Tag Archives: grief

Parenthesis.

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Dear Papa,

Two years yesterday was your last day awake: your feet were too warm so you didn’t want them covered by the thin hospital sheet and blanket but it felt good for someone to rub them. We all sat around your bed, come and went throughout the day. At night, you said Vesta and I didn’t need to stay, you knew how boring it was to sit around with the dying since you’d done that with your mom, not even 5 month before. I said we were happy to be there but, a few minutes later you said it again, so I asked if you wanted us to leave and you said you thought that was best. We kissed you goodnight and I said what I said each night before we left you in the hospital that week two years ago: “I’ll see you tomorrow, if you are still here.” And you gave me your last small smile, your last little nod. The thought that if I never you left you, you’d never leave wafted through my brain in that moment. Our brains, always trying to find the solution, always trying to defy our nature, because they so often can. What a relief, after all these years wrangling with not being able to save my son, that the thought evaporated into nothing and I put my arm around my kid as we walked the hall to the elevators. I took her to eat at Applebees, where we made funny TIkToks and sent you the last picture of us we’d ever send you and you’d never see.

Today, two years ago, you were here but asleep thanks to morphine and Klonopin. I saw you but you didn’t see me. You were all done with words, so I didn’t hear you but you heard me. We felt each other. I touched your foot and moved up your leg until I felt where your body began to warm again: just after the knee. Some kind of imprecise barometer of how much longer you’d be here. Not long. I sat with you and we felt each other’s presence there, for the last time, in the blue light of the midnight hospital room death bed. I felt you and you felt me as I kissed your forehead. I heard me, and you heard me say “Goodbye, Papa. I love you.” I hope I said thank you, too.

Tomorrow, you were gone. I was dropping the ridiculous, giant truck I had rented by mistake at the Binghamton airport when the hospital called me. How stupid is that? At the counter of Hertz or enterprise or something and then you’re dead? The kind clerk said don’t worry about anything, just go, she’d take care of it all and I hoped that would include a discount, but it didn’t, in the end.

Mom pulled up to the long, wide, empty sidewalk that serves as both arrivals and departures at this little regional airport and I got in the front seat and told her you died. She said “Oh hun,”and squeezed my leg, like she always does when the worst thing has happened. She said, “I’m so sorry,” like it was only mine. Like you weren’t once hers, too. It was a gift to have that for a moment: just me and you without each other and Mom there to witness it. A microsecond later, all I could think of was all the phones calls I needed to make. I thought about how I didn’t want to go back to your house and tell my stepmom.

The other day, Vesta said, “It’s so weird that Papa is dead.” As a swung the car into our parking spot. “It’s so weird.” I said back. Because it is. Because what the fuck even is this world without you in it?

As I stepped out of the car and onto the asphalt, I felt my body acutely in this world without the container of you. You were the parenthesis around me. I, an inserted but important phrase in you story. You held me in. You were this: (me). Now what?

A few nights later, my friend Meg and I were at my house playing Scrabble. She said, “Sometimes, I think to myself ‘I should call my dad’ or ‘I haven’t talked to my mom in awhile’. It’s so weird.” And this does not bode well for me because her parents have been dead quite a few more years than you and sometimes she still forgets she’s a complete sentence on her own now. Perhaps you all hold us in forever. That little moment of forgetting is like this: (Meg).

Back in September, Vesta’s new friend from third period American Sign Language was in the back seat when I told her she couldn’t go with them to this or that because she had Dougy. Her friend sat up: “Dougy?” And Vesta said, “Yeah it’s like therapy but for kids who had someone die.” Her new friend said, “I go to Dougy, too.” In the front seat, I smiled and exhaled. Rare kin.

On the way to tennis practice the other day, this same friend and Vesta were talking about grieving someone they never knew and how hard that is. How the groups at Dougy would ask questions like “What’s your person’s favorite color?” or “What’s your favorite memory with your person?” and that neither of them can answer, which creates its own grief for these two hurting, insightful, wisened teens. I told them that it’s not great to compare but that I was going to do it anyway. That, for me, having now lost you after losing Harvey, it felt harder to lose Harvey (maybe because he was my kid? of course because he was but also:) because I didn’t have any memories with him. I never got to know him. And that not very many people understand that. In fact, most think it’s the opposite: we’d miss him less because we never knew him.

Vesta said, “It’s not just cuz he’s your kid, Mom. We have, like, soooo many memories of Papa. Like, all these fun things we did and good times and all these things he told me about. I really miss him but it’s just different…”

So, there’s that: fun things, good times, all the things you told us about. We have that. We got to know you.”Got,” like had-the-privilege. Like we’re so lucky you didn’t die before we could know each other, like your dad did, like her friend’s mom did, like Harvey did. We got to know you. “Got”, like got.

For the last six months or so, I have been driving around, hiking around, looking out at the skyline of my favorite city and falling deeply, deeply in love with it. I have always been in love with Portland since the very first time I drove into town in 2000 from my cross country adventure and got myself an apple juice at some little store on NE Broadway. I knew this was my home. Just the feel of it. My young life, ready and ripe to begin in this new place on this whole other side of the country. I couldn’t get much farther from home. And yet, I had found it.

It’s really different now. Way more people live in tents on the streets, not just run away youth like back then. It’s fentanyl instead of meth, now. Some downtown buildings have stayed boarded up since Covid and the uprisings of 2020. It’s full of high-rise, personality-less apartment buildings where once were cool, old shops and victorian style homes. Roads have been one-wayed and diverted to accommodate the many expats, like me, who have found this place magic and stayed in droves. There’s a sentiment across the country, and even among us Portlanders, that it’s lost its shine. Even the dream of the 90s is dead in Portland and retired people are stretched to retire here, let alone young people.

And yet, I’ve been marveling at myself marveling at my city. Feeling so rooted here. Thinking, I never want to leave here. Planning to live in Portland forever. The beauty of the fogged in firs along the highway this morning, the towering downtown buildings and steel bridges over the quick moving river, the blooms of the magnolia tree and cherry blossoms and the ephemeral trillium in the forests. My people here: grievers and writers, queers and parents, teenagers figuring it out as I drive them back and forth, a city of tender-hearted, weird, resilient people. Where else would I go?

Until you died and I sold your house, to you. You were (always) my back up plan, my ride or die, my safety net. If anything went sideways, I knew I could always go “home” to you.

I remember being beside myself when I learned that you and Mom had agreed in the divorce to sell the house I grew up in when I went to college. I felt betrayed and told you so. You said, “You’ll come to understand that your home is not your house. Your home is where your family is.” And I said, “No I won’t” and stayed mad about it.

Until your next house, the house I sold last year, became just as much my home as the one I grew up in, even though I never lived there for longer than a few months at a time. And (hopefully) I told you as much. Hopefully, I told you you were right and that those words, which I believed with zero parts of me, have become an essential truth for me. A truth that I would tell my own kid, every time she moved (nine times so far between me and her dad) over and over again. A truth that I would have to be sure to embody for her: I am your family. This is our house. We make it a home.

But now what? What happens when you’re dead? For months after you died, I was untethered. I’d think to myself “I knew that was bullshit when he said it, and see? I was right. And now I’ve been telling my kid that lie her whole life, too.”

And then these past months started happening. These weird feelings of being settled and content here. Like my body and the skyline and the fir trees and the trillium flower match. Blend like two voices finding harmony. Like I’ve finally found my place, my home, and it’s been literally under my feet for 25 years.

Driving over the Marquam bridge on a rare sunny winter day, seeing my favorite urban vista (the skyline with the sun reflecting off the Big Pink skyscraper; looking up the Willamette river with its bridges bracketing the city together; Mt. Hood to my right, a perfect beret of clouds along its cap and Mt. St Helen’s to the north, flat topped and majestic; the blue sky with its whisps and wandering clouds opening up to me), I realize I fell at home now, at home here, because you are gone. Without you, I can root down here and finish out my life, in my home, without you. That the tether to you has become the roots to here. That I have become my own back up plan; my friends here are my ride or die; the communities I’ve built, my safety net. I created this whole other life on the whole other side of the country without you and because of you. And, now, I will continue to. But without you, for real this time, this rest of my life.

Thanks to you, this is me:

(Vesta).

And this is me: (Harvey).

And when she’s this: Vesta and I’m with you and we’re with him, she’ll know what to do, too.

Goodbye again, Papa. I love you. And thank you. For all of it.

Love,

(Monica)

Laughter.

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Grief is like laughter. It’s triggered by living. Something happens, something is said, a memory flashes and there it is, carbonating up from your belly or toes or throat. A laugh. You can’t help it. It just happens.

Like grief. Like my son’s birthday is the expiration on the carton of milk I recently bought for his sister’s boba teas. Like I saw a funny meme about Wayne’s World and I automatically hit the little arrow “send” button to forward to my dad, who’s been dead almost two years. Like a client tells me about her partner dying suddenly from a heart attack without heart disease at 50 and suddenly my Uncle Kimmy’s 40 year old, fluffy mustache, black Ray Bans and huge smile come into sharp focus in my mind’s eye, because he died like that, too, 30 something years ago. It just bubbles up.

Grief is like a time machine, like laughter. Like when we’d all crack up at my dad’s story of his boyhood hound dog, Question, who was scared of the back steps but would still bark there to be let in before running around to the front door’s not-scary steps. How I might as well have been right there with my teenage dad as he told the story for the hundredth time, getting up off the couch to open the front door, Question excitedly circling us before belonging to the kitchen for his food dish. Like when my baby, small enough to lay vertically on my lap, looked up at me and laughed for the first time, eyes shining, and there was nowhere else in the whole world but right there, right then. Like when “Build Me Up Buttercup” is background music at a kitchy boutique on the Oregon coast and I quietly sing along but I might as well be belting it out with Theresa as we shoved ourselves out the doors of our high school one sunny day, the year before she died driving too fast on a windy country road known for crashes.

Grief has all these different sizes and tenors and other emotions threaded through like laughter does, too. Like when the kids couldn’t go to the movie theatre (or the water park or their favorite restaurant or inside friends’ houses or school) during the pandemic and so we made our bedroom into a movie theatre- complete with tickets, concessions, and their own little chairs at the base of the bed- and we had the best, most fun, laughter filled, normal feeling night in a long continuum of weeks and months of constant uncertainty and disappointments. Like how I got my daughter from her dad once when she was 5 and relatively new to this one-parent-a-time business and she burst into tears the minute we drove away and all I could think to do was tell her how sad what was happening to her was and then roll the windows down, blast her favorite song and drive a little too fast down the highway, showing her that sometimes matching the intensity of the inside to the outside can be potent medicine, at least for a few moments.

Like how we think grief is only big and obvious. Like it’s only for death. As if it’s not the loss we feel after the baby is born or the vows are said or the new house paperwork is signed for the life we lived before all of this and how we’ll never be that person again. As if it’s not when your mission driven company, with your dedicated coworkers, unheard of benefits package and work you love, dissolves and you can’t find that kind of meaning or camaraderie at your job again. As if it’s not how time just keeps going and buildings that have always been there are torn down for standard-issue apartment complexes and your favorite restaurant shutters and you have to move somewhere completely new to you, anyway.

Grief is so natural, it’s like laughter. So woven into our daily lives. Sometimes so acute we can’t fight and sometimes just a little shutter through our bodies. Sometimes, grief is laughter and sometimes, laughting is grieving. The gift of both being complex and nuanced and human. Of just being a consequence of being alive.

Sliver.

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I loved your first birthday. The lead up and now the aftermath are treacherous and unbearable but, I loved your birthday.

You have, we have, this amazing family and this amazing group of friends I’ve known forever and all of these amazing people who are new to our lives, who you brought to us, either by your magic of setting me up with people I needed before you were born and died or from our support group, together because our children were here and now they are gone. We are surrounded by this loving, supportive, generous, and thoughtful village of people who loves us so much, who love you so much, who miss you so much. Your grandparents flew from New York and New Jersey and your aunt, uncle and cousin came from San Francisco. Papa and Nona said they wanted to come months ago and bought tickets in advance. I was so touched. They have flown to every one of your sister’s birthdays and it meant so much to me that they would come for yours that I just said “yes!” without talking to your dad or even considering what we might want to do, that we might not want to be around other people on your birthday and anniversary. But then Tio and Mandy said they wanted to come, too, that they were planning on it, so we decided to make a “thing” of it. To invite your other two grandmas and make it a family affair. A time to all come together and love and miss you under one roof. What a gift.

T suggested that we do something together, plant trees or release butterflies. I agreed but we had already done both of those things and so I wasn’t sure what to “do”. A few days later, I was driving and I saw a huge, illuminated billboard that the March of Dimes walk was the day before your birthday, your birthday weekend. I barely knew what the March of Dimes was but I knew it was for babies, I knew it was something we could do together. It turns out the March of Dimes supports families with babies in the NICU, works to prevent prematurity and educates for healthy, full term pregnancies. Your contribution to this world was an attempt to save babies with your heart valve donation and your corneas going to vision research, so this was a perfect way to continue your legacy and have an event for us to put our focus on. We had nearly 20 people walk with us, these same amazing people: your family, my dear friends and my new friends who have held me up this year. We raised nearly $4000 from the sheer generosity and compassion of those that love you, that love us, that just know us or one of your family members or friends. We sported our “Harvey the Hero” t-shirts and we walked. We walked 2.5 miles and Papa took us all out to lunch. All these people who love us, who love you, all together, for babies who have a chance.

The next day was your birthday. I awoke at 6:03am, hearing Abuela come up the stairs, and willed myself up an out of bed to light the Yahrzeit candle that Grandma sent. She sent two and, I don’t know Jewish tradition, but I decided to have these 24 hour candles lit for the whole time you were alive outside of the womb. I couldn’t do it. I just laid there paralyzed and exhausted until your dad got up a few minutes later and said he was going for a run and I asked him to do it.

I decided to keep your first birthday ceremony again limited to those who met you, and of course the family that was visiting, who instead of flying out quickly to meet you, waited so they could come later and support us through our grief. We all gathered. Papa made chili, L brought the most amazing kale salad, and J created the most beautiful and perfect birthday cake for you that I could have ever imagined. We gathered in the park with things from your altar I used to mark the seasons throughout this first year: the special Teddy Bear Alison gave us at your service, shells from the beach during Bubba’s birthday weekend, the skeleton family I queried about on Facebook and Dennise sent to me, the ceramic turkey I bought for Thanksgiving, the Christmas ornament from our support group, the heart I sewed at Vesta’s school for Valentine’s Day, an Easter egg your sister made, and the “I Did It” March for Dimes pin. Your picture, the locket with your hair from Thalia, a glass ladybug, and a sparkly heart from Nona, one of the first things on your altar. She brought it 2 months after you died.

I never know what to do with your ashes. They are in the same tin they were brought home to us in and they sit on the shelf in my closet. I have tried to put them on your altar or find a pretty urn but nothing feels right. Because nothing is right. There is no appropriate place to but your dead child’s ashes. Except, they found their first place, out there in the park with us. The first time “you”, your remains, felt like they had a place: out in the park with those who love you. I placed them on the try with flowers from my cousin, a photo of your blossoming tree at Papa’s house, a picture of Gram and baby G wishing you a happy birthday from NY and a photo your Grandma sent of us and Tio at the hospital, all gazing down out you, trying to soak you in, burn you into our mind’s eye, because you’d be gone soon.

We all stood out there in our park with your things there, balloons from Nona. We played music and your midwife read a beautiful quote from Anais Nin.  Your dad wept and he was not alone. Everyone cried. Everyone except me. I felt like I wasn’t doing it right. What kind of mother is not crying at a memorial ceremony for her son? Was I numb? Was I doing better? Was this ritual helping me? Was my planning it, preparing it, running it, taking away from my ability to grieve on your first birthday? Was I using that as an escape? I was self-conscious about my dry eyes, about laughing and smiling as we blew bubbles for you. This is the time. We gather to remember and to grieve and to cry and to hold each other up on these marker days, on these anniversaries and I just felt strangely comfortable. It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized what happened to me that day, why I loved your birthday.

I cry almost  everyday. My daily tears returned at the beginning of March, almost two months ago. My grief overcame me like a tsunami. During the weeks leading up to your birthday, I was crying anytime I was alone. I would pull myself together to do my life and fall apart inbetween. Or sometimes, I would cry again while doing my public life because I couldn’t pull it together. I would ache for you. I started negotiating with God again, bargaining, magical thinking, pretending. All of that beginning stuff. Back. I began to dread night time when all I had bottled up during the day, to get through the day, came pouring out. I’ve been nauseated most days again, at its worse I have the toxic blood feeling, like each of my cell walls is burning, that move through my body in sickening pulses. Back to feeling so uncomfortable I just want to crawl out of my skin, to get out of this body, this life of mine. Sitting, standing, laying down nothing helps, there is no comfortable way to be.

But your birthday arrives and I am comfortable. It was almost like a break. Everyone was focused on you like I am always focused on you. Everyone was crying. Everyone was missing you acutely. I wasn’t alone. For the first time in months, I didn’t feel alone, being surrounded by all of these people who want you here, too. Your midwives who, in there own terror, tried so hard to save you as I screamed, were there standing next to me, wishing I was like all of their other clients, save one other, crying because you are still gone. Everyone wishing this was different. Not just me. As the months went by after you died, I began to long for that first week, when it was like this. When everyone’s grief matched my own. When people were flying in. When everyone walked around in a daze. And here was a piece of it again. Here I was again, surrounded by people who love us, who also can’t believe it, who also want you back, who also don’t know what to do next.

I spent your birthday weekend being overwhelmed. I couldn’t tease anyhting apart becasue everything felt overwhelming: the grief, the loss, your absence, the joy of being around your sister and cousin, laughing and talking with your family like nothing was a miss. Later in the day, I would look at pictures of the walk and your ceremony and the cake and the littlest ones in our family gathered around to blow out your candle for you, and I realized one of the most overwhelming feelings I had was gratitude. I looked at those pictures and I felt blessed. I felt blessed for the first time in exactly a year. Everyday of my life I am surrounded by good things, by blessings, by people and opportunities and experiences and circumstances that 99%  of the world’s people will never know. I am one of the very few lucky ones. And I can’t see it anymore. I can’t feel it anymore. Your absence blots out the good that I experience because it all just keeps happening, even though you are gone. There is joy but it is always tempered by you not being here. It is always my second thought, the next feeling, after I laugh or smile or feel joy and pride and ease. It’s learning to live with joy and tragedy in nearly the same breath, in nearly every breath, that I find so impossible. They used to feel separate: now I am happy, now I am sad. Or when there were mixed emotions, so proud of your sister for doing something she couldn’t do just yesterday and so sad that she is growing so fast and a phase has ended, they didn’t contrast so sharply, they weren’t so intense. In this example, the pride was stronger than the sadness. Not so, anymore. But this weekend, since the whole thing was so intense, so jumbled, so impossible to know how or what to feel, how or who to be, somehow what sifted out was that old familiar feeling, like from a dream, like a long lost memory evoked from a present day smell, of gratitude. Gratitude which I used to practice like one does an instrument. Gratitude which once transformed my life in profound ways. Gratitude which I have attempted to feel using a variety of tactics so often this year. That I finally came to realize, I was feeling it, it just, like everything else, didn’t feel like it used to . So much so that I couldn’t even recognize it. But I felt it this weekend. When I should have been looking at you enjoying your first special day and feeling gratitude that you had come into our lives, I was looking around at what your short little life created in the people who love us, who love you, and I felt it anyway and like I used to.

Over your birthday weekend, I also gained a clearer understanding that I must live some of my life for you, carry out your work here for you, or what I imagine your work to be. Not what it would be, not what I envisioned it to be. I don’t know that I imagined what your contribution to the world would be but it certainly wasn’t what I now know it to be. Now I know that you came to spark a compassion in me for other babies and other families. This weekend bought me clarity, it brought me a settling in of how I do our work now. Of how I work with grieving families on my behalf and how I work to help save babies, to help prevent grieving families, on your behalf. Your life’s work, your souls’ purpose this time around will not take your lifetime to be revealed. It arrived in me after you died. These last 12 months bringing me to a weekend where I felt gratitude and blessing again. This weekend that I thought would cripple me but rather brought some clarity, brought some light, became a pivotal moment in my grief journey in a way I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years.

I didn’t know what to expect on this day. I didn’t know if I’d be able to get out of bed, or since my life is a series of “do it anyway” actions, it’s more accurate to say if I’d feel like getting out of bed or not because I’d do it anyway, regardless. I assumed it would be all sorrow, all anguish. But instead, it was a crack. It was a crack in the armor of my grief. Instead, I stood with people who love us so dearly, and for once, I didn’t still feel alone, isolated, made of different stuff. The feeling of gratitude, the ability to feel blessed, it cracked it open and now there is this sliver of light shining from the my chest. It is just a sliver but it is a beacon, nonetheless. I felt like a real human again even if jsut for those moments or even for a few days and that light, that crack, illuminates the dark path I am walking. “Here is the way”, it says. “Follow this light because there is wholeness somewhere. And if not wholeness, than more of these feelings. More of coming alive again. Follow this tiny, sliver light.” That’s all it takes. I don’t need beams or a spot light or the sun. I just need this tiny sliver.

People brought you gifts. They brought us gifts. A beautiful, silver forget-me-not charm that I don’t envision I will take off for years to come. A rainbow swirled lollipop with a stuffed zebra holding on to it. Handmade ceramic hearts, ladybugs and flowers glued to a beautiful, thick orange ribbon with a cloth vine winding through it. Your aunt and uncle sat down and recorded your story, their experience of this past year without you, and gave us a CD of it. Candles, cards, so many many things. Even though you are dead, people brought you gifts, made you gifts, thought about you, talked about you. I have nothing of you but this. Nothing but my own grief and the grief of others which seems less intense, less persistnat, less ever-present than my own. I have felt so alone, even with your dad, these approaching weeks, and now somehow, I have more of you because they all told me about you. They all told me about themselves, about what their lives are like without you. They all brought you something. They all brought me something. The precious gift of you. The precious gift of sharing with me how you, how your life, lives in their hearts. When we have children and we share them with the world. We talk about them and take their pictures and worry to each other about them and go into too much boring detail and they become the center of our lives. I don’t get to do that with you. In the minds of most people, your story has ended. The details of it seemingly too painful to continue to talk about. But at these moments, these moments that feel so few, that will become fewer, less pressing for others, and for me too, as time goes on, these are the moments that bring you back to me in the only way you can be here. In the hearts of others. In my heart, reflected back to me by being allowed to see into the hearts of others.