105 - dear baby (comment)

I talked to my daughter for the thousandth time yesterday, and I swear she talked back to me from heaven. I told her I loved her and how my heart hurts so much without her. She told me she loved me and she knew I loved her. I felt her above my head at that point. I think God let her come close to me to comfort me, and I thank him for that. I wish she was in my arms. It has been six months since she passed away, I miss her and love her so much.

107 - the fairies took her away

Dear Marianne,

Your story spoke to me... I can imagine myself sitting by the stone circle and wishing for the magic of old to help me with my desires. Many times through my little Emily's short life I prayed to the Goddess that she would let me keep her. I already had an intuitive feeling that my little one was not meant for this world. Each time we would pass another milestone I would whisper thanks and promise not to forget her kindness and the gift of the life she allowed me to keep.

After Emily was stillborn I wondered many times if I had forgotten to pay tribute to our great mother... Sometimes I still imagine this, but I know in my heart that she wasn't mine to keep and though with my prayers I was granted the short time I had... no amount of wishing would have made her live.

To me all gods, goddesses are one and the same. Turning yourself towards one does not necessarily mean turning your back on another. God has many faces for all of us so unique and diversified. Your faith and goodness rings true regardless of the form it takes.

I am sorry you forgot to pay tribute with your little Pixie and I am sorry you lost your little 12 week baby... Please be gentle with youself, after a loss like ours we wonder all sorts of things because there are all sorts of possibilities. I sometimes wonder if all the possible situations that my mind has been going through is reflective of all of the expectations and possibilities I lost with the death of my little moon child. Essentially I think we just need to remember that we did the best that we could. Please be gentle with yourself and hug your little's close.

Sending you loving kindness and healing energy,

109 - my confession

dear Mary's mom: You are so brave to have expressed this fear; your confession. For I think of such things all the time but never had the courage to write it down until I saw your post. But what I feel is that the fact that you wrote it down shows your immeasurable love for your baby girl.

My son was born 8 weeks early and died after eleven days. I wanted a boy so much. I love my nieces a lot but for some reason I always wanted a son. I have a baby brother 8 years younger to me whom I took care of like my own baby so probably I was hoping to relive that experience. Plus strangely I never got along well with my mom but just loved my father. My H wanted a boy too. I got pregnant after some try. In my second month, to my horror, I caught myself thinking if it is a girl, its okay if I miscarry. That thought must have lasted less than a second but it shook me & I still remember it. Sometimes I think, God gave me a boy and then took him in such a tragic way to teach me a lesson.

When I were pregnant I was strangely scared that something bad may happen to my H. I'd always heard about women who lost their husbands tragically in an accident. I constantly worried and prayed for my H's safety while taking for granted my son's life. He was inside me, I took care of myself well. I could control my baby's life - those were my thoughts. Now, I know how wrong I was. I wish I had prayed and worried for my son too.

My son had gotten well in the nicu but fell ill suddenly one day. He was a cheerful baby otherwise but that day seeing him under the vent in such a bad shape..I just couldn't take it. I was made to believe everything was well the night earlier but this terrible shock came. I still remember standing outside the nicu that day and thinking -'enough god, end this ordeal'. I don't know what I meant by that. I too bartered with God that day desperately. But ultimately I lost and my son was gone.

Sorry for the long post but I hope you get some comfort reading all the messages here

111 - the pain is still so deep!

Thank you Joanna for replying. For me its also terrifying to look at woman who are pregnant and sometimes it makes me mad that I did not know of thing I know now. But it is very comforting to be on the site, it helps me get through this bad feeling although its only been 4 weeks since Zandre died and my emotions is still very much up and down. I think I want to get pregnant very soon cause I wont forget Zandre or my feelings will get lighter but not go away, just to know that there is a possibility that we could bring a baby home makes me think life is not that bad.

Just wish that our stories will also be important as all other illnesses, cause if I have know about stillborn, or NICU more I would have know what to ask my doctor or what to look out for as my body changes.

I'm sorry to hear about your boy and know that God has a plan for all of us, we will only get the answers when we see our babies ones we get home to them one day

113 - reflections on baby photos--three voices

Today is 2nd year aniversiry of my still born son, I came looking for support and I am glad I came! My son was born at 21 weeks and the pictures we have I hold sacred! I cant display them due to their "scary" nature and the fact I have older children that would be effect by them. I have chosen instead to display a picture of Christ holding a baby. I like to imagine that the baby is mine and that he is holding him until I have finished my work here on earth. I know that may be to much religion for some but it comforts me. To me, that is my picture of him! I miss him!

I have gone on to have a health son almost 5 months ago, he has helped the healing but he doesn't take the place of the child I've lost!

My heart goes out to all of the parents here, that like me miss and love a child that they never got a chance to hold alive. I like so many of you, the ultra sound pictures are more valuable then gold!

115 - not so much the picture of patience

So I am super Zen when it comes to people outside of our community saying stupid ass things. Let me say I'm 1 1/2 years and 4 1/2 years out so I've had practice. After the anger phase, which is important and necessary, there is another place. I'm not so good with anger so that phase was short for me. I figure- people try, they say the wrong thing, it's rarely from a malicious place, it hurts but hey worse than losing my child? Not so much. Now this doesn't mean something shouldn't be said to those who are insensitive or inappropriate... we all do what we must. I just felt most comfortable cutting people some slack and being honest when I felt it was important for them to hear. But compassion is good... I aim for that.

And then I did this dance workshop for 4 days. Super intense dance meditation workshop- about death. Long story short a woman adds to a group dance piece at the end a little 'performance' - talking about 'a baby coming, everyone waiting...' it went on for too long and then, she looks at all of us and says, are you ready?, she says, "but it was born still". 'It' she says. Out of NOwhere she decides to school everyone in the feeling of friends of someone who lost a child (which, did I say she called the baby 'it'). I screamed WHAT? in the middle of her monolouge. She stopped. I talked to her later. She said it wasn't a performance, it was a healing. ?!?!?! For those in the group who may have experienced something like this. THEN she said, in the performance- "And the baby went into the white light'. She reiterated this to me and said it was important for people to know that's where the baby went. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

How unbelievably presumptuous that she, not having this experience could think that she could heal, that she could even be a voice for us, that SHE is the one who knows/decides where our children go. It's like telling a Jew, "When you die you will be released into the arms of Jesus". Insane.

I was shaking when I talked to her. I told her that it was the OPPOSITE of a healing for me. That it was hurtful and inappropriate to turn someone else's experience into a performance. But rather than over engage with a crazy person, I left it at that and now I have so much more to say.

I'm looking for something productive to do with this anger. Afterall- WE are the voice of this community and I felt like she took that voice- she simplified and spit on my experience. But why care? She can do nothing to the memory of my boys.

Have you ever responded to such ignorance and felt like you said the right thing? everything that you wanted to say? did walking away feel better? Yuk. I feel like I can't shower enough to get her words off of me.

117 - turn it inside out: the evolution of her grief

How does your heart feel today? How has that feeling in your heart changed over these past nine years?

My heart feels strong... ... and that's the best word that I can come up with. My heart feels sure and it feels strong, and I only really became aware of that in the last year or so. A certain ease has come after nine years and it's a happy place. It is hard to reach out to fathom the possibility of personal happiness directly after a stillbirth experience, but it is possible. The journey has to be taken one step at a time. Along the way you never forget your child, so much so that she becomes a part of your personality - definitely the case for me.

How did you spend this past Mothers' Day, and Fathers' Day? What do these days mean to you and your husband? How about Victoria's birthday?

We used to do things that were very Victoria-centered. One year we went to see a Chinese fertility doctor to get a tea... and it did not work. Another year we went to get a spiritual reading on Victoria. Everything was very Victoria-inspired.

Also, in the first seven or eight years, I supported this Childreach program, a wonderful worldwide humanitarian organization that links sponsors to more than one million needy children in forty impoverished countries. At first I sponsored a girl called named Annie Rose, in the Philippines. I really wanted to feel a connection with a child across the world because Victoria seemed so far away. I've made a difference with Annie, and then three other girls, and also fulfilled my own emotional need. But recently, I felt the an inner shift and I changed. I started to sponsor Save the Children's Survive to 5 program. It focuses on saving the lives of children from birth to age 5. I realized the same amount of donation could help save thousands of young lives. It seemed more effective. So I now do that instead. And I know I would not have been able to do that even as recently as last year. I shifted from fulfilling a personal emotional need to asking myself, "What's the most effective thing I can do?" I evolved.

Now, for Bill and I us, that week of Victoria's birth and death is a magical one, because there are always opportunities to help always present themselves. In the spirit of Tonglen, this is how we spend Fathers' Day, Mothers' Day, and Victoria's birthday. These dates fall within weeks of each other, so it feels like a season, Victoria's season. For example, I'm a peer grief counselor and I work with the SIDS Center of in New Jersey, which refers newly bereaved mothers to me. This year, I spent Victoria's her birthday talking to a new SIDS mother, for about 1.5 hours. Then I wrote back to a woman, who was a reader of "Life Touches Life" in England. She was a prenatal yoga teacher who lost her baby to a stillbirth. She felt a loss of confidence as well as grief. She was totally fragmented and had written to me saying, "Please help." and so I spent another 1.5 hours writing to her.

Another opportunity naturally surfaced. I am a newspaper reporter, as you know, and at the newspaper where I work I was contacted by a mother whose daughter died of cancer at the age of 12. It was a fresh loss and the mother wanted to start an Alex's lemonade stand in honor of her daughter. These are stands, opened all over the country in front of farmstands and supermarkets and other places, and the proceeds benefit research on all childhood cancers. This mother wanted to raise awareness of the pain and complexities these cancers involve, so I covered the stand she and her husband began and wrote it up.

At this point, for me, it's all about using emotion and grief and the closeness that Victoria and Bill and I have and turning it back out to the world in a loving and productive way. There's a time in grief when you close in on yourself like a cave, and you need to. You need all those time and your energy to come back and understand where life has brought you. And then there comes a time when you open up again, and when I wrote to the woman in England, when I wrote the article for the woman with the lemonade stand, that's my love for Victoria in all that stuff. That's the grief and the love in action.

That's what I do. That's what we do. That's what Victoria and I do.

On Fathers' Day, or on Mothers' Day, do you do something to say, 'I am a mother' or 'I am a father'?

We no longer need affirmation that we're a parents. We talk to each other, to Victoria, very matter-of-factly. We give each other Fathers' Day and Mothers' Day cards and we just think about what can be done for others. Again, it's an outer energy opposed to a closed-in energy. It shifted.

And we get birthday cards from all over the world for Victoria. These are all affirmations and it is just impossible to feel sad when we you see all these cards. It just makes us glow.

Do you think that you would not be who or what you are if Victoria Helen had not died? Does it have to be through this way?

No, I will not be who I am today if Victoria had not died. Absolutely. First, there is this shock, that this can happen, that something like this can happen. Then the realization that none of us has immunity from pain and loss. Next come the feelings of extreme vulnerability and fragility. Then there is this years-long process of getting stronger and stronger... ... I want to talk to you about Tonglen, a beautiful Buddhist practice - something happens to you... ... And it puts you in touch with your own pain, which propels us to take it away. But Tonglen gently pushes us to get in touch with our pain, whatever it is - to talk to it, listen to it, get in touch with it. When we go into ourselves in this way, we understand not only our own desperation and difficulties but those of all human beings.

Every good writer knows that universal truths are found in the extreme details and intricacies of her individual experiences. God is in the details. After this inner scrutiny, we turn our sight outwards to the world and we realize that everyone has some kind of pain, and because we deeply opened to our own pain we can open to that of others. This is how compassion is born and grows. Next, we act. We do something in the world, for the world. Our strength then grows, and the process is no less than the cycle of spiritual life.

Do you still watch for Victoria Helen in the dark of the night? Why?

Yes, I do! Just in case she appears... I still do watch. But I won't know how I will react until I see her.

Do you think of Victoria when you see a 9-year-old girl?

Yes, I do. My friend has a granddaughter the same age Victoria would be and I always feel so charmed and delighted to see her and talk to her. She had asked about my daughter, and I told her that Victoria is in heaven, that she's an angel. She understands that I'm a mom.

I also talk to little girls quite a lot, and when they ask, I always talk about Victoria with love and enthusiasm, and it had always been fine. The attitude we parents strike when we talk about our children is so significant. It is important to approach any discussion about them from a place of love, and not fear or some hush-hush attitude.

[ the journey ]

How has your relationship to grief changed over the past nine years?

From inward to outward. Like the flower on the cover of my book, I have fluttered open. You realize how precious everything is.

Ram Dass wrote a book called "How can I help?" and I think it is such a productive question. First off, It is a question that diverts attention into the present and the future. It's a healing question because it starts the action. Stillbirth is just so... still. You're in this place where you need to stay. But there comes a time when you need to leave. And this question sets things into motion. It calls on us to do something. People have done so many things - they create sculptures, they run marathons, they raise funds for cancer. I am a writer and I decided to put language to the experience. It's all about movement, doing something. And that's part of healing. It's a gradual process, though. For me, it's been nine years so far.

Was there a definitive moment when you said to yourself, 'It's OK now. It doesn't hurt anymore'?

I think there is no moment when it doesn't hurt anymore. But, it goes from "I am hurting and it is NOT OK." to "I am hurting but it's OK." Because, pain is a part of life, and I have integrated the pain into who I am and what I do. I don't think this is a wound that can heal. But I also think this wound can be a gift.

Can you share something that someone has done or said that has touched you the most, after the death of Victoria Helen?

Certainly. Here are just a couple of examples:

There was this gas station that I passed by on my way to work, and there was this guy there who one day asked if I have any children. I replied, "Yes, I have a daughter, but she was born still." He said he was so sorry. and I told him but she is still my daughter and I am still a mother. And the next time I pulled in for gas, he asked me, "Mamacita, how are you?" I went to get gas there for three years and he always called me "mamacita"! It was wonderful to be acknowledged this way.

There also was this gracious stillbirth mother, who read Life Touches Life. I met her for dinner because she is from my home state of New Jersey. At the restaurant she gave me a silver box. On the lid these words are engraved: "Forever in my heart. Victoria Helen." She told me to write the name of every person Victoria Helen's story had helped heal and place it in the box. This mother gave me a real, physical thing with Victoria's name on it. That's always powerful for a stillbirth parent - to present him or her with something tangible to acknowledge a baby who was invisible to the world.

Additionally, I have an aunt and cousin who every year give Victoria Helen a Christmas present. It's just amazing. They are letting me us know they have saved a spot in their hearts for Victoria Helen.

Using her name, saying her name, remembering her, acknowledging that there was a daughter, there is a daughter, and that I am a mother, all means so much.

What has been most disappointing?

The inability of friends to stick with me. And in this incredible trial and time, it hurts like hell in the beginning. In the long run, though, I've become wiser about what I can expect.

Also, stillbirth is such a scary experience. When it happens to us, people around us see that it can also happen to them. In fact, they see that anything can happen to any of us. Their way of denying that reality is to push the whole thing away, psychologically speaking. In pushing away the fear and fragility they feel, they push away us stillbirth parents as well. It is a way of coping. A bad way, but it is their way. There also are people who will "blame the victim," asserting that something went wrong in the pregnancy or birth because "she was too old/young/active/angry." They fill in their adverb of choice. They put blame on the victim to get themselves off the hook.

As a stillbirth parent, then, you not only have to heal but you have to become wise beyond your years when it comes to dealing with human nature.

What has surprised you the most?

The tangential folks in my life who came forward to help. They ask "How can I help" and "How can I be with you?" These people are helping because of who they are, not because they expect anything in return. Some folks do not want to come forward. Others want to come forward but lack the courage. That doesn't mean they're bad people; it means they're not courageous.

Have you ever wavered in your decision to not try for pregnancy again, or not to adopt?

Actually, we did try to get pregnant again. But it did not work biologically. And you know Nature is such a mighty force, there is no way you can bend it to do what it doesn't want to do. At least we were not inclined, after being hit with the tsunami of stillbirth, to try to bend it. Others feel differently. Both approaches are fine.

We also explored adoption. We went to talks and agencies, and considered many options, but in the end, we realized we really wanted to raise that daughter - Victoria Helen - and that was just not going to happen. I have learned to accept that whatever happens in life, it has to be OK. Instead of raising a child, then, we have used what happened to us to help heal others. But first! we have to allow ourselves to heal.

I've come to accept that this is it. We tried to have a child but the universe's reply was "No!" Loud and clear. It took a lot of time to let that go. But, that love stays. No matter what, we who have lost our babies are still mamas and papas. We still love, whether the baby makes it or not. Over time, the grief recedes and the love becomes bigger. Day meets night, and you will go through this.

Do you ever feel any boundaries between yourself and the non-bereaved? Please elaborate on the experience.

There is always some kind of boundary. In the beginning, it is easy to get angry and upset and want to punch through the boundaries, but now when I come upon one - which is often - I kinda understand. I'm writing another memoir now, about living life as a spiritual adventure, a rebirth-kind of book.

When I was writing Life Touches Life I met a writing coach at a writing conference. Beforehand I had sent her pages of my work to read and was hoping for a useful critique. When I sat down with her, though, she said to me, "Do not write about this. Stillbirth is something that did not happen. Write about something that happened." I looked into her eyes and knew that there was nothing I could do to explain to her that this is something that happens. There was a barrier that could not be broken.

After my book was published, a reviewer told me my story was but "half an experience." Now I need to have the guts to finish the experience, adopt a child, and move on with life, she said. Again, this is another boundary. I cannot make that woman understand stillbirth is a complete experience in itself. I simply cannot.

What has made me so discontented, though, is the language around stillbirth. Or the lack thereof. There had been generations of great silence. We need to speak now, all of us, and set the parameters of a cultural conversation. We need to put language to this experience. Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." So we need to expand this world with our language, and the whole world is going to be the better for it.

***

(I see the following as pearls of wisdom that can only be developed from enduring the irritation of that grain of painful grief and loss while staying in one's shell. One day, the shell pops open and we see beauty.)

What is the best thing that a friend of the bereaved can do?

Use the baby's name. Use it, say it. The sound of it vibrates in the air, and it is a beautiful thing.

If you could go back to June 2, 1999 and whisper in your own ear, what would you say to yourself?

I would probably say what my doctor said to me, really early on, after we found out that Victoria Helen had died. He sat on my bed in the hospital room and said to me, "I just want to say this now: ‘It is not your fault. This happens.'"

There are so many ways things can go wrong, and there are so many women who feel that their babies' deaths was their fault. I still remember a woman who called me from rural Illinois. Her child had been stillborn in 1967 and she had just read an article I wrote about stillbirth. She asked, "Do you mean that it wasn't my fault?" It is really a shame that some women had to live with that guilt for so many years.

I know I will never write or say to another woman, "Everything will be fine... ..." because I and every stillbirth mother on the planet know that pregnancy is a chance. Our job is to love this baby, do everything in our power to protect it, nurture it. But Nature is even more mighty. We have to realize our own illusion of control. There can be two paths. One, "I have no control, and I am scared out of my mind." And two, "I have no control and I am existentially relaxed. I will do everything in my power for a good outcome, keeping in mind that there are greater powers beyond mine."

Your wish for all bereaved parents, in five words.

Realize they're still with you.

If you have an afternoon to share with Victoria Helen, how do you imagine it will be like?

I will share my life with her... but I like to stay in the moment, rather than to fantasize. Victoria and I are intertwined, she is with me all the time. She is a separate presence, and yet she is also within me, and with me. She is in my life all the time, really.

How has the death of Victoria affected your marriage? Any insights for grieving couples?

It has made our marriage stronger. We've become more of a team, yet we are also still individuals. As Kahlil Gibran said, "Let there be space between your love." Bill was there for me, and I know he grieved differently. We all grieve differently, and we need to allow that to happen, and to let things happen at their own speed in their own way, which varies from person to person. There were times when Bill was crying inwardly. That is his way most of the time, though there have been times he let out his grief. He will have his moment, just let that happen in his own time.

You wrote on your website 'The act of writing brings meaning'. Can you elaborate on that?

There is wisdom in our hands that comes out when we write words across a page. It's the kind of wisdom that weaves a thread of meaning through everything. We can write what we know in such a way as to invoke deeper layers of knowing, to bring out what our soul knows and needs to tell us. Other arts can do the same, but writing is precise. It is intensely personal and beautiful, and it helps us to understand ourselves and what has happened to us. It is also like inverting ourselves. We turn ourselves inside out - first so we can see what is there and then so everyone can see and receive this gift of life and art.

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.  ~ Kenji Miyazawa

You also wrote 'Pain can be used to better the world'. Other than what you have done, can you talk more about this?

I can talk about our pain in relation to stillbirth. We who have experienced the pain know how it cuts. Next we have to do things, propel things ourselves into action. We need to create a database on stillbirth: Experiences need to be tallied and measured, meaningful studies need to be launched. There need to be systematic studies. We need to help make these things happen, to write letters to our congressmen, visit Capitol Hill, get the bill for Certificate of Stillbirth passed in all 50 states.

You know, the link between babies in utero and Group B Streptococcus (GBS), which took Victoria's life and almost my own, has been known since the 1930s. Why haven't we learned more about it since then? Why is it still happening and causing lives? We need to question the protocols of pregnancy care and birth. We need to make it all better for those who come behind us. Pain can give us a lot of fire and endurance, which can be put to good use to do many good things.

You have written that your search for understanding and peace has led you and your husband to a richer way of seeing, being and loving in the world. But, have you ever questioned, 'Must this be the way?'

Yes, this must be the way, for reasons I cannot fathom. You know, Life talks to us, to all of us, and I got a big, resounding "No" when it came to raising children. So, where's the "Yes"? I looked for it and I went with it. I've come to accept life as it comes. There really is no other way I can live a life so rich and meaningful, and beautiful. And I am proud of myself to have come this far, and I am proud of Victoria Helen, too.

Life touches Life was written as a gift of love for stillbirth mothers all over the world. It validates their feelings and let them know that someone else had been through the same territory before. It opens up a whole cultural conversation about this kind of pain and makes it visible. It was a tremendous healing experience for myself, and it led me to this place, the place we've been talking about the past couple of hours. Honestly, I think it's impossible to come to this place unless you had some kind of blood sacrifice in your life.

If you process the experience, you will one day come to feel peace and happiness.

~ Lorraine Ash

The hurt you embrace
becomes joy.
Call it to your arms
where it can change.
A silkworm eating leaves
makes a cocoon.

Each of us weaves a chamber
of leaves and sticks.
Silkworms begin to truly exist
as they disappear inside that room.

Without legs, we fly.
When I stop speaking,
this poem will close,
and open its silent wings...

~ "Silkworms" by Rumi

119 - pale blue dot (comment)

I was once very scientifically driven. Everything had a place, a reason, an explanation. Until Stella died. There was no "reason" it was a medical "mystery" The doctors, scientists, no one. not one person could figure it out. So I turned to the spiritual side of it. Why? Was this one of those "everything happens for a reason" "God has a plan" kinda BS?! Was I being punished!? I dont understand it. Not from a scientific point nor a spiritual point. It plain does not make any sense and just made life worse. Harder, less happy. Like a huge dark cloud in my heart covering the sun. Making it feel cold and iced. And every time someone has a baby or i see pregnant people or hear of all the beautiful rainbows being born, i feel sorry for me. Ive become introverted and selfish over losing Stella. Im mad that her brother ans sister couldn't meet her. That I dont know what color her eyes were. Then I become heaven sick. I sickly await my own death as people around me die off. ( literally just about every other month i am attending funerals) and I think "Boy they're lucky, they get to meet my daughter before me" "They've escaped this hell and get to be in heaven" When I do have times of peace and thanksgiving here on Earth I'm mad Stella cant be with us. She doesnt get to enjoy this with us. Or is she? Is she here with me? I just dont know. There is no explanation, no scientific proof she is here or not. Or even why she left. I just hate it all and have not accepted it. Its harder with out a reason. But then again, I have not seen the other side, the side that tells me Why.

121 - Ghost Story (comment)

Angie--Such an interesting post. Your way with words is amazing and definitely sends my mind off to thinking about wonderful things. But also, reading your readers' comments. It is all so encouraging to read how other BLMs regard their little ones' spirits. I have become much more spiritual and less religious since Chase died and yearn so badly for some sign, some point of contact, something nearly tangible, if I could. Something I will never forget...and can let my mind wander as it may....About 4 or 5 months after Chase died, I somehow caught a glimpse of a helium balloon coming down out of the sky (slowly deflating). Like many, we use balloons to send messages to him. So when I coincidentally l saw this balloon coming down while driving on a busy street in the middle of our moutainous town, I was sure that it was Chase's message coming back to us. I finally turned my car around and parked where I thought I saw the balloon (it took that long to talk myself into searching for an impossible message--come on, this was too obvious to be real). I got out and walked along the street and searched in the treetops and the grasses below for the red balloon. In the end, I was too embarrassed to ask these people that were in the exact spot, I was sure, that I had seen teh balloon land about the balloon at all.
I still like to think that it was a message from my son, as ridiculous as it sounds. But sometimes all we have are extraordinary measures to hold onto. And I like how you refer to these extraordinary things as ordinary to us.....because in our "new normal", they are.

123 - the happiest story with the saddest ending

I'm curious, did you go online at all to search for similar stories and/or find support after Pudding's death?

I honestly can't remember when I went online after Pudding died--not soon, and the timing was strange.  We were in England right after with dial-up internet access, and besides I don't think I was ready.  By the time we got back to the US, I was pregnant again--like, I found out the day we moved into our new house--and then I really wasn't ready.  Really, I think I basically cryogenically froze my whole mourning process for nine months as much as I could, which is why I ended up writing a book-length object three weeks after Gus was born.  Except writing that I think I found Niobe's blog  while I was still pregnant.  In fact, I'm sure I did.  & I don't know how--if I was googling symptoms or science and it came up.  & I read it and kept reading it.  & strangely it was comforting because it was A. so well-written and B. because her reactions seemed so different to mine.

But now I like to read stories and I really, really, really like to know the names of other lost children.  A bit of an obsession of mine.  I think it's because while on the one hand I know there's nothing you can do for a dead child, I also think that, as the mother of a dead child myself, it's somehow my duty to think of those children.  Someone warned me that if I published the book I would get every sad story in the world sent to me.  So far it's been mothers of dead children, and I am grateful (a strange word, but it's the right one) every time.

One reason I was interested in whether you had been online or not was the structure of your memoir.  I guess since I'm so used to reading blogs I had zero problem with how your book moved around chronologically, forward, backward, present, back again around "the great divide" between "then" and "now."  (Tiny little one page chapter?  Fine with me.)  I've read so many blogs where people wait a few entries to get the crux of the story out, or wait until the year anniversary to go through the details, or sometimes it just comes out in dribbles here and there when they're talking about something else entirely.  There are others where frankly I still don't know the details, and I wondered while reading your book if you would be one to keep those hours close to the vest or perhaps buried.

Was the structure of your book purposeful, or did it just come out that way -- with the actual story of The Ultrasound and the stillbirth at the end -- rather than, say, at the beginning, or even in the middle?  Did you or your editor/publisher foresee any problems with this organization or did it seem to make perfect sense?  In other words, why did you lay out the story the way you did?

[I]t just came out that way.  The funny thing is that I always want to play around with time in my fiction (I'm mostly a novelist) and I can never quite manage it.  I would love to come up with some high-minded artistic reason for why this book came out that way, but the fact is (and any writer who has a blog--ugh, I'm trying to avoid the ugly word "blogger" because I love the medium and hate the word) that it was just life.  Sleep-deprivation, mostly.  I started writing when Gus, my second son, was three weeks old.  I wrote the whole thing in about three weeks.  I didn't know what I was writing.  I just wrote because I had to.  I was sleep deprived, I was griefstruck and lovestruck at the exact same time, and I was trying to sort things out.  The chapters are funny shapes because sometimes Gus was asleep and sometimes he was nursing and sometimes I had to fall asleep.  What came out was book-shaped because I write books.  But I imagine it's really not all that different from blog-keeping.

Also very much like blogging: once I actually thought about publishing the thing, I decided that I would not do a lot of revising.  I don't need to tell you: what you write one month is not what you'd write the next month, or the next year.  That's what kept me writing (again, I'm sure this is familiar).  I wanted to hold onto what I felt then, when I felt the equal weight of both boys across my lap.  I didn't want to erase those feelings through revising, or summing up.  (Indeed, there's a line in the book that came out of a conversation I had with an editor who'd read the book and said that she thought that readers would want some sense of closure.  I said, "You know, if there's one thing I'm certain about now, it's that closure is bullshit."  About fifteen minutes after I hung up I added that sentiment to the manuscript.)

So I held onto the details of my first son's death and then birth because I wasn't ready for them yet, because they were what I was writing up to.  I think if I'd discovered that I couldn't really write about those days, I probably would have put the manuscript away in the drawer.  But it was writing everything that led up to it that allowed me to understand things, and then let me write about the worst days.  (They still do seem like the worst days, though I know for a lot of people what comes afterwards is even worse.)  Again, I imagine this is exactly the same motivation that other writers have, even if what they're writing is a blog, and not a book.

When I was done with the book, I gave it to my husband to read, and then I sent it to my agent, who is also a good friend of mine.  I didn't even tell my friends I was writing it.  And I said to Henry, my agent, "Listen: I wrote this thing.  If you think that it might be publishable, will you tell me?  If it needs a lot of work, just tell me, no hard feelings, and I'll put it aside.  I've got what I wanted out of writing it, but I'm not up for enormous fiddly work with it."  This wasn't something I could ask of my other friends: Hey, I've written a book about my dead baby.  Um, could you tell me whether I should keep it or toss it out?  But I knew Henry would be honest in his very kind way.  He said that he was all for the details of the death and birth at the end, but I should add about two sentences that would suggest that I'd get around to talking about them in some form.  So I did. 

What was your intended audience for this book?  Was it purely therapeutic?  Were you hoping to connect with other babyloss mamas? (And what term do YOU prefer, by the way?)  Were you hoping to educate people who might know about you and your work already about a topic (stillbirth; grief; grieving the loss of a child) that they might not otherwise care to hear about?

I don't mean to be disingenuous about audience.  Clearly I wasn't writing it entirely for my own benefit.  I was trying to write pretty sentences, for instance (though trying to write pretty sentences is one of my forms of therapy).  But the audience in my head was distant and abstract and kindly, maybe a sort of imagined grown-up Pudding in the ether.  Early on a friend made it sound as though she thought the only real audience for the book WAS other women who'd lost children.  (About vocabulary: I don't mind the adjective "stillborn."  I stumble over the noun "stillbirth," which somehow feels dehumanizing to me.  The phrase, "She suffered a stillbirth" drives me nuts.  "Mothers of lost children" is what I usually land on.)  Anyhow, I was stumped by this notion, maybe because it took me a while to be hungry for other women's stories.  After Pudding had died but before he'd been delivered, a friend told me that The New Yorker had published an essay by the father of a stillborn child.  I am very grateful to the author, David Raeburn, because the essay meant that people had some fresh notion of what I was going through.  But I couldn't read it myself: at that moment I wanted my own pain, not someone else's. Soon enough--like a week or two later--I was ridiculously grateful to hear about other women who'd lost children.  But I still wasn't ready to hear stories, for some reason, and I wasn't until Gus was born.  At first I was too self-absorbed, and then I was pregnant again and, like I said, sort of cryogenically frozen when it came to any thoughts about birth at all.

I never have really read that essay, though I have squinted at it, and it was like reviewing the accident report of someone who'd been through a terrible crash something like my own.  & now I so associate it with sitting in the hospital in Bordeaux, I can't imagine reading it.  So at first I thought, No woman who's been through this will be the least interested in this book.  They have their stories, so they don't need mine.   This is a book for people who haven't been through it.

I realized that I was wrong when I started reading blogs and death stories and birth stories and felt the same thing you mention--I wanted to see how other women's stories were like mine and not like mine, and I wanted to figure out what that meant.  & since the book's been out I've gotten beautiful letters from women who've lost babies.  (And from people who haven't, too.)  Did I say this?  I was warned by some people that I would get letters filled with other people's sad stories.  & they were right, but it turns out I really need those stories. They mean the world to me now.

But I really don't think I thought about that while I was writing.  That was a concern of publication, which as far as this book goes was completely separate from the actual writing.  Which is interesting to me because again, that's what I strive for in my fiction, but never quite achieve.  I didn't know whether I was just taking notes for a novel, or notes for Gus later in life, or whether I was just doing what I imagine people in therapy doing, converting terrifying emotions into language and getting them out of my body.  I wrote about things and felt better almost instantly.  Not, you know, over it, but at ease with my worst suspicions about my interior life.  Before I wrote, I worried that I was being selfish or morbid or betraying both children at once.  I felt like I was doing everything wrong.  Converting those worries into sentences made me see--the way reading other people's stories did, too--that my responses were actually appropriate and reasonable, considering what had happened.  Writing the book felt very intimate, private, and lovely.  I can't remember if I said this--about three fourths of the way through, I told my husband I was writing it.  When I got to the end, I told Henry, my agent.  Not until he had read it did I tell anyone else, including my closest writing friends.  I don't think I could have written it otherwise.

You said you wrote this not much more than a year beyond Pudding's death, right after the birth of Gus.  Has anything changed (for better or worse) in your life or your thoughts so much that you wish you could change what you wrote?  If another edition was forthcoming, would you write a different introduction?  Add or subtract a chapter?  I understand the idea of "capturing the moment," but a book really solidifies that moment much more than a journal or blog.  And this journey is nothing if not a collection of wild and sometimes wildly contradictory moments.    There's room in a blog, for example, to say a few months later, "Well, you know that relative I adored?  Now not so much."  Or conversely, to say "Wow, you know that bitterness I raved about?  I'm not feeling it so much these days.  I actually enjoyed something today."

The question of what I would have put in/taken out is interesting.  I did in fact revise a little, rewrote some sentences, added a section about a trip to New Orleans Edward and I took when I was pregnant the second time.   I took out a couple of ranting paragraphs where I carped about well-meaning but dumb things people said.  EG, "Never mind, you'll have another!  You won't get off that easy!"  I never experienced any real cruelty, or any deeply stupid reactions.  Just a few people blurting out things, and as someone who has blurted in the past I decided it was unfair to put it in print; I think if it were online I wouldn't have hesitated, I would have vented.  (It's interesting that we each think we might be more likely to vent in the other person's usual medium.)  I deliberated over whether to include the one old friend I was furious at (but left her in, because I don't think she wasn't well-meaning).  One of my friends said she thought I was too easy on some people, but I felt like if I started examining who I was mad at I might talk myself into psychic corners and make myself more miserable.

Two big things I wish were different in the book:

We lived in France during my first pregnancy, first in Paris, and then the countryside near Bergerac, so I had to switch doctors.  (I wasn't pregnant when we made the decision to move & signed the lease.)  Then I left the second doctor for a midwife who delivered in a hospital in Bordeaux.  I left for a lot of reasons--and figured in an emergency, a hospital in Bordeaux, a real city, was a better place than the podunk place in Bergerac--but before I did, I had a long, long conversation with the doctor husband of one of my best friends, a GP who's delivered hundreds of babies.  What's your best advice, I asked.  He said that hospitals and birth were a recent phenomenon.  Do you know, he asked, the first US president born in a hospital?  Jimmy Carter!  (This fact is etched in my brain.)  He told me that the US overmedicalizes birth and makes mothers-to-be too anxious.  In the absence of any complications--my only complication was that I was 39--he would advise going with what made me feel comfortable, what made sense to me. He saw nothing wrong with a home birth.  I was staring out the back window of the weird old farmhouse/single mother's home we were renting at this beautiful hill studded with cows while I was on the phone with him, thinking about Jimmy Carter and comfort.

Such a calming, lovely conversation.  I decided I'd rather be in a hospital (the nearest hospital was apparently no great shakes, and not all that close, and I was getting maternally geriatric) but happily dumped the doctor.

But when I came to that point in the book, I couldn't write up the conversation.  I couldn't digest it.  Every piece of advice he gave me was absolutely accurate and I didn't and don't blame him for giving me the opinion I'd requested. It just turned out not to apply to me.  As I wrote, I kept thinking about the conversation sideways but never straight on, and so I just skipped it.  It's really only now--I mean, now that I'm typing this to you--that I can see the real problem, which is that before that moment I was full of the usual anxieties of pregnancy, an average neurotic middle-aged American woman in a strange place, terrified of making the wrong decision.  From that point on, I was cheerful, full of hope, reassured. My shoulders went down.  I relaxed.  Goddammit.

Anyhow--flash forward, the book comes out, and one review refers to me "bouncing around from doctor to doctor," and another one refers to my choosing a midwife as a "fateful" decision, and I really wish I had made it clear that I sought actual medical advice.  I probably will change that for the paperback--that is, I'll write a sentence or two.

Another thing: there's a line late on where I wonder whether I think about Pudding every waking hour and I conclude, "Probably."  Now I think, Yes, of course I do.  He's just always with me.  I think I wrote that sentence out of a combination of sleep deprivation--I was agonizingly aware of every single thought that came stumbling into my brain--and guilt.  Surely with such a nice little boy healthy in front of me, it was selfish to be thinking about the boy who wasn't.  I felt like I couldn't quite admit to thinking about my first child so much.  Which seems idiotic to me now, especially since I'd written an entire book about the first child.

& I had no idea that in the US they no longer give out the medicine to dry up milk; I would have mentioned that.  There I was in a French hospital; they gave me some pills; I took them, and they worked.  I never had to deal with my milk coming in.  I can't imagine it.  So maybe that needs half a sentence, too, since I don't want people jumping to the same conclusion that I did, that no woman need go through such a thing.  I learned I was wrong from Julia's blog, I Won't Fear Love.

I find this fascinating (from a very macabre perspective, I know) because my background is history, and women's history, and it's been drilled into me from early on that childbirth was the leading cause of death for women in this country until well into the 20th century.  (Jimmy Carter may be the first president born in a hospital, but now I'm curious as to how many of their mothers and daughters died in childbirth.)  So I have no romantic preconceptions about childbirth (much like I imagine men don't have romantic preconceptions about swigging a few shots of whiskey, biting a bullet, and having a limb amputated with a tree saw) and couldn't see myself in ANY situation other than a highly medicalized (is that a word?) one.

But fat lot of good that did me.  I took advantage of every test, every last thing known to us now, and birthed in a highly respected hospital down the street from the nation's top children's hospital.  I'm grateful for this, because like I've written, even if they uncovered no answers, I rest easy knowing they did everything possible, and we all received the best care.

And yet, like you, I feel I approach this background rather sideways but with some visceral need to bring it up -- I don't want people writing of my child's death as though *I* missed something or could've done something different or didn't avail myself of the technology or -- from the neighborhood I live in now where homebirth is the norm -- the smug looks that seem to say to me, "see where THAT got you?  At least you might've enjoyed yourself."  But I'm very defensive about it -- about my care.  I think we all are, regardless of what that care was.  To me it's been a necessary factor in being able to look through the rear-view mirror and absolve myself of guilt.

I guess what I'm trying to say is:  I would've chosen differently for very different reasons, and yet I sympathize and understand your point entirely.  Funny thing, that.

Well of course the funny thing is: I never would have gone with a midwife without a medical doctor's endorsement.

The New York Times review of my book made me insane, and not just because it was written by someone I kind of know who should have recused herself.  The last time I e-mailed with this woman, I was 8 months pregnant for the first time, and she was 7 months pregnant.  She mentions in the first paragraph of the review that her first child "stopped kicking" on her due date (leading some people I know to assume her child died, too; I think she even got a condolence card), and she's the one who called my decision to go with a midwife "fateful."  I felt like the subtext of the review was, "I, the smart reviewer, had trouble and so went to see a doctor and so even though I had a traumatic experience, my kid was fine.  The dumb author of this book, on the other hand..."  So even though the review was mostly positive and people come up and congratulate me on it, all I can do is grit my teeth and wish I could punch the reviewer in the nose.  & I'm happy to go on record as saying so.

She also felt like I was being too polite in not blaming a midwife who did, it's true, make a pretty bad decision in sending me home to "relax" for a few hours (very French, that).  But I made a decision, really within minutes of knowing my child was dead, that I couldn't blame her, because then I would end up blaming myself more than I did already.  I could blame nobody or everybody.  It was like a switch that I flipped in my head.  I understand that this is one of my emotional peculiarities, that I'm able to do it, just as I'm aware that the fact that other people's babies didn't bother me in the months after my baby died is also just part of my psychic constitution.   These days, every now and then my brain hits a pothole: I think of a brand new moment when, had I made a different decision, I might have changed everything (for example, we decided to move to the country to save money when I was upset after a novel I wrote fell apart; just two months ago I realized if only I'd done a better job with that book, we would have stayed in Paris with the American doctor who wanted to induce me...).  When this happens, I get highly distraught, and then preoccupied and mopey for two days, and then I can flip the switch again and tell myself that there's no point.

Which is to say: it makes me crazy, too, when I feel like someone is going over what I did wrong.  What they're looking for, of course, is evidence of their own luck and safety.  I'm sure I did such things too, Before.

Well, that's a supremely unhelpful thing to say.  I wish I could point that reviewer -- who I'm sure thinks that by reading your experience that she's now free from this tragedy simiply because she'll make better choices -- to a few writers who had extremely monitored pregnancies who still wound up with dead children.  Wonder if she'd still find a find a point of difference ("a fateful decision").  I haven't read that review yet, but it sounds as though she missed your discussion of Maud, who drank copiously during her pregnancy (which paralleled yours).  She clearly missed the part about how in addition to guilt, babyloss mothers grapple mightily with cosmic questions of luck and fate.  Circumstances be damned.

Which leads me to my next question:  In the book you speak of only one lost relationship in the aftermath.  Which I find . . . amazing. (My jaw may have dropped.)  It seems people whose social lives are untouched are exceptions to the rule, and most women find their social circles change rather drastically and not infrequently there's a dramatic falling out with friends or family members.   So my question is, has this situation changed since the writing of the book?  You said this book was going to be your calling card (and might I add, I've often wanted a t-shirt that reads "My Baby Died"), but has it gone too far with anyone?  Has anyone accused you of wallowing by publishing?  Wondered why you did this, why you spent so much time -- especially given that Gus was there when you wrote it?  Misread your subsequent pregnancy and child as the happy ending that negated the entire subject of Pudding?  (Or are your friends and family the stuff of fairy tales, and can I meet them?)

Well, one of the other things I didn't know when I was writing the book is how awful people can be to parents who've lost babies.  I knew about the silence and I knew about awkwardness, but what I've heard what other mothers and fathers of dead babies have gone through--my God.

But maybe it's just this: my friends were extraordinary, but what was out of a fairy tale was my ability to go underground.  We went to a small town on the coast of England & I scarcely had to see anyone for four months after my son's death.  That was huge.  For some people, I know, this would sound awful, but it was exactly what I needed.  So while I was at my most vulnerable (not, of course, that I'm invulnerable now) and people were at their most clueless (not that they're always clueful), I didn't need to see them.  I didn't have to go back to work.  I didn't have to see all the people who had seen me pregnant.  My only responsibilities, really, were to Edward and to my grief.  I was not "better" when I emerged but certainly people, less frightened by my possible explosiveness, were by and large less awkward.

Nobody ever said to me, "It just wasn't meant to be."  Or, "God wanted your child for an angel."  Or, "God has his reasons."  A friend of mine who lost her first child last year told me that she asked her grandmother, who'd lost her second child, for help, and her grandmother said, "Heaven is happier with babies."  Nobody said, "Well, you were kind of old to have a baby."

I have one beloved friend who wasn't awful when Pudding died but was hugely awkward, and I sort of thought, Well, I'll never feel close to her again.  And then when she read part of the book in a magazine in August, she wrote me the most beautiful and heartfelt e-mail (I was in Scotland, and that was the only way to get ahold of me).  She apologized for her awkwardness and said, She hadn't known what to do, and that she wanted me to know that the saddest day of my life was also the saddest day of hers.  She said it had felt inappropriate to her, to feel so sad.  And then she talked about me and Pudding--it was an amazing note.  I cried when I read it.  It was as though I hadn't realized that I still needed that kind of condolence, and somehow it had been set aside for me, waiting, as intense and fond and loving as it would have been in April and May of 2006,  and I did still need it.

& there's one friend--not tremendously close--with whom I corresponded a while after Pudding died.  She'd had a daughter a month before, after a very, very complicated pregnancy and a long complicated fertility journey.  I think she'd had two miscarriages.  We'd been e-mailing while pregnant, and continued to afterwards.  She wrote me a really unthinking e-mail over the summer (about how she'd never seen her partner happier in all the time they'd been together), and I stopped e-mailing her because it got under my skin; then I sent her a group e-mail when Gus was born.  At which point she sent me an e-mail that said, "That's great!  Does that mean I can send you these pictures of [her kid] that I've really wanted to but haven't been able to?"  & then sent them before I could say, "Well, you know..."  It included pictures of her daughter's first birthday party from the month before.  So I've never written HER back--speaking of people who assume that the healthy birth of the second erases the death of the first.

But honestly I have not had the horrible, horrible things I've heard about.  On the other hand, my family generally plays things pretty close to the vest--sorrow, joy, etc.

Someone did once say to us, when he found out that I'd written a book, "Life is for the living.  What about Gus? What will he think?"  And Edward said immediately, "I hope he'll see how much he was longed for and how much he was loved.  And that his parents wouldn't lie to him."

And so we won't.   Maybe the book's partly so I don't chicken out, but I've since spoken to people who have found out as grown-ups that they had a sibling they never met, and it's hard for them in a different way than always knowing would be.  I don't want to lie to him the exact same amount I don't want to make my first kid disappear, so that decides it.  We don't have pictures, so it will be a matter of telling him.  But we don't know when or how.

I was also curious, because you didn't say in the book, if you did anything to mark or acknowledge Pudding's "birthday" (or the day you learned of his death) or if you will in the future.  I know it came close (too close, perhaps) to Gus' birth, and that may have tempered anything you may have wanted to do.

We didn't do anything to mark the first anniversary of Pudding's death or of his birth other than huddle on the sofa and feel paranoid.  I like to pretend that I am no longer a superstitious person, and certainly I've given a lot of them up, but some part of my reptilian brain thinks, If only I hold very still, if I don't call attention to myself in any way, then danger will pass over me.  I don't think it was a conscious decision to not tempt the Evil Eye, but.  Some people sent flowers, which I hadn't been expecting but which I was very grateful for.

And on the end of that subject, what has Gus' pregnancy/success given you?  My friend C. at My Resurfacing  admitted that she was a bit reluctant to read your book knowing you had a subsequent successful pregnancy -- and I'll confess I was a bit a too.  She notes, and I concur, that you don't romanticize it, nor does it negate the individual who died preceding it (as we well know from others in our corner of the blogverse).  However, it seems to me there's a sort of mental restoration or correction that comes from a subsequent success.  One, I might add, that some of us reading your book will never get to know.  You speak of talking about another child immediately following Pudding's death, and that idea being your "towline" and "believing in the future."  I hate to ask counterfactual stuff along the lines of "what if Gus hadn't happened," but could you answer more in the affirmative -- did Gus' pregnancy/life give you back your ability to plan a future?  What did this success give you?

As far as wondering what life would be like without Gus--well, that feels as dangerous to me as wondering how life would be different if I hadn't left Paris, or the United States, or if having insisted on seeing the midwife in the morning I'd insisted she send me immediately to the hospital, when my first child was still alive.  But I will say: having great joy come after great sorrow is easier on the heart than the other way around.  No doubt in my mind.  It doesn't make the sorrow or the loss less, I want to say quickly, but--well, easier on the heart is the only way I can think of it.  A happier second marriage, security after wretched poverty.  It doesn't matter.  Better to have your sorrow mitigated by joy than your joy rearranged by sorrow.

But as we said earlier, every little difference in biography changes the whole story.  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a mother of a little baby and not absolutely obsessed with death.  I'll never know.  On the other hand, I also will never know what it's like to try to tend to one child while in the worst throes of mourning another; I will never know what it's like to look at two children, one born Before and one born After and wonder what kind of difference that makes; I will never have to wonder what that sense of restoration, of feeling that the universe has bent back in favor to me, feels like.

Still, Gus is not a happy ending.  It feels disrespectful to both my boys to consider him an ending of any kind. I'm still lousy at thinking about the future.  I suppose one of the profoundest changes in myself since Pudding died is that I have completely lost the ability to be comforted by statistics.  This may not sound like much but for someone who's resolutely agnostic it feels as serious as a believer losing faith in God: that thing that convinced me that I was safe and protected from the calamities of the universe--gone.  And will never come back, I don't think. 

... This question woke me up at 2AM.  I kept coming close to it--of course it belongs in the list of things I'll never know.  I started writing, "I'll never know what it's like to be left with no children living," but I looked at that sentence and thought, Well, there's no guaranteeing that, evil eye, etc., etc.  I don't know.  I can't turn around and look at myself and imagine not having had Gus, but I can think about women who have lost their first children and then never had another living child and feel the deepest--I wish there were a better word than deep to go with sympathy--the most enormous sympathy, and I can hope that as slow as their path is to a life that is mixed grief and happiness as opposed to only grief they somehow find that slow path.  I do think that if I had never had any children at all, I would have been perfectly happy--a different kind of happiness, of course.  But to have lost Pudding, and then not to have Gus?  Or to have lost the first, and then the second?  I don't know.  I don't know.

You decided not to do any testing in your second pregnancy.  And from what I gather, this choice had more to do with amnio risks than anything, but I remember a few sentences there too about other factors as to letting this particular screen go.  I know many, many other mothers who made the same choice the subsequent pregnancy:  no amnio, no gender determination.  Part I'm sure is a defensive mechanism to put some distance between you and the child, but I'm wondering . . . . what else?

With Gus both my husband and I both felt--we really didn't even have to discuss it--that whatever we could do differently this time, we would.  We were in a different country, different doctor, different everything; I think feeling like we were putting a single foot in a similar old footprint seemed too much.  I did have an amnio with Pudding, and it came back absolutely ordinary; we did find out his gender.    My second really was the one-day-at-a-time pregnancy.  Knowing gender would have been thinking about the future.  I didn't want to think about the future, because look where it had gotten me.  The practice I went to was half doctors, half midwives, and I had to see a midwife once, and then made it clear I didn't want to see one ever again.  I wanted DOCTORS.  I wanted possibly awkward, emotionless, highly-degreed DOCTORS.

I do feel like that--no matter the universals--every little change in our stories makes our reactions different (and interesting).  It seems so different to me (and harder, at least considering the kid I do now have) to have had a living child already, and so different to me (and harder) to have a child born living who then dies.  Our anxieties land in different spots at the very least.  I was remarkably unanxious about Gus's birth itself, because giving birth the first time was tremendously sad, but not full of anxiety:  When Gus was born with the cord around his neck, I was kind of stunned that I hadn't even thought to worry about birth complications.  What did I know?  My first experience held no surprises at all.

Was the decision not have photographs taken yours or the hospital's?  (Was it made available?)  Are you ok with this now?

They did offer us the chance to take a photograph, and we said no, and I have never once regretted it.  You were talking about how you'd want every test in the world if you got pregnant again, and how that might make you unusual among women who'd lost a child; someone told me that my absolute peace over a lack of photos was unusual.  I feel like my brain has done a better job than a photo possibly could have, even though I always hear that faces fade from memory.  I've retained my motherly focus on his face, not a photographic one, and that's what I want.  Besides,a photo of the body of my child would not be a photo of my child--which is perhaps a strange thing for a non-religious person to say.  But it feels true: not him.  I have since heard of a couple who, after a few months, looked at the photo and it was enormously upsetting to them--they had remembered a child not so beat up by the birth process.

I might--MIGHT--feel differently if I'd had access to professional photographers who specialize in such portraits.  But probably not.  Maybe four months after Pudding died, I looked online at some pictures that had been posed as though the children were still alive, and that really, really upset me.  I have a constitutional aversion to make-believe (and that might be strange for a fiction writer).  Though maybe if I looked at them now I would interpret them differently, maybe they would look to me like anything but make-believe.  I did see a beautiful montage of photos of the birth and delivery of a still child recently, which I found so moving and right.  So my head might be in a different place these days.

And we said no at the time because we were both worried we'd look at it all the time.

I asked the question about the photograph because:  it seems as I read other bloggers' commentary on your book that there are so many places where they shout, "Yes!"  Be it "Closure is Bullshit," the desire to have our OB charts marked "NOTE: do not blow sunshine up patient's ass," the calling cards we all wish we could hand out.  For me it was your bottle of wine and a smoke while still looking very pregnant, in the space between finding out Pudding had died and delivering him.  If Children's had a cafe, I would've run to the same indulgence (and I've never smoked in my life), but as it was, moments after making the decision to take Maddy off life support (and hence bringing my pumping to a close), I ran and got the biggest cup of "fuck you universe/I love you, comfort food" coffee I could find.

But there are moments in reading your book where I scratched my head and thought, "huh."  And the photo was one of those places.  (Interesting, you mention Niobe as someone whom you felt did things quite differently, and yet you two are two of the only people I know who don't have photos.)  Another was when you riffed on your ability to do it again knowing the outcome, because you feel you couldn't "love and regret him both."  (I can, and I do.)  Rather than pick apart all of these, I'm wondering if you're familiar with enough other stories now to compare your experience with, and I'm wondering if there's a topic where you often think, "Yes, it was just like that, that must be such a universal feeling," and one where you often find yourself thinking, "Wow, I didn't think that at all.  I'm really peculiar in that regard."?

You may still find my reaction odd--but it's not that I would go through my pregnancy with my first child and his death, should some ghoulish apparition--Cher, perhaps--asked me if I wanted to Turn Back Time.  I have no idea what my answer would be, and I'm glad that I don't have to make the choice.  Perhaps that's the same thing.  I mean, I do renounce regret, absolutely.  It does no good.  He's dead and in this unchanging earthly dimension, I don't regret him.  

My biggest eccentricity in all of this--as far as I can tell--is that within two weeks of Pudding's death, looking at other babies (and their mothers) wasn't all that painful.  I'd lost a specific boy.  I think I could have walked into Babytown and addressed the citizens and chamber of commerce and shook the mayor's hand without blinking: I knew I would never see the person I was missing.  That particular longing was equally awful in the presence of grown-ups or babies.  Made no difference at all.  Even as I experienced it, I knew that was unusual . 

& the things that stick in my head as possibly universal are, if I remember correctly, precisely the things that Niobe wrote about not agreeing with--wanting the comfort of other people, wanting to hear the name of your child from other people.

What does strike me as universal: the shock of finding out that some people will simply not mention that you were ever even pregnant, the confusion over what to say when someone asks you how many children you have, the need to explain that the children existed.  & the strange feeling of being an untouchable.

The pictures.  It's funny, it had never occurred to me that not wanting a picture was unusual, until Sarah Bain (who blogs at Geography of Grief) asked me about it.  All along, when I've heard about pictures of dead children--not sick children, not children who will die--but those already gone, I haven't understood.  I particularly don't understand prominent displays of pictures of dead children.  (I can't really parse it, since I don't consider myself religious in any sense--but I'll repeat that a picture of my son's body would never seem like anything but a picture of his body, and not of him.  It would be like a picture of his gravestone on the wall, if he had a gravestone.)  But I don't understand in the way that I don't understand Spanish: I know that for other people the pictures are full of meaning, and my lack of comprehension is utterly without judgment.  I do understand the photographs are beautiful and neccessary to the parents of those children.  I can see that they're beautiful.  I don't think they're morbid or weird.   It's just that the meaning is somehow emotionally inaccessible to me.

Again, like Spanish.  & I imagine that's how it is for all of us, when we scratch our heads at someone else's reaction.  We don't doubt the reaction; we just don't speak the language.

Though in the end my guess is I wrote a book for the exact same reason people want and require and love those photographs.  Proof, for myself and for other people.  A way to keep the child from disappearing for good.

I'm quite embarrassed to admit to you (in public, nonetheless) that I've never read any of your novels.  And of course I now have a keen interest in doing so.  But I'm wondering, will this experience change your work in any way?   And I'm thinking here of both the obvious like creating characters that undergo something similar;  and the more subtle, like characters or plots or themes that perhaps shift in unexpected ways or don't proceed to end like they should?  Are you done writing about this, or do you think it will pop up, one way or another?

Once I thought about it, I was absolutely appalled at how many children I had, over the years, killed off in my fiction.  I can only blame my essentially Victorian sensibility.  My third novel is particularly bad in this regard, and features a drowned 2-year-old (based on a historical drowned child).  I think I mention in Figment--the novel I was working on the summer before I got pregnant with Pudding featured yet another drowned child, this one five-months-old, based on a story that someone told my aunt Liz years and years ago, which she told me as a child: he claimed that he had drowned his identical twin brother in his bathtub: his mother stepped out of the room, and came back to find one boy sitting atop the other, his arms clasped over his head in triumph.  This image had never left me, though--again, I'm having this revelation as I type to you--it strikes me at this moment as impossible.  What mother would tell her surviving son the story like that?  Anyhow, it wasn't a major part of the book, but when I went back to it after Pudding died, I was grateful for that kid, and the ability to write about a dead baby in as much detail as I wanted to.
 
I don't reread my own work anyhow, but I haven't reread any of the Fictional Dead Children passages from my old books.  Still, if I think about them I think I might have gotten it mostly right.  One of my dearest friends said to me, not long after Pudding died, "It's like what you wrote in The Giant's House [my first novel]."  I said, Huh?  And she quoted some passage I'd written about grief.  In response I wailed, "I MADE IT UP!  I HAD NO IDEA!"
 
But, as you know, you're never the same after losing a kid.  So I imagine my fiction is already different and will continue to be.

125a - crappy friends

I am loosing it today. I am so numb. I never really woke up this morning; my mind is in such a fog. What a crummy day! What really happened… nothing, nothing except I lost my son; my son who looked like my dad and me. Who had my dads’ chin and mouth and ears. Why did this happen? I found a white crocheted blanket today. It made me mad. Why didn’t I think of this when I was in the hospital? I could have wrapped Leo in this blanket. UGH! I am so pissed at myself today. Anger fills me quickly these days… worse than normal. And what the fuck is with my so-called friend Samantha? What a joke our friendship is. The disappointment smacked me in the face this afternoon like a soccer cleat to the groin. Why do people pretend to give a shit? PS people, my son is dead! So when you say, “I didn’t want to be in the way” or some other bullshit, just spare me. When did being supportive cross the line of “being in the way”. Let’s face it, what you are REALLY trying to say is you don’t want to have to deal with it, that YOU have your own issues on the subject, and that really you don’t have time to care. I am SO sick of the cop-out of “I just don’t know what to say”…funny, NEITHER DO I! What do I expect from someone who doesn’t have any faith? shame on me for expecting more from a friend of 6 years. And oh, how I am NOT looking forward to this weekend away with Scott. He hasn’t said more than 10 words to me all week. Why are we in a funk? We need to talk more now than ever and yet he comes home, is quite, and I just get more angry and hurt. Tears are threatening to spill over tonight and really I have no clue why. I am so tired and so freaked out about photographing this wedding this weekend. I hope I can find my artistic center. God is my only hope at this point. I am so freaked out about this wedding. Why? I know what I am doing, for the most part that is. I don’t want to go to the beach; it will just make me think about how I’ll never bring my Leo to the beach. Man this sucks. Everything in my life will always be, “I wish Leo were here with us.” What a revelation that is! I will always be suffocating on my own sorrow. My heart will forever be scarred. I hold back tears because if I let go, the force of Niagara Falls will flow from my eyes and never end. How do you come back from this type of thing? I read blogs from other women who share in my misery and 3+ years later they are still angry and hurting and longing for their lost ones. Will this loss always define me? Should I feel guilty for not wanting it to define me? Or guilty because I want it too? Oh how to navigate this new part of my life.

The rain pounds my windowsill. Each drop reminds me of the soft plucking of harp strings. Harp strings, like the harpist who played during Leo’s final hours. Her soft melodies blotted out the never-ending bleeping of life support machines. What a blur those final hours were. Red eyed family members with tear stained cheeks filter in and out of the room; everyone clinging to the person next to them, hoping to be roused from this nightmare. I am handed Leo for the first time and I fall apart. My sobs jerk me back to reality and I struggle to control myself as my tiny son barely fills my palms. I lay him skin to skin on my chest and I feel my heart swell to double its size. My tears threaten to drench his tiny head as I struggle to get a hold of myself. His hair, oh my gosh he already has hair, hair with curl, dark hair, like mine. He grips my finger, how can this be? How can I be holding my son already? He should still be inside me. I try to hold on to this moment for as long as I can, but it is no use. My mind is 100 different places other than where it should be. I need to focus but I can’t. I look down at my beautiful son and imagine him healthy. I don’t want to you to be here yet. I want more time damit, I want more time.