by Band Back Together | Sep 11, 2010 | Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, How To Help A Friend With Infertility, Infertility, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Miscarriage |
The first miscarriage was the one that destroyed me.
I lost four more babies; suffered a failed adoption; and barely saw my first born before she was yanked from between my legs – limp and drenched in a dark, life-sucking coat of meconium – then rushed to specialists trained to cheat death.
But that first loss, when my body cramped and convulsed and spit out a baby we so desperately wanted, is what shattered my heart. It robbed me of hope and started a years-long spiral into grief, despair and, ultimately, nothingness.
Exhausted by the anguish and terrified of feeling it again, I turned off as one loss became two. I numbed myself as two bled into three, and the doctors called me infertile. I became a shell and didn’t feel the fourth miscarriage or remember the fifth. I disassociated from my body when the doctors told me they intubated our first born and knocked her out after she had an eight-minute seizure. That person, sitting speechless and alone in the hospital room after they rushed our baby to a first-rate NICU at a different hospital in another city? That wasn’t me.
But it was.
I was 30 and married just a few months when I first got pregnant. I didn’t know much about babies, didn’t have friends who had them – or lost them. And I certainly never heard the statistic that as many as 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage.
We pored over baby name books at the bookstore and delighted my parents with the news. We heard the baby’s heartbeat and marked the due date on the calendar.
Then we saw blood. Just a spot. “It’s common in early pregnancy,” the nurse told us over the phone. “Try not to worry.” So, we didn’t. We believed her. We didn’t know enough not to. Idiots.
Then I bled more and they asked us, ever so calmly, to come in to the office. “Let’s just take a look.”
I sat in the passenger’s seat while Kent drove down the interstate and I tried not to think this was anything more than typical bleeding. Truthfully, though, I feared otherwise. Kent excitedly pulled an ultrasound photo from his suit pocket as we readied for the doctor; he couldn’t wait to compare the growth from the last appointment to now.
Ten years later, I can still see the inside of the car and the exit from the highway as it was that day that changed everything. I see the inside of the doctor’s office and Kent fiddling with the black and white photo.
“Put it away,” I snapped nervously. Sure he was jinxing the luck we needed.
And then, quick and impersonal as a business transaction at the bank, the doctor inserted the ultrasound wand, marked the top and bottom of the little bean with an X and explained that he didn’t see a heartbeat.
“Put your clothes back on and when I come back in we’ll talk,” he said.
We left the office in silence, a short, poorly-written book about miscarriage in our hands and an appointment for a D&C on the books. The tears started in the car and rushed with scary abandon once I crumbled on to the couch at home. I hid my face and howled into a pillow. Angry, terrified, lost.
Kent made phone calls to my family, talked to my boss. He tried to explain what we didn’t understand. How it happened. Why? When.
I agonized over the “when,” made myself sick flipping through the calendar as I tried to imagine what I did the day our baby died. Because, of course, I killed the baby. We went camping a few weekends before: did scrambling over rocks and hiking to exhaustion kill the baby? I spent too many hours at the newsroom: did I drown the baby with the stress of deadlines, interviews, and vapid politicians?
The baby fell out of me in horrifying pools of blood and fluid and mangled clots the night before the doctors planned a sterile procedure on a cold operating table. I was alone in the house, doubled over with cramps when the first gush sent me running to the toilet. Over the course of the night, Kent phoned the doctor several times to ask about the shocking volume of blood spilled in the tub, the toilet, the bed, on the floor.
We left the doctor’s office the next morning in silence. We stopped for bagels – because I was famished after losing so much blood – and ate without a word: chewed food, swallowed milk, stared past each other. Like robots, if robots could eat.
Kent went to work while I called in sick the next few days, stayed home and wept with little reprieve. I listened to angry, pulsing music at deafening volume to drown the mournful wails of my heart. And I wrote a letter to the baby I held in my belly but never felt in my arms.
“Today we were supposed to see you once again, all flickers and squirms and holy, miraculous life,” I wrote. “Instead, we shall say goodbye. We came to church to do it. We had hoped the baptismal waters would rush one Sunday morning in June as the priest held you aloft and the congregation craned to see your pink body and dark hair. God would welcome you then, we thought. We didn’t know He’d want to take you now…
“Now, we entrust you to Him. Though we wanted so desperately to hold you and touch you. Love you. Watch you. Clothe and bathe and feed you. Nibble your feet and tickle your ears. We couldn’t. But we did love you. And we will miss you. You can be sure.”
I signed the letter, then Kent did too and we traveled to church to leave a pink tulip at the base of the baptismal font, a symbolic gesture to signal the start of our healing.
Ten years later, I pulled the letter from the envelope and found a leaf from a Japanese maple and a helicopter seed tucked in with it. Signs of life lost, just like our baby.
I changed, but I am not healed.
by Band Back Together | Sep 10, 2010 | Baby Loss, Child Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Coping With Losing A Child, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Loss |
A little while after Charlie died, a girl I volunteered with at the Ronald McDonald House shared her idea with me about the grieving process. She had lost her 5 year old to Cancer a few years earlier so she had experience and was already a member of the “Moms of Angels” club.
She said grieving was much like a rock in your shoe.
And you can’t get it out. Can’t take the shoe off and shake it out. It is there and always will be.
At first it cuts into your heel and ball of your foot causing you to bleed and be in pain. Then after a little while, you can wiggle it around and get it into a spot where you can’t feel it too much.
But every now and then something will happen and make that rock get under the heel of your foot – causing you to bleed and be in pain. So you go through life with this rock in your shoe that sometimes causes you a lot of pain and sometimes is just “there”.
I thought that was very interesting at the time. And now I know that it is very true.
I attended a visitation for a friend’s stepdad about 5 years later at the funeral home where Charlie was. I remember our visitation almost too vividly. I remember greeting hundreds of people (seriously, like 500) – local friends and friends who had driven several hours or had flown in for our 24-day old baby’s funeral. It was very humbling. I had been in that room for various visitations over the last 5 years with very little pain. But tonight for some reason when I walked in the room, I felt physically ill. Like I might throw up. I remember feeling that way the first time I went in the church where we had his service (my home church) and that morning they just happened to have a baptism and sang “Jesus Loves Me”. Again, I felt physically ill.
You never know what is going to trigger one of those “Moments” and the moment might not make you cry and get all emotional or anything, but it puts a knot in your stomach and makes your hands shake and just makes you feel that rock in your shoe.
But I’ll be able to wiggle it back out of the way and go for a little while until it decides to get under my heel again. This is how we are able to go on.
by Band Back Together | Sep 10, 2010 | Coping With Losing A Partner, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Loss, Partner/Spouse Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder |
i’m thinking i should tell my story.
or attempt to.
i am being nudged because there is a new site coming up and it’s about..READY FOR THIS…grief.
all kinds of grief, the grief spectrum. whatever.
anyway, i know about it. way too much. and i also realize this is an attempt, because it won’t be right.
not that it’ll ever be right, but i figure i’ll have to hone this to make it really readable, or good enough, or…
wtf? good enough? for who?
jesus, it is what it is. i write like i write. i feel what i feel. (sense the anger? i seethe a lot, sometimes it is a murderous rage, often directed at my dead husband. it’s a nice side effect of ptsd. as is depression and drinking and eating too much or too little – done all)
so.
january 21 2006.
i feel my husband get out of bed, roll over. “morning”
..i go back to sleep.
(it’s a saturday morning, it’s 7:30 am..yeah, i go back to sleep! don’t judge)
maybe, MAYBE 5 minutes later i hear my son running down the hall, screaming “daddy fell and there’s blood”.
up like a shot, into the bathroom, where he was feeding the dog. water everywhere. did he slip in the water? “No. i passed out”….
calm me to crazed son ”call 911 and then get me some pants.” (i thought enough to ask for pants. i’m great in a crisis.)
husband not in pain, but says he’s having a hard time breathing. so we sit him up (BTW… we is me and a 13 year old scared shitless piece of love). we wait for the ambulance. it seems like hours..under 5 minutes.
i am CALM. SO CALM. i put on pants, i hold husbands head. i speak soothingly to both my guys. i call neighbor to come over to stay with son while i go to hospital. ambulance comes, and as they get him loaded and i see i can’t go in the ambulance, i grab water and my knitting…and then i BRUSH MY GODDAMED TEETH (WTF? what was i thinking?), because i figure i’ll be at the hospital for a while, and. and. and…i can’t remember if i told him i loved him. (drives me insane to this day)
i called my friend to meet me at hospital and took off. got a call en-route that ambulance was changing hospitals…what? why?….so i pull a u-turn in the middle of the street and head to the 2nd hospital. still..calm enough to call friend and tell her. weird.
(Later i find out that the 2nd hospital was trauma center. great)
when i arrive she is there, we go in. i speak to a nurse who IMMEDIATELY brings us into the ER. at this point….well, the dread is setting in. i breathe, say to susan “this can’t be good”.
AND NOW I NEED A BREAK…saving as draft.
(BTW..it’s been almost 5 years. i still can’t breathe, often, when i tell my story. and now i’m back, 6 days later to, hopefully, finish).
and i walk into the ER room that has doctors hustling and bustling (that sounds like a song from Oklahoma) and all i can see/feel/hear/ KNOW is that there is no life in that room. because, the only life i cared about is not there. the doctors kept working on tom as i held his hand and cried and asked for “a xanax, PLEASE”…, but he was gone, we all knew it. and there was a point when i just asked them when were they going to stop, so i could leave and get my son (my son, our son…how was i going to tell him?) and then they stopped. and called the time. and it was truly over.
(crying again. i wonder when i ever will not cry telling this?)
my husband and i met in 1985, married in 1989 and he died in 2006. our son was 13. my son will be 18 on september 21st, and the pain is still acute for him. but we’re going to get tattoos, SO FUCKING THERE! (tom HATED tattoos…we like them)
i’m older than most of you who will read this. i didn’t know about blogging when tom died, i wish i had. it would have helped.
the only thing i regret about that day, in terms of my choices, was the choice to leave my son at home. it seemed right at the time. i believe it was a mistake; we were without each others most important OTHER person at the worst moment of our lives.
i have never written all of this before, and it is filtered through several years. but, it is exactly how it was, because i will never forget it. and there is more to say about that day, and friends and how to deal with grief, for yourself and others, and i will.
i know i will because now i NEED to.
and i trust that this new site will be a safe place for us all.
by Band Back Together | Sep 8, 2010 | Anniversary Reactions, Baby Loss, Child Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Coping With Losing A Child, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Loss |
Ever since 2000 when our daughter Elli was born with life-threatening heart defects and nearly died three times the first three weeks of her life, I’ve experienced blindsides.
I wish I referred to the movie.
Blindsides are swift and completely unexpected emotional breakdowns, often experienced when sharing your story with a stranger or a group of strangers.
As the parent of a child with special needs, I have shared Elli’s story countless times with medical personnel, school staff, new acquaintances, and random strangers we’d meet out in the community. I have had the opportunity to share our story for some college classes for special ed teachers and therapists, and for potential donors to our hospital.
I never know how those presentations would go. Will a blindside slam me into a teary mush pile this time? Or will I be able to communicate clearly and strongly?
When Elli passed away a year and a half ago, the blindsides changed. They began striking at any time, in any place, doing anything or nothing at all.
Anything.
A wisp of a memory… her sister’s laugh that sounds exactly like hers.
A glimpse of a familiar-but-no-longer-visited place… driving past her aquatic therapy pool.
The scent of the hospital’s blanket warmer, so comforting after yet another general anesthesia.
The discovery of a long-buried personal item… her bath towel.
Anywhere.
…sitting at the piano in church on Sunday.
…driving down the highway.
…laying in bed, drifting off to sleep.
…watching a movie with my husband.
…waiting for my son’s school bus.
At first, they assailed me daily, even hourly. With time, less frequent and more unexpected… except in the fall near the anniversary of her death and in the winter near her birthday. Those are memory minefields.
At first, the pain was bitter, cutting deeply, exposing raw wounds. Now it’s more of a wistful dull ache, a pain of long separation, hidden under scar tissue and wrapped in hope of heaven one day.
Have you seen me? The random weeping girl in front of the yogurt at the grocery store? If you do, would you spare a tissue? I promise, if I run into you, eyes red, face puffy, I’ll dig one out for you.
Where’s the craziest place you’ve ever been blindsided? What helps you get through it?
by Band Back Together | Sep 8, 2010 | A Letter I Can't Send, Baby Loss, Child Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Coping With Losing A Child, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving |
[What to say when a friend loses a child is such a mystery. I was the mom at her daughter’s casket in the fall of 2008. So when a friend of mine lost her young son to a progressive fatal disease, I wrote her a letter somewhat like this. When my daughter died, I craved a letter like this.]
Oh my friend. My heart breaks that you find yourself here, where I have walked and wept. Every hour I lift you and your family in prayer, pleading with God to pour out grace and strength and rest over you.
I was so encouraged by the outpouring of support for you and your family at your child’s visitation and funeral. I well remember how exhausting that was, but how much the presence of friends both old and new holds you up in those initial days after. I pray that you drew strength from that love poured from so many who love you and loved your child.
Please consider me a willing listening ear to hear whatever you need to say, or to just sit in silence when the words won’t come. I’ve walked this dark road and would be pleased to walk it again with you, if that would help.
Even now, 21 months later, some of life’s moments still seem surreal. It’s like I step out of life and look at it in disbelief. Can this really be the life I’m living?
The day Ellie died I felt myself split in two. I remember riding in the ambulance with her and yet looking at the scene and thinking, “Is this really IT? Look at the way they are working on her. I think she is gone. Is this really happening? Is this really the way it’s going to end?”
And that numb detached feeling persisted through the funeral planning, the visitation, and the services. Whenever I’d step back into my life, I was saturated with sadness. I remember thinking that I had to figure out how to stop crying because it hurt too bad. My sinuses and eyes were swollen, throbbing, aching. Grief is a physical pain. So I would step back out when it got to be too much.
Ever so slowly, the crying slowed, though it will never stop completely.
Ever so slowly, I could move through a day a little more.
Grief is exhausting. I had no idea. I needed help with food preparation, clean-up, housework, laundry… for weeks. Every task took everything I had. Things I had done before without a thought took every ounce of concentration so that I didn’t leave water running or the stove on or milk on the counter.
At the same time, all those days I couldn’t figure out what was taking so much time and effort. Without Ellie and her needs, the days gaped empty. Again, another surreal element of that time. Those days finding your way through is so awkward. You feel the yawning emptiness in your family: Folding laundry and folding your child’s things for the last time, and then having one less pile of clothes. Their empty bed. Their silent equipment. I constantly looked for what I was forgetting, constantly counted heads because I wasn’t confident I could keep track of everyone anymore.
It took at least a month for my energy to return.
If I may offer a bit of advice? Many will say, “If there’s anything I can do…” Take them up on it. Mention the lawn that needs to be mowed, the dirty dishes, the vacuuming, the leaf-raking, the snow-shoveling, watching the kids so you can sleep, writing thank-you notes (I personally think that a grieving parent should never be expected to send thank-you notes.), doing laundry. It will give you rest and they will love to be of some small help to you.
And in the midst of crying your own tears and asking your own questions, your other children have fears and questions. They are worried for their parents. They make valiant efforts to understand death and funerals and where their brother or sister is versus where their body is.
I write in hope that knowing others have walked through this gives you hope. I hope that you can feel my arm around you as I weep with you.
Love and prayers,
Joy
by Band Back Together | Sep 7, 2010 | Codpendence, Loss, Major Depressive Disorder |
I’d do anything for my wife. It’s a running joke between us that I’d even die for her—take a bullet, a knife, name your poison. The joke part is that for as long as we’ve known each other, she’s said she’d never return the favor.
What makes this funny now (and when I say funny, I really mean sad) is that after 22 years together, we’ve never felt more apart. She wants to end it. She says she loves me, but isn’t in love with me, and she’s not sure if she ever truly was. She says I’m her best friend but she no longer feels comfortable being naked with me. She wants to move on with her life.
I know the way we’ve been living is unhealthy, codependent and whatever else Dr. Phil is talking about these days. I know that the reasons we first got married—my mom was dying of cancer, I needed someone to take care of me, and Caryn needed someone to take care of—are no longer reasons to stay together. Christ, I’ve been in and out of therapy half a dozen times since we first met. But I also know that, unhealthy or not, this is the only love I’ve ever known.
Caryn says I’m too intense, that I’m critical, that I’m sarcastic, that I’m depressed, that I’ll never enjoy going out dancing with her. What she’s really saying is that I’ll never be the person she truly wants, and she’ll never be the fantasy woman in my head.
For the last five years, we’ve been going through the zombie suburban motions for the sake of the kids, or because our hands were tied financially, or whatever other excuses we made for hanging on to the status quo. Six months ago, during one of our typical Sunday-morning arguments with the bedroom door shut and the kids downstairs, Caryn said, “no mas”—and since then, our everyday life has been like a rehearsal for death.
I picture myself growing old and being alone, and I get that sick jolt in the pit of my stomach when it hits me that I’m done, it’s over. I’ve always been the type of guy who, given the choice between a straight line and a more circuitous path, would choose . . . the path Caryn chose for me. Heartbreak and grief—ping-ponging between numb and angry—I have to do alone.
Caryn’s laugh has always been the biggest turn-on for me, and we’ve laughed together a lot, from the first time she showed up at my apartment more than 20 years ago wearing a pair of Minnie Mouse sunglasses. But during our zombie years, she slowly turned her back on me. The worst of it was lying in bed knowing I couldn’t touch her. It sent me back to our first few dates when, in a foreshadowing of her future ambivalence, she wanted to break up. I’d worked hard to change her mind then, bombarding her with late-night calls. Now I was determined to do it again. My plan was simple, really: I’d find a way to change myself. Caryn would fall in love with me all over again and we wouldn’t have to have this stupid conversation for another 20 years.
So I shaved off my beard.
I know that doesn’t sound like much, but to me it was a symbolic gesture signaling more significant changes to come. I’d worn a beard for more than 30 years, and I told everyone I’d finally shaved it off because it was getting gray and making me look old. But the truth is that I did it because I wanted Caryn to see me differently.
“Did you get a hair . . . OH. MY. GOD!” she howled when I came home clean shaven, feeling like a new man. She said I looked younger, but really not all that different, and a few minutes later she went back to the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.
It was sort of the same deal when we both got tattoos a few summers ago. I got a large Chinese symbol on my left arm that roughly means “to live,” and Caryn got a smaller version on her ankle that means “freedom.” We said these would be constant reminders of what we want out of life. We also thought they looked cool. What I didn’t understand at the time was that although I wanted “to live” with her, she wanted “freedom” from me.
When my close shave failed to get her attention, I tried something really scary: yelling at our kids. Caryn was always on my case for ceding the responsibility of disciplining our two sons, because it meant she was always the bad guy. She was the one who told them “No!” or yelled at them for fighting or leaving empty Cheez Doodles bags under their beds, and then I’d waltz in from work, plop down in front of the big-screen TV and hang with my homeboys.
So no more Mr. Nice Guy. The next time Rob, 14, and Zach, 13, went at it, I swung into action. “What the hell is up with you guys? When are you gonna grow up and stop this stupid crap?” I screamed, making sure Caryn heard every syllable. I took away Robbie’s laptop and Zach’s cell phone. They shrugged if off, since they knew they’d get it all back in a matter of days, if not hours.
“Why are you yelling at them like that?” Caryn asked, and for the life of me, I didn’t have an answer.
I’d always let Caryn make the major decisions in our life. She was the one who said let’s get married, the one who said let’s have kids, the one who said let’s adopt when we couldn’t. As I saw it, this was about love—it made her happy, so she’d love me even more. In fact, she complained for years about the burden of having to make all these decisions, and now she wanted out. Well, I’d show her.
“I want Chinese food tonight, goddamn it!”
“I want to see City of God!”
“I want to build a new deck in the backyard.”
“I want to have sex—now!”
To all of which Caryn pretty much said, “Okay.” Things were finally changing around here, I thought, but for some strange reason I pictured George Costanza saying it.
When I wasn’t barking orders, I shut the hell up. Caryn and I had always been great talkers. We’d go on about everything, pick it to pieces and then start all over again. You can avoid a lot of stuff by talking. The truth is, when one of us talked, the other didn’t always hear it. We took in what we wanted and interpreted it to fit our own rationalizations and arguments. So I decided to try the tough-guy silent treatment (which, not coincidentally, was both our moms’ favorite form of punishment). I also gave her more space. I’d go downstairs to watch TV instead of lying silently in bed next to her. If she was in the kitchen, I’d go into the living room. On weekends, we’d go our separate ways and meet up for dinner. I never felt more disconnected in my life. It was as if blood had stopped flowing to my heart.
My friend Doug, the art director for the Web sites I’m in charge of, would listen sympathetically and share whatever emotion I was tangled up in. If I was pissed at Caryn, he’d call her “that bitch,” and if I was feeling the least bit hopeful, he’d egg me on. He told me one day he thought I was being incredibly selfless, and went on to say how men, in general, are all too willing to twist themselves into pretzels. I nodded absently, but knew that he couldn’t be more wrong. It was all about fear. I was scared to be alone. I was scared of the unfamiliar. I was scared of opening up. And (damn you to hell, Dr. Phil!), deep down I was scared to be happy—with or without Caryn.
After a month or so, my Kafka-esque transformation just stopped. As I looked at myself in the mirror while shaving, it hit me that, other than my beard, there was no growth attached to any of my so-called life changes. Transforming myself into someone I thought Caryn would want me to be was exactly what she had always wanted me not to do.
The real tough stuff was still locked away because I didn’t have the courage to go there. The deeper truth of our marriage, the stuff we’re not proud of but that connects us on the most basic level—fears, judgments, evasions—that’s what we both needed to face if our marriage were to have any chance in hell.
So for the past few months, we’ve been doing the therapy thing. And when we walk out of each session, Caryn says it feels like she’s just taken a bullet, a knife, name your poison.
Under a heart-shaped magnet on our refrigerator, there’s a New Yorker cartoon I knew Caryn would get a kick out of, a picture of two women immersed in serious conversation. The caption reads, “It’s easy. The first step is to entirely change who you are.”
It’s the second step that’s a bitch: figuring out what we really want. I keep asking myself the same questions over and over. Why do I still want to be with someone who no longer wants to be with me? Am I really in love with her, or do I just need to be loved? I could give you the usual psychological mumbo-jumbo—my need to stay with the familiar rather than explore the unknown, how Caryn reminds me of my mother and vice versa—but I think it’s simpler than that. There’s a place in my heart that is Caryn’s, and no matter what happens between us, that place will always be hers.
Sometimes I imagine how it would be if we went our separate ways. I see myself sitting alone in an empty apartment and there’s a knock on the door. It’s Caryn, and she’s wearing those ridiculous Minnie Mouse sunglasses again. She’s standing there, crying softly, and between sobs she says, “I’ve been such an idiot!” I hold her tightly in my arms, and as she takes a deep breath, I feel her holding onto me.
And then I let go.
