You have to learn something that you wish you didn’t have to learn: How to love somebody as if it’s not going to last because it’s not. The way we are trained to love. . . is we’re trained to love what’s lovable about it. You don’t love anybody until you love their end. You don’t love being married, until you love the end of the marriage, too. Because the marriage includes it’s end. Of course it does. Just as truly as getting born includes not breathing anymore. And that’s what you have to love. Not accept. Accept is too neutral. You have to love it. You have to say ‘yes’ to that.

-Stephen Jenkinson

Dear Harvey,

I hope it’s not circumstance: steady diet of pain meds, lots of rest time alone without Vesta, not being able to drive so no bustling around from here to there, loved ones bringing me food and good company. I hope it’s a new layer instead.

I think a lot about acceptance. I first learned about it, in a preschool sort of way, after my early grieving time (which, as time goes by, begins to extend. Someday this moment, almost 21 months, will seem like the early time, too). I spent the first nine months after you died in utter disbelief and protesting your death. Time marched on as it does and even just the physical evidence of your absence: sleeping through the night, no diapers to change, no car seat to carry out to the car, no care for my baby needed, even with just that physical evidence, the acceptance, or at least understanding, started to sink in. There was a Harvey shaped hole in my life, in my days, and I began to accept that you were gone, that you had been here and that you weren’t coming back.  Though my mind and my heart kept me from these very obvious and logical truths, it took time for them to sink in, for me to believe in them as true, for it to integrate into my experience.

Shock is a miracle when it comes to the process of grief and its acceptance. Shock allows us to process tiny bits of truth at a time. In the very beginning, it allows us to even have some moments of normalcy, where we feel like ourselves, we may be able to laugh and joke even. It give a buffer between our human-animal brains and our harsh, cruel reality. It subsides over weeks and months in small, bit sized increments, though it eases nothing. During the unraveling of shock, it feels like an elongated, torturous process as feelings become more intense, last longer, become increasingly debilitating. But the truth is if it all came at once, we would die from it. The truth of our situations would fall on us like anvils. So, shock after trauma allows us to step onto the path of acceptance.

Anything that changes our plans or our path takes time to accept and the acceptance is the key to feeling better, to finding some peace or at least to learning to adapt to our new lives. Even the smallest thing, like a looked forward to meal at a favorite restaurant that turns out to be closed unexpectedly. That takes us a minute or two to feel disappointed and sad and then to accept and choose another place to eat. From the very smallest to the very largest, like a dead child, we need time and space, we need emotional awareness, to be able to keep living, to adapt and maybe someday, to accept.

Acceptance doesn’t mean to forgive or to agree or to condone. It doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t have it another way in a heartbeat. It means that we come to a place on our journey, in our lives, in one particular moment and we see what has happened, what has transpired, who is here and who is gone, who has left and who has stayed, and we let that be. And we eek out the “at least”s and the “Thank God for”s that got us through, that we still have now. Acceptance allows us to stand up again in our lives. To take all of it with us as we step forward into whatever is next.

I have a suitcase with me that I am filling with the things I accept or am coming to accept. Somethings stay in there now, like you are dead and you are never coming back. Somethings, I take out and look at for awhile and then hesitatingly put back in, like I will never birth another baby. Somethings, I put in, take out, put in again, try to rearrange in there but they just don’t fit yet, like, what happened to that man I loved? There is an order there. Some are heavier and harder to hold, take longer to get in there, enter in layers. But the acceptance comes with time and the looking at the things and the putting them down for awhile and the doing it all over again. It’s not truly linear but the events closer to me, the ones newest to the grip and slow release of shock, those are the ones that hang around more on the outside.

Acceptance is the inevitable result of our love. Whether we hold it with a grudge or forgiveness or resistance it becomes the goal, the end game, the last step. I receive glimpses of it. Usually when I am dancing but also in ordinary moments, where I feel the integration of my losses: bereaved mother, infertile woman, ex-wife, in my very cells and I move right with it, I bring it all with me into the next phases, the next seasons, the next impulses and intuitions and choices. Moments when it is not uncomfortable at all but what it, forming who I am now. I hate when my experience boils down to age old cliches like “it is what it is”, “live each moment as your last”, “all we have is now” because usually the teller of these truths I suspect doesn’t get it all the way. Treats them like cliches, like they are attainable ways of living, like those phrases or even the practice of them will get them through tragedy and trauma. These are for later. Or at least the accepting of them are.

As I lay on the operating table and the stark white room buzzed with people covered in blue paper and cloth, the women around me spoke to me. The smiled and kept it light. I was already on a calming medicine that made my mind fuzzy. I lifted my tattooed arm and one of the nurses said, “Oh look! Her babies on her arm! How beautiful!” and another one or too responded in kind. I wondered if they all had read my chart, if they all knew about Harvey or not and then a different nurse came to put the oxygen mask over my face. I began to sob. Half paralyzed, I could only lay there feeling the typewriter contractions of my chest and the warm tears down my face as I wept. “Oh honey, it’s going to be okay.” they comforted. “Take some deep breaths.” And I sobbed and sobbed and someone put her hand on my shoulder and I wondered again if they knew. Did they know I was not crying out of fear but of finalization? Did they know I wept for my body, for my tubes, for my empty, broken womb? Did they know that I cry all the time and that these were the last tears of this chapter? This chapter of my life that is the aftermath of Harvey, this chapter of my life that was my normal and healthy ability to fall in love and create another human, the chapter that had been my potential my whole life up until now, up until 20 months ago? Did they know these were the tears to release the one person who I had my babies with, that the taking of the tubes were also some extraction of the two of us, too? As I cried my way into the darkness of anesthesia, did they know that they were my last tears of resistance and my first of acceptance?

That’s why I say I hope that it’s not circumstantial. I hope it’s not pain meds every four hours and days alone in bed with time to write and to think and to step more firmly into acceptance. It is what it is for me. It is what it is for Vesta. It is what it is for your dad and his new love. There is no changing any of it. There is just moving with it. There is just packing it up into my suitcase whenever I can and bringing it along with me. There’s the opening of the case and the showing of it to people I need to tell, who have heard it time and time again and who have new ears for the pitfalls along my journey. There will be new things that come that I will be certain will never fit into my suitcase. That are too awkward, cumbersome, heavy to ever have room in there for. That I will be convinced are impossible to live with, let alone accept. But these, too will fit, eventually.  Or I’ll get a bigger bag if I have to. Those things will come along and this moment of relative peace, of ruminating over acceptance, will seem folly and it will be: foolish, rose-colored folly. Until I come back around again.

Today, I watch this movie, Griefwalker, on Netflix, which I have been meaning to see since I learned of it shortly after you died. The man, Stephen Jenkinson, says “Accept is too neutral. You have to love it.” “It” being the inevitable end. That if we are to truly, fully and completely love another, an experience, even ourselves, we must embrace and fall in love with the whole: the birth, the life, the death. He says we bring our children into this world to die. There is no escaping that. We pretend we are bringing them in to live, and we are, to live, to be alive, to experience, to be, to learn, to grow, to discover, to ache, to yearn, to love and also, inevitably, to die. Life is a death sentence and we bring our children into the wholeness of life, we bring ourselves into it. It starts to feel obvious even as it is startling. My friends who are able and have children after they lose a child are very anxious. The illusion that they are safe or spared is lifted. Often their anxiety comes from a fear that what happened to their dead child will happen again to the next one. Sometimes, there is a sigh of relief after the new baby lives past his/her siblings age or stage when the other child died. I have not had the experience of a subsequent pregnancy and live birth and I have no intention of devaluing the very real fear that comes with a sibling, nor do I devalue the true bravery it takes to risk your heart again when you know the exact intensity, severity and dimesion of what it feels like to have it shattered by loss. But I also believe that to be born is a risk, to be alive is a risk. Children die at every age. Surviving birth garauntess nothing. Because Vesta survived her birth and the last five years does not garauntee that she will live longer than I will, that she will grow to a ripe, old age. After listening to this man, I see that it’s not just a risk, being born, it’s an unflinching fact that we all face, that we all come to], our deaths and the deaths of those we love the most. And so can we love their deaths? Is there a place beyond even the acceptance that I am beginning to feel? Can I enter the marriage aware of and in love with its end? Can I bear my children and love the ugly, the impossible, the inevitable end of them? Not yet, I cannot. Acceptance is not neutral for me yet. I can not yet commit to loving the end of the things I find so exceedingly precious to me. Recently, I have found myself living for Vesta. I am rebuilding my life and rediscovering myself and developing new, uncharted parts of myself and yet, I am quite sure should Vesta die, that I would quickly follow suit by my own hand. In the last week, facing a surgery that I feared I would die during, I realized, that is no way to live. I have to learn to live for myself again. I have wondered how I might get there, to a place where I can imagine I would stay alive without my daughter. And then I was given this key. This insight into loving the whole of it. Allowing the paranthesis of birth and death to make everything between deeper, more meaningful, precious and sacred. Just as I begin to explore how deeply I can sink into acceptance, I am invited to not just accept the reality of life and its end but to expect it, to embrace it, to love the whole of it. I felt it at the Bat Mitzvah. I cried through most of it because I could feel the fleetingness of the occasion, of the moment. I could feel both how incredible it was to be there and how fragile at the same time. I was in love with the whole experience.

I don’t know that acceptance is neutral, though. It feels like a red, hot fire right now. It feels like the life line that pulls me through my days, weeks, months and years. It feels like the pathway to making my life more bearable, providing greater and more frequent moments of peace and ease, regardless of what has happened and what is happening. I can lean into it, I can trust it, I have lived the unthinkable process of love and loss and grief of my child and I have come to accept that which is unacceptable. I have lowered my daily bar to getting out of bed in the morning. If I do that, everything else is gravy because this one loss, just you Harvey, outside of fertility and my marriage, my plans and my self-image, just you being gone makes it a miracle everyday that I get out of bed. That any of us do. Any and all reactions to a loss like this are valid in my opinion. Any and all.

People, including myself, look for the gifts I will bring into the world because you died and how I have reacted to it. Be it through massage or writing or supporting other loss families or whatever I go on to do. But I am here to say that all of it, any of it, are less than consolation prizes. I’d remove the gifts, the blessings, the work that helps others to have you back. I’d do it in an instant. That I am changed, that I am deepening, that I am coming into my own in a way I never knew humanly possibly, all of it, since it is at the cost of you, will never be worth it. But my suitcase. My suitcase full of regret and pain and circumstances and poor choices and uncontrollable events and anger and grief and fear that are accepted or becoming so, that I can live with. That I can pick up and carry with me and keep working on. That is the work that honors you. That is what helps to make sense of how my world stopped and yet time keeps moving forward, pulling me with it, forcing me at times, flowing with me at others. That I have learned that time and introspection and wailing and laughing will bring with it acceptance and some peace, that I can manage. That I have learned just today that there is another place to go, a radical, passionate, all-encompassing place of true, whole love of it all, that is what will honor you, son. That is something that is not tinged with your absence. That is what your absence, your death, your life, my love for you, have brought to me that I find has some value. Acceptance and eventually love. Finding the path to feeling human again, to becoming more human than I imagine is possible, that is a gift I readily, gratefully and fully accept from you. Somehow, there is no magical thinking around my suitcase of acceptance. There is no, “well, I’d trade it all in to have him back” hung on my every thought about it. Because it connects me to you, like this bridge of love and grief that connects us from Earth to wherever you are. Because it’s something I can take out and show people, something I can open in the darkest of nights and feel like there has been some purpose, some meaning and an endless embrace in this whole, huge mess.

Tomorrow’s the day. I’m returning to the same old hospital, seeing the same surgeon, going back under into blissful nothing while they remove my tubes.

At the pre-op, the doctor skimmed through the risks of surgery, reading quickly legal and medical terminology and the innumerable ways surgery can go wrong as he traced the words with his finger on the consent form. He threw around words like laproscopic, dehiscence, and salpingectomy. He said “sterilization” and everything went slow-mo except that he kept talking “blah blah blah blah”.

I wanted you.

After you died, I wanted the one who would come after you.

But no more babies will die inside of me, nor will they take me with them.

This is the end. Tomorrow is the day I am sterilized: made clean, is one definition. Maybe there is a purity in this. Maybe this is the beginning.

One of the risks is a dehiscence, which the doctor read aloud and then looked over his shoulder at me and said “which you’re all too familiar with”. It means, in medical terminology, a splitting open. “You have no idea”, I want to say back but don’t.

If one more person tells me how good this is going to go, that everything is going to be okay or how everything is going to work out in the end, I’m going to scream. “This is a new chapter”, I’ve been parroting back. Smiling and allowing them to feel like they are comforting me. When my mask slips, they look closer at me, touch my arm and say “Really, Monica. Everything’s going to be okay.” And I nod and smile and say “Yes, it’s going to go very smoothly.” But that kind of positive thinking, silver lining, sureity is reserved for those whose babies were not fine one day and dead the next. For those who didn’t have a surgery designed to fix that nearly killed them and left them with the dream of another child a death sentence. For those who’s husbands weren’t weeping over them when they woke up from surgery because they survived and then putting the first nail in the coffin of their marriage two days later. I’m a statistic. Harvey was a statistic.  When you are in the 1% of terrible shit happening, the probabilities that those who rely on the belief the “everything is going to be okay”  are no longer in your main frame of reference. When the rug keeps getting pulled out from under you, the security that everything’s going to work out because most things do, is all but gone. I’m pretty sure I’m going to die tomorrow. I’m pretty sure some freak thing is going to happen and I’m going to die. But I can’t say that out loud. Nobody can hear that and nod and say “You must be terrified.” No, everyone has to make it okay, to reassure and convince me that there is some kind of order in the universe, that “I’ve been through enough” and somehow because of that it is going to be easy and normal and as planned. And if it is, then they all get tolean more solidly on their confidence and say, “See, everything’s okay in the end.” But if I die, a very small chance I readily admit, they end up in shock, telling each other stories about how they just saw me yesterday, how it’s incredible that so many horrible things could happen to one family in such a short time, then they have to grapple without a rug under their feet.

This is what we do. This is what we tell each other. And we are usually right, except when we are wrong, horribly and devastatingly wrong. But we have to say it to ourselves, to each other because it’s too much for us to look at the alternative. And it further alienates someone like me, who has lived the alternative, who is the alternative, who nearly became the alternative. To have little faith in probabilities and statistics, to no longer be sure that everything will work out, to have no faith that I might get a good thing because I’ve had so much bad is lonely and sorrowful and it beats me down. It feels like everyone but me can see the silver lining, can believe their shit won’t get totally fucked up, again. There are many side effects of traumatic events and these long term ones, the ones that rock the very foundation and topple the structure we’ve built around us, this is one of the worst.

I try my best though. I smile and agree and say yes new chapter, new beginning, I’m trying to make it feel like that, fresh start. I will myself to rejoin them and believe again. But there’s little room for my fear that I might die and leave Vesta motherless, even though that fear has basis because I almost died last time and people die in routine surgeries every day. There is no room for what this means in terms of Harvey. There is no room for what this means for my future, for the continued emptiness I feel deep in my belly, since he was born and died and how there will now be a physical space inside me, another part of me, taken out, removed, gone. There is no room for what it means to be without my husband tomorrow. That I still feel like this is his, too. His infertility, too, even though he’s off on his way with someone else. His too, except I don’t even want him there anyway, except that the person I have leaned on for 13 years, the person who went through all of this with me, I don’t even want to be around. See that? See how it’s both, see how it’s everything all at once?

It’s not just a tube removal. It’s not just whether I survive or don’t or anywhere in between. It’s all the shit that swirls around the tubes, the uterus, the energetic body of my reproduction, the end of my fertility. It’s that I feel like I continue to bear the brunt of it alone. That each of these punches landed much more squarely and solidly on my face. That on rare days like this, having a half marriage with a child in grown up clothes sounds more appealing than facing it alone. That I’m tired. That, honestly, it doesn’t sound like such a bad thing if I go to sleep on the table tomorrow and never wake up. Except for Vesta, of course. If I struggle bearing all of this, there’s no way I would wish for her to have to go on without me at 5 years old. Good Lord, she’s had enough. And so have I.

So, let’s make some room for our fears. Let’s make some room for what we are really feeling, in all its complexities. Of course, this is a new chapter. Of course this is an end and a beginning. Of course it’s likely that everything is going to go smoothly and as planned. But it’s okay if I’m afraid I’m going to die because I might and you don’t have to try to convince me of something you have no way of knowing. It’s okay that there is further devastation around the loss of my tubes. That it’s the end of my dreams for another baby, for the family I had, for the fact that if Harvey survived I probably would have no need for them anyway and they’d just stay in there. It’s that the one little egg that became my son who died floated down one of this tubes. That we have so little of him, so few places he was but inside my body, he was there and so another part of him is leaving. That my husband doesn’t have to do any of this with me and can just go begin another family with relative ease. Who’s canvas wasn’t wiped clean like mine, who can have a similar version of the life we planned, just with new characters. That’s some devastating shit, right there.

It’s hard to suffer in a culture that doesn’t t honor or even want to acknowledge suffering, depsite how much each of us suffers inside ourselves. In a culture where it’s not okay to say these kinds of things. Where we think our positive intentions and attitudes will change our course and so called “negative” thinking will lead to poor outcomes. I’m writing this and I’m thinking “you can’t say this shit!” Once upon a time, my baby died and I thought I would die from it, from how I felt, for days and weeks and even months, but even that wasn’t forever. So, it’s okay if you ask about my surgery and I say “I think I’m going to die. And it’s bringing up all these terrible feelings and hateful thoughts and taking me away from my ability to see all that I have, all that I want in my life and to feel grateful”. And for you to say “”that’s awful. That’s terrifying. I’m so sorry. This is all too much for one person to have to deal with. And to do it alone? To have all of this going on and to have to help Vesta through it, too. That is some hard shit. I wish it was easier for you. Can I help?” And for me say “you just did.” I wanted someone to say to me, ” I hope you don’t die tomorrow” because that’s what is true. It’s not true that everything is going to be okay because we don’t know that but what we do know is that you love me or like me a really lot and you want me to stay alive.

And after all of that, when I meet someone now who has recently lost a baby, I often find myself tongue tied. When a baby who died has an anniversary coming up, I have no idead how to comfort the parents, what words to say, to be more quiet than soothing, to sit or to speak. It’s not easy becasue we have no culutre context. We are not given any lesson in sitting pateintly, compassionately and quietly next to suffering. We don’t learn how to witness, observe and hold space for each other. We want to fix, make better, erase, ease and get back to feeling good as soon as possible. Our cultrual bar is “happy” and if you fall below that bar, which the vast amjority of us do let’s admit, there is something wrong and if you stay below that bar for an unnamed bu culutrally acknowledged apporpriate time frame, then consequences begin. People begin to worry, people loss patience, people feel like we are bringing them down. So often I think that what I have to say is too confronting. I am so comfortable with death and hardship and suffering that I tend to talk about it with the same intention I give to talking about my last trip to the grocery store. And that is off putting. Most people in my world haven’t had to confront so many challenges and tramas and cozy up to them like I have. Cheryl Strayed, in her adivce column “Dear Sugar”, repsonded to a greiving mother that: “They live on Planet Earth. And you live on Planet My Baby Died” and it’s so very very true to me. It’s hard for me to gauge now, what the experience of other’s is like because I have been so entrenched and wading through my shit just to get through the days, to try to make some meaning and sense out of al of this, that I we live on different planets and it goes both ways. You and I, we are hard to reach, now that we live on different planets.

The loss of my tubes, becoming sterile, adding another dehiscence, another splitting open, it’s very complex for me. It saves me from dying but that’s all it saves me from. It begins a new chapter but not one I ever imagined or wanted. It doesn’t fix anything. It isn’t the end and yet it is the end. There is something final final about this. There exists the strong possibility that I will survive and there will be some “made clean” both in my body and mind. It’s possible that I will feel free, that I will be able to forgive my husband more readily and accept the path that he is now taking with greater ease. It is possibly that my sterilization will bring another baby into my life, via some other way babies come into the world, who needs me and who I need more than anything. It’s possible that this is all for the good. It’s possible that it all totally sucks and I may never get over it. I may remain angry at myself, my husband, the universe who were all players in this hand that I have been dealt. It’s possible that this will never heal quite right, either. It’s possible that it just is. It is what it is and nothing else. That what my job is to keep moving through the world is to find meaning, is to make meaning, is to let the experiences of the last 20 months color how I see the world, let them change me, let me celebrate the things I like better about myself because of them and allow me to accept the things they have given me that I hate about myself now. Possibly, there is no there there. In fact, there is no there there. It’s a constant moving forward, moving through, in times of ease and in times of struggle, that makes us human, that might be my bridge back to Planet Earth. That might be the bridge between your suffering and mine which we can both cross over to or meet in the middle of.

I have feelings that are fleeting but feel entirely true. But they nearly always pass, they always soften, they always transform. And I guess that’s why we don’t need to fix each other, we don’t need to make things better or paint the silver lining on the pile of shit. We can just sit next to each other, holding on for dear life to each other’s hands, and say “This sucks. But I’m right here next to you.” Let’s be here to witness and observe, to hold space for the movement of emotions. To let them flow and make meaning later. Draw conclusions when we are far beyond them. But for now, we just sit together and see each other through it.

He used to come to me in the early days after he died. Only at acupuncture. I would lie on the bed, needles in my skin trying to get the blood and then life force going again. It was spring and the light would dance across the ceiling and the wall I stared at through my unending, unstoppable tears. And I knew he was there. In the beginning, that spring and summer, he would show me his presence in dancing light. And then he would come. Not the spirit of a little baby but the energy of my grown son. I could feel him there as if I was an old lady and he an adult, sitting together quietly. He had a strong, overwhelming energy. And overwhelmed I would become and I would send him away. I would send off the spite of my son because I couldn’t bear to be that close and not touch him, hold him, see his aged face. But not before I would feel our relationship shift. Not before I would feel him morph from my son into my ally, into my guide, into my spiritual partner in this life. I couldn’t bear it, so I would tell him to leave and he would. He would go and I would weep, drenching the pillow underneath my head and gasp for air between sobs. I wasn’t ready for this man, this grown full spirit in all of his fullness. I still was bargaining with God to get my baby back. I still wanted my baby precious little child in my arms. I still wanted him as he had been when he was here. Small and adorable and perfectly formed.

During his birth, I did something I had never done before. I called in my angels. I was laying in bed, waiting for my labor to become active and I called in my angels. And for the first time, they came. Hordes of them surrounded me in golden light. Forming a circle around me. Those in the inner most ring, people in knew in this life: my grandfathers, my grandmother, my uncle and my aunt, Robyn and Theresa. I could feel each of them uniquely like I had when they were here. As the rings rippled out, the Angels became strangers to me but their presence, like an army of silent strength, was felt as strongly as those I had known and loved. I asked for their protection. I asked for their love. I knew they would get me, get us through this, this labor, this birth, and the first early hours. It was like nothing I had ever seen or felt before but it was clear as day and I knew we were safe.

Of course, we weren’t. Not in the way I thought we were. Not safe here in Earth together. As the newest most intense chapter of my life was about to begin, I called them for the first time and they came, at the ready, waiting to guide me through. I have been living in the surface these days. Feeling the physical and emotional anxiety squashing and numbing what I am really feeling, what I am in need of processing, what needs to move through. With this impending surgery which is fraught with everything that has brought me to this point: the growth of my babies, the death of one inside me and the dying of another. The loss of my son. The infertility. The revealing of our shadows and the end of my marriage. It’s all deep in there. Deep in the wounded uterus, deep in the ovaries that continue their duties unthwarted by their uselessness, deep in my tubes which will be gone in two days times. I haven’t been able to touch it, to feel it. I know there is enormity in there. I know inside my belly I carry the enormity and intensity of all of it ,for all of us, but it didn’t speak until I lay there today.

And I called them in again, at the end of the physicality of this journey, at the closing of this chapter: of my son, of my ability to bear another child, of the end of my love. And they came. All the same. Golden and surrounding and they held the space for me to fall apart. To feel it all inside of me and to let it out, let it leave, if only just a little. To let what’s left begin to integrate and form my new insides. I told them, “this is so hard this being human, down here in this body. It is so hard.” Being back there with them, I shared with them my disappointment, my question “why didn’t you protect us?” And they stood their guard and held me there in their light and let it all be okay.

The tears slowed to a stop and I closed my eyes to take deep breaths into my belly. And then I called to Harvey. Come to me now, my son. Sit with me here and now. I am ready now. And he came. And I felt him there and smiled through my tears to be with him again, to be able to be with him this time. And I learned that he is a stabilizing presence. That he is the strong foundation I have searched for my whole life. That the son is holding the mother.

As this second round of tears slowed, I asked him what I need to know and a weight came into the center of my chest, into my heart. It felt reminiscent of how my grief was, sitting so solidly on top of me for 13 months and yet it wasn’t fraught, it wasn’t tortured. It was just pressure. “Open my heart? “I said inside myself, I asked the spirit of my son. And with that question, I realized I have been doing this all wrong. I learned at my miracle healing what having a whole, open heart felt like and I walked around with it, high as a kite, for two weeks. And then Danny moved out and the reality of what all this meant came crashing down on me and I haven’t been the same since. I have shut my heart to him, and not without good, human reason. I have been riddled with anxiety. Flummoxed that one day the person you love the most turns on a dime and becomes someone you wish to never have to see again. It’s crushing. And that’s what I have been doing wrong. I’ve been letting the lies be true. I have been hurt, I have been nearly mortally wounded on several occasions this past 20 months and the lesson in surviving is to love bigger. The challenge in that is to keep my heart open. The relationship I must cultivate is with forgiveness.

I have a lot of forgiving to do. Layers and layers of it and I start today. And I’m taking on the two hardest people to forgive first: myself and my the father of my children. I begin by believing in these two people who have shown me that they are not worthy of belief. I begin by building trust back in both of us, the two of us who have proven to be quite untrustworthy. I begin by falling back in love with the two people who have torn me down to my bare bones. I don’t have the slightest idea what this looks like but I feel it in my heart. It doesn’t look a thing like it did before. For either of us. I don’t even like either of us anymore so there’s a lot to do.

And yet, I feel it now at the center of my chest where my son pushed down on me to reveal to me what I need to do. That it’s hard being this human because I’m doing it wrong. Being here is about opening, not shutting down. It’s about staying open when the only option is shutting down,when it seems like the stupidest, most risky thing to do. It’s about being strong and clear and loving, no matter what.

I often think of the card Danny gave me for Mother’s Day a few weeks after Harvey died. It was about us getting through the hard times but what sticks out is the last line he wrote: “Come what may.” Come what may. Yes, my love, come what may, even if it’s fractured and irretrievably over and riddled with lies and too often silent. Some part of us set out on this journey together. Some part of us wed each other for life by bringing our children in, a stronger bond than any other, an unbreakable bond, stronger than our vows, now meaningless, stronger than our love that broke apart, that stopped. This has all felt so awful because I’ve been doing it wrong.

As I step into this next part of my life, the one after this surgery, the one that feels like a new chapter, I become a radical. I radically forgive. I radically love. I radically keep my heart open.

Thank you, my son, my ally, my guide, my partner. Thank you.

Dear Harvey,

Whew. It’s been a week. I have been an anxious mess. Cast backwards, it feels. It’s excrutiating, gettign through these kinds of days. I do comfort myself in moments with the thought that it’s been worse, I’ve been worse, I’ve gotten through worse. That’s a backwards gift I’ve gotten for you: nothing, outside of your sister’s untimely death, will be as hard as what I’ve already been through. I’ve been through the worst but it rarely makes the moments of anxiety, fear, confusion, anger, guilt, and grappling any easier. And this week was no exception. I’m having my second and, God-willing, last surgery related to your birth and death this week. Your dad, and I to some extent, have made some decisions, and have had some conversations that have proven to be incredibly challenging for me, though they are pushing us in the direction we are inevitanbly headed. It’s all mixed up and crazy inside of me. I have a numbness that I want to pull away like bed covers to see what’s under there. I feel like I am standing in the rubble of my life, what was once our life, and he has seamlessly moved into his new life, as if nothing happened, as if he gets a do over. And I’m having my tubes removed, scrambling to get Vesta’s health insurance in order and a million other thigns all while I feeling like I’m drowning again. There is a lot of gratitude and ease I have in my life because our marriage ended but this one, this particular week, threw me for a loop. A big, anxious, desperate loop.

And then there is Michael, the brother I chose and your uncle. Happily, he was free on Friday night and we went to the movies. He took me to the movies. He picked me up and I started right in and he held my hand tight like he does and he said, “I’ve watched you do this over and over again for 15 years. You figure it out. You make things happen. I just want you to see what I see. Everything’s going to be okay.” I vried and said I don’t even know that means and he squeezed my hand harder and he cried a little, too. “None of us know your pain”, he said, “but we’re right here with you.” I told him how uncomfortable I feel and how I don’t know how I’d make it through this without him and Jenn and Larissa. These people who have known me my whole life and my whole adult life.These people with whom I am comfortable, these people who are my home, walking around in flesh and blood. I eek out comfort from them. My grief family does the same in a different way because they know nearly my exact pain. And then I can go home to loves who have known me forever. “We are all just walking each other home”, incarnate.

We had a drink before the movie started in one of Portland’s cozy theater pubs and he listened to me. I put my anger and fear and pain out there between us and he shook his head with me and he asked me questions and we pretended we could figure this shit out. And we laughed at ourselves. Who we were and who we are and whoever we will become. We saw an amazing movie called Birdman, which I felt like was made just for me. It was compelling and unpredicatble. The characters had strong opinions and feelings. They did amazing, beautiful things and they did thoughtless, terrible, selfish things. I watched, jaw agape, at everything I have been grappling with about being alive, about being human, this existential crisis I have been thrown into since you died. I got lost in this movie. Everything made sense and yet nothing made sense and there was magic. There was pain and confusion and art and laughter and fear and truth and lies and people, one right next to the other, just trying to figure it all out. People telling each other their truths, people projecting their shit onto each other, people doing the best they could with everything so messed up inside. I watched and I thought. “yes. am I falling…or am I flying?”. It was an antedote. It was a healing. It was good to feel meaning again. To be moved by art. To feel like a normal human. I’ve had several of these moments since December and I absolutely cherish them. It gives me hope that I will rejoin the humans. That the spaces inbetween loss and meaninglessness will get further apart and will be more frequently peppered with the tragic beauty of being alive.

After the movie, we sat and watched all of the credits roll by, soaking in what we just saw. We crossed the street for a night cap and saddled up to the bar and next to a man sitting by himself. We struck up a conversation with him. He was funny and charismatic and insightful. We laughed and laughed and joked about starting a little stand-up, or sit-down as the case may be, comedy troupe. He introduced himself: Michael. Well, that will be easy to remember, we laighed the three M’s sit-down comedy sensation. He told us about his children. His oldest daughter and her new baby, his middle son who died as an adult from an undetected heart condition he had since birth, and his youngest son living in the south near his mother. He spoke about the death of his son with such ease, with a notable lack of discomfort in the telling, barely pausing in his telling so as to masterfully both avoid our probably awkwardness and tell the truth about his family. We quickly moved on to other topics but I, of course, was stuck on the dead son. I have a dead son, too. I had mentioned my 5 year old so when he inquired about her whereabouts I answered him and I, much more awkwardly told him that I, too, had lost a son. “It’s like nothing else” he said. It never goes away. It’s inked on our very souls, he said. He said he buried his parents and his son in a five year’s time. He said, there is nothing like burying a child. And I asked him questions like I didn’t already know the answers because I wanted to hear him tell me. He has a fancy job, a beautiful apartment, a one month old grandson and he’s sitting here at this bar, content as can be, laughing with strangers. I asked him questions I know the answers too because I wanted to hear him tell me, from seven years out, with the world at his fingertips. I wanted him to show me that we can bear this weight, that we can live with this heaviness, that I might someday know whether I am falling or flying or maybe jsut stop asking and enjoy the wind in my hair. Later he said “What are the odds. There is probably nobody else in a six block radius who has lost a child and here we sit together.”

As we finished our drinks, we three told each other what a wonderful night we had. How glad we were to meet on this night, at this bar and fill it with laughter and with truth. And that was the truth. It was magic and my body reset itself. I told my Michael on the car ride home that, even though it’s impossible to see when I’m deep down in it, these waves that keep knocking me over, they actually come to lift me up on their crests. To allow me to see more, to feel more, to understand more, to keep moving back toward the shore. I know their depth and their height will become less. They will come for the rest of me life but they will slow and they will shallow and I will rejoin the humans, just as the new Michael has, as much as he has, as much as any of us living on without our child are able. And that is enough. It has to be.

There was another Michael, once. My grandpa and your great grandpa. I used to head back to the office after a long day of work at the dry cleaners he owned, in the hopes of getting him to close up on time so we could all go home. Inevitably, it would end up being our few times alone together. he would tell me stories about his time in the Navy or about my grandma when she was young. I’d tell him something that was annoying or upsetting to me and he’d put his gnarled hand on my shoulder and say “Won’t mean a thing in a hundred years, Monica. Now, I gotta get home for dinner or your grandma’s gonna kill me.” and I’d go out front and sit with him while he counted the till and we’d lock up together and go home, me to my dad and he to his wife. after you died, I have thought about him saying that to me time and time again, how it was oddly comforting, how it put things in my teenage mind when everything feels so immensely important, into some perspective. I have thought how your death could not be answered with his frequent answer to my woes. How your life and death will always and forever mean something to me, even when I’m gone too. Last night, I thought again about him saying that to me. I could almost feel his hand on my shoulder and I thought, “You’re right, this time, Mike. You’re right every time except once.” All of this with your dad, all the challenges we’ve faced at the end of our marriage, those we will continue to face together as we parent our daughter into our new lives, they won’t mean anything in a hundred years. Time will takes us into our futures and we’ll forget the details, the harsh words, the difficult discussions, the words never spoken and what will remain is what we share: the love of our two, beautiful children. It won’t mean a thing in a hundred years, Harv. Not a thing. And so I go on into my new life that looks nothing like I planned, nothing like I expected, the blank canvas of who I’ll be next. And so, I go on. And so do you, for centuries. Always apart and close together.

I stood outside tonight and closed my eyes and called them in again. It was incredibly dark behind my eyelids. I leaned against the house and I called to them: to my guides, my angels, God himself. “You gotta get me through this,” I told no one in my head. “You have to do more. If you want me here, you have to get me through this. Stop piling more shit on and get my head above the water. You HAVE to help me. You aren’t doing enough.”

I opened my eyes and crashed back into my life, realizing that darkness and quiet, that time calling out to whomever in the universe might be listening, was a momentary release from this debilitating anxiety, this constant and renewed existential crisis, these endless fearful stories playing in my head. I’ve started crashing back in again, like in early grief. Upon waking, as soon as my client leaves, after a movie with a friend, it all comes back: the dead baby, the impending surgical sterilization, the cruelly broken marriage. I opened my eyes, crashed back into my life and a future that now seems riddled with tragedy and hardships with moments of joy instead of the other way around.

I went inside, changed the laundry, emptied the litter. Vesta heard me moving around downstairs and brought her chocolate chips, the ones I gave her along with crayons and paper to distract her long enough to go outside and try to gather myself, for the umpteenth time today.

“What are you doing, Mama?”
“Emptying the litter,” I say. Trying to get myself together, I don’t say. Trying to not let the heaviness of my grown-up troubles squelch your little spirit. Trying to make some space so my rage and fear and grief don’t consume you, too.
“Can I help?”, she asks.
“”Of course”, I say and hand her the scoop. She scoops and shakes and dumps and then sits on the ottoman of the rocking chair I nursed and rocked her to sleep in for years. She looks right in my eyes and says, “I appreciate you, Mama. I appreciate that you bought that mat for Ziggy’s litter.” Tears well in my eyes as I look down at this mat with a cartoon cat scuba diving on it that she begged me to buy weeks ago at the pet store.it was $12.99, about $10 more of the money I’m trying to save than I wanted to spend. we didn’t need it and I didn’t want to buy it but I did anyway, knowing it felt important to her in the moment but it would be soon cast aside with the myriad of other toys and nick-knacks she has to have when we are at the store.

But there it was, there it all was: That stupid mat and this gorgeous little girl, sent to me by my guides or my angels or God himself, and my tears of pure joy, of pure gratitude.
“That means so much to me that you said that,” I tell her and she rocks back and forth awkwardly on the ottoman, not sure what to make of the sincerity between us . “Want the last chocolate chip?”, she smiled.

Later, we crawl into bed and she picks the new “Frida” book to read, placing it on the top of the pile. Frida Kahlo, who I’ve been slightly obsessed with since college. An interest and love for her and her work that I never understood because I don’t even really like it but I would study her paintings and I read her biography several times. This girl, stricken with polio, this teenager, nearly killed and severely maimed in a bus accident, who couldn’t keep a baby in her womb no matter how many times she tried and who painted grotesque images of her losses, who’s one true and undying love couldn’t and didn’t love her back in the same way, who unrepentently lied and cheated, including with one of her sisters. It wasn’t until after Harvey died and I saw “Henry Ford Hospital”, her painting of herself lying bleeding in a hospital bed, tethered with ribbons to medical equipment, a snail, her broken pelvis and her most recently lost baby, that I understood. I understood that there was some knowing in me back then and through these years that I might suffer similarly. That I might begin to know chronic and debilitating pain, grief and loss and betrayal and fucked up love. That I too would see the world as both grotesque and beautiful and make some art, mine with a pen and her with a brush, to try t make some sense of it, to try to move the overwhelming sadness out and into the world where I might be able to better bear it. I never understood my draw to her but now I do. I wore my Frida socks just yesterday as a talisman to get through the day. If she could do it, so can I. We have different tragic stories but tragic stories nonetheless and she painted in her bed when she couldn’t walk, and she painted on the cast that engulfed her whole torso, and she painted as she died and she painted on my very soul before I even came to be.

The kid’s book “Frida” by Jonah Winter touches on her illness and her accident, how she drew and painted her way through her pain and her sadness. How she painted like no one else ever had. It’s final sentences are: “She took her pain and made it into something beautiful. It is like a miracle.” I close the book and Vesta asks to see the pictures of Frida spinning on clouds in a blue and white dress. She gazes for a minute after I find the page and says “can I get a dress like that?” And I say “yes. We can try to find you one like that.”
“I’m Frida”, she says as we close the book and she runs her five year old fingers over the embossed letters F-R-I-D-A on the cover. “Look at how she paints that bird, Mama.”
“I see”, I say. “Do you draw and paint when you feel sad?” She does, she says. “Does it make you feel better?” I ask. “It does,” she says. “I write when I feel sad and it makes me feel better, too.” I tell her.
“I’m going to draw her dancing in that dress when I’m at school,” she tells me thoughtfully.
“Okay,” I say. ” I have a book with all of Frida’s paintings in it. Want to look at it in the morning?”
“Yes!”, she exclaims as she grabs “Courdorory” from the top of the pile and stuffs it in my hand, ready for the next. “I’m that little girl, Mom” she says as we read, pointing to the girl in the pink dress and shoes who wants to buy a little teddy with a missing button but her mom won’t let her so she goes home, counts her money from her piggy bank and returns the next day to buy him herself, “and you are Courdorory.” Yes, I think, you are the little girl who loves that bear no matter his imperfection. You are the little girl that saves that bear. And yes, Vesta, I am Courdorory.

And I breathe. For the first time in days, I can breath.