May 4th, 2013
My baby died. My body hurts. I need pain meds. I need to not be hurting everywhere. I walk around the house in a stupor, a fog, empty arms, empty uterus, aching. Danny and I have been out. We went to and from the NICU four times before he died, I’ve been to the OB for a postpartum check-up, we went back to the hospital to meet with the NICU chaplin who will lead Harvey’s memorial service tomorrow. I do my best to get out of bed to take care of Vesta some, but Danny is here, his brother, my best friends, family is arriving and they are taking care of us, all three of us. In the chaos and shock of Harvey’s death, not much attention is paid to how much my body hurts, not even by me, it’s very nearly the least of my worries. One friend has been concerned about my physical pain all week and has encouraged me to do something about it, I’m sure she’s talked to the others who are here helping us about it, she gave me a few pills she still had from an injury. I’ve taken all of it. I need more. I meant to call yesterday, Friday, but I never did, no one did. I know tomorrow is going to be one of the hardest days of my life and some numbing of the pain would be very helpful. I call the number on the back of my insurance card.

“I’m sorry, we don’t prescribe narcotics on the weekend. You’ll have to come in to be re-evaluated.”

“My baby died last week. His funeral is tomorrow. Can you make an exception? I just need to stay in my bed.”

“Let me see what I can do”

Musak interrupted by how much this insurance company cares about my health, how they are making it easier than ever to make appointments, fill prescrip…

“I’m so sorry, honey. I talked to several people and you just have to go in. I’m so sorry.”

My dad and step-mother drive me to urgent care. I’m starving. I forgot to eat. We talk about where we will get lunch after I get my meds. We check-in, we wait, I get called back, vitals taken, seemingly endless questions answered, we wait for the doctor, the physicians assitant walks in.

He is very sorry for my loss. He can’t imagine. How am I doing? How is your grief? We have a lot of resources her for you from counseling to medication. Anything we can do to help you, we will. I give him the most honest and oft-repeated answer I give everyone, which a whole-heartedly beleive: we are doing very well under the circumstances. We are talking to each other, we are talking to our family and friends, we have an amazing amount of support, we met with the chaplin, I don’t need psych meds, but I do need pain meds. He spends a good 15 minutes, possibly 20, discussing my grief. There is still a normal part of me left, thanks to the shock, and I am impressed that a medical doctor in urgent care would spend so much time talking to me about my mental and emotional state. I appreciate it but I also just want my pain meds, to eat, to go back to my bed, to get out of this hospital. I tell him about my pain. About how it seems to have gotten worse over the last couple of days but I had an intense, long labor, my baby died, his funeral is tomorrow, I just need some pain meds to get through right now and tomorrow. He asks more questions, inspects the stitches on my tear, apologizes for having to touch me internally, he presses on my abdomen. Yes, it hurts there, yes it’s sore when you push there, yes, yes yes, pain meds please. He seems to take forever. He says “I think you need to have an ultrasound. I want to have a look in your abdomen. If we can’t see anything in the abdominal ultrasound, we’ll have to do a vaginal one.” Like hell. I can’t believe he doesn’t just see the pain of my heartbreak, my grief, my fog, my confusion, my inability to comprehend and retrain information. My baby died. I am a mess. I need pain meds and I need to go home. “Ok, I understand. I’m going to insist. This is very hard. But I if we do this scan, we can just rest easy that everything is okay with your body so you can face the day tomorrow.” Nope. He leaves to consult. He comes back and says he’s concerned about the pain increase and he will move me to the front of the line for ultrasound and we won’t do a vaginal one, even if the abdominal one reveals nothing. Okay, I give up. I have to do this to get my meds and go home. I agree. Then comes the trauma of being escorted to the ultrasound room, laying there like I did when we saw his heart beat, when they checked his growth, for ten fingers and ten toes, he’s a boy. The tech knows nothing, asks a routine question, which leads to the reveal of the dead baby, which leads to embarrassment and stammering on her part, which I reassure her out of, which I fall apart from after she leaves the room.

I am wheeled back into the exam room and a flurry of activity begins. The PA comes back in and explains that there is bleeding in my abdomen and that the ambulance is on it’s way to take me to the main hospital. I may be dying, I may need emergency surgery. They can’t tell if I am actively bleeding or not. A nurse comes in to do vitals again, a phlebotimist wheels her cart in to get my blood work started, an IV is placed. I am thrown swiftly and surely back into shock. We figure out who is driving and who is riding in the ambulance with me. I remember to call Danny. I’m wheeled outside by two women who talk and joke easily, who make me feel comfortable. My dad is by my side.

I am not bleeding anymore. There is a large clot in my uterus. I was saved by a final layer, a “skin”, of the outermost layer of the uterus. We learn that the uterus ruptured. I don’t have to have surgery now but I might later. I stay in the hospital over night. I beg them to get me out of there so that I can go to my son’s funeral. I have morphine, which is wonderful. I feel almost normal again. Now I am talking and laughing easily, until it wears of.

October 18th, 2013
Six months, a million doctor and surgical visits, and further complications later, I have the surgery for the uterus which did not heal correctly. Which they assure me they will be able to fix and we will be able to have another baby. We stop talking about not being able to entirely. They are sure of themselves.

The tear is embedded in the vasculature. They inflate the uterus and I begin to bleed out. They save my life, the repair the artery and the muscle as well as they can. They sew me up. The shaken surgeon tells my shocked husband the good news. I survived the birth somehow, I survived the surgery because they found the bleed in time and we can’t, I can’t, carry anymore pregnancies. In fact, if I was to get pregnant, I would not make through even the first trimester expansion of the uterus. Pregnancy is a life threatening condition to me. In fact, nothing should ever be inside my uterus again, certainly not a baby and no medical instruments either.

Three days later, our marriage takes its first, and eventually fatal, blow.

I want to find out who that urgent care doctor was. I need to write him a letter. I need to thank him for saving my life. For the time he took, his concern, his patience, his insistence. By this time, we have decided we want to have another baby. Had he not done his job so perfectly well, the hematoma would have dissolved, the gap in the ruptured uterus would have gone undetected, I would have gotten pregnant again, and subsequently widowed my husband, left my daughter motherless and taken our 4th pregnancy with me.

I look through my records online and find his name is Erik M, PA. No last name. I ask my surgeon at my post-op this man’s last name and he tells me. I will write him. I will thank him with my whole heart, with my whole being for being the first person this year to save my life. My grief overtakes me. The mourning of Harvey increases exponentially. He was our last baby. I grieve the loss of the ability, at 35, to be able to have another baby. My marriage slowly crumbles around a decade of also unseen wounds. I never write Erik M—, PA. I think about him often. I give silent thanks for him every time I do but pen never touches paper.

September 24th, 2014
I go to urgent care for a routine problem, finally and happily, unrelated to birth or death but just run of the mill bacteria. I am surprised that the advice nurse tells me to go to urgent care even. I have no fever, hardly any pain, no sign that I am in immediate need. I mostly called to see if I could get an appointment in the morning with my doctor to be checked. But he tells me to go ahead and go in, the clinic closest to me is open until 11 so you still have some time. Do I know how to get there? Yes, I am very familiar with that place. I query with my roommate if I should change out of my pajamas to go and she says Why? So I leave.

The urgent care department has changed locations. I check-in, I wait, I meet with the nurse. “Ok”, she says, “We’re going to send you to the lab and then you will be seen by Erik M—.” I gasp.

“Really?”
“Do you know him?”
My eyes as wide as saucers, my heart racing, tears beginning to well, “Yes! He saved my life.”
It’s her turn to give a shocked, “Really?”

I walk to the lab in tears. I am so excited to see this man again. To thank him in person. To tell him my story and how he was the first angel sent to me on my new journey. To hug him and to thank him. To look into is eyes and hope he sees how deep and eternal my gratitude. I am also crying because I am taken back to that day. Lying in shock and pain on the exam table. Listening to him go on and on about grief resources. The fog so dense that I float in it, the inability to really understand him, the resignation I had once I realized I had to jump through this ultrasound hoop to get my pain meds and get our of there. How completely lost I was. How I could say things like “We are doing very well under the circumstances”, as if there was anything “well” about us at that time. I remember the moment I realized he was an angel. I cry from grief and anticipation and excitement and overwhelm that I have this apportunity.

He comes to the waiting room to get me. I don’t remember what he looks like but as soon as he starts talking I know it’s him. He says, “We don’t have the results yet but we can just get started before they come in.” Of course. Of course, I am given extra time, because it’s 10:30 at night, to sit and tell this man, this sacer of lives, that I stand before him as one of them. I start crying immediately after he closes the door. He hands me the tissue box. He doesn’t remember me until I tell him about the clot and then instant recognition. I said first that my baby had died and he didn’t remember me but once I mentioned the clot he said “yes! I remember you. You’re baby died.”, as if I hadn’t told him. I told him the whole story of my rupture and incomplete healing and surgery and infertility, through my tears, equal parts grief and gratitude. He thanked me. As an urgent care doctor, he almost never gets to find out what happens to his patients after they leave his care. He went into medicine to help people, to hopefully save lives, but he doesn’t get to see or hear that often like most other doctors. He is grateful to me for sharing. We hug.

From this connection, we begin an unprofessional and unorthodox urgent care visit. He asks about my marriage. I tell him it ended and why. His marriage ended the same way. We commiserate. He gives me some hope for the other side. He mentions how I am laughing and smiling but that there must be some real intensity on the other side of that. I almost don’t because it seems so out there, but then I do. I tell him about the miracle healing. About how a group of women saved my life in this same year as he and my surgeon did. He believes me. The man of science and medicine, of number and research and studies, tells me he believes me because he sees the unexplainable, the unmeasurable everyday in his work. Because he has seen it in his own life. We talk for a long time, including also the matters at hand which he advises on and medicates and then we hug me again as he leaves.

I drive home in tears with a full, full heart. I feel my son in a moment. I feel him as I drive and I know he sent me there. Minimal symptoms to a routine issue, an advice nurse who strongly suggests I head to urgent care right now, Erik M not only working but seeing me (the nurse told me there were 5 other doctors on tonight), the lab results taking forever to come in so that we had plenty of time to talk and connect, to be grateful for each other and hopefully, give each other a little hope. I know I got some. Some hope that my angels will send me these kinds of miracles even when I am not falling apart, even when I don’t need to know well I am watched over and cared for. That the universe will bring this shit, this fallen apart, shattered to bits life, full circle. That I will be provided with opportunities to share with people, those I love and a stranger like Erik M., how so very grateful I am that they came into my life, for forever or for an hour or so one afternoon. Since my heart has been so torn asunder, since a big part of it left with my son and the returned in the healing, I know so well the amount of emptiness one heart can hold, that my heart can hold. There have been few moments since Harvey died that I have felt my heart full, but tonight was one of them. Tonight as I drove and I felt my son reveal his orchestration of this connection, I cried for him being gone, for him taking care of his mother instead of me taking care of him, I cried because my heart was so full, so exceedingly full, I thought it would burst from my chest. And knowing the contrast, knowing this feeling’s exact opposite so intricately, I savored and I relished and I gave thanks for my full, broken, healing, whole heart. My human heart, that has the capacity to tear and mend and break apart and piece itself together again. That can bear both the very worst of human experiences and have the same capacity to hold the best of human expereinces without bursting into smitherines. Well, these are the moments I live for, that I am alive for. So thank you, Erik M. Thank you, from the whole of my heart.

As a side note, a totally off topic lesson I learned tonight: as a single, thirty-something, when you ask yourself “Should I change out of my pajamas to go to urgent care?” (or anywhere else), as you say to your roommate, “I probably should because you never know who you might meet!”, the answer is a strong and resounding “yes!”. You should change back, put on a bra, redo your make up and fix your hair. Because you might meet a handsome young doctor who saved your life and who understands some of your loss. Lesson learned. Winking emoticon.

I went to group tonight. I don’t need to go to group like I used to. I don’t mark time by the space between meetings any longer. But sometimes, I still just want to go and find some purity. Sit with my grief for my son, talk about him and his story, quietly nod my head at the shared experience of other loss parents, and, in a sense, spend some time with Harvey. It is a sacred space. If he was here, I would make time to do things, just he and I but he isn’t here, my 16 month old toddler is still dead, and I still need that time with him. My heart does not ache the way it did most of the time I spent in that circle of parents and I often wonder now, what will I talk about? I often laugh to myself, now I need a divorce support group instead. But there is always something of Harvey alive in me. There is always a new phase of learning to live without him, there are always experiences that drag me under again, there are always things I am learning and coming to understand better about my experience and myself as a grieving parent. There is always more.

It was just me, another mother who is nearly two years out from her loss, and our beloved facilitator. This never happens, so few people, and both of us “veterans”. We still talked for hours. As usual, we laughed and we cried and we grappled and we despaired and we smiled and we tried to make meaning out of senselessness. We tried to come closer to learning how to hold two things at once.

I got in my car to drive home and my heart was full for the first time in long while. It was full of my family, my whole, broken family. My children and my husband were in there again, all together. All united by the love that began our family, that brought us two beautiful children and engulfed the four of us in something brand new, in a love bigger and wider and utterly different then when he and I began it. Much of the time I spend inside myself with my family is all befuddled now. I am often angry and confused and heartbroken and unmoored and afraid. But tonight, after spending some time with the purity of my grief, with the undeniable fact of my healing process, with my son, I could see a path out. I could see forgiveness and connection and love. Also bigger and wider and utterly different than I’ve imagined. I could feel myself, out there in the future somewhere, when the details are blurry and some forgotten, when the pain has dulled to a quiet murmur, when there is enough time and space for some clarity, some understanding and a whole lot of forgiveness. A place where I com forgive and love myself and my children’s father. Times when we will come together to celebrate the milestones of our daughter life that will be about the love that was once there that she was born from and into. Times when we will come together in the grief for our son, for the celebrations and the milestones of his life that we are missing. Times that will also be pure. When he and I can see each other again. And by “see” I mean know and remember and honor who we were and who we will be by then. Times in the future when we will honor our love, the love we had that created this family, as something that was real and true and of utmost importance in our tiny lives and in the cosmos. When we have each rewritten our stories so that we can sit comfortably in them. When we can be a family that broke, in several irreparable ways over a very short period of time but that none-the-less is still a family. It is the power of children. It is the power of love. It is what is left as the dust settles, as we do our work to heal and to live again, to live alive. And it is all that really matters.

I will wake up tomorrow, like I’ve woken up day after day for so long now: grieving and sad, angry and betrayed, confused and unmoored, unsure of how to proceed but proceeding anyway, amidst all of the painful details, all of the acuteness of the layers of this year’s grief, all of the fear and uncertainty left in its wake. But tonight for a minute, I sat in the future and my heart was full. I came into my house and I closed the door to the room of best friend, which was once our room, because she had left it open so she could hear if vesta called out. Then I stood in the doorway of Vesta’s room, that is now our room, and I saw my daughter sleeping in the darkness, and I felt the presence of my son represented in his picture on the bookcase and my heart opened up to include my husband, most likely also asleep but now on the other side of town. I stood there for a minute and felt us all where we belong, all four of us full in my heart and I took a breath. I took a breath to seal us in there, to create some space for this possible future I’d sat in tonight and to brace myself for the morning, when I go back to the mess of single parenting and divorcing and getting myself financially independent again. When my intense and mixed emotions inevitably return. I breathed in the purity of the love of this moment, the hope for the future and also the inevitable reckoning of all that we have lost.

All is not lost. All there really is underneath grief and anger and confusion and fear is love. I would feel none of these things if I hadn’t loved. All there is is love.

Something that I learn is that I can be sadder.
My grandpa died two years ago today. I was with him, as were his three living children, his great-granddaughter, his dearest family and friends. We stood at his bedside as phone calls came in, put on speaker so he could hear his loved ones say goodbye and they loved him. I marveled. I marveled at what that took to make that phone call. How many of us would do that? How many of us have the courage to call a dying man, who cannot respond, serenaded by the loud, articulable breathes of the ventilator? I marveled at my grandfather, lying there dying, listening, unable to say goodbye and I love you too. At a man lying there, surrounded by love, knowing this was the end of his life and not knowing where he was going next. We encircled him, we held hands and we sang. They gave him drugs, they took the ventilator out, I left with Vesta before he died and went back to his empty apartment where I put my exhausted toddler to bed, ordered Chinese food for the family and friends who would come back after he was gone, and broke a heart shaped glass dish that I prayed to God did not have a strong significance to anyone, especially not him. I was pregnant with Harvey. I wanted to tell my grandpa before he died but I didn’t. I had only just told my mom days earlier and we were still in what I used to know as the “danger zone”, the first trimester. I wasn’t telling many people yet and I didn’t want to say it to him in that room full of people. I have wished I did. I have imagined that he just knew, in the inbetween state of alive and dead. Six months later, Harvey was born and died and sometimes I think the not telling was reflection of the whisper that Harvey was. The same as how he stopped kicking every time Danny put his hand on my belly. A way of saying, I’m here but I’m not staying, I’m here but I’m not here. Another way of not connecting with the people who would love him most. After Harvey died, I wondered if Grandpa knew, in his inbetween state, that I was pregnant and that his sixth great-grandson would follow him, shortly, into the abyss. I wondered if Harvey was there with him as he left. I wonder if the left together, Richard Duncan and Harvey Richard, in some way, into that place with no time and no space. I wonder if my boy escorted him out and if my Gramps escorted him in.

Six months later, they took the ventilator out of my son’s mouth. Even in those most intense moments, it wasn’t lost on me that I sat with two people, 91 years and 2 days, who died in the same way. Taking their last breaths, hours later than they would have, without those machines, surrounded by people who loved them, people who sang to them. Oh, the people who would have called Harvey, if we’d only thought of that. These two deaths are inextricably linked in my mind, in my being. The eldest and the youngest of my maternal side. Two Richards. My son died the same day my grandfather’s son died, 19 years apart. His name was also Richard. Somehow there is a connected and complete circle there. A connection between those three men and would-be man, with me, all lost and broken in the center of it. Somehow it brings comfort and somehow it makes it worse.

I was so sad when my grandpa died. Today, I thought about her. I thought about that woman who wailed into the phone at the news of Kim’s sudden and untimely death, who cried for four days straight after her aunt’s slow and untimely death, who buckled at the funeral of her other grandpa and who just two years ago got to at once witness this grandpas sacred transition and mourn him all at once. I think of her and now I marvel at how sad she thought she was. How unbearable these losses. How do we live without these people? Without their wisdom and anecdotes and quirks? How are we a family without all of our members? Today, I long for her. I long for that sadness. That sadness that, it turns out, was in fact bearable. I miss my family who are gone. But for me, as the niece and the granddaughter, there was some sense. They would all die before me. My uncle and aunt, far, far, far too soon. They should both be alive still, to this day. Before they died, I couldn’t imagine my life without them but I never imagined they would be with me my whole life. None of my family who are gone. Except Harvey. Except for this sadness that I never imagined I would bear, never imagined I could bear. I turned away from movies and stories about children gone. I gave my condolences and then turned away from people I knew who lost children because I couldn’t imagine it, I could even bear the thought. And in terms of Vesta, I still can’t. Even though I know exactly what it’s like to lose a child, I cannot imagine the loss of another, I cannot even bear the thought.

We can always be sadder. (Not a word but I’m using it anyway). I’ve turned on the news the last couple of days for the first time since Harvey died. I haven’t been able to handle extra noise feeling so overwhelmed already, let alone news of endless and constant tragedy. But all of the sudden, I’ve turned it on when alone in my car. “When the parents of the American journalist beheaded by ISIS last week learned of their sons death…” which quickly became a story about the origins of the organization and a gel-political commentary, I was stunned. I was stunned that we can say such a thing, we can hear such a thing, and move on to something else in the next breath. All I can think about our the parents of a beheaded son and what that must be like. A couple days later, I heard a report of clinicians working with people with incredible PTSD in Kurdistan after they have suffered “the worst forms of torture imaginable”. I believe that I have experienced PTSD from the loss of my son and that I still do, but not like that. Not from unimaginable torture. It can always be worse. But that doesn’t help. Inevitably, putting myself in a larger context of suffering takes my down a road of several days of feeling worse and worse for myself. Just the same as seeing the “first world” complaints and struggles people post on Facebook everyday or hearing them in my own head does. I wake up every morning to a life I don’t want, that has gone off the rails of security and plans and innocence. I want my son alive, I want the ability to have another child, with the man I married, within the marriage and family I thought I had. Now, I even have thoughts outside of that: I’ll adopt a baby on my own, I want to own a house, I want to feel like I can easily support myself and my daughter. But these complaints, these silly wishes that lead only to some false sense of security and comfort don’t help either. They take me down too.

When asked “how are you?” my grandpa would say one of two things: either “I think I’ll make it through the day” or “I’m in good shape for the shape I’m in”. I would always give a small giggle, polite yet awkward, at these replies. But now, I think I understand them. He lived to be 91 years old. He lost his son, mother and wife in three years time. He was hit by a cab at 87 years old, breaking every bone of his pelvis and most of his ribs and he learned to walk and swallow and laugh again, against all odds. He knew he might not make it through the day. His son literally dropped dead at 40 and his wife died unexpectedly after a routine surgery. He knew in his bones, in his broken grieving heart that life is fragile and we can’t necessarily count on it to last. He also knew such great grief, the heavy burden of getting through days without those who were so important to him, so central in his life. Every day after those losses, I’m sure we’re long, long days and he knew he only might make it to the end of the day with all of that heaviness he carried. He accepted his shape. The shape of a man who’s life was full of adventure and chaos and love and joy and heartache and confusion and grief and, those last several years, pretty intense pain and struggle to literally and figuratively get back on his feet. I don’t know if he truly accepted it but the saying of it, the mantra of “I’m in good shape for the shape I’m in” harkens to some truth, some knowing, some acceptance.

Almost daily, I bolster myself with one or both of those phrases. “I think I’ll make it through the day” I whisper to myself. I have lost certainty but not hope. “I’m in good shape for the shape I’m in” I’ll think loudly inside my head. I’m a fucking mess, but I’ll be damned if I don’t carry this mess around with a little bit of grace, a dash vulnerability and a whole lot of resiliency.

2 days and 91 years and so much to learn from them both.

I love you, Gramps. I love you, son. Even if you don’t want to, Harv, learn a little tennis for the old man.

The air here is heavier. It holds scents and feels almost wet on the skin. The houses are set far apart, with aluminum siding in white, pale yellow and green, each with a sun porch and a mowed, green lawn and multiple cars in the driveway. There are crickets instead of crows serenading my midnight writing.

My heart has been broken here before. I have been lost here. I have wandered these streets asking myself these same questions. I know it was heavy then, but it feels heavier now. As a depressed, frequently suicidal teenager I never thought I belonged anywhere and certainly not here. I felt the black sheep. I found kindred spirits and we struggled along together and then we moved on and away and some of us, back.

I asked Danny, “Will you move back to San Francisco?”. He said no, he couldn’t afford it. He said, “Will you move back to New York?” with fear in his voice and I just said no.

I came home to find some comfort. In my family, in the food, in the familiar and I find myself more like myself as a teenager than I ever imagined. I healed myself from my childhood’s confusion and sorrow. I moved to Portland and found a place where I felt like I belonged, among its like-minded people, its trees, its quirky ways. I fell in love. I started eating meat again. I found Nia and danced my way into happiness. I learned massage and took a coaching program that finally transformed my thinking, my feeling, my way of being. I built my toolbox on how to be here, in this world, that I have always felt slightly off key in. I found happiness. I created it. In my late teens, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never be happy. I reasoned that there are happy people and there were sad people and I was a sad person. I would just have to get used to it, just live with it, just make it through. But I learned how to be happy. With the help of teachers and friends, I found my way out. Killing myself slowly stopped entering the list of possible solutions to whatever major troubles arose. I loved and married a man I thought was my match and I learned a lot from him, most importantly, that I was going to be okay, everything was going to be okay. He has that confidence in the world that I never had and he taught me to believe it, by saying it over and over again, by living his life with that knowledge, by being an example. I have everything I need, he taught me. We fell in love, got married, had our first baby. We stumbled and bumbled and worked out kinks and even passed through road blocks. I was happy everyday: to joyfully teach Nia and see how it brought joy and healing to others, to practice massage, one of my life’s true callings, a space I always feel connected and present and whole. I looked forward everyday to coming home to our simple life of “okay”, having dinner together, watching TV, a kiss goodnight and a kiss good morning while I slept and before he left for work. Our daughter came and we cared for her well and together. We took the photos and made the decisions and thoroughly enjoyed our life as a family of three, patiently awaiting the time we would become a family of four. We saved money and invested money and set up retirement accounts and bought life insurance. We were together. I had found my wing man and everything was going to be okay. I was happy. Finally and fully happy. I had met my demons and then left them behind.

Except that my teenage suffering was just the dress rehearsal for what awaited me. It was the workout scenes in the Rocky movies. Somehow, I thought I’d won. That I’d done my work and went on with the rest of my life. And then our baby died. And then I was left barren. And then my marriage ended. And now I am home.

I came home seeking comfort and I find myself adrift again. I feel the heavy air and age of these old homes and the melancholy that comes with the economic downturn of a once booming little town. And I match it again. I am not here to visit and then go back to my happy life. I am here with two gaping holes in my life that reveal themselves so deep, dark and empty in this old, familiar context. I am with my family, it’s oldest surviving members and it’s newest by marriage and by birth and the absence of the two most recently lost becomes a great burden on me. I am overwhelmed again by the weight of it all. The impossible heaviness of absence.

I have been heartbroken here before. I have gnashed my teeth and wailed the cries of the lost love. I have not known how to keep going without my loves. This time, before I arrived home, my heart has laid low while my mind has gone about the business of trying to make sense. How I could have been so foolish. How I could have made endless and tiny bad decisions. How one person can be two so brilliantly. How time seems to have gone by so quickly. How all of our plans and dreams coming true and okayness could just evaporate and I could find myself lost again. Back home, back where I started. Back here, feeling the brokeness of my heart. I have been here since Harvey died, we three came together and held babies and saw everyone for the first time and talked about how our confusion and grief was here before crying ourselves to sleep. After Vesta was born, my dad and stepmother would give us their room. A bigger bed for the the three of us, space to spread out diapers and wipes and changing mats, toys scattered all about, piles of clothes, clean and dirty. When we came here, pregnant with Harvey, I wondered where he would sleep or where Vesta would sleep. I wondered about two car seats and needing another car and how we would arrange sitting together on the plane, how we would eventually afford another seat on each plane. Now, we are down to two and share the guest bed. Her car seat has transformed into a light and manageable booster. She picks up her own toys and the diapers, wipes and mat are a memory. There was nothing to worry about, as it turned out. No longer even the guilty feeling of sending my parents out of their room and exploding our stuff all around it. This time, I feel my heartbreak more fully than I have. This time we plan our meals without him. WIthout him planning them, shopping for them, preparing them and sharing them. Now I put her to bed alone, buckle her in alone, listen to their peels of laughter while I sit on the couch and cry. Now, I feel for the first time the full impact of losing the male members of the family I created, here, at last, amongst the family I was born into. Now, my heart is broken.

I’ve been going for walks to stem the overwhelm. To have some space to give that mind some time to make sense where no sense can be made. As Anne Lamott posted today, to find meaning even in things that don’t make sense. But I don’t find any. I remind myself I am back. I am back to noticing each breath, to putting one foot in front of the other, to just getting through the sadness and brokenness that engulfs me. It is the resurgance of grief with a new one to boot. I desparately text my best friends back in Portland who say the wisest of words, the most supportive sentiments, somehow they always know what to say and what not to say. I text Danny and tell him I loved him being in our family and he tells me he loved it too. He says “best to the family” and “give Vesta my love” and I want to. I want give them his best again. I want them to have the side he showed us. I want to give her his love but I don’t have it, I can’t find it, I’m not sure it even existed in the way that I experienced it. We have now just the worst of each other: my incessant need to push us forward and get things done and his dragging his feet and avoiding. Silence has replaced our love. We say next to nothing to each other. Thirteen years contain a lot of words, true and untrue, and the silence between us in the last two months goes on for millenia.

My family is alive with new babies, babies just turned two and coming up on one. Their lives are full of the milestones and moments we spend with our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren. They all know each other so well, they see each other, they stay together. I fly back and forth and they learn of Vesta in six month increments. And there is no room for Harvey. No stories to be told, no relating to do, no milestones or moments. Just aftermath. We talk one on one about my dead baby and about this man who became a son and grandchild and cousin and who are both gone. I try to make them understand what I cannot. I try to convey these impossible last 3 increments in my life in stolen moments away from others. I am lucky that they ask, that they recognize what might be hard for me. That is much much more than many and even most people have in a family. But I feel that I bring my acheing upon them. That there lives go on as planned with the regular fits and starts, potholes and speed bumps and that mine is this terrible tragedy, unrecognizable, incomprhensible. But it’s not true. We know divorce and we know death, including out of order death. My parents split and two sides mourned the loss of the person they loved and valued and enjoyed being with. My aunt died way too early after a long illness leaving my uncle a widower and my young cousins to try to live without their mom. My grandfather died, leaving my grandmother to live alone for the first time in her life at 82 and now she must negotiate old age alone, leaving her home and coming to terms with her own inevitable passing, all without her partner. We lost a son, a brother, a grandson, a great grandson, a nephew, a cousin, one to death and one to estrangement. Another family member left the fold without dying and so the gaps in our photographs keep growing and keep getting filled. And we are subject to this life, to this cycle. We stumble through. We hold what’s dear closer. We steal conversations, away from little ears, so that our alone time might not feel so alone.

Yes, I am back here. Some conglomorate of my sad self and happy self finding that neither last. That there is no this or that. That there is no there there. There may be something in between and there may be something else. Something else to strive for. Something besides trying to maintain the happy times and trying to get out of the sad as quickly as possible. There is something in the gaps. There is learning to love this life with all of it’s impossibilities and never-able-to-prepare for losses. There is drawing strength from the laughter to carry us through the tears. In these in between places, there is glue and tape and thread to put our hearts back together with. There is a long linaege of resilience, endurance, and finally, hopefully, possibly acceptance. There is a group of people born and wed to each other who love without condition. Each who would give me a roof, a car, a job, some money, if I asked. And I them. Even if none of us had any of that, we’d give it. We are the family who laugh through our tears, who bear the unbearable together. Who stand in shock and grief at funeral homes and cemetaries. Who stand in front of a sea of family and loved ones as we declare our love and commitment to the newest person we will welcome in with open arms, even if we have doubts, even if we fear they may not be as careful with our family as we need them to be. We stand in hospitals welcoming the babies who come to us, who stay and who go. And there will be more of all of this. There will be fewer and fewer of us left as we welcome more and more new people in. We will share with our new loves the legacy of our old. We will share with them acceptance and understanding, of always thinking the best of others, of always trying our best and most importantly, how to be a family who loves with our very breath, the very beating of our broken and always-more-room hearts, to the very last ones.

When my parents split and sold my childhood home, I felt displaced. My dad said, “Home is where your family is.” I didn’t believe him until I saw it, until I felt it myself. I toss around a lot cliches in my head these days that have brand new meaning: love is blind, actions speak louder than words, do as I do not as I say. But the one I get now, in a whole new way, in a more complete and integrated fashion is “home is where the heart is”. The home I live in inside my chest, where my babies live and all of my loves do too. The home I have in Portland with my most treasured friends who I have chosen as my family. The home, here, where I grew up, where my family is. Home is wherever your heart is. And I have the very good fortune of many, many homes.

“Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog

Where no one notices the contrast of white on white

And in between the moon and you, angels get a better view

Of the crumbling difference between wrong and right

Well, I walk in the air between the rain

Through myself and back again

Where? I don’t know”

           – Round Here by Counting Crows
He left.

Thirteen years and many miles and gone.

We walked calmly through the house and divided our things. The Cuisenart for the Vitamix. Some large plates, some small. A few cups, my favorite mug. Art from the walls, photographs taken down. Our son’s memorial book. The double frame of our babies in the same position: one asleep resting her head on her arm in my lap, one dead, photographed by a stranger who arranged him by happenstance in the same way on the NICU couch. It’s over.

The truck almost packed, I sat on the couch and cried finally. He come to sit by me, elbows on knees, head in hands. I talked, he sat. I tried to make sense, I apologized. He said, “You know I did this.” And then, “I have to get the truck back.” And he walked in front of me and left.

Vesta played with her friend as I paced, trying to find a place for myself in our home, still full of our years and years of stuff, so little he could take for his new studio. I texted my dad. He texted me back. Searching for the man who never leaves, the man who was also left. Different story, different circumstances, and yet, alone in the homes we created, alone for the first time.

I cried. It rained. It began pouring like it never does in Portland. Huge drops of warm summer rain creating instant puddles. I sat again on our couch and watched it fall and then walked out into it. Like a ghost or a zombie, just called out there, so I went. I stood there like some stupid heroine in a romantic comedy, getting drenched, watching the drops pummel our park, our fence, our pathway. I begged for this rain to cleanse me. To free me. To be some sign from the universe that there will be sunshine. That there is something after this besides more tragedy and heartache. I smirked that he was having to move his things into his own place in the deluge. Some kind of small justice. And I felt free and I felt cleansed and I felt lost and I felt alone, so very, very alone in this world, subject to its elements, subjects to the chaos of this universe, to the curve balls and the right hooks this life throws at us. A few days later my friend would say, “For a white girl in the United States, you have had the worst.” A little perspective, a little truth, a lot of rain.

I walked inside to our nearly empty bedroom: where we loved, where we birthed, where we grieved, where we slept, where we spoke, where we dressed, where we died. The girls were in there and Vesta looked at me, sopping wet in my tunic, sweatshirt and yoga pants, my hair dripping, my shoulders caved, my tears replaced by those from the sky. She looked at me with the most amazing mix of bewilderment, surprise and joy. “Why did you do that, Mommy?!”, she exclaimed. “I don’t know”, I laughed, “I just stood out in the rain.” By then it had let up and not long after I had dried myself off and changed my clothes, piled my sleek hair into a high bun on my head, the rain came again. He was probably driving to return the truck by now and our daughter, with delight and daring, playfully commanded me to go back out there and stand in the rain in my clothes again. I declined, this time. Enough is enough.

It’s over. It’s just beginning. There is warmth and there is renewal. There is deluge and there will inevitably be dryness and drought. There is life after this for she and I. There is more than a mother crying everyday for a year for the baby she lost. More than a mother who is irritable and short and gone. More than this mother who watched her love drive away, again, 11 years after the first time, in a truck full of his stuff, who then stood outside in the pouring rain looking for a sign. There is more than this. There is joy again. There is reconnection. There is knowing and comfort and laughter. There is growing and pain and confusion. There are two homes to negotiate, documents to sign, decisions to be made. There are questions without answers and questions I don’t even remember that I even asked because the answers have become truth.

What will we do without him? How will it be to spend the rest of our lives together and yet apart? What will she want from us? When will her desire to have us all together wane? When will mine? What has happened to the life we planned, for ourselves and for our daughter? The life we ushered her into and now through that had a plan and a path and a way that she wasn’t even aware of? Will this be her truth now? This will be her truth now. There are three sides to every story, to our story: his, mine and hers. It happens everyday. It happens to most families, to most marriages. But just like everything else, it’s different when it’s mine. When it wasn’t what I expected, when it wasn’t what I wanted for her or for me ,for that matter. When I’ll spend endless moments, both day and night, trying to figure it out, trying to make different decisions in the past, scolding myself for bringing her and I to this moment, these circumstances, this sorrow. This amazing bewilderment, streaking itself across her face, betraying her every emotion and thought in that moment. May I always know, may I always see it, may I always have a better explanation than I gave.

They say, make plans and God laughs. God’s sides must hurt by now. This white girl from the United States gives up. Lives in the gray. Lives now in the pieces left after the shatter rather than spaces of brokenness between them. She gathers herself up. Lives in the unknown, the unplanned, the unenvisioned. I hear the people around me talk of their plans, their confidence in their path. and now I laugh and my sides hurt. That will do, until it doesn’t. And then what? And then what will you do? Will you lay more plans? Will I? Will you stand outside with me in the pouring rain and wait for a sign?

I heard a TED talk tonight by a child of holocaust survivors growing up in a community of holocaust survivors and she said there were two kinds of people in her childhood world: those who didn’t die and those who were alive. And, for a second, I saw everyone divided into those two catergories. And I wondered, in which am I? Will I always chose to be alive or will I simply not have died and live close to the Earth, clutching onto the things I hold most dear. And I thought about my husband, out there in the world somewhere tonight, trying to find ways to feel alive, to feel conencted, to feel powerful and here. And I hope he does, in ways he’s never dreamed for himslef. And I hope I do, in all the ways I have.