A letter to my broken heart. Or, perhaps, from.

“The twin of grief . . . [is the] the being able to praise or love life. Which means wherever you find one authentically done, the other is close at hand.”

– Stephen Jenkinson

11/14/13

Dearheart,

Look at you. There you are again. All mangled and shattered and bruised and broken. Didn’t we just think we were done? All healed up and ready to go. Boosted and bolstered from deep appreciation and gratitude. Beating strong and hard from good food and dance and joy. All that sorrow and betrayal and loss and insecurity behind us. We healed you up. We did the work. But just look at you.

I see you there. Shocked, as I may be. How will I ever put you back together? Don’t you just marvel at how long it takes to create something, to build it up, to make it real and whole and then how it turns to ruins ina milisecond, in slow motion moments, in time-lapse photography. How as we start patching, some pieces fall off again, come unglued, taking new parts with them, revealing weaknesses yet unknown. Showing us that there is in fact something more left to be destroyed.

But are we? Are we again destroyed? Can we see nothing but the holes, the absence, what is not there? How do we know these holes without what surrounds them, without that which holds up the empty space? How do we know the absence without the presence? We only know what is gone because it was here. Otherwise, we’d be none the wiser. Destruction and holes and absence may be all that we see, but it’s not all that is there.

Grief is the other side of love. It breaks us apart and it also builds us up. It transforms and destroys and invigorates. It changes, it grows, it lessens, it expands. It grips us so tightly that we cannot breathe until we are sure we will die from it. And then we don’t. And then we keep moving until it sweeps us off our feet again. And again it will.

When you sat staring at that hospital wall, holding your dying baby, the tan on tan on off white walls, the beeping machines and sucking of the ventilator and felt your heart crack apart, shatter, explode inside your chest to the exact and equal measure to which it swelled, grew, expanded when you held your first baby, who was very much alive. Yes, that. That all happened in one place: right here in your heart. It was the same moment, the same sensation, the same experience, except it was the exact opposite. Two sides, same coin.

Hasn’t our love for Vesta grown and changed and transformed each day as she has gotten older, developed more fully, moved in and out phases? Hasn’t parenting her, since day one, been nothing more than letting go and loving?  Has anything told you that it will ever be different than that? It’s the same with this grief. So must it shift and move and change. Sometimes it must be clutched closely, so very closely to the chest. Sometimes it must be all that you can see so that you can parent your dead child, so that you can parent yourself through the experience of having a dead child, so that you connect and bond and get to know this new you and therefore, this new him. You two who are changing daily, hourly, each second and whose relationship therefore needs tending. Just as sometimes we stop pushing her, stop asking her to be a big girl and just give her a big hug and say “We’ll try again. Maybe tomorrow.” Doesn’t your love and how initimatly you know her tell you when do to that? When to challenge her to do it herself and when to do it for her or help her with it or show her how it’s done? It’s the same. This grief will ask you to let go a little or a lot depending on the timing, or the stars or the chaotic Universe or the physiology of grief that will forever connect your cells with his cells, with his timeline, with his would-be milestones. It will ask you to grow in your relationship with him, in how you parent him. And make no mistake: you will parent him. For the rest of your life. Just as you will parent Vesta for the rest of your life, even if she also goes before you, too. Love doesn’t end, especially love for your child, so why might you expect grief for your child to? Remember, it’s the same except differet, except the exact opposite.

Just as your love does, this grief will ask you to let him go. Again and again and again. To deeper and deeper and deeper levels. You will parent a living child and a dead child and you will come to as close as one can to understanding exactly how far a mother can allow her child to go from her while at the same time keeping him at her side. It’s the same. Except he’s not here so you have to do it blind. Except she is here and you have to watch and worry and hope, hope beyond hope, that she stays here, despite all of the stupid and  even mundane choices she will make.

So, Dearheart, I see you there. All broken and battered and banged up, like you never have been, like, God-willing, you never will be again. But I also see the edges at those breaks, the viability around the bruise, the intact places that are holding up this mess.

Now, I can see you. Now, I can truly see the whole of you. What is here and what is gone, what is absent and what is present, the holes and the ever more important parts around those holes that even make them possible.

Let’s start there, you and me. Let’s start all over again from right there, from here. From inside this fire, from the places where we have stepped out into the ash, from the places we are soaring above already. Because they are there. As sure as I can see that you are broken, I see that you are soaring.

Love, Me

Dear Harvey,

I thought maybe if I used my left brain, I’d feel better. Engage myself in something totally different. I got our books done a month before you were born, so at least I’d be caught up for a few months of the year. Just like if you were here, they have sat since. Seven months of receipts and statements and bills. I piled every important document, everything that needed saving, precariously on the desk in the dining room.

I don’t know why  I thought it would be a distraction. Every year since your sister was born, I do our books about every 4 months, sometimes every 6. It’s a walk back through the year. Remembering that meal, that weekend away, that gift given or received. Money I’m glad we spent, money I wished we saved instead. Why would I think this year would be any different? I piled the papers on the floor in front of me, I opened the banking software, the online statements and it crashed down on me exactly what not a distraction this will be.

I started crying right away, closed the computer and stuffed all the papers back in a bag. But it has to be done. We have spent and over spent and I’ve been out of work so much this year, plus medical bills. We have to look this in the face and make a plan, so I can take that worry off my plate or at least, see it for what it is and make some decisions rather than just fret about dwindling savings and not enough income. Here I have some control, some volition, and I need that sense more than anything really.

And so I start from March 26th, from where I left off. There we are at Home Depot and Target, buying homebirth supplies. Your dad hates shopping and was nervous about the upcoming birth so was reluctant and in a hurry to be done. Click check and hit enter. There I am, waddling into Vesta’s school, to register and pay the deposit for her first year of school. Grateful that she seems to already be comfortable there, for the time this will allow me to have alone with you, while fretting about how I will ever get her to school on time with a little baby in tow. Click check and hit enter. There are Vesta and I, having our last meal at Por Que No? as just the two of us. It was a beautiful day on Mississippi street. We sat at the bar-style table by the open window, Vesta went outside and I fed her through the open window. We laughed and I savored. Click check and hit enter.

And then,  I start to see just the dates, April 24, 25, 26 . . . and the entries subside during those days, when you were being born, when we were at the hospital, when your aunts and uncles and grandparents were paying for our meals and whatever it is we needed during that time, I can’t even remember.

And then: $31.05 Kaiser Permanente Pharmacy. Pain meds. And then automatic withdrawls are all that are there: life insurance, car payment, rent, internet and phone, a cashed check I wrote before you died.

And then, we paid for Vietnamese with Grandma and Papa and Nona. And then, we paid for Por Que No? after Grandma had left and Papa and Nona stayed on another week. And then, Mississippi Pizza, to see my favorite kid’s musician for Vesta with Daddy, Nona, Papa, and L and M came, too. It’s only $10 so I’m guessing it was a drink or two. I was so numb and in pain and it was my first time out in the world at a family event. Children and babies and pregnant moms, dark and loud and everyone trying to be normal, or being normal and I, having no idea how to be. Then we are grocery shopping again on our own, getting gas because Daddy has gone back to work, he even went bowling one Sunday. I wonder how I managed? Probably J came over.

And then, May 15th, Metro West Ambulance.

I can’t do it anymore. I cry and cry and cry. Whisked away within minutes. I didn’t even touch you. I just screamed and screamed and the midwives tried to calm me while trying to save you. They asked me to talk to you, so you could hear my voice because that would help you. I knew it would too and I tried and then you were gone.

I decide to organize the papers, instead. Make organized piles of credit card statements, utilities and pay stubs. And once again, why would I think this stack of papers isn’t riddled with you also? I sift through and start to sort. The piles begin to take form. My medical bills, reports and summaries the tallest by far. And yours are there, too, of course. As I organize by date the bills and reports addressed first to Baby Boy Walker, since you weren’t named yet in either ambulance nor at the first hospital. Then, Harvey R Walker, from the NICU, from our insurance, from the state. The pencil scribble of the health record number the kindest woman ever was able to give me so you could be covered retroactively, for only 2 days, by the state and help us that much more financially. The pen scribbled on note paper that I wrote the week after you died while talking to the woman from the grief organization, Child Life, about how to talk to Vesta about your death. Then there is the envelope from your Tio: he mistakenly took your dad’s scribbled paper, his eulogy for you, with him back home. So he sent it. He took care of so much when he was here. He applied for your death certificate and two copies of that are in there too. I cannot read the eulogy. I start but I can’t do it. I begin to unfold the heavy paper:      Harvey        Richard        Walker     in three separate boxes under the flourished, official document: Certification of Death. We received your birth and death certificates the same day. I remember the starkness, the truth of the latter as I opened it, looked it over, saw how they try to make beautiful in their beaurocratic way. I must have tucked your birth certificate in the same envelope the day I threw them on the pile. I open it, but not all the way, because I remember. I remember that those bastards stamped a big, red, diagonal “DECEASED” across the bottom of your birth certificate. They couldn’t even give me that. That you were born and that you were here for almost two days. Not even that. So, I just looked at the top half. And I smiled through my tears. Because you were born. There is the letter from Donate Life and a grateful director who was getting all of these donations for Harvey “Superhero” Walker without him being registered. She did some digging and found us and wrote to thank us. The letter from the place that received your corneas. A heartfelt letter that helped my heart knowing you truly were making a difference here. They almost never get corneas so small. It is a rare opportunity for their research and, most importantly, future babies.

I put your papers in chronological order. The only mail you will ever receive, neatly stacked, organized and paper clipped, soon to be filed. 40 hours worth of birth and machines and tests and medical expertise and death. Months and months of statements and bills from all of the institutions that cared for you, from our insurance and the state insurance who paid for most of the care you received. Missing are receipts and bills from your cremation, your service, candles, framing, catering, flowers, because your amazing family and friends took care of all of that. Because we are incredibly, unbelievebly well cared-for. As you, too, would have been.

At some point, I will have to move past May 15th. I’ll have to see our life this year replay itself in the numbers. I’ll have to hear the story again, feel it again, come to know it on yet a deeper level. Come January, I’ll have to talk to the accountant. He’s the last to know. I thought it was my hairdresser but it’s him. He’ll ask about you in an email because he’ll rememeber you were coming at tax time. Last year I hurried us through the tax process so as to have it off my plate before you arrived. He’ll ask and I’ll tell and then I’ll go about the awkward and pragmatic business of getting a child tax credit for you, just once, just this year. Because you were here. Even the IRS, off all things, honors that.

There is nothing, Harvey, no nook or cranny, no dark, hidden corner of our lives that you haven’t touched. You have permeated our finances, our decisions, our whole brains, left and right. Just like if you were here, except the exact opposite, except it’s the worst instead of the best.

6 months here and 6 months gone.

It’s Halloween, Samhian, Dia de Los Muertos, Diwali. All of these significant days in several different cultures marking the thinness of the veil between your world and ours. The place where darkness and light meet. The time of year to honor and remember and connect from deep, deep within. From our darkness and to your light. Now I have you over there on the other side so I feel what they feel. I get it now. The trickster spirits, decorating the body, spending time in the darkness, meals at the cemetery, candle lighting. I get it now. How do I get to you? Let’s try this.

You’d be six months old and I don’t know when you would start eating solid food but this half year is my best guess. I would have watched for signs of your readiness and then tried this or that. I would have worried and braced myself and said a silent prayer before giving you an allergen. But now I don’t have to worry about you choking or your esohpagus swelling or anphalactic shock. But I have this freezer full of breast milk. I pumped after you died and my milk came in. It was a deep, thick yellow the whole week I was able to pump. It came readily until I was taken to the hospital myself a week after you were born. Until I sat in the wheelchair, all of the sudden swarmed by nurses and doctors and CNAs, taking blood and setting up an IV and remembering to call your dad and staring at the wall, the now familiar stupor, the shock. I hurt after you were born. I ached and I couldn’t walk and I had a hematoma and gash, so I took vicodin and iburpofin and then morphine when I was in the hospital. But I pumped because maybe there was a mama out there unable to sleep, terrified because she couldn’t feed her baby for some reason. Maybe there was a baby out there that was hungry and needed your milk. I pumped and stored and labeled until it dried up on it’s own after the shock of the hospital. There were mamas and babies but as soon as they learned about the meds, they never wrote back. Time and time again. I was so disappointed. It came because you were here and it could help but no one will let it. I thought about saying, “My baby died. Will you come and take my milk and tell me you’re going to feed it to your baby?”. I thought about not telling them about the meds at all. I just gave up instead. I put your milk in the chest freezer downstairs and it’s been the pea in my mattress ever since. It’s forgotten, lost power pulsing away down there. It was meant for you and only you and you are gone.

Fall has moved past it’s prime. It’s getting colder now, the leaves more brown than beautiful, the world is hunkering down for the winter, the sky is clouding over, it’s beginning to weep, day after day. You were born as Spring was passing it’s prime. Buds in full bloom, sunshine and cloudless sky, warm weather heating up, time for outside and play and ease, more freedom and space. Somehow our summer stretched from when you were born right up until  couple weeks ago. The outside world beautiful and warm and joyful. A perfect contrast to my inside. A buoy. Now, I will spend the next six months or so in perfect synergy with the outside world: mostly gray and blowing, rain and tears, the occasional break in drudgery that reminds us to just hold on a little longer. I’m looking forward to it really. Stitching ourselves back together on the living room floor, playing board games and eating soup in front of the fire while the world outside does our mourning for us. Let’s see how we emerge next summer.

You were on your way here during the full moon,  the pink moon, and a lunar eclipse, all in Scorpio. A half year later almost exactly, back into the depths of our grief, the full Scorpio moon comes again and again into eclipse.

Your service was held on Sunday May 5th. By what I thought was convenience, I scheduled a six month ceremony, to mark all of the above occasions, in my seemingly endless and futile attempt to ease my loss and emptiness, on Sunday Novemeber 3rd, 6 months of Sundays, the same Sunday on the other side of the year. Everything about the last two weeks has been the other side of your life and death and memorial.

There is this huge world of people out there who love you and I wanted to invite them all. But instead I invited those who were with you when you were here: your aunts and uncles, your midwives. Your uncles couldn’t come, nor your midwives so it was me and Daddy and Vesta and Jenn and Larissa, K and M, not far away. Michael brought you a beautiful, autumnal bouquet in the morning and got me out of bed and out of my head. Perfect because I forgot to have Daddy get flowers. Jenn spent her afternoon thinking about you while making us a huge pot of soup. She brought the snake she’s been knitting, so you have one just like your sisters. She offered a ladybug hat, too small for M but perfect for you, just like the one that you wore when you were here, that M wore when she was small. Larissa planted a mother and a baby house plant together for us and dug deep into her childhood seashell collection for a shell with arms (all of us) cradling a perfect spiral (you). Daddy bought me donuts and cider that taste like home. Vesta and I made muffins. I prepared some foods for you in little dishes with a little spoon: squash (from Tamara), guacamole Vesta made, banana, soft boiled yolk. I couldn’t do it myself so Jenn poured your milk into a vase and we arranged a tray. I brought your box from Natalie and a lighter for the candle Daddy bought special.

We carried it all out to our park.

We moved here for that park. So we could open the door and be in the trees and the grass and the playground with our kids. So, we went there with one of them and for the other.

We found the perfect tree, arranged the tray and ourselves. We listen to Traces of You and Vesta began collecting pine cones and needles, leaves and a stick, placing them on your box and rearranging some of the items until they were as she liked. I had also forgotten to do that on our way into the park, so again, perfect. Your midwife sent you a note that Larissa read since I was unable:

For Harvey:

I will never forget your mom’s strength and your dad’s excitement as you were being born. I will never forget your chubby cheeks and your soft skin.  There are mysterious miracles surrounding your birth (your body is a gift to other babies and your mother is alive) but I wish we could have experienced the ordinary miracle of you being born and hearing you cry. You have shown me that sometimes there are more questions than answers but most of all you have shown me that love endures.  You are loved by so many and that will never change. We love you Harvey.

I love you Monica and Danny and Vesta.  I hold you in my heart today and always.

-Heather

Your sister took the paper from Larissa and read from it what she saw, what she felt in her heart. I don’t know what she said but it was about sisters and brothers and family and love and my heart swelled as much as it broke. She is going to know you as she grows up and she won’t know a thing about you. Just like us.

I tell your aunts how much I appreciate them, how much I need them again and again and again, that they keep coming to my side to relive again and again again. That they won’t forget you ever either. Jenn remembered how she arrived in Portland same day you did, the day you were conceived. You’ve been here together the whole time. Larissa is honored to be here for us and to have seen you, been with you. I put my arm around your dad and his around me.

I ask Vesta if she wanted to pour the milk. I had decided that there is more good in that milk than bad. You and I made it and though through other mother’s eyes it’s tainted with medication, with chemicals, with what gave me the most comfort in the depths of my discomfort, it will nourish something. It will not keep poking me from the basement. I will let go of it and let go of my utter disappointment. I have to turn it around somehow, so I decide I will pour it on this plant, I will pour it in the park, on the grass in our courtyard, on your herbs and on your flowers. Wherever you would be will be nourished by what was meant for you. She is so excited. She takes the pitcher and so happily pours the milk onto the plant. She pours milk onto the grass of the park and I cover it with a huge heart leaf.

She stayed the whole time with us. She’s in it with us and she knows it, so she stayed. Her little “sister” M and the playground just over her shoulder but she stayed with us. Your dad wept and wept. She stared wide-eyed again at him and then looked to me and I would smile and she would smile and then look back at him. I cry little bits everyday so she has gotten used to me. Daddy saves it all up for awhile and then it all comes out at once. She’s so happy to participate, to tell you her story, to pour your milk, to sing you a song. She doesn’t feel the weight of your absence the way we do, so it doesn’t make sense. Not to her. Not to us either, really. We talk about it later.

We sing. “I’ve got peace like a river, I’ve got peace like a river in my soul” because your sister has been singing it to herself for weeks. One of her teachers at school sings it. We were going to sing “You are my Sunshine” with extra verses written by Jenn and Natalie. I was able to sing that to you when you were here, the first song I sang as I held you, the weight of the truth of it coming down on me only as the words left my lips. None of us could get through this time so we packed up and came back to the house. Daddy made a fire, we ate soup and donuts and the girls played.

We went to bed and we talked and we cried because everything has come crashing down. Because we can’t breath. Again. There is no phoenix in this ash. There is just more and more to dig through, to sort out, to try to make some order of. Nothing makes sense anymore. The structure I had built around me, how we related to each other, our plans for our family and our future, it has all crumbled. So we laid there, both staring at our piece of the ceiling and we tried to make sense. Just like this ceremony, just like lighting the candles, the tattoo, this blog, it’s an empty exercise. Our arms are still empty, there is a space between us in that bed where you are not, your piece of the ceiling unobserved. I make up all of these things to do to try to reach through that veil. Maybe I get there. Maybe I stand there in the park and look at your picture in a box, the food you’ll never eat, the milk you never needed and you’re there with me. Maybe I tend to your altar, clip the flower stems, add and remove and change, wipe down and dust off and you’re there with me. But I always come back to our side of the veil. You are still always gone. And I’m still waiting for you, I’m still in shock, I’m still trying to find a way to wake up. Except when I’m not. Except when I can look your absence right in the face. Except that time or two that I’ve felt you near and not broke in half. I keep waiting to stay full. I keep filling myself up with ritual and remembrance and then empty back out into your loss. That’s how it goes, ebbing and flowing, tossing and turning. The candle never bright enough, the decorations unable to fully disguise, the veil never quite thin enough to reach you.

Dear Harvey,

Today you would be six months old. You might be sitting up, cutting teeth, trying solid foods. Since I don’t know any better, I imagine that we would be so happy today. You would be giggling with your sister, playing together in the way that you have come to. Your daddy would hold you and I’d take your picture so we’d have a record of this half year anniversary.

I have been renewed in my grief, Son, and often wish that losing you was enough. I’ve been cut open again, similar physical pain to after your sister was born and that lifetime ago, the weeks after you were born. I am torn apart. I am mourning the little sibling that you and your sister will not have. I am mourning the loss of seeing another baby for the first time that looks like you two. Of being there in the operating room, our third child born, a safe arrival, and carried over to me by your dad, in tears again but this time of relief and joy. I am tending to private wounds that are both new and old, that are compounding the intensity of this time. I continue to learn the lessons I already knew, except to a deeper level, to which I have no desire to go. I continue to wish that losing you was enough.

I have wanted to die before. I tried as a young person to relieve myself of great ache through overdose and cuts. A friend, who is a therapist, asked me a couple weeks ago if I have been suicidal since you died. I told him, if I didn’t know better, I would say yes. I am not suicidal but I do want to die. I do not want to leave our family and friends for one minute but I do want to disappear. I know that if I live the rest of my life with the dullness that has replaced my passion, that what I contribute and what I gain in this life is far more valuable, far more pressing than the swift end of this ache and discomfort. Sometimes, though, I feel I will die of it. I have a hole in my chest that I wish to sink into, be swallowed by. I do not want to die but I do not want to keep waking up to this layered nightmare.

I have wished you away. I did this shortly after you were here and gone and it is renewed. I have wished that we had counted our blessings and found ourselves complete in our happy lives: loving your amazing sister, careers that we enjoy, more than our share of wonderful friends and family, surrounded by beautiful things, bellies full of delicious food. I think now, how greedy of us, to ask for more. Nay, to expect it. Despite all of this, we felt incomplete without you. So we chose you and you us and the aftermath has me drowning. And so I have wished you away. I have thought “If only I was never pregnant”. I have blamed your dad who knew from day one that he wanted two children. If I hadn’t let him convince me (not that there was any real convincing, of course! It is the mind that plays tricks in search of relief). If you had chosen to leave us earlier, before we even knew you were here, or just after. I have wished you away. This grief reduces me and that is the measure by exactly how far. A mother wishing she never had her child, never even wanted him, to spare herself this impossible heartache.

I have touched insanity. I have entered the spectrum in which a mother steals a baby because she just needs a baby to hold, because her every cell is crying out for her baby and if not, any baby. I have entered the spectrum that at the other end is the mother, despite having living children whom she loves as much and who need her even more than her deceased child, kills herself or leaves them or just plain goes crazy. I have entered the spectrum of the teen mother of a two year old who found was carrying her miscarried baby in her purse. I get it. A reasonable response from side from where I sit. Thankfully my life circumstances have left soundly on the side of just recognizing how these emotions could spin that out of control, without actually feeling them or taking any action. But I am on that spectrum, none-the-less. I understand those women now and I do not hold it against them.

I wish I had a c-section and saved us both. I wish I didn’t believe so strongly in natural birth and surround myself with people who supported it so much. I wish I hadn’t wanted so much for you to be born vaginally, to receive the yet fully unknown but never-the-less evident benefits of the way people have been entering the world since the beginning of people. I wish I hadn’t been so righteous in my quest for a VBAC, to have you at home. The bright lights, being surrounded by strangers, the deficit to your nervous and digestive systems, the poking and proding that I wanted to spare you from. Oh, how I would have you in the least ideal circumstances of all time, if I could have you. Even if I knew then that 1 in 4 pregnancies and infants are lost, I never would have imagined us being that one. I believed in probabilities. I trusted the numbers were on my side. I have gone back in time and imagined myself telling the midwife at Kaiser that I’d like a scheduled c-section instead of what I actually said, that I would try for a VBAC at home and her honoring that. She didn’t see why not. Even if she had, I wouldn’t have listened. Not one of your doting family members even questioned me this time around. They knew I couldn’t be told, I wouldn’t listen, my mind made up. We live in a city where the hospital with the highest risk pregnancies in the state has gotten their VBAC rate down 20% by sheer will and intention. We live in a world now that is encouraging it, for all qualifying pregnancies. If we lived where it is less liberal, if it was 40 years ago, I wouldn’t have had the choice and here we’d be, you and I: Sitting next to the fire, you in my arms instead of this computer in my lap. Nursing and snuggling instead of wasting my time on this pointless exercise of acknowledging the bullshit acrobatics my mind does in trying to change the present, the past 6 months. Having the time and space to entertain and be tortured by things already done, futures already decided, instead of trying to figure out how to parent two children, grow my practice, take care of the minutiae and find time for your dad.

But I’m alone here, lighting your fucking candles and tidying your altar which is all I have of you. I am making up ceremonies to mark this half year milestone in some feigned attempt to ease this pain. But it does not ease it, nothing but time will and I have begun to even doubt that. Do you see me here, living in the past, trying to undo decisions and remake the consequences and living in the future, longing for a person who will never be? Because the present is just too much for me, because I have lost control of my life and even the belief that I can control it and I’m trying to find my way in this new, dark world.

I can hear the thoughts of the reader. The reader, who lives on the planet I used to live on. Who sees me torturing myself with these thoughts and feelings. Who can find comfort in poetry and inspiring quotes. Who can see that I will feel better some day, that my passion will return, that I will not be consumed. Who wants to talk me out of it or help me out of it because there has to be a way and because it is their worst fear and they too want out of it. The reader who is a beacon, reminding me there is that other world to come back to, lighting my way.

And you and I know none of this is real. Though it feels like I am literally being crushed, the truth is I would do it all over again. Every moment. If I could go back, we’d want you and get pregnant on purpose and have you and hold you until you died. I’d take my life to the egde, I’d sacrifice my hope for another living child, I’d find contentment and even joy again with the abundant blessing around me and the ways in which you being here and then being gone will change the world.

As I sit here without you, your  sister is walking up the path, pressing her body against the wind, wrapped in the strings of six balloons and is calling out “Mama! Mama!”. Your dad will follow her in, carrying groceries and checking to see if I’ve kept the fire going. I have. We will keep the candles lit and the fire burning all day for you today and in our hearts everyday until the end of time. As you know, I won’t be crushed or consumed or even disappear. But I will always miss you, wonder about you, love you and wish you were here. I will live in the past and the future and the present. I will continue to mother you, to be in relationship with you for the rest of my time here. You will always be my son who needs his mother’s attention and I, yours.

Happy six months is heaven, Harvey. I’ll always be waiting if you ever want to come back.

Love, Mom

_________

Postscript: As the afternoon went on and we went about Sunday at home, the fire all but went out, just embers. I asked Danny if we should keep it going. “Nah, I guess not.” He left for a run and I stayed by the fireside. I looked over and it was a blaze again! Harvey takes me at my word!

I should be dead, too.

I was groggy from the anestia and I saw my husbands bloodshot eyes, soaked in tears, sniffling and weeping again just like when Harvey died, when we were waiting for Harvey to die, when we had small hope that he might live.

“Did they have to take the uterus?”, I asked hurridly. Was he grieving the loss of our potential children? His heart was clearly set on another, on more, and all I could imagine his tears to be for another loss, the loss of the hope we’d gained.

“No, no”, he shook his head and between sobs said, “You almost died. But you are okay now, you are okay now. I asked him over and over again and you are going to be okay.”

______________

My uterus ruptured. My baby died. the rupture site didn’t heal correctly. It required a surgical repair.

“Dear Monica, There is a very small gap on the uterus, but everything else looks normal.” -OB

“I don’t know who looked at your initial CT, but he never should have told you, you couldn’t carry a pregnancy. No one can tell you that. Looks to me like once this is repaired and unless there is intergity issues with the tissue, your risks would be the same as normal pregnancy risks but you won’t be allowed to labor.” – Perinatologist

“Depending on what we see when we get in there and our access to the defect and surrounding tissue, we’ll be able to repair the uterus so that it will not only be closed up, but it will be stronger than it was before.” – Surgeon

Everyone is so confident. We stop looking into adoption. I notice a couple weeks before surgery, that the thought of being able to physically carry a pregnancy, if not emotionally, is really getting me through this time between finding out the uterus hasn’t healed correctly and the actual surgery. It is my silver lining, my beacon of hope. The numbers and statistics that my team of doctors and specialists throw out at me are starting to penetrate and make me feel like this is all a fluke. How likely is it to be struck by lightening twice, to win the lottery for a second time? Despite my fear that my body is actually not equipped to birth babies (emergency c-section, miscarriage, rupture/dead baby), their confidence has bolstered me. The light at the end of this tunnel is the physical possibility of pregnancy, the very low odds of anything bad happening again. We cease discussing with the doctors the possibility of no more babies.

_____________

The surgeon comes in and talks to me, tells me what happened, draws a diagram in pencil. It was not at all what we expected. I am too drugged to understand, to fully grasp my husbands overwhelm until days later when I am out of the hospital and he explains it again, in his shook up way and then promptly falls asleep.

They went in laprascopically as planned. Camera through the belly button, surgical instruments on both sides of the abdomen. Three surgeons, one an intern or at some level of training as an after thought, just for an extra pair of eyes. They cannot find the defect on the uterus so they expand the lower uterus by inserting a Foley balloon and inflating it, as was the plan in this instance. As the balloon expands only in the slightest, the abdomen begins to fill with blood. There is a rush to find the source. The small incision that might have had to been made if they couldn’t repair it laprascopically, turns into a full transverse c-section incision as they frantically try to find and stop the source of bleeding. The prepare for surgical assistants prepare for transfusion. The anestisologist assures them I am fully under. They find the source: the left, lateral uterine artery, the one that connects directly to the aorta, the heart. They stem the bleeding and save me from a.) a trasnfusion and b.) bleeding to death in a matter of minutes. They repair the artery. The seemingly unflappable surgeon we have met with four times, is shaken and close to tears as he goes out to talk to me husband and the others stabilize me and sew and staple my wounds.

There is no defect on the uterus. He had told us that he couldn’t see exactly from the MRI where the gap was, I had asked him specifically. The “very small gap” was on the main uterine artery. It had torn open at some point during Harvey’s birth, depriving him of life sustaining oxygen and creating the giant hematoma in my uterus they found a week after his birth. It had never healed. As the uterus clamped down after birth, with the added weight of the hematoma at first, it fell just right so as to put pressure on the artery and stop the bleeding, just like you do to the puncture site after you have a blood draw. How I did not die right along with Harvey cannot be explained, says this man of science. How I have been walking around, dancing, doing yoga, giving massage, picking up Vesta and spinning her around, and the uterus has not moved off this artery leading to a bleed out within minutes, is nothing short of a miracle. For the past almost 6 months, I have been a walking time bomb. That during surgery, they were able to find the source and stop the bleeding in time, well, I am just plain lucky.

Arteries are not made of the same tissues as a uterus. The straw-like tissue of an artery is not meant to give and stretch and be pulled on the way the musculature of the uterus is. If the uterus expands just a bit, like say the amount it does in the first couple months of pregnancy, my life is threatened. No more pregnancies, no more babies. We hung our hat on it and now there is nothing.

Except that I am alive. That I should have died in childbirth, that I could have died at any moment in these months leading to the surgery, that I almost died under the knife. The probability that I live on remains in these slim margins that I have grown accustomed too. It was incredibly unlikely that my baby would die and it is just as unlikely that I would  not. And so here we are, he and I: dead and alive.

Today was a crying day. Except, I don’t cry. I seep.

Most adults only cry when they reach some kind of breaking point. But I am already broken. I am a million little pieces. I am piecing myself back together again. Some pieces are beginning to fit back together, sealing tightly along their crack and creating a new foundation. Not like bone, which reinforces itself, creates lopsided bulges on the break since it identifies that area as weak and vulnerable but like ceramic. Some pieces fit back together beautifully, you can hardly tell there was a break. The pattern aligns, there are no chips, no glue oozes out on either side. Some pieces have gaps between them, lost shards, chips in the pattern and require more care in gluing back together, require more glue, more time to seal back together. Some pieces are balancing precariously on top of each other, just waiting for glue. Some pieces are shards, dust that will never be returned to where they belong and some pieces are just gone. Just literally not there anymore.

And so I seep. Not like at first, before I began reconstructing the foundation or before I even began rebuilding.  When I was in shock, disbelief. When I sat in the NICU staring at the wall whispering to myself or perhaps saying out loud, “What’s happening? Wait. What’s happening?” or when I told my dad, “My whole world has changed. Well, no. Not my whole world.” and he looked at me increduously and said, “Yes. Your whole world.” He knew before I did. Back then there was no container to hold anything, so it all just spilled out, marinating the pieces in salt water and cortisol and whatever else is in tears.

It seems now the base has come together quite well and I am carrying on. Always with this river of sorrow just under the surface and sometimes over it, like today. When I fill to the brim. When my sorrow becomes overwhelm and isolation and it rises to the unglued parts, the balancing parts and spots I’ve missed and begins to seep out. There is no prevention, there is no halting or damming to be done. It’s time for the water to find it’s way out, to put pressure on it, to crack it open again and then to recede, in it’s own time, in it’s own way.

I seep. I do not reach a breaking point. I am broken and I cry to let some of the pressure off. Like writing, it is a relief valve. I have built up as much as I can, I have held in too much too long and out it pours of the overlooked spots, the unfillable gaps, the places yet untouched or even seen to be repaired.

I have begun to notice others meeting my tears or sobs with wide eyes. What has happened to push her over the edge? What breaking point has happened that this woman is sobbing on the floor of the Nia class, on the massage table, walking through the grocery store? How can I make this stop/fix this/help her/make it better/get away from it? My tears are met from that other planet that I used to live on. The one that does not recognize tears as the physical manifestation of healing. The world that, should it hear my thoughts today at the depth of my sobbing (“Please, please, please come back. I want my baby back. Please don’t be gone. Please don’t be gone. Please don’t be gone), would think I have taken a step back. That I have regressed to a place I have already moved on from. The world that forces us into straight lines and right angles. Except that nothing is this way and I am in the midst of the chaotic hurricane of a mother’s grief and am all too aware that nothing, not one thing, is linear or black and white or clear cut. Not one thing.

I don’t reach this place because of some event or some trigger or some inability to keep my adult shit together. I have reached this place because my body is ready to let go a little bit more. Because the more I cry out to the empty air to bring my baby back, the more I start to believe, or at the best moments, understand, that he is not coming back. Because what has happened to me, what is still happening to my body, is so fucking horrible, I am mostly laughing about it now. It’s so fucking horrible that it’s funny. Because I am coming to realize, he’s not coming back and on new levels, not every day, not every week but at some unknown interval. That the more I protest and cry and rail against what has happened to me and what happened to him and what has happened to all of those close to me, the more it integrates, the quicker the glue dries, the steadier my hand at placing the pieces one on top of the other.

I live crying now. I seep now. If I don’t cry now, I will cry later. If it is a less than ideal time to cry and I am full up, I’m going to cry anyway. I cannot stop it. If it doesn’t happen now, it will happen shortly after and it will only be stuffed and harder to get out. There is no timeline, no appropriate or inappropriate situation, no stalling or conjouring or stifling. I am seeping. I am a walking, talking grief river that is unseen but that I can always feel and it’s just a matter of how far above the water my head. I am not having an experience in which crying is an isolated event, an anomaly. All bets are off. My baby is dead. He was here and he looked perfect and his brain was dead because my uterus tore open and didn’t tell me and then he died. My baby is not coming back. My baby is gone. My son. My only son. And so I will seep and cry and moan and laugh and be numb and smile and hope and despair and worry and fear and rail and soar and live and die without him. With him always just beneath the surface, with him always in the cracks, with him never here in my arms where he belongs.

Dear Harvey,

Last year, you were here.

Can you see yourself up there in that picture one year ago? Swimming around in your little sack of waters? Growing and changing and moving and being and already learning. Already hearing our voices, tasting what we were having for dinner, knowing the exact pressure of your sister’s hugs, feeling the shake of your dad’s excited hand on my belly.

Last year, we prepared for Vesta’s birthday and you came with us. You came with J, M, Vesta and I to the Costco for supplies, the Michael’s for favors and squirt bottles to put the syrup in for Vesta’s pancake party, and the Freddie’s for all the fixings and balloons. You were there with me as climbed up the step stool to hang the streamers, as I stood over the stove and made 75 pancakes, as the children ran through the house screaming, as the babies cooed, as the presents were torn open, as the hugs and “thank yous” were given. As we, as a family, collectivelly fell onto the couch to put our feet up afterwards, you were here.

Last year, you made the drive with us to the coast with Papa, Nona and Grandma. We got there and you and I ate half a loaf of bread with half a stick of butter on top. You were there when we all went down to the beach and built the sandcastle with Vesta and Papa. At the aquarium, hearing Vesta’s exclamations about each animal, reaching with me into the tide pools, enjoying the slow walk around the place with your family. You were there for the crab cakes and Papa’s meatballs and Vesta’s pink ice cream and more presents and more exclamations and more hugs and “thank yous”.

Harvey, you were here with us.

This morning I woke up early to get ready for Vesta’s birthday celebration at her new school. I cut the fruit for the salad and I reached into the past and I told my old self to help me out. I told myself that today was not about you or me or my loss or my grief. Today was about Vesta, about honoring and celebrating Vesta. I told my old self to step in here. That if you were here with us, I’d strap you on my chest and we’d go to Vesta’s school and I would show the pictures of her just born, at 1, 2, 3 and almost 4 and tell stories about her and I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t mourn the time that has passed, the time I now feel I have lost, the time I will never have again with her, will never, ever have with you, will maybe never have with anyone else. If I was the old me, I’d go to that class and my heart would swell with just how much I love your sister, with how much joy and laughter she has brought into my life, with how much I have learned from her, with how I have struggled and wrestled with parenting and how it has made me a better person, with how intensely proud, in love and in awe of her as I am. This special day, her first Waldorf birthday, would not be tinted with grief, if you were here. I chuckled to myself as I reached for an enevlope to put the photos in how frazzled I’d be if you were here, trying to get breakfast made, lunch packed, fruit salad made and you and me ready for our day and Vesta for school. Instead I was alone, quietly cutting fruit and filling her lunch basket and warming our breakfast and asking for strength to not make this day about you and me and my engulfing grief.

We got to school and the teacher told the story of the little angel Vesta who looked down upon the green earth and saw the butterflies and the trees and the mommies and the daddies and she asked the angel if she could come down to Earth. The Angel said, “No, it is not time yet.” So, the angel Vesta went back to being happy in the clouds and playing and enjoying herself. Until one day she looked down at the Earth again and there she again saw the butterflies and oceans and trees and also people doing wonderful things like writing and engineering and farming and she wanted so much to come. Then, she saw a very special Mommy and a very special Daddy and she asked the angel could she come down to join us and the Angel said “Yes, now it is time”. And so she came.  And here she is on this beautiful green earth with butterflies and oceans and trees and mommies and daddies and she is happy and we are so glad that she is here.

Even through this beautiful story, Son, I did not cry for you or for me. Even though you did the same, Harvey, and then turned around and went back because it was not your time, or it was your time, it just not nearly long enough for me. Even though my daughter was an angel and me son is an angel. Even though you were here with us and now you’re gone.

Vesta came and sat on my lap and we showed the pictures and I told the stories and I did not cry and I did not mourn. I remembered and I gloried in sharing who she was and what has brought her to who she is today. I walked to my car after and time slowed down as I reached for the door, pull it opened, lifted my leg in and began to sit as it sunk deeper into my bones that there will be no photos or fruit salad or stories for you. Not because you weren’t here but because you aren’t now. Because, though I sing your story in my heart, though I think your story many times everyday, though I am possibly closer to you right now than any living being, there will not be you here to drive to school, offer the salad, and tell the stories to eager ears. When you are mentioned, when your story begins to be told, very few ask more. Very few ask what happened to you, what was your name, how old were you. The more time goes by the less and less people will ask or remember and some will even forget.

But not me, Harvey. You were here. I will never forget. Not for one single moment. Not ever.

After I summoned Past Monica this morning to get me through this day, I went into the shower and I realized you were here last year doing all of the things we are starting to do now for Vesta’s birthday. You were here last year for Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s and that will carry me through this next few months. So, at least this year, I have last year. I will remember you with us when we return to the very same beach with the very same family for Vesta’s birthday. I will remember you with us at Uncle Michael’s for Halloween night. I will remember you with us in San Francisco for Thanksgiving with your Grandma and Tio and Mandy and how you heard your cousin’s voice for the first time. I will remember you with us at Christmas. How you were there at Gram’s with us for the first and only time, how you got presents. That you sledded down Nona’s hill with Vesta and I and that you sank into Abuela’s couch with me and made marble mazes with Daddy and me, long after Vesta was bored with it. This year, I have last year to help me get by.

Because you were here.

“from the height of the Pacific
to the depths of Everest”

                                          – Ani Difranco

I have such a strong need to be understood. But I feel like an alien in this world now. I don’t remember anymore what it’s like to not have lost a child. I realize it is becoming harder to relate to those who haven’t lost a child, which is most people, obviously. That it is still just their worst nightmare. That though I want to feel understood again and implore them to imagine how they would be without their child, they cannot imagine. I have forgotten that they can’t even bring themselves to imagine. That even if they could, they would not know the devastation, the way the grief saturates every corner of my life. That they have not yet plunged the depth of their love for their children because we cannot truly know it until they are gone. We have our moments when our hearts swell or nearly jump out of our chests or leap Into our throats with how much we love them. Having lost my son, whose voice I never heard, smile I never saw, eyes I don’t know the color of, I can tell you what you feel for your child right now is only scratching the surface of how vast and deep your love. I did not know this person in any sort of way that is normal for human interaction and relationship development and progression.

Which is why, I imagine, baby loss is so misunderstood. By any measure, except the very smallest one, I did not know this person: we don’t have memories to share, pictures of events to look at, things that he wore or touched or held dear. And yet I am utterly transformed by this loss. And yet, I have become an alien in the world I knew so well. The world where there were bright sides and blessings to count, where I cared about so much more than my own inner experience, where I could even see past it, where things like birthdays, holidays and anniversaries were celebrated with ease, where pregnancy and birth were met with joy and happiness and innocence. And here’s the twist: I do not yet know the depths of my love for Vesta because she is still alive and (pleasegodpleasegodpleasegod) will be, long after I am gone. There is something about the loss that brings out the true nature of the relationship, even with this tiny person no one got to know nor ever will.

The experiencing of losing my son is coming to a new level of integration. One that, like every other step along the way, feels at once more grounding and centering and also more separating and isolating. I can feel that I am fundamentally changing and so I grieve not only my son but also myself. The way that I see the world has changed, my operating system/belief system has crumbled, my priorities have changed, what I focus on has changed, how I communicate, my ability to communicate has changed. I have lost my passion, my spark, my will. There is an endless list of what was important to me, vastly important , day-ruining important, can’t-fall-asleep-because-of important that are literally meaningless now. There is a freedom in that that I enjoy. I don’t miss worrying about my dirty floors or if the meals aren’t planned or if Danny did or didn’t do this or that. My whole life has dulled. I am concerned about Vesta’s eating but even that is dulled. Even the welfare of my living child. Except of course for what feels like the weight of the world, that is a piercing, acute pain. what looks to the outside like woe-is-me or grief or depression, but is actually, I’m sure, killing me. Without the normal worries and everyday concerns, I cannot relate to others the same way I used to. I can no longer connect and empathize to the depth that I used to. And that was so important to me: gratitude, empathy, connection. It’s what saved me, spiritually and mentally, from my depression. I had a chuckle today at thinking of myself as a life coach. That kind of nostalgic look back at the good old days, at how silly I was back then, “oh, so young”…. If I had coaching clients today, “I’d say it’s a careless, chaotic universe so just go eat some twinkles and play Nintendo because what the fuck?”

I know the depth of my love for Harvey because I know it’s loss. I know it’s vastness because of its absence. Because I had it here for a minute and now it’s gone. Because I am absolutely unable to take him for granted, any part of him. The reality of the living is that they are mired in the muck of the every day, subject to mood swings and inconvenience and frustration and boredom. They come up against our triggers, our buttons, and they push away until we are at our wit’s end. One would think that a grieving parent would throw themselves into valuing each moment with their living child, by not getting frustrated and upset with them, have a deeper appreciation than a parent who has not lost a child. But that is not the case because the child is alive and that hides exactly how precious they are, exactly how much we love them, exactly how utterly and completely our despair we would be if they were gone.
And that is a blessing.

This is a wound that won’t heal. And like its physical counterpart, it must be attended to daily, if not hourly, if not minute to minute until we cannot live with it any longer. I have a knowing that Harvey’s loss will kill me. My teacher said “I hate the saying ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. What doesn’t kill you, kills you later.” In my previous life, I would have corrected her and said unless you get down to it, unless you heal it. I’ve spent much of personal healing and professional life focused on getting to the root, or at least the trunk, of our wounding so that it leaves the cells of the body, so that the gene expression can shift back to health and does not transform into cancer or anorexia or obesity or you name it. But this, this is going to kill me. There is no getting to the root or the trunk. There is no cure. God willing, I will live until I’m 99 but no matter when or how, I will die of this grief.

Author’s note: Just like every other post, all of the below has felt like the heaviest of truths. And yet, none of it is true at all, not entirely, not all the time. I am out from under the fog of the deepest part of my grief and feel self conscious about this post. I am uncomfortable being angry and honest and vulnerable. In fact, I am quite scared to put this out there. But fuck it. (And I still want you to post inspirational quotes and pictures on my wall and not read my blog if you can’t and have your healthy babies and be so happy and tell me everything is going to be okay and…and…and…. Also, if you don’t like swearing or blasphemy, this is not the post for you.)

__________________

I want to drive to the rocky coast, to the highest cliff I can find, the one that sticks out over the ocean the farthest. The end of the earth. I want to stand on its edge and scream as loud as humanely possible, make as animal a sound as a human has ever made. I want to get as close to God as I possibly can. I believe it will improve my position. That obviously he has been unable to hear my pleading from the dead of night showers, my negotiatiing, what I will sacrifice, how I will change, what I promise to do differently, if he’ll just give me my baby back. I want to stand on my tiptoes at the edge of that cliff, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, lean into the wind and scream at the top of my lungs, ” Fuuuuuuuuuck Yoooooooou! Give me my fucking baby back, you bastard. He is mine. I did all of the work, I put in all of my heart, I dreamt and hoped and planned, I created and worried and grew and got ready. He was two fucking cells and then he was four trillion because of ME. You created this miracle but I did EVERYTHING else. He is mine. Give him the fuck back to me!” I have already pleaded. I have begged. I have made my case before God and he has not changed his mind, he has not seen the error of his ways and so now I come to him cussing and fevered and enraged. I have fantasies of standing on that cliff edge and howling my protests. Though I know they will be to no avail. To no fucking avail. I will lower my head, slump my shoulders and walk away from the edge, just as defeated and devastated and alone as when I arrived. I can see it, feel it, all happening, in silhouette. Like a caricature of myself.

I am out in the world and I hear mothers complain about their children, about the shit that feels so important that actually isn’t, liked sleep schedules and weaning and social development, and I want to scream “Fuuuuuuuuck yoooooooou” at them. I want to tell them that this is fucking it. This is it. After this, it’s over and your are alone again and you will wonder where the fuck the time went and you will crave the night wakings and the clinging and the unending concern. But they have heard it, and I have heard it and it’s a fucking cliche but the the bitch of it is, it’s the truth and we can’t know it until we know it. And so, inevitably, I want to scream at myself. At my own endless taking for granted, at my honest-to-God annoyance at my daughters incessant need to be next to me, in the same room, on the same chair. I want to scream “Fuuuuuuuuck yoooooou!” to myself. Fuck you because you know better. Because this is it. Because I already regret the time that has passed, that moments, the events, the milestones that I took so subtly for granted because I would do it again with my second kid. Here I am wishing her into her room to play by herself, imagining her older so that she can happily entertain herself and I can go about the business of prepping the dinner, folding the clothes, writing the business plan, sending the email, and all the other seems-so-eminently-important shit. All she wants is to lay in bed with me, put the covers over our heads and giggle wildly as we hide from the monsters. My baby is dead, she is all I have, I am fucking incredibly lucky to have her, and all I can think of is that fucking laundry and the God-damn dishes. Just like everybody else. I want to scream right up in my own face for being so self righteous and so hypocritical and so entitled. Have I learned nothing from this humbling?

The pregnant lady, the new mother. It’s the same to them. They are just living their lives, being happy or being miserable or being both at the very same time and I fucking hate them. And I feel like they are flaunting it and of course, I don’t even enter their radar. Or they look at me with my little girl and smile at me because we are moms of young children and we sustain ourselves with these knowing glances except I look away as fast as possible. And I am defeated and even my thoughts can only muster a pathetic, “Fuck you” to these moms, just being, just trying to get through the day. What’s worse is some of these ladies are on their first baby, which I have already had. You’d think this narcissistic grief would give them a break but no, they still get the “Fuck you.” I’ve had the glow, the attention, the exhausted joy of a baby’s new presence and still to them I want to scream my curses. For what I already have and have had. Because I wanted more, because I had more and then it was ripped from me and if you were me you’d feel the same. If that beautiful little baby was torn from your arms, you would be the same ungrateful, hateful, angry, unjustifiably judgmental asshole that I am. And then I’d want to be friends with you. Fuck.

I am driving behind a Christian with the fish emblem embossed on their trunk and the license plate frame that says, “Goodness Comes From God” or some other such thing and I want to lay on my horn and press my middle finger to the glass, shake it around and scream, “Fuuuuuuck Yooooou and your fucking God and his fucking goodness because he took my fucking baby.” I would make a deal with the devil to have him back.

Facebook is a nightmare. Baby after healthy, alive baby born. Complaints and pride and each development documented and crowed after and commented upon. It feels like family after family, planned out, perfectly executed and going smooth like butter. Like I was. Like that is something that actually exists. Like there isn’t pain and heartache and even unbearable sadness behind the closed bedroom door at night. But I cannot see it, they do not show it and so I say to them, “Fuck you and your babies and your family and your ease and your happiness.” Even to those whom I was just 5 months ago, even to myself 5 months ago. My nothing but good intentioned friends and family who post inspirational quotes in fancy font with flowers or butterflies adorning the edges to my wall with comments like “You can do it, Mon!”. Who attempt to compare my situation with their completely not equal hardship. This is not cleared up or buoyed by conventionalism. I cannot eventually acquire some life lessons from this. This will be a learning but not one that I will ever celebrate. Anything good that comes from this will always, only be a consolation prize and I will not someday appreciate the growth and self-awareness it has catalyzed in me. I will always willingly trade it for my baby’s life.  The people who write me with how heartbroken they are that they can’t even read my blog because it’s so painful. To them I want to scream “Fuuuuuuuck Yoooooou”. Can’t read about it? Try living it. Try bearing it. It’s not a story I am making up that is all too real. It all sounds so dramatic and I wish to God it was just drama. Fuck you if you think I should be over it already, I never knew him anyway, I could have another baby. I don’t miss him because he was here and now he is gone. I don’t miss him because he was such a strong presence in my life. I miss him because he is supposed to be here with us. I miss him because he doesn’t get to know his sister or discover his passions or try to make sense of this crazy world and I see him not with us everywhere we go. I miss him precisely because I didn’t know him. I could have 15 more babies and I would still miss Harvey. There is not a parent on this planet who lost a baby and then mourned less because they had another.

To the universal truth that life goes, I want to scream “Fuuuuuuck Yooooou!”. That people can hear about Harvey and be saddened, grieve and mourn and then just keep going, including my fucking self, is so impossibly unfair because he was so important and this is incredibly tragic and we need to not only remember it but feel it always. It’s that important. It really is. Except it isn’t. Fuck this march of time. I want to scream.

Today, I drove past a two women on the corner: One sitting on the curb, one standing next to a stroller holding an infant car seat, both smoking. And I’m guessing what you gather I wanted to scream out my window. I eat food with the intention that it will strengthen my every cell, that it will fortify and optimize my physicality. I’m not kidding: bone broth and real gelatin and vegetables even for breakfast. That mother smoking next to her baby, has a fucking baby, who is alive, whether or not he is well, at the very least he is alive. I eat better than most, I exercise, I sleep, I do work that I love, I have close, strong relationships and on and on and on. Riding on the train, there is a family, including grandparents, with four children, who do nothing but criticize and belittle and berate.  I think about or at least analyze almost everything that comes out of my mouth and how it will affect my child. Am I honoring her? Is she feeling heard? Am I restricting this or that for a reason or just because? I am consciously and intentionally parenting. And so I point my middle finger to the heavens and I scream one long exhale that makes me horse. Not just because my baby died but because there is no justice in their soda drinking and cigarette smoking and my relatively clean living and uterus that can’t carry a pregnancy or labor because the tissue integrity is such that it will tear open and kill or maim one or both of us despite my “doing everything right”. Because I feel like I am better than the people around me and therefore deserve my child more than they do and that is the fucking worst. And that is not who I am. I give people the benefit of the doubt and imagine their struggles and credit them with doing the best that they can do with what they have, in this moment. But not anymore. Now I am broken and angry and humbled because my baby died and I am  a judgmental, elitist brat. So fuuuuuuuck me.

And fuck the whole thing. I am so tired of being in an existential crisis. Of my each feeling and thought being so heavy and exhausting and important while at the same time being so totally meaningless. I think of children gassed in Syria, civil wars and famine around the world. I think of daughters raped and beaten, of the mother who has lost more than one child, all of  her children and her husbands too. I hear about and imagine the most horrific situations and still my hardship is more than I can bear. My middle class, American life with a great husband, a healthy young daughter, employment, privileges beyond measure and I can feel almost nothing but my own sorrow and pain, I can hear nothing but my own, ceaseless protests. I can see the vastness of all time. All the people before me and the billions after and how one dead baby and one broken mama mean nothing in its midst. We are ants, amoeba, dust on the calendar of the universe. And we just keep going and I have to keep living and pretending to live and try to make meaning and sense of it all. And I am so fucking tired of the whole thing.

I want to be me again. But I am gone, left behind, burned to ashes along with Harvey’s body. Now I struggle and wrestle and wail and ache. And yearn for that cliff. Everyday there is a moment when I want to, need to, scream all of this out of me. Scream so long and so hard that every being, every person, animal, dust particle, cell, and ion knows how real and important and utterly, completely endlessly tragic this whole thing is. How all of the screaming and cussing and anger just attempts to salve this wound that won’t heal, that is everything and nothing all at once. That I just have to figure out how to live in the duality, the multi-dimensionalty, until I die when, God-willing, it doesn’t matter anymore. When God-willing there is no meaning to be made and I can rest, quietly and peacefully.