Beside Us

This past Tuesday, Mary Jo, Judy, and Hannie held a Share holiday memorial service for us parents. I was surprised by two thoughtful gifts that moved me immensely: Rachel gave me a very sweet pewter angel ornament with "Elise 11-07-06" engraved on the back, and Mary Jo gave me a CD music mix and some delicious spice cookies. We lit candles and decorated ornaments with glitter for our babies. Felix sat very quietly during the ceremony, and told the other parents that he had a baby sister named Elise who couldn't be with us, but he hopes that soon he will have "another baby sister who will come to our house and stay with us."

I'll close today's writing with a lovely poem by John O'Donohue from To Bless the Space Between Us. Chris Furtak, the 60-something super-energized, muscular yoga lady who lives each day for spirit and community (see "Hope is Prayer" from Dec. 7th), read this poem after class, just 2 weeks after her husband died.


On the Death of the Beloved

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts
Where no storm or night or pain can reach you.

Your love was like the dawn
Brightening over our lives,
Awakening beneath the dark
A further adventure of color....

Though your days here were brief,
Your spirit was alive, awake, complete.

We look toward each other no longer
From the old distance of our names;
Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,
As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,
We know our soul's gaze is upon your face,
Smiling back at us from within everything
To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,
Darkest winter has turned to spring;
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:
To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.

Hope is Prayer

Last year at this time, I wanted to be in the furthest place on the globe away from Christmas. I ended up not only surviving the day, but actually enjoying myself a bit too. Even though I felt terribly sad because Elise's due date was around Christmas, I kept myself open to the possibility I could have a good time. I even got us a small tree and decorated it with as many star ornaments, Elise's symbol, as I could find.

This time, I am astonished at how peaceful and blessed I feel. I anticipated an undercurrent of sadness when November 7th arrived and the nearness of the holidays, but there is none. I almost looked for it, around corners, under the sofa cushions, asking myself, Do I really feel this good? But why?

I think it's because I worked so hard to remember Elise, to forget Elise, to miss her, to welcome her. My heart has been open to her, even though this meant having it break repeatedly over the months and years.

And my heart has been open to another child, and breaking repeatedly, again, when that child has not arrived. Truly I have never known the meaning of "It just is" until now. Why did Elise die? Why when we suffered her death are we now dealt more suffering with infertility? When I read stories of people losing their babies, I always held my breath thinking, oh I hope they had another baby, and they always did.

But not us. And I raged at the world, at the families with multiple children. Now I know that it has nothing to do with them and their good fortune. It has nothing to do with whether I'm a bad person, a good person, whether it's "meant to be," whatever that means.

It just is. And truly, it is all good. It could be worse, and life would still be good--eventually. I will not stop hoping. I used to think hope would only make the downward spiral of disappointment more precipitous. Now I know it leads to other possibilities. "You always have choices," my friend Mary Jo says. I will not stop hoping. Hope is prayer. Prayers bring blessings.

Last night we had dinner at Ben and Sarah's house. Felix had a great time with his girl cousins--Anna who is 5 months older and 6 inches taller than he, and Reeve, born in March 2006, the same year as Elise. They chased each other around the house, I chased them around the house, they watched "Mulan" on the TV, they gathered in the bathroom with the lights off to look at Felix's glow-in-the-dark shirt.

As we walked to our car, Reeve and Anna waved goodbye from their front door. "I want a little sister," Felix said to us. My heart swelled with tenderness.

"We'd like another baby too, Felix. You know, you do have a baby sister--her name is Elise, remember? She was born when you were 2 years old. But she just can't be here with us."

"Yeah, I want a baby sister who will stay with us and live in our house," Felix said eagerly.

Dan told him, "Well, after Christmas, Mama and Papa are going on a trip. You'll stay with Bamba and Granda, and we'll go on a trip to see if we can get you a baby sister, okay?"

"What kind of store will we get her from?"

"We don't get a baby from the store, we make one. And Mama and Papa are going to see a doctor who will help us get a baby. We won't come back with the baby, but it will be in Mommy's tummy. Maybe it will be here for your 5th birthday," I explained.

Dan added, "We're going to try to make you a big brother for your 5th birthday, Felix. Would you like that?"

"YEAH!" Felix shouted from the back seat.

So I ask the universe, (the) God(s), spirit, Lady Luck, Saint Gerard, Diana, Isis, Demeter, Pan, Hera, Hariti, Kishimojin, Mother Earth, Kokopelli, Sarah mother of Isaac, Rebecca mother of Jacob and Esau, Rachel mother of Joseph and Benjamin, Hannah mother of the prophet Samuel, and whatever other-worldly allies there are to conjure. Most of all, I ask for your thoughts and prayers in whatever tradition or faith you choose. I'll take all the blessings and magic and whatever there is for us! Somewhere I have a prayer card of Saint Gerard that my fellow "Catlicker" friend Susie gave me--I'll dig that out too. We're going to Seattle Reproductive Medicine in early January to see whether they can help make our family's wish come true.

I've been going to yoga classes at the home of a most amazing woman named Chris, who creates community and embraces the world in every way. After a class of about a dozen people I'd never met was over, people were chatting, nibbling on the treats Chris always provides after class. Chris was listening to people's recent news, talking about her own, just as enthusiastic as ever even though her adorable husband had just died in October after a swift bout with pancreatic cancer. She turned to me and whispered, "Is it okay to talk about your trip to Seattle? Is it private?" For some reason, without even hesitating I said, "Sure, it's okay."

I thought she was going to introduce me and my news to the woman she'd been chatting with, but at the top of her lungs she announced to the whole room, "AND MARILYN IS TRAVELING TO SEATTLE FOR IN VITRO FERTILIZATION NEXT MONTH!" After I recovered from laughing, I threw up my hands and said, "So send all your good vibes my way in January." No one was scandalized, and I wouldn't have cared if they were. "That's exciting!" a number of them said. In that moment, I realized it felt good to have their support, that a little bit of the burden of my secretly lived anxiety had been lifted.

Hope is prayer. Prayers bring blessings, in many forms, in every moment.

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!"