Halloween?

Things are starting to pop up about Halloween now, costumes and treats in stores, invitations to events. I have always loved Halloween. I love dressing up in a costume, never anything scary but something funny or retro and amusing. Friends of ours always really go to town for Halloween, their whole block does actually, with gravestones on the front lawn and cobwebs everywhere and animated zombie mannequin things. Tonnes of kids come to their neighbourhood because it is always the most in the spirit and we always go too. But I think Halloween may now be lost to me forever. I don't see fun and frivolity when I see something like this:

I see a dead baby, my dead baby and I remember holding her lifeless body. I remember her the rattling last breaths, I remember her blue lips and crepey skin. I remember wrapping her up and putting her in the coffin we made. I remember being given her ashes. I feel the ache of grief and emptiness of loss and I want to scoop up this little cake skeleton and hold her tightly to my chest.

Of course the roots of this holiday are more meaningful than an excuse to dress up and depending on your age binge on candy or become your trampy alter ego, with it's connections to Samhain and All Saints Day etc. Maybe I need to look to making the day more meaningful and put aside what I can no longer do, at least until my son is old enough to want to celebrate. Really this is just one more thing that signifies how I am not the same person I was and I never will be.

High Water Line

The stress of grief and loss and subsequent pregnancy and motherhood has laid pretty heavy on me. I have applied for a new job, but I almost feel like my anxiety levels are still so high at a baseline that I am not sure I can survive an interview! At the same time I don't think I should hold back from opportunities, especially since grief and motherhood are just my reality now.
Have you found that too, that it's harder to manage other kinds of anxiety now?

2 Saershas

Does your baby age in your mind's eye? Will he or she remain the small newborn/born too soon/born still? For me, it is both.
There are two little girls I know who were born within weeks of Saersha and I have them has kind of place holders for her growth. What would she be doing now? Oh, I see, she would be talking and walking around, having her own fierce will and getting into everything. Chubby legs grown leaner with all the toddling around. She might have enough hair that I could put it in a pony tail. Her hair was brown but then when the sunlight hit it turned this beautiful coppery colour. Later it would have come in blonde like her brother. Big girl shadow Saersha who would almost be 2. 
When Stellan is sleeping I see her in his face, but then she is a small baby the one who will never speak, who made only one sound, a beautiful sigh. This is the one that haunts me in dark moments as I remember her final hours and her death. Why couldn't I do more for you precious, tiny, still daughter?

Five F*cking Years, some thoughts on grief

Five years ago I had never had anyone close to me die. At 31 years old I didn't really know what it was to grieve.

Then it was August 1 of 2008. I had just gotten engaged (at long last) the month before. I lived in the West End and it was Pride and fireworks weekend. It was probably one of the happiest times of my life, then I got the call from my best friend saying that her dad had died. To say he was a great man is not enough. He was like a surrogate father to me and he was beloved of his whole community. He was 64 and only a year shy of a much deserved retirement. That summer it was so hard to see similarly aged men alive who were way less enlightened and kind, including, perhaps especially, my own father. How could these others more deserve to live? I still feel his absence and my anger at the injustice and arbitrariness of death became even stronger later. Now even 5 years later it's hard to believe he is gone.

Little did I know that this was just the beginning of my lessons in grief. Not that long after I lost my first would-be baby, then my very dear cat (if you've ever really loved a pet you will know this is not trivial), then 2 more pregnancies, then Saersha, then my cherished grandfather this year.  All but one of these deaths was shockingly unexpected and too soon.
These losses were of course very different from each other, but the same painful permanence of the absences is there. How can my brain even process these losses are forever? 

As I have alluded to in previous posts, I experienced significant trauma in my early life, but that pain felt like it could be overcome or even maybe erased. I went through therapy and I could release some of that hurt and felt like I had regained some of what I thought I had lost (this is of course debatable). With death/grief as an adult, I am only too aware of how I was different before and how potentially impossible it is to recover to that state. This kind of trauma, while it can be somewhat healed with time and effort, I am not sure it can ever be overcome. For me healing from Saersha's death (and these other untimely losses) I find as time passes of course it does get easier. But I was surprised to find that it was not that the pain was less, but just that the intervals of extreme pain become farther apart. Certainly the painful permanence of death (for me as someone who can not believe that we are reunited after life, as much I wish I could) will always stand as a barrier to full healing.

But as I ruminate over these things, I remind myself that no one is immune to loss. Sooner or later everyone will lose people close to them. It might not have the same burning injustice and searing pain of losing your child, but loss is a part of life and dealing with it is part of gaining maturity. By "dealing with it" I don't mean keeping a stiff upper lip and pretending everything is fine, but by having the courage to face it, feel it, incorporate it into a new self and carry on living.


I started drafting this post a few days ago but today I read Mark Epstein's article in the NYT. He writes: "In resisting trauma and in defending ourselves from feeling its full impact, we deprive ourselves of its truth." I feel like this is so endemic in this culture. Everyone wants to pretend that they are apart/immune from trauma, pain and death. When your child dies you are forced to look at death directly and accept your own mortality as well. I know some people still resist it even then, but trauma can only be set aside temporarily. It will wait for you.

I keep trying to accept the truth of my losses, not pretend them away, even though that may be easier at times. I will dive into grief when it comes like a wave over my head, then with effort come out the other side, breathe deeply and carry on.

37 weeks in, 37 weeks out

Happiness writes white, so they say, and these have been mostly happy times, but of course there is no uncomplicated happiness anymore.

Now Stellan has been on the outside for as long as he was on the inside and I am confident in caring for him and I love him more than I thought possible. He brings me so much joy in his laughter and playfulness, his sweetness and calm nature. The more I get to know him now the more I wonder at what Saersha would have been like. On the outside I knew her only when she was unconscious but somehow I felt like I got a sense of her strength and tenacity. She was tough to come back after 20 mins of resuscitation and she held on for hours more than I thought she would after we took her off of life support. It may be a projection but I think that is a reflection on her character. Of course I will never know and that hurts every day. As I watch Stellan grow and get to know him more Saersha is always like a shadow behind as I imagine her version of these traits and milestones.

Some days still are a struggle to keep going, to engage with the world and get out of the house. Some times my heart is just not in it, but I keep trying for Stellan's sake. If he were not here I don't think I could be either. Those 37 weeks of carrying him while still so fresh in grief was some of the toughest work I have done but I could not be more glad to have done it. 

Eraser

Do you ever feel like people around you are intentionally trying to negate your baby? Maybe they are failing to mention them in a list of your children or acting in other ways to pretend that your baby never existed intentionally, perhaps to try and force you to get over it?
The month after Saersha died a family member set about unraveling the hats she had knitted for her, directly in front of me. It was so painful and especially considering this person's personality and profession I think that she was trying to erase Saersha.

What is a mother?

As Bereaved Mother's Day passed last weekend and Mother's Day itself approaches this week I have been thinking about how I feel about the title of Mother for myself.

Was I a mother last year? Is this my first year of mothering or my second?

Most of the discourse I have read on this has been mothers asserting that they want to be thought of as such even if they have no living children. I totally respect and support this for them but last year when my close friends or other loss mamas assured me I was still a mother it didn't feel right. It was actually jarring and upsetting for me. Maybe because it painfully reminded me of my losses at a time where I felt very vulnerable. I felt like I wasn't a mother if I had no one to nurture; I wasn't doing the job as I understood it to be defined. It's like calling a widow a wife, an incomplete description. I had that empty arms ache and I wanted motherhood to be something that felt better than excruciating grief. I felt like there needed to be another category that is not lesser or excluded but specific to someone whose only child died before they got a chance to live.

Now I am definitely a mother by any definition but I still feel like I am something else too. I don't know what that is but now I can say that being the mother of a dead baby is a lot harder than being the mother of a live one. Saersha doesn't need me like Stellan does but I hope that I can honour her in my life some how.

Missing

I am missing you Saersha and I wish you were here. You would be 18 months old today.
I still wince when I see girly things, the knife twisting.
I wish I could see you again, or even feel like it is possible. I wish I could know you.
Your brother is not you and you can't be replaced.

Not enough

Sometimes it seems like my grief is not enough to some, my sadness not sufficiently passionate, my pain not shared and so they may forget that it is there or think I am unfeeling. 

I am not outwardly raging at the injustice, I am not weeping. I don't want people to see my hurt.

Almost a year and a half after her death my feelings for Saersha are a vulnerability that I try to protect from the world.

I steel myself, I talk about her but I don't let them see. It's only a few instances where I was held and cried and those were with my very closest people at the beginning.

In part this is because time as passed and I have healed a bit. Stellan has helped me a great deal. The thing is, though this is one of the most painful experiences of my life, this is not the first time I have gone through extreme trauma. My life was defined by it from 2 months old; I was neglected and abused. From that I have managed to become a functioning adult because I learned to draw from my inner strength rather than support from others, in fact I have always had to protect myself from others rather than trust that they could help me.

That said, I am tough but I'm not a rock.

At the same time now that Stellan is here, I want to connect with other moms and make little friends for him. Just as in pregnancy I am faced with the dilemma about what to share and when and how I will feel about what I say or don't say.

Also people have asked me about the early days with Stellan. Was I a crying mess? Was I overwhelmed? Did I think I couldn't handle it? Definitely there were moments of intensity and frustration and still are. There are also moments of guilt over my love for him. But compared to everything else, this is a dream. (Thankfully I have so far managed to avoid PPD and Stellan is pretty chill. I've been lucky in these things at least!)

That seems to offend sometimes too, people are looking for someone to relate to and even if I don't tell them about how/why I am so different, they are discomfited by my less stressed responses.

I guess all of these things come to a common point: don't judge me, and I will try to take my own advice.

Dreams

I know there is some part of my brain that doesn't understand that Saersha is dead. My waking mind is fully and logically aware of the facts but some part of my primitive dream mind seems ignorant (willfully in denial?).
When she first died I dreamed of her all the time. Dreams of nursing her back to fully developed life after she had shrunk back down to an embryo. Dreams of her being with us and healthy.
Since Stellan was born I have been dreaming of two live babies, not one. Twins who were not born together. In my dreams they are the same age. Once when my husband brought Stellan in to nurse in the middle of the night and still half in a dream I asked him repeatedly "where's the other baby?". I was thinking she must need to be fed also.
Lately my dreams are more of searching for her. Those awful dreams where you are searching though rooms and tunnels and hallways and never finding what you seek. Where is the other baby?