001c - No Two Are Alike (comment)

Lori, that second-to-last paragraph... that is just such perfection. It's all wonderful, but regardless of how anyone feels about God or religion of any flavour (or not), that idea - that love repairs a broken world - sigh. It's wonderfully provocative.

Thank you so much for sharing this moment with us. I've heard a voice like that too [blog author references hearing God's voice], and still am not sure what I'd call it - but that's okay. The important thing, I think, is being open to hearing it, no matter what its source.

001e - Birthing a Dying Child (comment)

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, Ben and Liam's birth was not so much a belief-shattering experience as it was a belief-creating experience. I entered into it in a complete void of faith. What *was* shattered, for me, was my obliviousness. I hadn't realized how deeply rooted that obliviousness had been, and god, how naked and exposed I felt when it was gone.

The belief that Liam's death created in me... it's tough to articulate. It affirmed for me, to my surprise, that we are accompanied by something bigger and more profound and more loving than what's in our line of sight. Something more ancient than all our human attempts at constraining and packaging it up.

The other belief that was formed in my loss is that my motherhood of Liam was worthwhile. Again, tough to articulate, but that's the word that springs up. Worthwhile. I can't know why he was born so injured, and why he died. I can only presume that he needed to grow inside me, and was meant to be my son exactly as he was. He made my heart bigger. Birthing him made it bigger. As did holding him as he died. Not that his purpose was to make me bigger... but he did.

002a - The Inescapability of Karma--Maybe

For a couple of months after my daughter was stillborn at 38 weeks, my husband and I saw a grief therapist recommended by the hospital and our midwives' group. She served a purpose, mainly by helping us answer the thousands of questions we suddenly had:

How do we tell everyone that our daughter died?

What do we do with the nursery?

Is it okay to tell people that we would prefer not to receive flowers?

How do I eat breakfast in the diner where they fussed about my pregnancy?

How do we talk to each other about something other than her death?

After a few months, when those mundane moments of terror in the market passed, our therapy sessions became unproductive. She would ask how my husband felt and he would say, "Hungry."

She would ask me how I felt and I would tell her about Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed, compassion, Buddhism, and suffering. Her eyes would glaze over and she then she would tell me I was avoiding my true feelings by intellectualizing.

"Perhaps individual therapy might be more beneficial for us," I mentioned to my husband as we left her office one snowy Tuesday. I had some bigger questions. This therapist wanted to educate us about our grief, not philosophize about the nature of the universe. I felt nostalgic for a time in which I never lived where a stinky Socrates sat in the town center, just waiting for someone to pose a question about fate, death and the gods. I needed an oracle, an unemployed philosophy PhD. Or maybe even a lama.

I began seeing my Buddhist therapist again. I saw him many years earlier, when I was a single woman bitching about my non-committal ex-boyfriend, insomnia, and my career. I have dabbled in Buddhism for fifteen years. And by dabble, of course, I mean reading Buddhist teachings and writing, but not finding a regular sangha, or community.

Sure, I meditated, occasionally visited a Buddhist monastery for group meditation and teachings, but I never sought an actual teacher who challenged me. Zen. Tibetan. Shambhalan. It didn’t really matter. I sometimes just wanted to feel people around me who could sit quietly together. Intellectually, Buddhism just makes sense to me. Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by our attachments to worldly pleasures and illusions of happiness. One needs to be accountable for his or her actions in every aspect of your life. Compassion, meditation, letting go of attachments and kindness can change suffering. Totally get it. Of course, there were times when I would get fascinated by some obscure text and teaching, but mostly I lived by the basic tenets, except the no wine thing. Alcohol always found a place in my Buddhism.

When I thought I should seek therapy, I sought a Buddhist therapist. I didn’t want therapy devoid of my spiritualism. I sought a more holistic solution to my angst and emotional ennui. The Buddhist therapist became sort of a de facto teacher for a lone wolf like myself. He guided me in meditation. He gave me some incredibly deep insights that mirrored my own beliefs. I learned more from him in the eight month period than I could have imagined. My therapist suggested that perhaps I was a Pratyekabuddha, or a bodhisattva who develops realizations without the guidance of a guru. He encouraged me repeatedly to seek a teacher. He pointed out, "Of course, you know, the challenges of that path are always arrogance and misguidance."

Of course, I have always been arrogant and misguided.

It made sense for me to visit the Buddhist therapist again after my daughter died and I was flailing. After I had met with him for a few sessions, we had begun reincorporating the Four Reminders into our sessions, which had been a bit revelatory to me in my earlier therapy.

1  ::  the preciousness of human birth (It is a gift you are here)

2  ::  the truth of impermanence (You are gonna die)

3  ::  the reality of suffering (Life’s gonna hurt)

4  ::  the inescapability of karma (You better do it right, or you are doing it again.)

He mentioned the last one again. "Karma," he said, "is how our actions affect our suffering."

"Oh, I have been meaning to talk to you about that," I said. And I had. I’d been thinking about how different religions deal with suffering. Majoring in Religion at university, I became fascinated with theodicy, which is the theological problem of reconciling evil and suffering in the world with the existence of a just and good God. But, in Buddhism, suffering is a whole different animal. Buddhists mostly take out God, but leave the suffering. Suffering is the nucleus around which Buddhist thought orbits. Still, something never sat right with me and karma. I want to believe that if someone commits a horrible sin against man or humanity, he or she will suffer eventually. 

But what if you are suddenly the one suffering?

"Uh, yeah, with something like stillbirth or the death of your baby without any reason, I wanted to know, uh, you know, I mean, when I think about karma, with this kind of suffering, the bad-things-happen-to-good-people-type suffering, uh, this is awkward, but what I wanted to know is: do Buddhists think it is my own fault that my daughter died?"

"Of course not," he said, after a pause. "At least not in the way that you are talking about. Traditional Buddhists feel that in our past lives we were all kinds of people: thieves, mothers, butchers, farmers, murderers, liars, nuns, doctors, children, and animals. A monk once told me that if we piled the bones of all the lives we have lived, it would reach through three universes. You may be going through your loss as a result of past karma from a life hundreds of years ago."

I hated that answer.

I wanted to spit on the floor and demand my money back. In no uncertain terms, I told him so. Then he clarified that the complexities of the idea of karma makes it difficult to explain, but Buddhists do not traditionally blame the victim for their own suffering. You could study karma for years and not quite get it. The Buddha taught not to take his words literally. He said to use this teaching to develop my own understanding of the universe. He asked me what I thought. What does karma mean to you now, as the mother of a dead baby?

I think the world is chaotic and random and often cruel. The death of my child had nothing to do with me—nothing I did, nothing my husband did, nothing my daughter did. She just died.

Thinking that Lucia’s death is my karma, or heaven forbid, her karma, or the karma of my entire tribe is of no comfort to me. Without a physical reason why Lucy died, it is hard not to search for a metaphysical one instead. It is hard not to speculate on why the Volcano Gods are angered, or what action in my youth caused my daughter to die now. And yet, I reject that. The guilt of that interpretation would eat me from the inside out until I am nothing but a withered shell of a parent.

To me karma means something much different than tit for tat. Spiritually, I have to figure out my own reason to move forward. What I do have control over is what I do with my experience of chaos and suffering in the world. This life, right now, is my choice. This is my karma. What am I going to do with this experience of loss?

Compassion. Fear. Love. Understanding. Grief. Sadness. Comfort. Kindness. Anger. Patience. Misplaced emotion. Mourning. Selfishness. Selflessness. If I toss each one, carefully peeled and scrubbed, into a blender and drink this past year down, I hope to emerge healthier. I hope this bitter juice helps me emerge more of those things I believe makes the world a place less wrought with suffering. I control that part of me, the patient loving compassionate part, the part that experiences other people's suffering and responds with love. Since Lucy died, I am frequently impatient. I am frequently unloving and unlovable. I sometimes give into anger and pettiness. But I try to use those experiences to forgive. Myself. First for the emotion, and then for the death of my daughter.

I have to forgive myself everyday.

As I walked away from that session, the therapist said one last thing just as I left his room.

"Maybe Lucy fulfilled her karma by living her life just as she lived it. Maybe she simply needed the love and comfort of your womb for those months. Maybe she was supposed to teach you about love."

Maybe.

002d - La Llorona

I paint my face like a calavera. I don't know what I am trying to achieve, making myself look dead, but I do it. I am alone. It feels like I am doing something wrong, and in that way, I am excited. I put a base of white onto my face. It reminds me of high school and listening to the Cure and being a punk rocker. Then I pull out the black face paint crayon and draw a joy there, a swirl here. Some flowers and decorations. I am more beautiful with the mask of death.

I want to feel close to her.  I want her to be amongst my posse in the afterlife, the otherworldly gang of ancestors that come when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, guiding me into good real estate decisions and warning me of enemies. I beckon her to come this day, the next and one after that. To rest in my arms while I dress like a calavera. We are but a whisper away from the other side. Maybe we are a coat of white face paint away.

I straddle cultures. I straddle existences. Half-white. Half-Latina. Half-mother. Half-La Llorona. I am an erstwhile Catholic and a half-assed Buddhist. I spent years living on the Mexican border in Arizona, speaking Spanish like a Chicana, and come home to a house full of Panamanians. I married a Southerner and live in New Jersey. I have attended midnight masses in four continents. I put each image of death, each candle burned, into a steaming cauldron, stew them for decades. I take some dark ideas out, adding liturgy and spells, until it is a soothing, warming bowl of ritual. Because above all else, I am a ritualist. I like rites. I like routine. I like customs. I like ceremony. I like something to do over and over because it is. What. We. Do. So I paint my face. I paint my face and I build an altar across my dining room. And I pull out the pictures of the dead.

I line up their photographs on my ofrenda. This time of year feels sacred and frightening. The leaves fall. My people fall. My grandmother. My aunt. My great-grandmother. My grandfather. My father-in-law. My daughter. So, I take a bit of them and add it to my Día de los Muertos altar. I decorate it with their funeral prayer cards, the Irish blessing written on the back. I put little bibles and prayer books. There is a rosary created by a blind nun and a bowl of fruit. I make sugar skulls. I paint a large painting of a woman crying and holding a stillborn baby. I hang it in the middle of the wall, papier-mâché skeletons flanking each side, flower lights hanging around the wooden frame.

Ssssshhhh. Don't tell anyone, but the painting is me and Lucy. It is a 16 inch by 20 inch secret done in bright acrylic. I tried to paint the Virgin Mary, but I always paint me holding Lucia and crying. It is pathological. It makes others uncomfortable. There is this show of competing artists. One of them could take pictures of nothing but clay and red dye that looked like bloody  internal organs. She suffered from colitis her whole life. She tried to create other work, but she always ended up painting organs hanging from a box. I keep painting my dead daughter. I paint death because I do not show her picture in my house, except on Day of the Dead. I put her picture in this little brightly colored frame that betrays the gray of our heartbreak. I can close it up with an orange ribbon when neighbors come by. Does anyone notice our Lucy there, lips red as the sacred heart? The lips are strange and mesmerizing to me, and I have kissed them. The dead wear makeup too.

+++

Is it okay to tell you a ghost story? It is Halloween after all. Sometimes I feel like La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, who walks the edges of ponds, arroyos, the rivers, the places where water runs and her children might wash up. See, the legend goes that her children were swept away by a flash flood, carried off dead, and she, driven insane by the grief, wanders the rivers of the world looking for them. She screams and keens into the night. In another land, the legend is that she killed her children herself, threw them in the river. But the end is the same--they are gone, and she is condemned to wander the earth. But the scream is one we all know. She screams into the night, "Dios Mio! Mi hijos! Mi hijos!" or "My God! My babies! My babies!"

She is beautiful and terrifying. Every old man and woman in Mexico has a La Llorona story, even my mother. It is a ghost story, a nightmare, to lose your children. Everyone knows that. La Llorona is a warning told to children who become young adults. Do not venture out at night or La Llorona will snatch you. Do not go meet your boyfriend by the riverbed, under that beautiful weeping willow, La Llorona will steal you from us. I am both comforted that child loss is acknowledged, even in ghost stories, as something to drive you mad, condemn you for eternity, and also sad that we have such bad PR. I get La Llorona, I do. I feel condemned some days. Like La Llorona, wild hair, wild eyes, wandering the babylost rivers of the internet, wailing, "Dios Mio! Mi hija! Mija! My daughter. My daughter. Oh  my God, my daughter."

This time seems wrought with ghosts and visions and the other world. Today is Halloween and Samhain, the Witches New Year. Tomorrow and the next day, the Days of the Dead. Tomorrow is Día de los Inocentes ("Day of the Innocents") also known as Día de los Angelitos ("Day of the Little Angels").  November 1st is a day set aside to honor children and babies who have died. We who wander the internet wailing have created our own culture around death, our own rituals of mourning. An angel writes our baby's name in the sand across the world. We write poetry. We light candles together. We trade skulls and hearts and ornaments.

I paint my face white, turn myself into a skull. I commune with the dead. I create elaborate altars for her. I summon her, conjure her baby form in the arms of my grandmothers and aunts. I stare into a bowl of water, scrying and crying. There is something comforting in the desperation of these motions. It is something other than wailing.

002f - Perfect

Someone just said the same thing to me last week. ["God only makes perfect, so my daughter must not have been perfect and He knew it. That is why he took her."] I am two and a half years out and I still didn't know what to say. What I wanted to say is that if God only makes perfect, how could she be anything but, despite her death.

What the Buddhist said to anonymous [ "Perhaps your child needed a life that was only love. Think about it - you nurtured her inside your womb, welcomed her, and held her until she died. She knew only love in this life. Perhaps she just needed a rest. You won't know why, but you'll know that you did give her love while she lived."], that is what someone said to me. I talk about that often, because it was beautiful to think she was in her last life, and picked me for unconditional love. And that I will spend the rest of my life reconciling her death in the wake of her. I guess that is what I find spiritually comforting, if someone is going to try to say something spiritually comforting. That I loved her and she knew it and she was perfect and I know it.

003b - A Great and Noble Life

I sit in the sanctuary. It is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year on the Jewish calendar. The year when even the least observant Jew can be seen in a synagogue.

I am not the least observant Jew… Not really possible with a husband who is studying to become a rabbi. Not really possible with the amount of Jewish tradition I was raised with. Not really possible with Polish grandparents who survived the Holocaust. Not really possible with the number of Jewish food calories I have consumed in 38 years.

And yet it is still somewhat a surprise to me that I am there, in this synagogue, following along with this kind of service. It is a traditional Reform Jewish service. The prayer book – Gates of Repentance, special for this day of atonement – talks of

God as Lord,

God as male,

God as judging,

God as forgiving.

I can’t quite bring myself to recite along during the call and response. I can’t bring myself to say, God, oh Lord… out loud.

This is not how I relate to God, to Source, to all that is around and within me. This is not how I connect to my divine essence. Not in this language.

My “God” is not separate from me.

My “God” is not in charge, deciding what I will receive and what will be taken away, when I will struggle and when I will overcome.

My “God” does not judge or punish me.

My “God” does not care whether I fast on Yom Kippur, or that my fast today included drinks of water and kombucha, that my day of atonement included a trip to Whole Foods and time sitting on my couch writing in my journal and reading a (non-Jewish) book.

Then I find this in the prayer book during the afternoon service: 

This is the vision of a great and noble life:

To endure ambiguity and to make light shine through it;

To stand fast in uncertainty;

To prove capable of unlimited love and hope.

And it resonates inside.

Hmm… A great and noble life as one that is lived as well as possible in spite of its precariousness, in spite of our fragility. Amid the fuzzy blurred boundaries that keep changing on us without warning, and rugs that are pulled out suddenly from underneath us.

I have proven capable of unlimited love and hope. Each day I surprise myself that I continue to feel it even more. In spite of the uncertainty that comes with knowing that things can completely fall apart and come crashing down again and again.

I never before thought of my ability to bounce back as being a quality of a great and noble life. I never before related to survival that way. Yet survival is what it is, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I’ve been doing? Surviving? 

Or perhaps I have actually… been… thriving…?

***

It is later in the afternoon and the yizkor memorial service has begun. The mood is quiet and solemn and the passage is about our finiteness, words about being on the road towards death from the moment we are born. (I close off some when I hear the words birth and death in the same sentence.) Again I start leafing through the prayer book, unsatisfied with the gloom and doom.

I find this: 

May the pains of past bereavements grow more gentle;

Indeed, let them be transformed into gratitude to our dear ones who have died

And tenderness to those who are still with us.

I was so lost at this time last year. I was so angry… at everything and everyone. I cried through the entire day at our warm and wonderful Renewal congregation in Berkeley, surrounded by friends who were there at every turn to hug me and sit with me or leave me alone outside if I needed that. I didn’t fast. I felt no obligation, no inspiration.

I felt no connection to this day, so soon after Tikva had died. All I could do was picture her spinning in circles in a white dress, dancing to the music, a year later. The two of us together in a parallel universe where she had continued to live.

All I could do was cry an endless stream of angry lost tears.

Now, a year later, the pain has grown more gentle. I think of Tikva with gratitude for the gifts of hope and love she gave me, for the compassion space she cracked open and expanded within me. For asking me to love her in a way I had never before known I could love, for teaching me that hope never completely goes away, even when everything feels lost

Or finite.

And I think of Dahlia, who daily stretches my capacity for patience, who demands my presence, my tenderness like no one else can, who reminds me to laugh in my most frustrated and exhausted moments, and I feel gratitude for both of my daughters, the deepest kind of gratitude for the way things are.

Just as they are. 

***

I surprise myself, that I can feel this lightness, especially today. On this day that for many is solemn and serious, reflective and laden with guilt needing to be cleared and asking for forgiveness. I surprise myself that I feel anything other than rebelliousness about Yom Kippur, this holy day I was determined to mostly blow off this year.

Then I woke up this morning and felt peaceful, held. By an energy that is comforting, serene, gentle. It didn’t matter that I was not spending the day with my community back in California, but instead in my house and at the grocery store and at services that felt mostly foreign.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t asked anyone’s forgiveness, nor made any big plans for ways I wanted to grow and expand in the coming year.

All that mattered was that when I stepped outside to watch four monarch butterflies and two fat bumblebees holding for dear life to the white flowers as the wind blew them furiously around, 

I felt connected… to all of it.

Connected to the wind, to the smells in the crisp fall air, to the bees and the butterflies, to the light streaming through their gold-orange wings…

Connected to Tikva. 

Connected to my essence, the most pure and true part of me.

Connected to a deep knowing inside me that I can and will continue believing in hope and love.

Perhaps the makings of a great and noble life are that simple.

003d - After the Transformation

Oh, ppphhhhhh… 

What do I do now?

She’s been gone longer than she was here, even counting the time she was inside me.

I’ve passed all of the first anniversaries: her ultrasound, the day she was born, the day she died on both the Jewish and Gregorian calendars.

We’ve anticipated her arrival.

Hoped deeply.

Said hello, welcomed our second child to the big world.

Loved unconditionally.

Taken her outside to breathe fresh real air.

Said goodbye.

Buried her fragile little body in a tiny coffin in the ground.

Her box of memories is full, her photo album is made. Her special soft things in jars, still smelling a little bit like her. Everything put away in the trunk that sits next to me in the sunroom, keeping me company.

Her quilt is coming along, something I am not in a hurry to finish… When I work on it, I feel close to her.

I still haven’t framed and hung her photos, but I will… soon.

Her headstone has been made, set and unveiled. Flowers planted with her placenta. Her DNA and ours stored at the hospital for research. Her birth and death certificate are in a safe place with other family documents, confirming that she really did exist, always a part of our family.

We’ve moved away and settled into our new home across the country.

Our new chapter has begun.

Now what?

*****

Today I watched as two cicadas completely left their exoskeletons and began a new chapter in their new skins, so bright green they were almost turquoise. They hung there from the branches of a tree, clinging still to their old shells, transparent wings spread, contemplating new destinations, new purpose.

It was stunning… I’ve never seen anything like it. For three weeks now I’ve been listening to them singing their songs outside, surrounding me with constant tropical melodies. I’ve just never seen a cicada before, not even in a photo.

Everything changes, nothing stays the same.

Impermanence... I see it when I look in the mirror. I look different than I did last summer. I look different than I did two summers ago. I think I look different than I did a few months ago. I’ve reluctantly left my exoskeleton, sometimes hesitating to leave it completely behind. Longing for it, for simpler times.

My old shell consists of all the mes I’ve left behind, said goodbye to, willingly or not.

It’s this next place I’m not so sure about. This after the transformation place. I can so easily tell you how changed I am from the person I was before I knew Tikva. I can describe in vivid detail how she transformed me, and for the better. But I’m not exactly sure what that means for me now… now that I’ve been transformed by knowing, loving and losing my child. Now that I’ve undergone a change I never in a million years would have chosen. Now that I’ve gotten kind of used to this new person that I am.

*****

How many children did you bring with you to Cincinnati? he asks my husband.

We have two children, but only one living. We’re here after a year off, since we lost our second child last summer, my husband answers.

I say nothing, look away even, let my husband tell him. Then I look at this new acquaintance and see the sadness and searching in his eyes as he looks at me then quickly looks down. I know what he wants to say. After a year, I am so aware of the sadness I’ve held in other people when they look at me after learning about Tikva. Some days I can take it better than others. This time I just notice it, allow the compassion to flow in silence. Nothing needs to be said.

*****

I hoped to be carrying another child by now, but I’m not yet. Still, I can feel that child’s spirit close, waiting. Sometimes I can’t distinguish it from Tikva’s spirit. I don’t think that matters. Baby spirit energy is one and the same. I think it comes from one big well.

I watch my older daughter and feel how powerful is her desire to be a big sister to a living sibling.

I wish I had a sister to play with who wasn’t a spirit, she says.

Me too, I answer. Me too.

She would have a sibling who would be almost two right now, if I hadn’t miscarried in between her and Tikva. Then there would never have been a Tikva… Strange.

Tikva would be 14 months now, would probably be walking. She would be so beautiful, that I just know for sure.

For two and a half years we have wanted to give Dahlia a sibling… One who can play with her.

We still do.

*****

It’s almost the new year on the Jewish calendar. The biggest time of the year. This is supposed to be a time of reflection, of going inwards, of making amends, making peace. I always find this time tumultuous inside, unsettling, unsettled. I guess that’s the point. I don’t know if I’m ready for a big time right now. I’m feeling especially un-Jewish right now, which is ironic as the wife of a future rabbi. Really, I just feel like climbing under the covers and not coming out until October. Until the new year, a new season.

Last year at High Holy Day services, less than two months after Tikva died, I alternated between sitting next to Dave in the sanctuary, crying, and running outside to cry alone. I resented everyone dancing in the aisles all around me. I felt no joy, no peace, no serenity. I felt isolated, empty, lost. Dave wrote angry messages to God in his journal. I did not fast on Yom Kippur. Dave and I got into a fight about something, I can’t even remember what. Afterwards I went with a friend to a candlelight vigil for babies who had died. It was one of the saddest days of those first few months after losing my Baby Girl.

I don’t feel especially compelled to fast this year either. I don’t feel especially inspired to do much that is Jewish, to be honest. Keeping kosher – in the limited way we’ve been doing so for several years – feels kind of trivial after what I’ve lived the past almost two years. That is not how I connect to something bigger, by eating my meat and my dairy separately… by fasting on Yom Kippur.

*****

There is a new layer of sadness churning deeply in me right now, a layer I’m not quite ready to shed. A space I just need to exist in for a while. I’m not entirely sure what it’s all about, but I do know that it’s less tidy, more raw than I’ve felt in many months.

It’s not the part of me that wondered how I would ever survive losing my child, terrified at the thought of forever having to hold that experience. I’ve survived, relatively intact. But I’m not settled. In fact, I’m feeling rather unsettled right now. In a new kind of limbo, an in between place.

Now what?

Now life goes on. Now life continues.

That’s it? It just continues? Just goes on, business as usual, except that I’m completely transformed in the middle of a world that hasn’t really changed much at all?

Yup.

How come I have to adjust to the same old world around me, and no one has to adjust to me?

Because you’re not the majority.

I’m not? I know and know of so many parents who have lost babies, our numbers grow every day, and we’re still just a minority? But this is all I know. What am I supposed to do with the transformation I just went through? With this new self I am sort of used to and still getting acquainted with?

*****

Tikva? Are you there? Are you still close? Is that you in the giant yellow and black butterfly I saw yesterday? In the turquoise under the transparent wings of the cicada? In the tiny bird eating an Oreo cookie outside the ice cream store yesterday?

What do I do now… still without you?

I will let myself cry for as long as I need. There are no rules around how long is enough before being done with the sorrow. You are never really done, are you? Here in this place, we know better than to create those kinds of boundaries. Here we feel what we need, when we need, how we need to.

I miss you, Tikva. I miss you differently now. But oh how I miss you still, my Tiny Love.

004b - The Meaning of a Life (comment)

This post was something I really needed to read - it helped to read your perspective and soak up your thoughts - I think for many of us coming from faith communities, there's the implication that we are supposed to learn & grow from loss. Even when things aren't said, sometimes they are felt.

But what you write about what is lost, the enormity of it, of the difficulty and fruitlessness of looking for meaning in it, strike me as so very, very true. In the early days I wanted an explanation, someone (God, the Universe, the Devil) to blame. Maybe that means that I assumed there was some meaning behind it? I don't know. I wanted to hurt and tear and bite and ravage and kick someone and I carried that for a long time. Letting go of that was hard, but now that I have (mostly, most of the time), it's easier to see the love, I think.

004d - God are you real

So many of these thoughts are familiar to me. I've been struggling with my faith and my ideas about who and what God is (if there is a god) since my son's death, and it's just constantly hard. My entire worldview has changed. The faith that was such a big part of my life is not there anymore, and I'm not sure yet what will be there in it's place.

One of the hardest things for me to hear was "It's okay to be mad at God. God can take it." Well, I didn't want God to be able to take it. I wanted God reeling in pain, like I was. I wanted him confused and cold and in pain, like I fear my baby was. I don't talk about this with my family - faith has really helped my mom to deal with the loss of her grandchild and I don't want to take that away from her. But I am almost four years out and still dealing with the anger sometimes. I still miss my faith, but I can't believe just because I'd like to, if that makes sense.

I don't have (obviously!) any answers, but I did want to reply to you and let you know that I hear you & am thinking of you & wishing you whatever peace & comfort you can find in all of this.

004f - her Name (comment)

[We named our baby] Theodore - gift of god. Considering what has happened to my faith since his death this seems almost a misnomer, but I keep hoping that, in the long run, perhaps it's not. It's such a big name, I thought (and still think) for such a little guy. He made it his, somehow, but I wish I'd been able to watch him grow from our little Teddy into that big name. His middle name, Isaac, means laughter, and I chose it because I was so astounded and surprised to be pregnant, and surprised to be so happy about being pregnant, and because I wanted all kinds of laughter for him. I hope Bea and C are right, and that he's laughing somewhere - in the skies or in the trees or around that corner I can never see behind.

004h - the language of loss (comment)

This may sound horrible, but I'm maybe especially ill-equipped to deal with more "normal" losses now. My grandmother died last year, and I found myself surrounded by relatives talking about miracles and faith and about how beautiful her death was. I had a hard time grieving for her with my family because I was a) jealous of her death - why couldn't my son have a peaceful death after a long and full life? and b) very conscious of and sensitive to the use of the word "miracle." I had to keep holding back the snarls, which meant I wasn't much help to my mom and family for a while.

I'm much better with unexpected tragedies. I hope it won't always be this way, but for now it's where I am.