“… A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened,Jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,
So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave…”

– “Puff, The Magic Dragon” by Peter, Paul and Mary

Vesta started school today. But it’s worse than it sounds.

We have chosen Waldorf for her first school experience, which is very community focused and parent involved. So, I don’t get to drop her off and then go sob in the car. The first day, I take her to her classroom, attend a parent tea, an all school assembly and then a potluck picnic in the  park. I was excited for this school for just this sort of reason: a community of like-minded parents, actively involved in their child’s education, other families to befriend. Today, I wish to God I was just like most people and picked a school I could just drop her off and leave. Today, I wish to God I could have the normal mixed emotions of a parent dropping her child off for the first day of school, smile through tears, both proud and nostalgic. Today, I wish to God, I strapped my infant onto my chest, did my best to help guide Vesta into her classroom and then went to the tea to say “He’s four and a half months. Yeah…not much sleep. He does have a lot of hair! And how old are your kids?”.

But I am not most people and must choose an alternative school. I am not most people and must take my child to school and then stiff upper-lip it through the parent tea, smiling and chatting about our children and dreading the inevitable and truly awful question, “How many children do you have?”. I’m not ready to answer that honestly, especially over and over again, especially today. I am not most people because my infant is a bag of dust in a tin container on the top shelf of my closet .

I can’t just be happy and excited for my daughter who is happy and excited for herself. It can’t just be bittersweet: the joy of seeing her joy, the nerves of seeing her reluctance, the resistance and disbelief at how fast time has flown. It has to be impossible. It has to be the first day of preschool and, quite possibly, the last first-day our family will have, not just nostalgia and time passed but time lost, time without fully living into the experiences of parenting my first child because I expected more. It has to be that another main reason that we chose this school was for more days and longer hours so that I would have some time alone with the baby. It has to be that before he died and I stopped taking my incredibly blessed, lucky and happy life for granted, that I wished for more time to spend on my career, that during my pregnancy I lamented the 3-4 years to come that would set me back that much further, that I wished for “a room of one’s own” daily. It has to be that I got that wish in the most fucked up way possible and that once school starts for real on Monday, I will drag my broken heart to work and try desperately for the comparatively empty passion I have for my work be able to patch it up. The sand bags to my Katrina.

As her first day of school approached and now today, I think almost solely of myself and how I will manage. So much so that I literally did not tell her that she would be going to school the next day, nor make any preparations for it: no extra set of clothes, no inside shoes, no special cup for her classroom, no dish to share for the potluck. I know how much she will love this day, meeting and playing with new friends, and I think only of how I can get out of going. I decide to skip the picnic but as we are leaving, her new friends surround her and ask if she is coming to the park. She is looking up to me for an answer and then back to them without one, as I stand there trying to be the adult, trying to get myself through this so that my daughter can go and do the only thing in the world she wants to right now. As a mother and a woman, I put myself behind others. I would rather their needs and desires be met more than mine. This change, this inability to put the needs and desires of my almost four year old child ahead of my own, is it’s own devastation. I tell her we are going to her cousin’s instead of the park and then thank God she is not older or more socially savvy because she pauses and then turns to tell her friends the happy news. “See you Monday” I say and they say and they go off to the park and we come home, because I lied to my daughter to get myself out of going.

Much of the school assembly was meeting the teachers. Each stands in front of the attentive parents and eager children to talk about what they will learn that year, in the beautifully lyrical and magical way only Waldorf can. The subject teachers are then invited: knitting, Spanish, movement and finally, music. “And now, let’s her that beautiful voice”, says the director of the school to the music teacher who lifts her guitar and begins to sing Puff, The Magic Dragon. By this time, Vesta and I are standing way in the back of the auditorium, as I am waffling about when exactly to make my escape. She has run straight into the edge of a table and I am holding her, embarrassed and bruised, in my arms, swaying back and forth. I begin to sing to her until I hear the words and I am lost in my own despair. She lifts her head from my shoulder and I can see her in my peripheral vision, staring at me wide-eyed, wondering where these tears and gasps have come from. And I remain, unable to parent my living child. I remain, unable to explain to her why Mommy is sad because the whole things sounds so ridiculous when said out loud these days. Because, one day, Jackie Paper doesn’t come back and Puff can no longer be brave, his fearless roar ceased. I remain, standing there in the back of a room full of families, happily greeting the new school year, bawling my eyes out, holding my stunned living child, having lied all morning about how many children I have and about to lie to my living child so that I can escape. And I remain, some shell of my former self. Some new version of my worst self. Some new creature, head bent in sorrow, slipping into my cave.

We took our grief to Mexico.

That’s what they say, the grief experts. Well-meaning family often offer to send the grieving couple on vacation in the hopes that it will give them a break, maybe even cure them. It doesn’t work, they say, you just take your grief with you. But this was my idea. Let’s take a mindless, relaxing trip to the beach, just the three of us. So, we took our grief to Mexico.

At first, I thought, “The only thing wrong with this vacation is that we aren’t home with our baby” as I stared out onto the crystal blue Caribean sea, felt the warm sun on my cold skin, heard the sounds of fun and play of the resort goers.

As the week progresses, I find myself less engulfed in sadness and yearning. I feel like my old self with my daughter. We are laughing and smiling a lot, spending our days swimming and poolside playing pretend under umbrellas. My husband and I are once again fretting about her eating habits and strategizing how to improve them. I had a regular conversation with another mom today by the pool. I didn’t feel isolated or uninterested in what she was saying. I see the few pregnant moms and those with babies and I neither look away nor rubberneck, I neither hate them nor does the envy overwhelm me anymore. I am beginning to disidentify myself with them or, at the very least, my reaction has dulled.

I watched my daughter and husband go down the water slide countless times in a row, both giddy as they splashed into the pool, over and over again. I noticed it’s just us again, not waiting and preparing for Baby Brother to come, not drowning in sorrow from Harvey’s absence and I found that that was okay. I watched this man whom I’ve grown into adulthood with holding our little girl whom we have raised together for almost four years. Our daughter, who is becoming more and more aware, observant, clever and savvy. Who has this impossibly small frame held so effortlessly by her dad. Who screams “Again! Again!” the moment the ride is over. I watched them and for a moment, I felt complete again. For a moment, the curtains parted and I saw that we there are a whole, living family. Just like we were before we started thinking about having a second, before we lost the first pregnancy and before we lost our first son. In the next moment, I felt the weight of complacency attach itself to that sense of completeness and the curtains closed again, though just a bit less tightly. The feeling remained that we are complete, here and now, with us three and without Harvey because we have to be. Because we have no choice but to go on without him. Because we must forever carry the memory of our newborn, who will not grow, who will not change, who will always be a healthy looking, plump little baby boy but for the oxygen deprivation, but for almost complete brain damage. We will live the rest our days cradling the memory of him while we watch in awe as Vesta grows into girl, a young woman, a grown adult. God willing, of course. On each of our parts.

I imagine this vacation is a window. I can see through to what is out there for me. What could be a new normal. Not a door though. I don’t think I am stepping through anything. I’m afraid I have just hit the pause button. I’ve removed myself from the context: the bathroom where he was born, the altar in the dining room, the relationships strained by grief, the constant and exhausting “fake it ’til you make it” existence. I’m afraid I will come crashing down when I get home, right back into it. Back into plundering for joy in work, in Nia, in my daughter’s laughter, in trying to be the friend, daughter, granddaughter, cousin I once was. I’m not planning on it because I never know anymore. I’m just bracing for it.

Amidst all of this, I am reminded of my current state, of our utter vulnerability. On the plane, landing in Cancun, a grandmother begins screaming and shaking her granddaughter, “Estephany! Estephany! Ayudame! Por favor! Ayudame! Estephany !” Her granddaughter wouldn’t wake and then seized. I am sitting on the edge of my seat, crying, and flashing back. I hear my screams in her screams. I hear my fear in her’s. Desperation to desperation. I am praying to my vengeful God, this God who has forced me into this both hateful and prostrate relationship with Him, “Please don’t take her. Please don’t take her.” Not so much for the girl, but for her grandmother, for her mother, for us, who will all leave this plane and not be left with their grief. She comes to, disoriented but okay. We all get our carry ons and deplane, unaffected. Except those of us who are, la abuela most of all.

As I write this, a group of teenagers play in the kid’s pool. The shoot down the twisty water slide one on top of the other. Splash-splash-splash-splash! They stand up in the shallow water, stark against the little kids around them, with smiles that reveal their youth and a self consciousness that reveal their age. They laugh and joke and tease. One races up the stairs and another shakes the bottom of the chute as he zooms past. They are alive. Fully. From and because of their naïveté. Because they are shielded by the immortality of young adulthood. As they should be. I should remember this, relearn it from watching them: “It won’t happen to me”. Until it does.

Moments later, not 10 feet away, a boy of 6 screams bubbly screams as he frantically kicks his feet, attempting to keep his head above water. Just as I notice, so do his parents. His father jumps in, shoes and all, and saves him. I look to the mother, hands at her chest, and watch her exhale deeply. The parents begin to argue, as is natural. We need to find blame. Who was supposed to be watching him? Who’s watch would this tragedy have been on? The father pulls him aside and gives him a stern talking to which ends in the truth: a tender moment, the father’s machismo veil descending for a moment as his face softens and he hugs his son. “I was terrified,” he says without saying it. Minutes later, kids play in the shallow end, mom and dad sun themselves, family picture taken. I have stopped crying and started breathing again, too. I went into that moment with her, like old hat: The worst thing I can imagine is about to befall me. But then, she goes on.

And so do I.

Yesterday, my hair started falling out. It happens at three months postpartum. The back and shoulders of my cotton shirt littered with hairs. I felt an itch on my chest, reached into my bra and pulled out 8-10 hairs. The drain in the shower is clogging. Some hormone shift around now and it happens.

Yesterday, Vesta said, “I want to see Harvey and give him a big kiss.”

“Okay”, I said and started to walk towards his altar, assuming she meant his picture.

She stopped me, lifted up my shirt and planted a big kiss on my belly. I was startled. We never called him Harvey when he was in there. He was “Baby Brother” then. People ask me how she’s doing and I shrug and say, “Pretty good.” It’s hard to tell with a three year old. I had the same reaction when people asked if she understood the baby was coming, “She gets that there’s a baby in there…, ” I’d say. It felt impossible to tell how much she really understood about him being in my belly and then coming out and then entering our family. Now, I know she makes the connection: Mama’s belly, Baby Brother, Harvey.

“He’s not in there anymore, remember?”, I say but she had already bounded off and is on to the next thing.

I wish I was bigger than this.

I wish I could walk into a restaurant without strategizing about where to sit to avoid having to spend my meal looking at a baby. I wish I could sit down on the bus or at the cafe and it not matter if a new parent and baby came and sat directly in front of me. I wish I could strike up a conversation with new people by asking questions about their children again without the fear that they will start asking about mine. I wish my first reaction to seeing a new baby was happy and congratulatory and not the sudden and overwhelming need to run away and hide. I wish my first reaction to seeing a pregnant woman was not “Oh God. I hope your baby doesn’t die.” I wish I didn’t wish bad things would happen to other people’s babies so that I could be less alone.

This makes me small. I feel petty emotions that I am not used to. I think mainly, if not only, of myself. I am a child again. The years of work to climb out of depression, become emotionally intelligent, practicing empathy. All gone. I am reduced.

_____________

Yesterday at the gym, after dancing in class together where I moved very small, modifying and changing movements to accommodate my aching muscles, a woman approached me and asked, “What’s happening with you?”. Without thinking I said, “I’m in mourning.” And, before she even hugged me and said “Oh honey, I’m so sorry”, it clicked.

I am in mourning. You probably have already gathered that, but it was news to me. It was what I imagine Oprah means when she says she had an”Aha moment”. A cosmic knowing, a tingle down the spine, an instant integration, a sudden and complete understanding.

It is a state of a being, this grief.

I am in mourning and there is something about knowing that now that is comforting. Maybe there is an end to this. Or if not an end, maybe it at least changes into a different state or stage or phase. Maybe it changes enough so that I can be a grown up again. So that I can see a baby and smile at him and then at his mother. So that I can hear of a birth and be joyous for the family like I once was and also, from this new place, bow my head in deep gratitude that her baby survived. So that I can be a normal human again and not the crippled animal I have become. There are people around me that tell me that it will be so but I can hardly imagine it and I’m quite sure I will never get there. But, I am in mourning. I am not mourning, it is not me. And maybe that means there is an out.

There is a reason that in some cultures and religions, people wear black after a loved one dies, signaling to the rest of the world that this person needs space for her grief. She needs to be met with patience and understanding. Her sorrow needs respect and acknowledgement. Someday, when they are “out” of it, they wear color again. Some people never do. But others, whether asked by religious or cultural expectation or of their own volition, begin to wear color again. They were in mourning and now, if they are not out, they are at least in something else.

_______________

Today, I met two new people at work. They each knew only that I had been on maternity leave.

“How many children do you have?”, the first asked. “Well, I have my daughter who is almost four . . . and, “awkward weight shift,” . . . well . . . I had a son but he passed away.”

“Oh!”, she said startled, eyes widening, “I am so sorry. When did this happen?”

“About three months ago,” casual, like I don’t know that it was exactly three months and two days ago or 13 weeks and 2 days ago.

“Oh I am so sorry. I am surprised you are here.” I quickly begin telling how work is helping, making me feel like I have a purpose, giving me a sense of normalcy. Am I smiling while I am saying this? Am I talking really fast? Am I not sad enough?

How am I to be? And how is she to be? It’s the worst possible thing a parent who has not lost a child could imagine and I am rather casually talking about it, possibly smiling, only three months out. I am not sure since I have mostly left my body. So I say, “It’s so new. I haven’t really . . . I’m not sure how to . . . I don’t really know how to talk about it yet. I mean . . . to people I’m just meeting, so . . .”

“You just had a baby, right?” the second asks.

“I did but he didn’t make it.”

“Oh!” startled. “I’m so sorry. That happened to me niece.”

“Oh, thank God”, I think. Any familiarity, any relating, is so helpful. Now she can tell me what happened to her niece’s baby and I can tell what happened to my baby. Then she can tell me what her niece did for support and I can tell her I’m doing those things or that’s a great suggestion or I haven’t gone in that direction yet. Then she can say, “I’m so sorry” again and I can say “Thank you” and we can move on. Except that she says, “Well, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known.” And once again, I too casually reply, with a smile, and a comforting touch to her knee.

I wish these unsuspecting strangers, these people coming to me for pain relief and easing of symptoms, were not my guinea pigs. I wish, that as the words were coming out of their mouths, that I wasn’t thinking “Okay Monica, here is your opportunity to say this, to practice this, to figure out how to be.”

I wish, I wish, I wish.

As my Grandma would say, “Wish in one hand, shit in the other”. Except mine are nouns, not verbs.

Dear Harvey,

This is a hard week for me.

Here is your timeline:

July 24th 2012: conceived.

Friday April 26th, 2013: labor.

Saturday April 27th, 2013: birth.

Sunday April 18th, 2013: death.

I know the date you were conceived because we were trying for you, we were planning for you. I was charting and it was too early. I would not ovulate for another couple of days  but we might as well try. We got sick the next day and that was it for July. We had missed our window, except that we hadn’t. By some miracle, our two cells became you and it all began that day. I know the date because we wanted you so very, very much. I wanted you first for dad, who always wanted to have two children. I wanted you next for your sister, whom I wanted to give the gift of a sibling: a playmate, in my deepest hopes, a soul-mate, a friend for life. Her brother who would be here closest family, someone to lean on and lend a hand to, a partner in growing up and then growing old. When your father and I are gone, you would have each other as your family and never be alone in this world. Finally, I wanted you for myself. I wanted to care for my next baby. I wanted to love you and watch you grow and tell people all the details of your every development. I wanted to show you things for the first time and participate in your own firsts. Each and every one. Mostly though, I wanted to cradle you in my arms: your soft, perfect little baby body, smell that unmistakable, divine smell of a newborn and kiss that beautiful little nose, then the warm forehead, the thin layers of skin covering the still soft skull. Then I wanted to sit back in my chair, gaze at you and remember how perfect  life is. I wanted you for all of us and all of this. And more.

Those other dates, they are stories for later. This birth, life and death, we will tell it later. We know them already, you and I. We were there, together, in those hours. They bare repeating, they deserve the weight of sound, they are branded on my being. I will tell mine, Son, and someday, you will tell yours. The parts I don’t know: what you felt, what you heard, what you knew. But these, these are stories for later.

This week is hard for me.

July 24th, 2013

Friday July 26th

Saturday July 27th

Sunday July 28th

This week contains the anniversary of your conception. At the three month mark, it contains the same dates on the same days of our labor, your birth, and your death. And all the stories in between.

The weekends are hard for me regardless. Last Friday night, I sobbed alone in my car, yearning for the very same moments 12 weeks before, that I was laboring. That I was opening and expanding to release you into this world, into my arms. Sometimes it’s the Saturday, the birth, that gets me. Some Saturdays my arms ache, my uterus cramps, my heart breaks all over again. I remember the hope of that day, then the crashing in, then the shock. Some Saturdays, my heart also swells, because you were here, not far from where I sit, alive, touchable, smellable, gazeable. Most often it’s Sunday, your death day. The day I spent all of my waking hours with you, except the ones for which you were dead. The day you did your own laboring, this time for breath. The day we saw your face again, without all the tape and tubing. The day we cradled you back to the ether.

Three months feels so significant. It would feel so, too, if you were here. You would be beginning to come out of your newborn cocoon, “the fourth trimester” ending, infant-hood beginning. Your eyes would see further, you would hold up your head, you would  be awake for longer periods. You would begin to take in more of your world. You would start your unfolding into the world of interacting, affecting, creating. You would smile.

But instead it is me, Son. I am coming out of my cocoon. The loss of you finishing it’s gestation on the outside of me. The infancy of my grief beginning, the newness of it coming to an end. The shock subsiding, the pain blunting, the adjusting to the idea, if not the reality, that you were here and now, you are gone.

I begin to see further than my own pain. I begin to hold my head up. To look around and take in this strange world. It remains surreal: I almost remember it here, I’ve been here before and yet it is quite changed. I seem to see and sense the same world as everyone else, yet our perceptions of it, our experiences of it, are as if we are on different planets. As my grief unfolds, as it dips me down into it’s depths a little gentler, then the climbs out less steep and the view from the top more focused, I begin to enter my life again. I begin to interact, to affect, to create. I begin, my son, to smile.

These are the days: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

These are the dates: 26, 27, 28.

They each have their weight ever week, every month. At the three month mark, they are heavier. As they line up to be not only the same as your time here but also the end of what would be your (our) newborn time, they reach their saturation point, they can no longer hold their own density. As the calendar falls, as the days trudge by with a sluggishness, I continue to discover this new me. I grow and develop in my grief as you would have in your childhood vitality. I develop into new stages and phases. I come into new skills, new neurology, new ability from seemingly nowhere, but some inner human drive to become. I am reborn in your wake.

I miss you every day.

I miss you. Every day.

Love, Mom

I would like to come and sit next to your pain

and you to mine.

Let’s cradle it, here together

on this soft couch in this big house with this lady with kind eyes

She knows our grief without telling hers

sitting here, in a room full of our stories

Her short sentences telling us there is somewhere to get to from here.

Let’s whisper it, here to each other

Between sobs, choked in the center of the throat, through the blank stare of shock

So that only we and God can hear. Give Him a moment’s rest from our pleading.

And us, too.

Sit here with me, together

Let’s look at each other, stare and marvel with wide eyes

the million broken shards, some blunt some sharp some splintered

one human to the other: “What has become of you, stranger?”

Let’s paste each other back together. You do some, I do some.

It’s not going to be perfect but

It’s going to be.

Let’s sit here together next to our pain.

Let’s cradle it in the ache of a mother’s arms.

Let’s whisper it so only we and God can hear.

Three months ago, the conversation would have gone like this:

Danny: “Did you see that homeless lady carrying the doll?”

Me: “Yeah. Crazy, right?”

Today, it goes like this:

Danny: “Did you see that homeless lady carrying the doll?”

Me: “Yeah.” Pause, “Maybe she lost her baby.”

Danny: “I know.”

____________________

Looking over at her across the playground, she’s sitting on the park bench and has wrapped the baby doll she was carrying on her hip in a soft, pink baby blanket. She is gently rocking it and looking at it as she smokes her cigarette. From this distance, she could be cradling a real baby, except that the crook of her elbow crosses the back of the doll’s shoulders, instead of the nape of it’s neck. It’s head sticks straight out from her embrace. I noticed a similar absent-minded hold as she walked passed us a few minutes ago. She held the baby on her hip but instead of her arm underneath the doll’s bottom to support it, she held it across the middle of it’s back. It’s limbs and head unnaturally spread in this position, like a starfish.

But it’s all of the other ways that she is with the doll that make the incorrect holding seem awkward and surreal. She loves this baby: covers it with the blanket, cradles it close and looks right into it’s eyes. Cigarette in between her fingers, she runs her hand across it’s bald head, the plastic likely indented and colored slightly brown to represent wispy infant hair. As she sways her legs where the doll lays, she looks up and stares into space, the blurred gaze of an exhausted new mother.

I understand her, just as I came to understood the crow. This shit can break you. Pardon. This shit breaks you. I think, “Right on, sister. Whatever gets you through the day.” Whatever fills this gaping hole. Hold that baby. Rock it, feed it, sing it to sleep, carry it with you. We carry our dead babies in our hearts, in our bodies, in our cells like an inexplicable weight, a hemorrhaging wound, an inescapable emptiness. We carry them on the inside, so carry it on the outside. Let the world see, let the world know: Your baby was here. Mine was, too.

What’s the difference between she and I? I have a computer and a community who will listen and I can write this horror out of me. I have money to pay for a therapist and a car to drive to a support group with. I have a daughter I have to stay sane for, I cannot break all the way no matter how close I come. I have a family who loves me and friends to support me and, and, and, and . . .

What’s the difference between she and I? Nothing.

Carry that baby, sister. Whatever gets you through the day.

Sometimes it just looks over my shoulder. Follows behind me everywhere I go. A stalker, a shadow, a prison guard.

Sometimes it stays beside me. Takes my arm and leads me through the day. Its constant pull making my eyelids heavy, my feet drag, my mind absent.

Sometimes it overwhelms me. Wrestles me to the ground, it’s feeble opponent. The fight is rigged. We are unmatched. But like the bully, the power-hungry, the privledged, it cares not and I am undone.

Sometimes I can cradle it in my hands. I can hold it close to me and go through the motions. Smiling through like there is a fullness where it resides and not a broken, heavy mass. These are my best days.

It will sometimes start to trail behind me. Keep its distance as its prey regains its strength. Not out of mercy but necessity. It and its kin are only as strong as their target is weak. No matter how far behind me it trails, when I stumble, it will catch up. For years and years to come. My constant companion.

I am driving to the airport. My grandmother and cousin are coming all the way from New York. They are coming to see my new baby. My grandma has never been a big traveler. She once compared my move from Vestal, NY to Portland, OR to her change of workplaces, from Vestal, NY to Binghamton, NY,  about a 9 mile distance. She’s a homebody, a creature of habit, a lover of familiarity. She would, however, at 87 years old with sciatica and other physical pain, travel across the country with my mid-pregnancy cousin to meet her new great-grandson. We made the plans months before he was born. I had said I was not going to make our annual trek across the country with a preschooler and an infant this year so we wouldn’t be home until Christmas. To my delight and with just a touch of cajoling, she agreed to accompany my cousin to meet Baby Brother. Nobody involved wanted to wait those extra 6 months before meeting him.

I am driving to the airport and I am crying and I am calling on my angels and anybody else out there who can lend me support as I get closer and closer. All I want is for this to be my first trip out of the house. To get there in time to meet them as they walk out of the secured area of the airport. To have my sleeping two month old strapped to my chest in a carrier and to have the moment where I lift the blanket, shielding him from the lights and noise of the airport, so that she can peek in and see his face. So that I can her here take in a breath, make a soft exclamation, feel that hand on my arm that I’ve felt my whole life as we celebrate this new life, this new creation, this new moment, just by standing, touching and looking. All I want is a bundle of her great-grandson to put into her arms, to offer her, to say “Here. He is a part of me and a part of you and a part of all of us and he will carry us on.” To my very bones, to my very being, I want to hand my baby to my grandmother. That is all.

_______________

I am laying in my bed. My newborn baby has been whisked away by EMTs, strangers whose faces I never saw, to whom I screamed “Save my baby! Please save my baby! Please save my baby!”. My husband, who wore the same clothes for the past two days, has run out with them to the ambulance in his house shoes. The man who is my chosen brother, whom I called as I lay here bleeding and sore after 2 days of laboring, to whom I said only “Michael”,in my utterly broken voice when he answered and he said only “I’m coming over.” has already been here.  He has sat by the bed  and then he has held me in the strongest embrace I’ve ever felt and whispered over and over the mantra  he had been telling me for months, for years really: “You are loved. You are protected. You are safe.” He has already left to be with my husband, who is alone at the hospital. The woman who is my chosen sister, who also took no pause in rushing to my side on this early, early Saturday morning lays next to me, feeding me broth and I say, “I have to call my parents.”

Reader, I do not want to call my parents. I am a parent. I would rather anything befall me then it befall my children. Is there anything else I dread more for my child than for her to lose a child, if only because I know how much I love her, how absolutely precious she is to me? Is there anything I dread more than to be the mother of a child who’s child has died? If there is, at least in this moment, I cannot imagine it. I do not want to call my parents. I do not want them to answer the phone. I do not want them to see my name appear on their phone. I do not want them to not be able to answer the phone fast enough in anticipation of  hearing about how beautiful their mewling/nursing/sleeping/crying, freshly born, perfectly healthy grandson is. I do not want to be that same broken voice on the other end. I do not want my parents to have to parent a child with a dead child. We do not “know” he will die yet but I know he was “dead” when he was born and I know in my bones, in my very being, that he will die if they’ve saved him by now.

“Mom?” “Yes!” “Are you driving?” “Yes.” “Can you pull over.” “. . . yes . . .”

“Papa?” (I don’t know what he said.) “Did you talk to Danny?” “Yes. We are on our way to Grandma’s to tell her.”

__________________

I am driving home from the airport. I have just dropped my husband and my daughter off for their first trip together, without me. Our son and brother has been dead for 9 and a half weeks. I have been away from my daughter 5 nights total in all of her 3.5 years, never 5 in a row and only twice without my husband: Two nights I spent in Seattle, two nights I spent birthing her brother, one night I spent holding him as he died. I am crying and I am riddled with anxiety. I am naseous, headachey and poison is coursing through my blood. Minutes ago, I was standing at the edge of the security area watching my daughter chase her father down the partitioned isle, watching him pivot and duck like a basketball player as she squealed with glee and tried to keep up. As I lost them in the crowd, I prayed to the Old Testament God that I am afraid might be ruling my life right now. Just in case it’s the violent, vengeful, merciless Old Testament God who is making desicions for me, because it just might be: “Please” I plead, “Do not take them, too.”

I am better now.

1/18/14 – 8 months, 20 days: Can you believe that the person you love most in the world can die right there in your arms and someday you can feel better? It isn’t right that we can laugh, look forward, feel better. It can’t be that life just goes on. That one of the worst things that can happen to a human happens and then time goes by and we adapt and integrate and keep going. That we become hopeful even, able to love, be grateful, feel joy again. There is something unjust about that, fundamentally flawed in this human phenomenon more like. There is not stopping it. Even if we resist and rail against and never leave our bed, we will improve. We can live on without an essential part of us and we can feel human and hope and dream and love and laugh and be thankful for each person, each deed, each event, each moment that has helped us through. It’s the most wonderful thing and it’s the most horrible thing. But, it’s better.

1/5/14 – 8 months, 8 days: My thoughts are no longer, at least for these last few days, not consumed with protest. By some miracle, I have stopped railing against this loss. I am coming to believe it happened. You were here and now you are gone and you are never coming back. I will never know anything more about you than I already do. My thoughts of protest have been replaced by thoughts of what I could have done differently: I could have scheduled an early c-section, for one. I could have asked for an MRI after the deep pain lingered for 5 months after Vesta’s birth, for another. My mind spends time pretending: hearing the midwife at Kaiser say “Oh no! You are not a candidate for a VBAC homebirth.” and I believe her. Someone getting my surgical records from Vesta’s birth and being suspiscious about some detail easily breezed over and taking action and you are saved. Never having moved to Portland or San Francisco and staying in my home town, never learning about home-birth or holistic health and just towing the line and having another c-section before my labor started. I imagine I was not the self-righteous, ingrate who just expected this baby would be born to her, alive and healthy, and set her back 3-4 years in her career again and woe is her. I imagine I was who I am now making decisions about your birth: humbled, afraid of the universe, aware of the fragility and fleetingness of our time here, knowing fully that nothing, not anything, is guaranteed or deserved or just given without risk of exploding her heart into a zillion tiny pieces. I imagine that I was that mother to you and you are saved. I imagine that you didn’t save my life and died right along with you and avoid this whole terrible suffering. It doesn’t sound it but it’s progress. And that’s better.

10/17/13 – 5 months, 2 weeks, 5 days: Sometimes, I am driving or working and I think of you, that you are gone, and I don’t cry. I will look out to the horizon or I will close my mind and for a second or two, it’s okay. You were here and you are gone and I’m okay. That’s better.

9/16/13 – 20 weeks, 8 hours: I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to slowly fade, disappear into the hole in my chest. I don’t know what to do with myself. The itch I can’t scratch, the wound that won’t heal. I contort myself around my emptiness, the endless protest, the continued disbelief, the incredible discomfort in an effort to get away, to get a break, access the illusive reprieve. But just some days, not everyday. That’s better.

8/17/13 – I’m not counting weeks anymore. So, that’s better. Your midwife had her baby and I congratulated her. I somehow knew the baby was born that day, so I looked on Facebook and there was a picture of her perfect little daughter. I was able to feel and express my happiness for her, though I cry as I write this. Though I want so much to have posted your picture, with your time and your date. When I think of her now, cuddled with her baby and her almost four year old, whatever joys and struggles they are having, I smile inside in equal proportion to my heart breaking. I have a level of genuine happiness for another mother and another baby. I have more than my own loss. That’s better.

7/20/13 – 12 weeks: I look up to see the shadow of the trees on the wall. The light is dancing between the leaves and the wind gentle rocks the branches. I look up and I see you, my dancing light baby, and I instantly smile, a “hello there” smile. My heart is warmed in your presence for a moment, maybe two, before I return to the sorrow, the ache, the yearning to see your toothless smile and not your dancing light through the trees, reflected on the wall, in shadows. That is better.

6/30/13 – 9 weeks: We went to the coast. I was not engulfed with hatred for and then crumble into tiny, heartbroken bits and then feel so deeply sad for myself when I saw other parents with babies. Yesterday, I had my first true relief because I also never crashed back into reality. I guess, truthfully, I hated them a bit, I crumbled a bit, I felt sad for myself a bit. But instead of being on top, it was just below the surface. For the first time in 2 months and 2 days, I could see these happy families with their babies, strolling on the beach, putting tiny feet into the sand for the first time, and I could feel neutral. On the surface, I could feel nothing and just observe. Just under that was the hatred, devastation and sadness, true. But my best guess is, that just under that is happiness for them, celebration of new life, and empathetic joy for what they have in front of them. I’m sure that’s there, too. Deep underneath. I’m sure of it like I’m sure you’re still with me, like angels exist. I believe it, but I could be wrong. That’s better.

6/29/13 – 8 weeks 6 days or 2 months 1 day: Tonight, I sang a lullaby to Vesta that I forgot to sing to you when you were alive. I did not cry when I remembered the song and realized you never heard it. I thought, “I will just sing it to my daughter.” I looked into your sister’s sleepy eyes and she into mine and I sang to her and I did not cry and I did not look away and my heart did not break a little more. I thought, “Someday, I will know how to sing it to Harvey.” That’s better.

6/18/13 7 weeks, 2 days: This morning, I did not wake to the crushing feeling of your absence. I awoke several times in the night and then this morning, worrying your sister was dead. She usually comes into our bed at some point but slept all night in her bed last night and I was sure she’d stopped breathing. It doesn’t sound like improvement, worrying that my daughter is dead rather than mourning my dead son, but it is. I am less consumed by your loss. I spent a couple hours writing about you and then got up to make breakfast for your sister. I put the bacon on, put your music on and began to pack her lunch. I realized then, listening and packing, that I was doing this with you. Here was a quiet moment, with a song that reminds me of you and I am taking care of your sister without crying. If you were here, I would have done the same thing this morning with you wrapped on my chest. Perhaps I would have sung to you instead of listening to Nat King Cole. I would have nursed you instead of writing to you and the terror that Vesta was dead in the next room, would have been relief that we had only one child to parent in the night. But I’m getting better. To have that moment of peace with you. That’s better.

“When the dark is at rest, the light begins to move.”

-The Secret Of The Golden Flower

When I was pregnant with Vesta, I taught a Nia retreat in Mexico. The retreat center was built 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean. Warm water, soft sand, rolling waves. I think back  to that young woman: I didn’t know how innocent I was, how naive, how vulnerable, so I just celebrated. I just enjoyed my pregnancy. I sang to her and talked to her and danced Nia with her and on this day, I waded into the ocean with her, my 3 month old fetus. I told her all about the ocean, how much I loved water and how I hoped she would, too. Though I imagined she already floating weigthless in her little sack of waters, I wanted her to feel her container feel weightless. “This is what it’s like”, I whispered to her as a lay on my back, far from the beach, letting the rolling waves lift me and lower me down. Staring out at the vast sky, gray that day, and the vast ocean, reminding me why people once thought the earth was flat. There is the end, right there. The thin line beyond which is nothingness. Yet, now that we know it goes on, past the point of where we can see, it feels the exact opposite. It feels endless.

I brought my 5 month old baby and my 17 month old baby back to Mexico the following two years. She was a cautious baby and is a cautious child. She did not want to enter that very same stretch of ocean I showed her in utero, even if I carried her. The huge power of the water foaming and roaring towards her was too intimidating and she couldn’t get away fast enough. That’s fair. There is a primal understand that that energy could easily take one down, under and away. So let’s try the pool.  She wasn’t even sure of the pool.

I returned home that first year of taking her to Mexico as an infant and enrolled her in swimming classes. My usually happy, smiling and laughing baby became incredible stoic and unsure. Everywhere else in the world, people would stop and engage with her and comment on how happy she was. Not at swimming. “You have such a serious baby”, they would say. After a year of singing, splashing, enticing with balls and rubber bath toys in her classes she began to enjoy herself. We moved to Portland and we go swimming at least once a week in these amazing community center pools with water slides, fountains and rapid rivers. She has so much fun. At the end of my pregnancy with Harvey, we would spend hour after hour after hour there. The weightlessness felt so good to me and she was so happy and entertained there, it was a respite for us both. I was so preoccupied with taking care of Vesta, building my business, preparing for baby and just being irritable and grumpy for most of the 9 months I had Harvey, that I was solely focused on my relief: My sense of ease in the water, how it felt for me to float. WIth Harvey, I so rarely put focus on him. I went 17 weeks before I went to a yoga class and remembered the joy of being pregnant and connecting with my little baby. The pregnancy went on and time kept moving without me paying very much attention to him. Even in yoga classes, I was so uncomfortable this pregnancy, I focused almost solely on relieving my symptoms. I felt so badly about it and felt so stuck in myself and my own needs and demands of parenthood and work and relationships and exhaustion, that I comforted myself with knowing that when he came out, that’s when I would bond with him, I would be so happy to have him, I would focus my attention on him, all after he was born. After he was born, I would fully connect with him. I would show him all of the things: floating, weightlessness, vast skies and endless oceans, when he was on the outside. “I’ll have his whole life”, I thought to myself, I eased my guilt with, I made it okay to be less connected to this baby in utero with. There is nothing wrong with that. Lots of second time moms feel that way. I talked to them, we commiserated, we comforted each other: “We’ll have their whole lives”, we said. What I forgot to say, what I didn’t know to say, was “God willing.”

Nine weeks ago today, I was in the hospital holding my dying baby. I changed his diaper once. We gave him his one bath. We dressed him in the one outfit he wold wear. We sang to him. We caressed him. I drank in every part of him, every wrinkle, every bulge, every hair, every imperfection of my perfect little boy. Nine weeks ago today, I held my newborn baby as he died. Nine weeks ago today, I parented my child as he died. For one day, I was the parent I wanted to be to my son.

But today, nine weeks later, I am at the beach with my stepmother, my best friend and my daughter. It is in the 90s in Portland and 15 degrees cooler at the coast, so we load up lunch and toys and sun-protectant accutrements and head west. The air is a blessing. It is cool and fresh and spacious and reminds me of my home in San Francisco. I live now on the surface of gallons of emotions. I am easily overwhlemed, frustrated, scared, saddened. Today is no exception. Except that today, Vesta has needed me more than I had the capacity for. We are both frustrated and annoyed with each other because she needs more from me and I have nothing more to give. So my stepmother entertains her, my best friend takes her to the water. I look for them. I look for the sihlouette of a grown up in a halter top and skirt near that of a child with a ponytail and a dress, frolicking in the shallow waves. But I can’t find them. The beach is so crowded today and I search and search until, I spot them. Yes, there they are but of course, not frolicking. Being held because, as I say, she is cautious, knows her limits, is observant.

I have this much needed break, they come back to our blanket on the sand and she is ready to go back to the water again. “I’ll go with you”, I say and she is delighted. We run toward the waves. She walks right in. Earlier she saw bigger kids jumping the waves, so even though she has no chance of clearing any of this small waves, she jumps as each one hits her, as if she can. She pulls me deeper, joyfully crashing into the foamy, broken waves as they crash into her. I never expected to be swimming in the Oregon Pacific Ocean so I am wearing a skirt and tank top and not a bathing suit like she is. I am trying not to get wet but as we move deeper in the ocean, I begin to get very wet and also to not care. First my skirt is soaked, then the long ends of the overshirt I am wearing, then the sleeves as I sometimes have to reach down and pull her our of a paticularly larger wave. She is suddenly fearless. Trudging through the water with enthusiasm and determination. Delighted by the feeling of the sand being pulled from under her feet and sinking into the soft earth as the water receeds. Each wave getting us more and more wet, cooler and cooler, elcits wide-faced smiles and elated squeals. She calls to me and encourages me and demands that I engage in this moment. That I hold her hand, that I jump, that I scoop her up, that I laugh and smile and live, standing right next to her, my one, living child. Who is so big now: long legs, sophisticated speech, strong memories. My one, living child who is growing fast, who is quickly becoming her own person. As much as she needs me, I see the exact match of innate drive to not need me. Already. Without Harvey, her first three years have seemed to exccelerate. The past has now gone so fast, not only because my days after his death are so long and slow, but, though I consciously did my very best to enjoy her at each stage and not even say “I can’t wait until she…” so as not to speed up this precious time, I was always counting on having another child. Because, if I’d known, I would have savored even more, I would have watched her grow even more closely, I would have struggled less to get her to sleep in her own bed, to eat the right foods, to wean her from nursing. I enjoyed and participated in her first three years fully, except for the part of me that was sure I’d have the chance again, with our second child, who would first not miscarry and second, not die.

But back to today again. Back to the cool waters of the Pacific  and my cautious daughter afraid  just minutes ago of the vast powerful ocean, the waves barreling toward her, now running into it, fearless. Suddenly, she is unaware of it’s power to take her down, under and away. On the cellular level that drives us forward in life, she has forgotten (or perhaps remembered?) that she is vulnerable to the tides, that she can easily loose her footing, that she is not in control, that she is subject to the whims of nature. All of the sudden, my daughter is brave and confident in the waves. Waves that to me look tiny as they hit below my knee, but to her are gigantic as the smash into her chest and a time or two right into her face. And beyond  that, she’s joyful. She’s elated. She’s delighted and enthuisatic and unbound. She runs forward, deeper and deeper into the ocean, water splashing from her footfalls, arms pumping as she presses against the force of the endless water, calling to me “C’mon, Mom! C’mon!” I have heard this more acutely for the past two months, sometimes joyous, sometimes pleading: C’mon, Mom. C’mon.

“I’m coming!”, I call back and run to catch up with her. I reach out to take her hand because I still believe, on some level, that I can protect her, that I can save her if she needs saving. I still believe that I can parent her everyday of her life the way I want to: the balancing act of guiding and letting go, guiding and letting go, guiding and letting go.

In my reflection of this moment, I look out to that thin line of horizon and with deep desperation, plead with God to never, ever take her from me, too. But that is not how it actually happened. That happened later tonight, when she climbs into my bed with her blanket, her plastic pony and Harvey’s teddy bear, sent to us from the organ donation organization. That happened when she snuggled up to me, my warm, sun drenched little kid smelling of sand and sunscreen, cuddling with this soft, stuffed, sorrowful representation of her baby brother, my 2 month old baby. That is when I pleaded with God, again, fervently, to have mercy on me.

But right now, in this moment in the ocean, watching her run away from me unfazed into the sea, I just grabbed on and let go and fell in love with life again, even just the tiny, tiniest bit.