Thankful for Longing

I take great comfort from this passage in Edwidge Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying:

   When my daughter was born, her face blood-tinted, her eyelids swollen with tiny light pink patches that Colleen the midwife called angel kisses, her body coiled around itself as if to echo the tightness of her tiny fists, I instantly saw it as one of many separations to come. She was leaving my body and going into the world, where she would spend the rest of her life moving away from me.

   Groggy and exhausted, I asked Colleen, 'Is it normal for me to think this?'

   'Maybe you're one of those women who enjoys being pregnant,' she said.

It wasn't so much that I enjoyed being pregnant. I simply liked the fact that for a while my daughter and I had been inseparable.  

These words remind me that I had a bond with Elise while carrying her--one that will always remain undefinable by our experiences in this world, but a bond nonetheless. We separated when she was born too, but of course in a much more painful way--that final separation, skipping the togetherness of being daughter and mother on this planet. 

But that bond we had while I carried her inside me: we were as close as we could be, though we could not see each other and I could not hear her. She could hear my voice, and her papa's and her brother's, and she could hear my breath and heartbeat. But this whole experience took place on a subconscious level, invisible to us in our sense-driven existence. I take comfort in the connection we had while still mourning its lost potential. 

When I think of this closeness with my children that I lost with Elise, that slips away from me with each day Felix grows up, that closeness I cherish and mourn at the same time when Felix cuddles and kisses and says "I love you" to me, the words of Cindy Sheehan keep coming to mind. Cindy Sheehan was the woman who held a vigil against the Iraq war outside President Bush's Texas ranch in August 2005 after her firstborn son Casey was killed serving as a soldier. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with her actions, I once read of her devotion to her son that "he touched every part of me." She carried him inside her, gave birth to him, nursed him and bathed him and helped him grow up. That sensory intimacy with one's child is like no other for me, and missing it with Elise is what aches the most.

But it does not hurt anymore. It will always ache, but the hurt with its rage and devastation has faded away, thankfully. 

All of us long to be with someone we miss, whether they have passed away from us or live on another part of the planet. And all of us have some belief in the invisible, in some form or element. My relationship with Elise is invisible, subtle, not of this world. Much more awaits us after this chaotic, contradictory life on this glorious, crazy earth. 

A week ago, I visited a couple in Labor and Delivery as a Peer Companion when they lost their baby boy. On the same day I met the new baby daughter of friends whose firstborn died two days after her traumatic birth a year ago August. My heart swelled and swelled with relief and joy and sadness when I saw little Chapin in her beaming father's arms. She is perfect, beautiful--truly one of the most beautiful babies I've ever seen. I went to Frances as she sat up in bed in the recovery room and started sobbing on her shoulder. I wanted to keep crying like that, but thought I should pull myself together because this was her day of joy. Frances said she felt Emerson's presence at every moment of her pregnancy and delivery with Chapin. 

If anyone is familiar with separation and reunion, it is Edwidge Danticat, who learned of this kind of love from her father and his older brother: her two papas. She writes lovingly of her uncle, a pastor who raised her for eight years in Haiti after her parents emigrated to the United States.

'Death is a journey we embark on from the moment we are born,' [my uncle] would say. 'An hourglass is turned and the sand starts to slip in a different direction as soon as we emerge from our mother's womb. Thank God those around us are too blinded by joy then to realize it. Otherwise there would be weeping at births as well. But if we weep at a death, it's because we do not understand death. If we saw death as another kind of birth, just as the Gospel exhorts us to, we woudn't weep, but rejoice, just as we do at the birth of a child.' 

This is what I resolve to do: keep hold of life and death. Like laughing and crying at the same time. 

Fear and Trust

We may not have a new baby on the way, but we did get a new family member. Yesterday afternoon, I went with Felix and our friend Shirley to the animal shelter. Shirley adopted two kittens that were buddies at the shelter, and Felix picked out a quiet-tempered, affectionate, sleek black kitty named Puma (we're not sure if we'll keep that name or not). It only took him about 5 hours last night to venture out from under the sofa to sniff every piece of furniture and pace back and forth alongside me to rub the length of his body against mine.

He is slowly beginning to trust this strange place with its strange smells and beings. He's staying in a small room off the kitchen, but early this morning he ventured into the kitchen itself and up the stairs where we were sleeping. I know this because Genki woke me by leaping up to charge down the stairs growling.

The kitty doesn't trust Genki yet, needless to say. I thought Genki's dogzilla behavior would send our new family member back behind the sofa for the rest of the day. But he came out as soon as I went downstairs to call to him, and is batting at his new toy. I have no doubt that soon he'll be roaming the vast new territory of our house, hundreds of times more vast than the nice, but small cage he lived in for 4 months at the shelter.

I've wanted another kitty for a while, ever since our lovely, feisty dilute calico Freud died in October 2007. But I didn't realize that he would teach me so many things in his very first hours with us.

Things like:
* Proceed with caution, but let yourself trust.
* Let things take their natural course, but participate in their process too.
* Let your heart be prepared for the unexpected, even if your mind is freaked out by it.
* Stretch and relax as much as you can in your new surroundings.
* No matter how scared you might feel about where your life is going, you will purr again.
* Someone will be there to inspire your purring, but having been through some of life's trials and weathered them somehow, you will find also that you've gained the ability to feel scared and to purr at the same time.

If I do say so myself (even though I grew up with the guilt of Catholicism and the outward modesty of a Japanese), I've become a much wiser person for the trials of the past couple of years. I trust my instincts more. I criticize myself less. I'm more understanding with my fears, and try to let them teach me about myself.

I haven't achieved these on my own: Elise is my greatest teacher, and the family and friends who show their love for me are my greatest living teachers. But I can give myself credit for calling these beings into my life. How else is the sincerity of loved ones tested, if not in times of trouble? I did not turn away from Elise's death, but let her take me to the darkest depths of pain. Now as I struggle with my inability to have another child, I see that sadness and joy, darkness and light infuse every moment, and I cherish both.

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.

Trees and Feathers

"Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity--which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem." --Eckhart Tolle


Dan was out of town all of last week, so I traveled to Helena with Felix to stay with the moms, AKA Grandma and Jannie. It was comforting to be with them, as that day I had taken yet another pregnancy test that turned up negative. Weighing heavily inside me was the knowledge that two other couples in Bozeman had just suffered the loss of their babies this summer, both of them during birth. Then, when I checked my e-mail, I learned that a friend and bright spirit in this town, Liz Ann Kudrna, was hit by a boulder while climbing and had her spine severed. In the span of a few seconds, she was rendered a paraplegic.

On a day when the moms took Felix into town and the carousel to give me some personal time, I dragged myself out of the house to take a walk in the forest. At first all I could see were the dead and dying lodgepole pines: every branch and needle brown and lifeless, the trunks riddled with round beige circles of sap like bullet holes, where the trees desperately tried to fend off attack by bark beetles. Jan and Mary Anne had 50 dead or dying trees cut down and hauled away to be burned. They are lucky in that they have lots of aspen, Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir in addition to the poor lodgepoles: some people, they say, lost every tree on their property.

I forced myself to see the bigger picture on my walk. I saw bear scat, a few days old maybe, full of seeds, not too big but I talked loudly to Genki and clapped my hands just in case. I was bushwhacking through a berry patch I hoped harbored no hungry territorial ones.

I searched for a weathered piece of tree trunk or branch I could take home for our garden as a memento of this lovely place. The moms will sell it in 2 or 3 years. The work of upkeep, shovelling, de-icing and negotiating a treacherous winter driveway, snow-blowing the 1/3 of a mile of drive to the road, keeping the grass cut, stacking firewood, monitoring propane and sewer and plumbing issues, and now spending a lot of money to remove the ecological and fire hazard of diseased trees, is wearing on them.

As I bushwhacked toward the lodgepole stands in the foothills leading to MacDonald Pass, I emerged to find all kinds of seeds stuck to my light fleece sweater. Sesame-shaped brown seeds, oval bright-green burrs, fennel-like dark slivers. When I got to the house and took off my shoes, I found black burrs like tiny twigs in my socks. Tenacious sparks of life, renewing themselves by grasping at any possibility.

Thoughts of life and death floated in fragments through my mind. I had already sobbed my eyes out in the house on my way out for the walk. Now I was drifting, going with the flow and watching Genki sniff around, trot back and forth to check on me, both of us listening to the aspens whisper, the evergreens sough, the bees thrum.

At the end of my walk I found my treasure, right behind the wood shop: a star-shaped bit of weathered Douglas fir root. It was part of a once-enormous being that was now a pile of weathered stump and branches aging into soil for decades, after a fire burned it down in the 1930s. The earth had claimed more than half of it, and no doubt dozens of spiders and insects and soil bacteria were now calling it home.

While writing this, my eye just landed on the peacock feather Felix brought me this morning. Purple, caramel, iridescent lime green and indigo and midnight blue eye: "Let it teach you how to live and die, and now not to make living and dying into a problem."

Messes

What is it about weekends that I can really relax into whatever it is I'm doing and not worry about time or To-Dos? After all, I'm not at a paying job, not having to clock in anywhere or fill any quotas during the week. Maybe it's some Protestant-work-ethic, go-out-and-make-something-of-yourself American socialization.

Whatever the reason, the best part is that I can enjoy myself with Felix and Dan on weekends. Especially one like today, clear and sunny at long last. Today's sunshine has an effect like childbirth: the agony of cold, rainy weeks vanishes at the sight of the first warm, clear day.

This past week I felt irritable and impatient with Felix, even after I had time to myself while he'd spent hours at his grandparents' or at preschool during the day. He has fits of whining for candy, where I try to sympathize while telling him "not today," but after listening to his broken-record "lollipop...lollipop" or "gumdrops...gumdrops" a few hundred times, it's like the opposite of hearing a soothing chant: I finally yell, "STOP! I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOUR WHINING!" I try to balance my tone of voice between This Is Your Last Chance authority and I Am Not Mad At You. Whenever I get abrupt with him, he bursts into tears, which I think is partly manipulation and partly that his feelings really do get hurt, which induces instant guilt in me.

But today is Saturday. Because it's Saturday, I happily indulged his wish to make banana bread, for probably the third time this month, even though it's a mess of an undertaking. In earlier bake-offs, he liked to whisk the flour mixture, crack the eggs, turn the mixer on and off. Today he reached Jamie-Oliver-like accomplishments: he held the measuring spoons while I poured salt and baking soda into them; and he cracked the eggshells AND dropped the eggs into the bowl. He shouted with glee at his egg-cracking feat, especially when I exclaimed that he hadn't let any shell fragments get into the bowl.

Of course there are the gooey bowls and spoons and mixing blade to wash. There are the counters to clean, especially where Felix insisted on using "the big spoon"--the tablespoon--to scoop baking powder. I got a bowl out for him to scoop and dump all the baking powder he wanted instead of wrecking the banana bread with an overdose of baking powder. Of course he got a lot of baking powder on the counter, and left an extra bowl for me to wash.

But the sun is out. The clouds have finally buzzed off. That means today is for making a banana bread mess, especially the batter on the face from licking the mixing blade. Today is for getting covered with sand while making "cakes" in the sandbox. Today is for muddy hands and knees from digging for worms. I couldn't ask for a better day.

Lightness

This is a picture I took of Felix at the end of a Tuesday we spent together. He likes these rainbow-colored gloves because he can put them on all by himself. Before bedtime, he stood brushing his teeth with one rainbow hand while waving at the mirror with the other.

We have Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons together, and today I was determined to just enjoy him and not worry about meeting time deadlines. These days Felix gets really upset when it's time to stop playing--get off the swing, park the Thomas trains, stop riding his bike--so we can get to the store /make dinner /get ready for bed. Even if we warn him ahead of time, he still mourns in his high-pitched wail when the fun is ending.

I can't blame him. How much do we tell ourselves to enjoy the moment? So I pushed him on the swing today for well over an hour, then we bought him a new bike with training wheels, his first. He didn't ask for one. He just had such a ball trying out the next-door neighbor's, and loves riding his tricycle so much that he pedals all the way to the library and back, which I think is over 1/2 mile round trip, that we wanted to see him on a bicycle. He rode it over to the neighbors' and again we spent as much time having fun as he wanted.

It was soothing for me. I was able to rest my spinning mind just hanging out with him. I started reading Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now, and it really resounds with me. I still am figuring out how to have Elise as a part of my life without letting the pain of losing her define me. I know her death has changed me, and in many ways for the better. But I want to access the peace I know is in me, bring it to the surface again and have it always at hand, just like she is always with me in everything I do.

Still Here

Felix had his Tuesday morning swim lesson today. Most of the children in the class have a younger sibling, so Elise's absence looms as I sit around the pool with the other mothers. Last time when I sat near 3 others as they talked about their multiple children, I read a book and discreetly stuck my index finger into the ear that faced them.

One of the women lost a 20-week old baby last summer and is 21 weeks pregnant. Her son is in Felix's swim group and is about the same age as Felix. I've spoken a little bit to her about the pain of Elise's death, thinking she could probably relate, but she never talks about the baby who died, maybe because it died from complications of Trisomy 13. I don't even know if it was a boy or a girl.

This morning the first thing she told me and another woman with a 3-year-old daughter and 6-month old son on her lap was that at her ultrasound, she found out that this baby was a girl. I was genuinely happy for her, and happy that the baby is all right. She and the other mother went on to chat about the age differences between their children, what a challenge it is with two little ones, etc. etc. etc. I turned away to watch Felix and discreetly stuck an index finger in my ear.

Then I went into the empty women's locker room and said out loud, "Elise, you are still our daughter, and you are still Felix's little sister. Others have forgotten you, but you will always be our baby." Later I said out loud again, "Elise, we can only see what's in front of our faces, and sometimes we even miss that. Our world here is so limited, we only acknowledge or speak about those who are here with us in our tiny little plane of existence. I know you are with me even when these poor eyes can't see you."

How to Thrive

"I grieved deeply when you passed away...My feelings came from deep in my body. Even though I could control them, they shattered reality, if you know what I mean. Reality has remained broken ever since. And oddly enough, it feels more real that way. So I don't bother to mend it. I just don't care anymore if nothing makes sense."

--Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander


I just read a short story called "Colorless Paintings" by Sata Ineko (Sata is her surname), a Japanese writer. I've been trying to pull myself out of self-pity, and so I picked up this piece to read from the short story collection The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath.

The narrator has a Chinese friend who was in Nagasaki at the time the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 9th, 1945. A few years after the war, her friend writes in a letter to the narrator, "Today again my friends went to the [anti-nuclear] meeting. I envy them and am suddenly irritated. Looking back, I feel that as foreigners we are much freer now, without the kind of restrictions that were placed on us in the past. We are free now from the feelings of humiliation that were unconsciously instilled in us from the time we were children. As long as we keep up an interest in the things around us, we can maintain a balanced outlook on life."

I am not so self-absorbed as to compare my tragedy with the scale of those who not only suffered the atomic bombings, but also happened to be Korean and Chinese colonial subjects inside Japan at the time. My point in quoting this passage is the line "As long as we keep up an interest in the things around us, we can maintain a balanced outlook on life." Everyday life's little interests and even tasks can be a salvation from the darkness and cruelty of this world. They are part of what keeps me going. I can name dozens of other blessings that keep me going too.

The loving comments posted and sent by amazingly supportive friends, for example, even when they're chastising. In fact, they are right to criticize my jealousy of 2-children friends. I probably chose the wrong term when I said I could not "relate" to them. I should have said I'm "burning with envy and bitterness." I know it's not right, and not good for me. And I should tell these friends how I'm feeling. Communication is something I work at daily. I need to work harder. I tend to project my pain onto others, to make it their fault. It's nobody's fault. I'm stuck in an emotional rut, or at least I was last week when I wrote that entry.

So back to counting my blessings (despite the cliche, and despite the fact I don't want to be told to do it, I can do it myself, to quote my 3-year-old): My loving husband, my sweet son. Our community near and far, singles and marrieds, breeders and non-, our families who count Elise as their own too. The fact that the sun has come out to play today for the third day in a row in the middle of a graaaaaaaay winter.

And the fact that Sata's writing has inspired me to dig out another of her story collections from the basement for reading, to start translating more Japanese fiction, to write more of my own stuff. I can do these while sitting at a desk we set up in a newly-tidied room, and every so often I can gaze up from the keyboard to admire three lovely frames of Chinese embroidery that we inherited from Dan's lovely grandmother Louise. She is another story of how to endure and thrive.

Second (and Third) Chances

One thing I don't think I've mentioned in here is that Dan and I have been trying to have another baby. We've been trying since June, and next week I'm going to try the fertility drug Clomid. I think one of the reasons I've been avoiding writing in here is because I'm having a hard time with the constant failure to get pregnant, and Elise's role in that. I thought I was dealing with the stress of grief well, but I can't help thinking that our inability to conceive means I'm not coping well.

No less than 12 people who are either friends or acquaintances have had babies since we started trying to get pregnant again. Most of these babies are second children. If we don't manage to have another baby, I can see my relationships with two-children friends begin to deteriorate further. Not all of them: there are some who struggled with infertility before their children came along who understand, or some who are just the sensitive type. I don't begrudge them their children; I simply don't relate, and it takes effort from both sides to relate, and I'm too tired to try to help them understand me.

To get started on the Clomid, I had an exam and history with a certain OB's Physician's Assistant the other day. After the visit, I felt deflated and depressed. She treated my pregnancies, including Elise's birth, as purely clinical events. This is how part of my visit went:

"So you have one living child and one that was stillborn. How may weeks into the pregnancy?"
"Thirty-three."
"And did they find anything wrong with her?"
"Nothing. An autopsy was done, and also my placenta and the umbilical cord were fine as far as they could tell."
"No chromosomal abnormalities?"
"No. With both my son and daughter I had a nuchal translucency that showed no risk of defects."
"And was it a vaginal birth?"
"Yes."
"You were induced?"
"Yes."
"Okay...and the medications you're taking..."
"An antidepressant, Lexapro 10mg."
"Nothing else?"
"Prenatal vitamins, herbs." I've been taking the Lexapro since August, and had taken it before when my son was born and I had postpartum depression."
"Were you taking it at the time you got pregnant with your daughter?"
"No. I was off it for most of 2006, until my daughter died."

I took strange comfort in the extra notes she jotted down about these. How pathetic is that?
No "I'm sorry for your loss" or "That must have been so hard." It was as if we were talking about having my appendix out. She was a pleasant person in every other way, but perhaps hadn't much experience with traumatic events in patients' lives, and so probably didn't know how to treat Elise like a child of mine who had died.

The other day I was talking with the very nice gal who waxes my eyebrows, and after she'd talked about having her twins by C-section six years ago, she asked if I gave birth to Elise. When I said yes, she said, "God Marilyn, that must have been so hard." But I said I was glad I could give birth to her naturally because it felt like an affirmation of her life, and that I was glad to birth her in the same way I had Felix, instead of having her be just a clinical procedure.

I ask myself why I haven't written in my blog for so long, and I think it's because I haven't written about wanting another baby. Our lack of success seems tied up in my emotions over Elise, even though it's felt numerous times like I am clearer and more accepting of her death as time goes by. I know that recovery from my grief doesn't mean I'll forget her. I know and accept that the pain of her death will always be with me. I am ready to move forward, and have been for a while. I talk about her to others when I feel they will listen respectfully.

As far as I can tell, I don't feel as if our desire for another baby is a betrayal of her. But I seem to feel that our inability to conceive is connected to her. My doctor says it's probably the stress still. I've felt stuck also in not doing any creative pursuits I dream about. Some more stuff inside me needs to be expressed, emotionally and spiritually, but it's hard and it's scary.

The puttering and restless wandering around the house is just like I was feeling last year, in the first months after Elise died. I've come full circle again, revisiting those times unconsciously, which is probably what I need to do. But I really, really want to take that giant step forward and have another baby. In the meantime, I've picked up my guitar again, and last night Felix and I made our own Valentines for his schoolmates: I cut out red, purple, and pink hearts from construction paper, and had him squirt gobs of glitter glue on them and pile on the heart-shaped sparklies. It felt like an act of love.

Wordless Connection

Another gray day among many this winter, but at least we are getting some snow out of it today: sequin flakes are parachuting out of a windless sky. I'm clinging to the fact that each day brings a minute's more sun.

Considering the Seattle-like gloom though, I'm feeling pretty steady, if scattered. I haven't had any emotional crashes since the holidays, but even if I did, they are part of going along with what life brings.

One thing I did that brought some catharsis was to send out an announcement to academic friends and teachers about resigning my job. I heard from people I hadn't been in touch with for a while, and people I was sure had heard about Elise's death but hadn't contacted me. I'm trying not to dwell on those I thought I would get a response from but haven't, because people drift in and out of my life and bring me experiences and memories I can still savor, even if we never meet again.

I haven't written in here in a long time. Writing is not part of my days lately, I think because things feel so transitional, it seems I just have to hold on and go along even though the road is so twisty, there's no point in trying to see around any of the corners. I can't stop to process, but somehow this doesn't seem wrong or disturbing. I write in my journal, but that's about it. Otherwise, I talk with Dan, with some friends, read and watch movies. And of course, talking with Felix is always a treat, with those big brown eyes gazing earnestly into mine.

Speaking of wordlessness, a friend last night was saying how much she loved After Life: she said she especially loved the scene where one of the characters, an 18-year-old girl who is a trainee at the way station for the dead, stomps around on a rooftop angrily kicking and throwing snow after she realizes the young coworker she's infatuated with is leaving the way station. She expresses powerful emotion unusual for her in that scene, and with no words. Most of the memories the dead choose to take with them to the afterlife have no words either.

The most comforting part of the film for me in my relationship with Elise is the experience of a teenage girl who thinks at first she wants to choose a memory from a trip to Disneyland. When her advisor at the way station sits her down to point out that dozens of people have thought they wanted to choose a memory from Disneyland, the teenager goes back to the drawing board. Towards the end of the film, she runs excitedly to tell her advisor she's chosen a memory from her childhood: one where she is lying with her head in her mother's lap while her mother strokes her hair, and the little girl lingers in the comfort of her mother's scent and the sound of her heartbeat. Elise felt the warmth of my body, the whoosh of my heartbeat and the sounds of my voice, her papa's, her brother's. We were important to her, as she was and always will be to us.

Solstice at Last

I'm taking heart that the daylight will start lingering a bit longer each day, even if it's only by minutes. In some ways I am savoring the darkness too, just because it encourages me to take things slowly. But the sun on my face, bright red behind my eyelids, feels the most comforting.

I sent candles to each of my family members. Inside their cards I wrote: "This Christmas, we would have been looking forward to Elise's 1st birthday. As my gift to her and to you, I am sending this candle. Please light it in her honor on Dec.26th and 27th, and whenever you think of her."

I also included this passage from Daphne Du Maurier, quoted from Healing After Loss. It captures best my feelings of our lost future with her, the hope she seems to bring us despite her death, and my belief that her life, however brief and forgotten by many, will always resonate with me, Dan, Felix, and therefore in those who truly love us:

"To have lived at all is a measure of immortality; for a baby to be born, to become a man, a woman, to beget others like himself, is an act of faith in itself, even an act of defiance. It is as though every human being born into this world burns, for a brief moment, like a star, and because of its pinpoint of light shines in the darkness, and so there is glory, so there is life."

Light and Shadow

I felt on a high the beginning of November, and made it through Elise's birthday with flying colors. Everybody was saying how I looked different, sounded different, and I thought, "I made it!"

As if I wasn't going to be sad ever again.

After Thanksgiving when we returned from a relaxing, cozy 4 nights at the moms' house in the forest near Helena, where we got lots of grandma love for Felix too, I descended.

What comes up, must come down.

I keep thinking, habitually, over and over again despite what I know is true about life, that my pain and grief go into some kind of "remission," and that I'll be "cured" or healed someday.

I've been feeling low the past week, and couldn't figure out why. When I realized the reason, I was surprised at my ability to repress the pain. Last year at this time I was supposed to be looking forward to Elise's birth. Her due date was Dec.26-27th. She should be turning one year old soon. I wasn't acknowledging this consciously, but my heart was--her spirit was. And so I am missing her so badly again.

But my pain is part of me. The light cannot be appreciated without the dark. Light always casts a shadow, lovely shadows of mystery with their own unique form and suggestion. I need to embrace those shadows, as impossible and formless though they may seem.

The other night we had our neighbors over for dinner. Pete and Sanna's daughter Oskaria was born last year on July 1st, and died hours later from a rare genetic disorder. We met them through our Share support group, but in a strangely fortuitous coincidence, they moved in across the street from us a mere 2 weeks after Elise's death.

It was very comforting for me to talk about our daughters. Sanna is due to give birth to their second child this Dec.16th. I told them I am excited for them, yet we all felt so aware of the sadness mixed up in the anticipation and joy. Felix went up to Sanna and patted her belly. "There's a baby in there, Felix," I told him. "Oh!" he exclaimed, and ran into the living room. "Papa, help me get the picture down," he asked Dan. Then he ran back to Sanna and handed her Elise's photo. "This is Baby Sister," he said.

Joy and grief. Shadow and light. Winter's darkness is here, and I am drawn to candles. Maxwell and Annie gave me a glass star to hang in our front window, and I light a tea candle for it every evening. I'm going to light Hanukkah candles too, even though I missed the first day of it yesterday and I'm only just now interested in educating myself about it, and it's not an important Jewish holiday, and Dan's family isn't that religious.

I don't care. My gut says I want candles. Elise wants candles. I feel a connection to her with stars, especially the evening star. I bought a star ornament today for the tree we'll put up next week. I lit the candle Katy bought for us on Elise's birthday. "May this candle light your darkness," she wrote. It will, and the shadows will dance around it. And the stars will glow in the dark night.

Integrating

Sept.25th: It’s been so long since I’ve written that my readers must have given up on me by now. I’m still here, but words have been absent from my state of mind until recently: I agonized through the writing of my conference paper and finally e-mailed it late to my panel chairman on Saturday the 15th, while Dan was out running a race and I was in charge of Felix. This day of course, Felix didn’t want to just zone out in front of his DVDs when I plugged him in to finish that infernal paper, but said, “I want to watch with you, Mommy” for the first time ever. Of course. So that made it even harder to write, but I finished the paper, and didn’t look at it again until the morning of my conference panel in Salt Lake City. Luckily, it was coherent.
I’ve been writing in my journal nearly every day, as an ongoing therapy that helps me unload my anxiety, sadness, and estrangement from words, ironically. I write about how I have nothing to write about. I write 3 pages, as prescribed by Julia Cameron in her “morning pages” prescription in The Artist’s Way. I usually feel off-kilter if I don’t write in my journal, even if I’m convinced I don’t have anything to say in it.

Today I went to meet with a fellow professor who kindly made an agreement with my worried chair / boss to be an official mentor for me. He wasn’t in his office though. I asked the secretary of his department if he’d been in, and she said she hadn’t seen him. I hope he is okay…the last time I was supposed to meet with him, almost a year ago when I was on the search committee for an anthropologist of Japan, I didn’t show up because I was in a delivery room waiting to give birth to Elise.

Sarah walked by while I was waiting for my official mentor this morning. We hugged each other a long time: one of her coworkers was killed in a car crash a few days ago, a woman with three children and two stepchildren, a husband who adored her, with whom she was looking forward to retiring with, Sarah said. My heart feels heavy with empathy today. Another friend’s sweet, beloved dog died, just got terribly, suddenly sick while she was out of town. He was not much more than a puppy and so cherished by her ever since she’d found him abandoned in the desert by the Colorado River.

Anne Lamott writes in her newest book Grace (Eventually): “It’s fine to know, but not to say, that in some inadequate and surprising ways, things will be semi-okay, the way wild flowers spring up at the rocky dirt-line where the open-space meadow meets the road, where the ground is so mean. Just as it’s fine to know but not say that anger is good, a bad attitude is excellent, and the medicinal powers of shouting and complaining cannot be overestimated.” My share of anger is definitely there, and my friend Tracy and I wished we could choose any number of others to get rid of (how about just ONE, perhaps Osama bin Laden?) instead of losing innocent babies, or good people or creatures that leave behind so many broken hearts.

I think I am figuring out how to integrate my pain into my life—something I’ve been frustrated with and confused about for many, many months. I can’t describe the exact process, except to try and try again to be patient with myself: be patient with my anger, my denial of Elise’s death, my depression, my impatience; and credit myself for my self-care (the therapy, the support group, the tears and conversations with Dan, the attempts to reach out to family, the outings with friends, the yoga, the massage, the antidepressants, the acupuncture, the exercise…and yes, the complaining!). I walked home from campus today, and the maple leaves on Grand Avenue are a lovely gold and red. The air was clear and chilly, the sun warm, my steps grateful.

A Break from...

I’m taking a leave of absence from my teaching this semester. I hadn’t posted anything in here for a while because I’d been freaking out about going back to classes, and then freaking out about not going back.

Even my body was telling me something wasn’t right: several people have remarked that I look like I’ve lost weight, and I got a stomach bug the day before the fall term was to begin that kept me home my first day of classes.

Again, I’d been doing everything to help myself heal: I got a massage from the fabulous Heidi, who sensed an emotional blockage in my belly region or chakra. I’m not well-versed in the chakra lingo, but the fact that I’d been going around with my stomach in knots, that my waist was shrinking with the weight loss, that my appetite was poor, and that I caught the flu two days after the massage, tells me my belly was trying to telegraph something. Also, it had been nine or ten months since Elise’s birth—the body remembers such timing.

When I told my mom about my leave last night on the phone, I didn’t hesitate, even though I had it in my head that Mom would never approve. She asked “How are you?” and I said I decided to take the leave. Surprisingly, she responded the way everyone else has: “That’s good. You need to take care of yourself.” She passed right by the news to tell me she was sending me a Joseph Campbell book, Pathways to Bliss. Her gesture is so touching: my mom the Catholic, who knows I am no longer a Catholic, much less a Christian, is reaching out to my intellectual side, and the part of me that still believes in some higher power or spiritual essence.

And the universe / God / cosmos / spirit seems to be speaking to me with synchronicity: the same day at lunch with Maxwell, we were talking about how life can be so cruel. “How do we go on?” I sighed with my head in my hands. Maxwell said that’s where mythology and theology must have stepped in. I’m not sure they’re for “making sense” out of this life, but maybe for imagining something beyond this existence with all its pain, for hope and deliverance.

Not that I don’t see the beauties of this life: my husband who is so loving, gentle, wise, fun; my sweet little son; my friends who don’t fear my sadness; the family members reaching out to us.

The other night at our SHARE meeting, I marveled at the courage and love of one couple who decided to carry their son to term after discovering at the twenty-week ultrasound that he had no kidneys. He lived for fifteen minutes after birth. His mother spoke of her gratitude for the experience of her first pregnancy with him. When I think about Elise, I picture her face as I gazed at her while she lay in my arms. Whenever I see her Papa’s funny long toes, so long they hang off the front of his flip-flops, I remember that she had his long slender fingers and toes. Somday I want to remember her with joy and gratitude.

We returned a few days ago from a week with my family in Sunriver, Oregon. There were 37 of us there. Needless to say, it was hard to exchange more than a few words with all the activity. Still, when 2 days had passed since our arrival with no one saying a word about Elise, I wanted to drive home screaming. My sister Mary and her partner Chris helped me calm down. Chris had already talked with Dan on his own, and they offered to communicate my needs to the others so that I wouldn't have to explain yet again that it really is okay, it really is a good thing, and helpful, to ask us how the day is going, how the hour is going, then listen for a response.

After a yoga class the next day, my sisters and mother and I cried in a group hug. They all said they are hurting for Elise, for us, and didn't know how to talk to us. Is it our eternally optimistic American culture that keeps us from including any talk of sadness in our days? Is it the same old fear of death thing? I keep hearing from people "I've never experienced what you're going through so I don't know what to say," and sometimes I get so sick of it. You expect us to teach you what to say when we're barely keeping our heads above water emotionally? Go read a book.

A lot of books have helped me, if just to confirm that, in the words of one wise soul of a bereaved mother who wrote me a card: "Remember, you are NOT going crazy, it just REALLY HURTS." Empty Cradle, Broken Heart; Still to be Born; Help, Comfort, and Hope; and a daily missal of sorts, Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief offer other people's stories and practical advice for being patient with myself and others in the drudgery of this pain.

But much of the time I am impatient. I still haven't accepted Elise's death. Maybe it's a gradual process--so gradual it's undetectable. It's not as if I am not working hard: yesterday I made calls to my doctor, my therapist, a close friend; I'm getting a massage on Friday, I write in my journal every day, I treated myself to 2 hours of yoga yesterday and took the dog on a short walk. When a friend called to go to a movie, I went even though it sounded better to cozy up at home with my boys for the evening.

But I also thought, maybe Dan and Felix could use a break from my gloomy self for a couple of hours. Felix had thrown a fit a little while ago: was it just a drop in his blood sugar from needing dinner, or is he picking up on my grief? He is a sensitive little guy; I hope he can still embrace that part of himself as he grows older. I hope his baby sister is teaching him how.

So I went to the movie and was surprised to see such a big crowd for the Bozeman Film Festival on a summer evening. With both movie theaters downtown closed indefinitely, and the cineplexes showing the usual lame comedies and blow-em-ups, this town must be starved for decent entertainment. At any rate I wasn't really prepared to see so many acquaintances with their meaningless "How are you" 's, so I inched my way out of conversation most of the time, which felt like absolutely the right thing to do. Whey do we even say those words when we don't really expect a real response? I'm not even answering that hiccup anymore: it's just another way of saying hello anyway.

Then Heather came up to me and gave me a hug. Her son died at birth 4 years ago. Her eyes seemed to reflect my pain, which I found strangely comforting. "I know where you are, and part of me is still there with you," they seemed to say. I could tell her today was a hard day and not see a look saying "Let's get this dreary stuff over with so we can move on to lighter, more trivial chatter." When it was time for us to leave the lobby for the film, part of me wanted her to stay with me like a mother might stay with her scared child in the classroom on the first day of school. But that child has to be left alone with all those strangers eventually, so I dragged myself off to be with the others who were comfortably socializing.

The new term is starting and with it all sorts of people spouting "How are you?" and me wanting to say, "I'm not really here yet," or "Today is going by slowly," or "This hour is an improvement on the last one," or "Words can't express it."