gifts. The day before she left, Michelle commented to Rachel that she sure had lots of people who loved her. Two days after arriving in Pittsburgh, Rachel came back to Bozeman, certain that such love is truly a rare thing.

When I think about Elise's death, I almost always picture the fifty-plus friends and neighbors gazing up at us from our front yard at her memorial service. This image sustains me through many a dark moment. One of the things I think binds people together is a shared history. By history I don't mean simply experiencing events, but sustaining each other through the drama of joy or trauma, and more important, through the mundane routine of living with their aftereffects. I'm thinking here of my friend LizAnn's return home from rehabilitation after her spinal injury, where she can count on the continued dedication of friends to, for example, shovel snow from the ramp to her front door, help her dress, retrofit her home. I'm thinking of how my friend Ann became one of my dearest friends years ago, when she called me at 1am in tears because a policeman had just delivered her cat's body to her when it was hit by a car. I'm thinking of when my friend Cara organized a group of girlfriends to gather at Chico Hot Springs a month after Elise's death. We talked until late at night in the lounge outside our rooms, and Cara shared the experience of seeing her elder sister dead at the hospital earlier that year.

When Cara's sister died in June 2006, I didn't go to her memorial service. I thought to myself, Cara probably wants her privacy, I didn't know her sister, Cara has closer friends than I am to be with her...in other words, I was thinking only of myself. A couple of months before Elise died, she invited me to get together, and the first thing I said was that I was sorry I didn't call or send her a letter when her sister died, I was being silly and thinking only of how I felt about whether or not she needed me, instead of just being there for her.

Now we've become closer through the shared experience of losing a beloved. For Elise's birthday, she gave me a lovely card and a pendant that I wear all the time: it has a sweet ink drawing of a little Asian-looking girl on each side. We agreed that it reminds us of what Elise might have looked like had she grown to become a little girl.

And so Elise remains in my life, and blesses us all.

Elise's Birthday

At this hour two years ago, I was trying to get to sleep while feeling anxious that I hadn't felt Elise moving inside me. Usually she got active just as I settled into bed to read. Sometime after 1AM I woke up and still didn't feel her moving, so I phoned the doctor on call and was told to go to the ER.

As I write this I just had the realization that I also arrived at the hospital at a little after 2AM the morning Felix was born, and that was the same time two years later that the ultrasound technician in Labor and Delivery confirmed that Elise's heart was no longer beating. While waiting for that damn technician, who had fallen asleep with her beeper on vibrate and kept us in dread for 45 minutes while the L and D nurses tried--and tried and tried--to find a heartbeat with the Doppler, I was silent, not wanting to say or feel anything. I did want to shout at the nurses to go away with their useless Doppler, stop pretending you might find a heartbeat when you know there isn't one but don't want to be the ones to tell me my daughter is dead. For some strange reason I felt a flash of relief when the technician finally did show up. Maybe it was because I was going to get an answer.

I couldn't look at the monitor. Then, "There's no heartbeat," my doctor said. I burst into tears as Dan sagged against my chest, burying his face in my neck.

That was the last definitive answer we ever had concerning Elise: the certainty of death. I ask myself, the universe, "Why?" But even getting an answer would not bring her back.

I write about the moment we learned of her death because it is a chapter of her life and, more relevant to those of us on this planet, a chapter in our own lives; a chapter that will be written for us all eventually, whether short story or long novel. In Elise's case, I suppose her story might be the length of a haiku.

Two years after her death felled me, I can say I am on my feet again. I've been brought to my knees again and again over the months, but one of the best things I've gained, which some people might think very strange, is that I am able to cry, sob, wail whenever I need to. I haven't cried like that since I was little and my family called me a crybaby. I used to laugh at the memory of being a crybaby. Now I know I cried because my heart is tender, and I suffered for not being seen as tenderhearted, and for wanting to seem tough and self-sufficient. I am all of these things when I cry the gift of tears.


My friend Shirley, pictured here with Felix, lost a son in 1978 when he was killed in a car crash at twenty-one. She adores Felix, and will babysit him tomorrow night when Dan gets home from a week-long trip and we go out to be together and remember Elise on her birthday. As I spoke to Shirley on the phone tonight, she told me some more fond memories of her beloved husband, how handsome he was, how fun-loving, how they were "like boyfriend and girlfriend again" when their grown children moved out. I knew from previous conversations that he had died in 1984, and mentioned that next year, 25 years will have passed since his death. "He seems frozen in time," she said. "And I can't imagine my son Howie as a 51-year-old. He'll always be a young man in my mind."

Lately I've found solace in Barack Obama's book Dreams From My Father. At one point he writes:

I remember a conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a woman who'd grown up in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She told me about her father's ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her mother's vegetable garden, the two pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby. Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she'd mentioned had actually died at birth, but that in this woman's mind they had remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two sisters who accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this woman, family had never been a vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices shaping the course of her dreams.

I never heard Elise's voice or saw the color of her eyes. But these things are merely audible and visible with the senses. I do long to hold her, but again, I console myself by remembering that she is much more than her physical being. My senses cannot define or contain her, nor can my intellect. But she is with me, with her Papa, and her brother, as we grow and change, and she remains forever our sweet baby.

Gifts

"Life and death are a continuum and this is revealed in initiation: that the end and the beginning are back to back, that life is circular. A great trust is required, often in the face of tremendous doubt or skepticism, for we have been well indoctrinated by the fear of the unknown and our own inner voice of guidance may be the last we are used to heeding.

....Facing our worst fears and meeting these powerful and often painful points of transition in a human life is to consciously connect with the mystery, with the order of the cosmos, with existence itself, and to be opened by its infinite potential.

To call on this greater power is prayer. To make ceremony to invoke it is ritual. To connect with it so deeply that it passes through you and leaves you irrevocably changed is initiation."

--from the www.Shematrix.com website


So many words, and yet so few, can describe how I feel upon my return from my weekend retreat on Whidbey Island: transformed, empowered, opened further than I ever thought possible. Every time I experience The Gift retreat, I am amazed, and this time I was on the organizing team and discovered more of my gifts (pun intended? no pun intended? doesn't matter!) by doing such mundane tasks as writing letters, talking on the phone, joking with the team, cutting and arranging flowers, replacing toilet paper rolls and wiping the bathroom sink, washing dishes and slicing cantaloupe. I grew up believing that whatever I did it wasn't enough, either for myself or for the one whose approval I sought. The day before the weekend when we all rushed around in frantic preparation, and the first day of the weekend when we welcomed 15 participants into a space where they could feel safe in their vulnerability and pampered with food and beautiful surroundings, I fretted over my ability to deliver.

All of us bring an intention we want to fulfill for ourselves to the weekend. I lit a candle to my intention to "feel into my power": not hide myself, speak what I needed to speak, be silent when I needed to, go with my instincts and trust my gut. By the second day of The Gift, I was there, and continued to blossom.

We formed a circle for talking about ourselves, and when each of the women spoke, they had my full attention. When I spoke, I felt heard by every one of the other 22 women there. This dynamic swelled into a compassion and companionship with every participant, whether during their rite of initiation or on a break when we could casually chat while marveling at the abundance of delicious food.

We all created this abundance through potluck and catered meals: chocolate, dried cherry muffins, granola-yogurt-cantaloupe parfait, fresh mango and pineapple, strawberries and raspberries, banana chocolate chip bread, lemon bars, deviled eggs, tomato and fresh mozzarella salad, chicken satay, smoked salmon, all the tea and coffee we could drink, all arrayed before us, for us.

I could walk outside or to another room alone on breaks to get some reflective quiet. Some breaks we took in silence as a rule. Then we would come together again and I would feel lifted up.

I've called on my strengthened sense of self through this work many times. I can let myself feel as much as I need to in times of upheaval. When it was time to deliver Elise, my doctor asked me if I was ready. I said I was scared, and she asked what scared me. "I'm afraid I'll die of heartbreak," I told her. I was scared also to look at Elise after she came out. But as soon as she did, I wanted to see her and hold her. When she came out, I screamed at the top of my lungs. I wanted all of the Labor and Delivery ward, the whole hospital, the whole world to hear me screaming my rage and grief.

I told the women in our circle last weekend that I left my job and all its stifling expectations behind because Elise showed me the way. She shows me the way to myself, in my writing, guitar playing, yoga, walking, in SEEING and connecting with those around me.

When I returned from the weekend, it was dear Felix's 4th birthday. That morning as the sun warmed me, I ran with Genki on Peet's Hill and stopped to take pictures of Genki and of a brilliant red cotoneaster. The song that Felix's classmates sang to him as he walked around a candle lit to represent the sun echoed in my head: "The earth goes round the sun, tra-la, the earth goes round the sun. The earth goes round the sun, tra-la, another year is done." A sweet, simple ceremony, invoking such power.

Whatever It Is

"I am not the sort of person to quote the Bible, but I'd hang my hat on "Be still and know that I am God": Be still. Be aware. Let the big picture come to you, so you'll know the right course of action. What more could any higher power ask of us than that we stop, listen, and then act to the best of our abilities?"

--Dana Wildsmith, "Survival Guide"




Today I am grateful that the snow has begun melting and the sun came out. I am grateful that my disappointment at discovering yet again that I'm still not pregnant after 16 months of trying has not broken me.

This Wednesday I travel to Seattle, Whidbey Island to be exact, to attend a weekend retreat for women called The Gift. This will be my fifth time at this event, and my first time on the organizing team. While in the area I'll also visit Seattle Reproductive Medicine to meet with a doctor about attempting in vitro fertilization.

I've passed through the Why Me stage: Why do I have to go to these lengths to have a second living child; Why do other people, even losers who don't even want them, get to conceive babies so easily; Why, above all, do I have to go through the grief of infertility when we've already gone through the hell of losing our Elise to stillbirth? We will never know. That's the way it is. I said to a friend recently that I never realized until now what a profound phrase this is: "THAT'S THE WAY IT IS." You can say it a million times, but it won't sink in until it knocks you over and kicks you while you're down.

So this morning while Felix was at his Kindermusik class, I spent a half hour waiting on the phone while the clerk for our insurance plan tried to find out whether my visit to the doctor on Monday is covered. Otherwise, it would cost 350 dollars (!). The clerk wanted to know the zip code of the doctor's practice, because she couldn't find him by name. "The doctor is in Seattle you said? What state is that?" she asked.

Talk about a broken health care system.

I sat in a window seat at a cafe while making the call, since I didn't have time to go home while waiting for Felix. The table next to me had a woman holding a newborn. While I spoke with the idiot clerk, the baby started crying. It was a very sweet cry, not screechy at all but the kind that went straight through me. The woman's friend who had been holding the baby handed it to the mother, and the baby quieted. As I stared out the window still waiting on the clerk, a couple with a very large pregnant mother and a father holding a toddler walked by. "Hm. Fucking ironic," I said to myself.

And then the feeling passed.

The last few minutes of Felix's class, the parents join in for a song and a little performance by the kids. Attendance was down by a couple of families today, so the other parents who were there each had three kids they'd brought with them, both sons and daughters. "VERY fucking ironic," I said to myself again.

And the feeling passed, and I held Felix on my lap as we sang a "Goodbye" song to end the class. Other people have their realities, and I have mine. There's no Fate or Destiny or Sin about it: it just Is. It's a lesson I recite to myself every day, along with my blessings.

Dressing for Fall

PHOTO at right: a drawing of Mama and Papa
BELOW: "Now I'm going to add a kid--that's me!"
Felix is wearing one of his "gowns," as he terms them: this is the spaghetti-strap one, held up with a clothespin so the straps don't fall down.

Monday Sept.22nd: The first official day of autumn is here. Mornings have been chilly, 30s-40s, for weeks, but on this morning I'm sitting at a picnic table surrounded by lovely potted plants and flowers: the outdoor seating for a downtown restaurant (only open for lunch and dinner). I'm waiting here while Felix is at a Kindermusik class.

Felix was particularly lovely this morning. He came out of his room after waking and ran down the hallway to hug me before I got dressed. He pinched the squishy flab around my belly button with both hands and giggled. He played his kiddie
music in the kitchen CD player AGAIN--"The More We Get Together," "Michael Finnegan." I have to admit I couldn't bear hearing that same CD again and went upstairs to the guest room until it was time to leave for Kindermusik class.

Ten minutes before we had to leave, he called up to me: "Mom, I'm ready to go-oh!" But he was still wearing the over sized pink velour "gown" I bought him at the Salvation Army store (yes, I bought them for him myself. You can call CPS now, or wait and see how he turns out as an adult. Obviously I'm betting he'll turn out to be a FABULOUS grownup). So I told him he needed to change into shirt and pants before we went. Earlier he was saying he wanted to wear his dress to class. "Dress-up is for home, Felix," I told him. "Why can't I wear my dress to Kindermusik?" he asked, thankfully without whining. I hesitated. I didn't want to put the kibosh on his gender playfulness, his un-self-conscious 4-year-old joy. After all, he likes the way the skirt of a dress twirls around, flips up, flaps against his legs. "Here's the thing, Felix," I sat down and looked him in the eye. "For some reason, where we live, girls wear dresses and boys wear pants." "Only girls wear dresses?" "Yep, for some reason, that's how people dress where we live. So when we're at home you can wear your dress, but outside you need to wear pants and shirt." Was I squashing his creativity? Encouraging secretive, shame-filled cross-dressing instead of fun? Caving in to conventional ideas about gender, or protecting him from a future of bullying and ostracism? The likeliest scenario is that he'll grow out of it. But if he didn't, I wanted him to know society's rules, arbitrary though they may be.

Like a true 4-year-old, he wore his dress until it was time to change. Then he put on some blue long underwear and a gecko T-shirt his uncle Jeff gave him last year. Perfect: his uncle Jeff is a hero of creativity and the spirit of Be Yourself, his Claire de Loon alter ego a fashion plate of fun and exuberance. I wouldn't have chosen the long underwear for him to wear in public on an 80-degree day either, actually. But as our friend Shirley said the other day of Felix's pink dresses, "If I'm gonne be four I'm gonna have fun doing it!"

Felix's World

Here are some photos Felix took recently. Actually, this is not a self-portrait--I teased him by grabbing the camera away to take his picture. He suddenly got obsessed with the camera, and after I deleted some of the ones he took of the ceiling, the floor, and the blank walls, I decided to post these as a kind of "Felix's eye view" of his world.

His feet are now a preschool-9, and in this picture taken a month or so ago, I think they're a 7. He is growing, and outgrowing his stuff, quickly these days. His toes still look pudgy and cute though.

Here are Dan's sexy legs in their sexy shorts. Luckily he didn't block Felix's shot of the dishcloth.


Looking at these, I remember what it was like when adults seem to occupy a different atmosphere, way up above my head. It really was like being Gulliver in Brobdingnag (sp?) (as opposed to Lilliput), with everything too huge, too high up, out of reach. Those feelings are still sometimes there for me, but in a more metaphorical sense.

Knowing

It seems as if autumn is suddenly upon us. Today is chilly, and a light rain is falling. More sunny days are in store for us before winter though, I know.

I'm sitting with a lot of pain in this world lately. I attended a Share meeting the other day, the first time in a while since we stopped going as regular participants last winter. There were many in attendance, many faces of grief: one couple who have no living children because of half a dozen miscarriages and a stillbirth 5 years ago; another who lost their pregnancy at 14 weeks, just when they thought the pregnancy would work out and they started buying baby things; another whose 2-week-old son died of SIDS a year ago; and a couple new to the group whose son was fine and healthy in utero, but had a horrifically botched delivery at term and died 2 days later.

We spoke a lot about how to acknowledge our children when others react thoughtlessly or awkwardly. "You can have another one," "You have other children," or clamming up completely. At first I used to tell people who asked if Felix was our only child that we had a daughter who died in my 8th month of pregnancy. Sometimes it felt right, sometimes it made me angry when the reaction made me feel like a freak. Every so often I talk about Elise to someone who asks, but for the most part I keep her to myself, like a special hiding place I don't want anyone to violate. And that feels right too. I'm protecting her because I am her mother. And I'm protecting myself above all.

I think of Elise and all the loved ones who have gone as existing in another realm, where we the living can't see or hear them. Just as we are ignorant of so many things in this existence--who we really are, what another is thinking, why the world is so messed up--we simply can't fathom those things that aren't right in front of our faces. But we can feel them. I feel Elise with me all the time. This morning as I ran with Genki through thickets of aspen and cottonwood by Sourdough Creek, I thought of the places I'd been with Elise while she was inside me. We went to Hawaii for her cousin's high school graduation, to Tokyo where I had such fun visiting old haunts and seeing grad school friends, to Lindberg Lake where we camped and swam. She heard the voices of her papa and her big brother, and all of my family members when we visited Hawaii and they came to visit us that August.

I felt Elise moving inside me for the first on the way home from Tokyo. I was sitting sleepless on the plane, crying about my aunts not wanting to see me. My attention immediately focused on her when I felt that ripple in my belly from her. "You know what is most important," she seemed to say.