Category Archives: Acceptance

Still and All

still-and-all


“Taking steps is easy/Standing still is hard”  Regina Spektor, You’ve Got Time

“Just for a moment, let’s be still.”  The Head and the Heart, Let’s Be Still


In the first couple of weeks after I lost my baby, I wrote some poems.  Prior to that time, I hadn’t written poetry since high school and never voluntarily.  It was not and is not “my thing”.

One of my poems was basically a fantasy about how I could have “fought back” against the events at the hospital after getting the news that something was going wrong with my pregnancy.  In my reimagined version, instead of cooperating with the medical monitoring to determine that my baby had no heartbeat, having labor induced and allowing myself to be escorted through the labor and delivery process, I instead overturned the equipment, picked up a rock and then used it to shatter the scene.

Looking back over 14 years later, I can read a lot into that poem.  But the visceral memory and accompanying word that stands out for me today is vulnerable.  I remember lying in the hospital bed feeling emotionally and physically exposed to the elements.  It was this state that preceded and led to those thoughts about fighting back.  I remember sensing that I had no defenses, no power and had no ability to do anything of consequence.

Baby loss puts us in a state of vulnerability.  Not the kind of vulnerability where we may choose to take a risk in the service of personal growth.  More like the ground shaking beneath your feet, house spinning in the tornado, canoe going over the waterfall version of vulnerable.  It’s involuntary and overwhelming.

When we are in such a place, we are beyond protecting ourselves in the usual and customary manner.  The walls are down throughout the castle and the bad thing can find us.  It may be loss, hurt, trauma or all of the above.

After losing a baby, we may (consistently or episodically) have a strong impulse to do something.  We may have a strong desire to undo our loss, however unrealistic that may be.  We might feel a need to take the advanced placement course in grief so we can do it faster and better and get back to the life we were expecting.  We may have an impulse to make a quick decision to begin trying again for another baby.  Or maybe we feel compelled to return to work as soon as possible in order to bury ourselves in something other than the pain and fear that is our grief.

It is perfectly understandable that at such a time, we may feel a need to take action and we may need distractions.

We may also at times need something much quieter to help us heal ourselves.

If you’ve ever taken a yoga class, you probably remember the final pose called Savasana or  “the corpse” pose.  After whatever style and duration of practice–complete with conscious breathing, seeing the world from different physical perspectives and stretching with varying intensity– we are instructed to lie down on our backs with eyes closed, limbs loose, palms up and to release any remaining tension in the body.

From a physical point of view, the corpse pose seems to be one of extreme vulnerability.  We choose to temporarily make ourselves immobile and blind while stretched out on the ground among other people.  Our hands are empty and open.  And rather than being vigilant about the whole thing, we are instructed to relax.  It’s a seemingly simple exercise that can go deep.  Some say it is a time to let the mind and body process what has happened in the session.  Some say it is a time to focus on nothing and meditate without the distraction of movement.  I’ve heard more than one teacher call it the hardest pose.

Richard Rosen, in the online version of Yoga Journal (Aug 2007), states that “in corpse pose, we symbolically ‘die’ to our old ways of thinking and doing”.    He also advises us to “Remember the words of the great sage Abhinavagupta:  ‘Abandon nothing.  Take up nothing.  Rest, abide in yourself, just as you are.’”

After my loss, I was not so much into the idea of abiding in myself.  I wanted to resist what had happened.  Failing that, I wanted to do something to rush through the awful looking season of grief in front of me.  I’ve seen this look and impulse now in so many faces–  the one that says “I need to get out of this feeling- NOW.”

Following a drastic injury to our lives, we may experience the need to fight back with all we have.  Not taking action may feel weak, and exacerbate a sense of vulnerability.  If grief is going to be a long journey, we may feel like we should hurry up and get on with it.  But despite the rush to feel something else, there might be reasons to take a moment to slow down or be still.

After having our heart broken we usually aren’t ready to be in the fast lane for anything.  It’s hard to heal when we’re always in motion.  And grief is known to be a generally exhausting time in which we need fewer responsibilities and more support.  We need time to rest and time to consider how to tend to ourselves in our lives without our babies.  We also need to practice bearing our feelings, not just avoid them.  What may seem like a time of extended vulnerability may actually be a time of gathering strength.

So whether we see it as a time to practice getting stronger, a meditation or just taking a knee in respect for the part of us that is gone, we may need to find a way to pause and be with ourselves for a bit.  We may even need to lie down and let the ground hold us as we practice just being.  We may need to have times where we see former parts of ourselves die just a little and witness the passing before considering the next part of life.

Hot Comfort

Hot ComfortRichard Easterling, 2014

 

 

“Love is a Temple
Love a Higher Law” U2, One

“I don’t even know what I would have wanted someone to say.  Not:  It will be better.  Not:  You don’t think you’ll live through this, but you will.  Maybe:  Tomorrow you will spontaneously combust.  Tomorrow, finally, your misery will turn to wax and heat and you will burn and melt till nothing is left in your chair but a greasy, childless smudge.  That might have comforted me.”  Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

 


I went through one of those trap door rabbit holes in cyber space the other day and ended up reading about the Temple at Burning Man.  Burning Man, of course, is the yearly art festival in the Nevada desert that is famous for a number of things, including the practice of setting fire to many of the art pieces.  My only experience at Burning Man was in 2014.  There were a million bits of wonder and feeling that came up for me in my time there.  It’s quite an event.  Look at pictures from any year and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about.

A participant may see a giant Golden Dragon with beautiful people on board partying at sunrise, flying zoetrope monkeys powered by drumming and a Barbie Death Camp.  In this gift economy, someone may offer to write the theme song for your life or make a sundae on your tongue.  You may get stuck in a sandstorm which leaves you stranded and disoriented and when it clears, a stranger may come along and offer you the best grilled cheese sandwich you’ve ever had–  it’s kind of like that.  And, because someone else is bound to tell you if I don’t, I should say that there are a fair amount of nude people.  Also, it’s hot, really hot.  Did I mention that it takes place in a desert?

Since 2000, one of the traditions at Burning Man has been the construction of a temple.  Various architects, the most well-known being David Best, have designed a different wooden creation every year.  Like may things at Burning Man, it is done on a grand scale.  The physical construction begins off site months before the event and continues on site in the weeks leading up to the festival.  Built to last only a brief time in an intense environment, every year the temple seems to be an extremely well thought out, intricate and gorgeous structure.

During the festival, the Temple is a gathering place of memory and reflection.  People bring pictures, personal belongings, and letters.  Pens and markers are available for writing on the wood.  It gets filled up with the space between the living and the dead.  It is a place of feeling and remembrance and is often packed with people walking, sitting, and lying down inside the walls.  During the week of the festival, it feels like an inviolate and solemn place.  And on the last night of the event, it burns.

Like other burns, it is done at a specific time, after it is emptied out and sealed up, with tens of thousands watching from a safe distance, feeling whatever they are going to feel.  People talk about it as a release, a spiritual catharsis.  It’s whatever you need it to be.

The McCracken quote above is from a book written about her experience of having a stillborn son.  This passage made me think about Burning Man and the Temple.  At first I wondered what about being told that you will be melted down could be comforting.  After baby loss, isn’t a person already so hurt and distressed that losing more of themselves is what they fear most?

But after considering McCracken’s words, I wonder if she is saying simply that it would take a dramatic, destroying image to resonate with what she felt inside.  Maybe she was responding to the knowledge that her pain wasn’t a brief illness that she would temporarily dip in and out of, but rather a loss that would take much more of her than that.  Maybe only a gutted, burnt out metaphor was a match for what she felt and the place she would be coming from to face whatever was next.  Maybe what she could identify with most was the idea of burning through every feeling and being taken down to almost nothing.

I wouldn’t confuse this with hopelessness.  A forest cleared by fire will have a next stage of growth.  A person who hurts to his or her core will still eventually let in new bits of life.  And every year a desolate playa in Nevada turns into a giant, vibrant city.

The time I went to Burning Man, the temple was filled with pictures, handwritten letters, pieces of cloth, at least one pine cone and some stuffed animals.  Robin Williams had just died, and there were several areas with his picture and notes to and about him. There were goodbyes written on the walls to every kind of loved one.  There were memorials to pets.  There were pictures of moms, dads, grandparents and the kind of friends that are family.

There were small items meant for newborns.  There were photographs of and names of babies, notes to and about the ones who didn’t make it into this world as well as infants who were no longer living.

On the last night, I pedaled to the temple burn at sunset along with others on foot or on bike–past the ashes from another burn, then a metal octopus, a miniature log cabin on wheels, a big group of people in sailor suits, a line of giant teapots strung together and some people sitting inside a neon star.

When I saw the temple burn, the first change I noticed was a soft orange glow inside, then flames outside.  The smoke moved softly and adamantly in one direction.  The moon looked tiny.  Everything seemed to slow while a small corner of the desert burned down into something else.

 

 

Two Sides

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I’m sorry, Gemma. But we can’t live in the light all of the time. You have to take whatever light you can hold into the dark with you.”   Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty


Last weekend I stayed at an off the grid hot springs establishment where the bathrooms were labeled “yin” and “yang”.  I’m used to figuring out that I’m supposed to head for doors marked “Damas” or “Cowgirls” etc., but this was a nice spin on the concept.  It turns out that sometimes a trip to the toilet in a beautiful and quirky location is a good opportunity to consider the relationship between the opposing sides of life.

Wikipedia gives us this:  In Chinese philosophy yin and yang (also yin-yang or yin yangyīnyáng “dark—bright”) describes how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.  Sometimes people talk about the two sides as male and female, fire and water, passive and active, moon and sun, etc.  The symbol has, in the form of a dot, a little bit of the opposite color, reminding us that each side contains a bit of the other element.

The experience of expecting or having a baby and then losing that baby tends to give us a dizzying trip to both the light and dark side of life.  It’s often a steep drop from one extreme to the other:  joy-sadness, expecting-disbelief, hopeful-hopeless, assured-anxious, expansive-contracted, connecting-detaching, full-empty, beginning-ending.  Certainly none of these feelings are unique to baby loss.  But babies tend to bring out our strongest and most tender feelings, and the abrupt and dramatic shift related to attaching to them and losing them is particularly stunning.

The outlier moments in our life, those that are bigger– whether bright or dark– demand notice.  They take our energy and attention and become landmarks in our memory.  The two halves of the spinning, messy embrace we see in Yin and Yang symbol remind me of times when I have felt the opposing sides of my own life experience.

I have a memory of being five months pregnant on an Easter Sunday.  I was lying on a lounge chair in the backyard of my then home feeling the sunshine on my skin and the movements of my baby inside me.  At that moment everything felt connected and right.

I have memories of being in the hospital a couple of weeks later and feeling that I was losing more than I could handle.  People mentioned how beautiful the weather was outside and I remember thinking that they must be living on another planet.  I wondered if anything could feel OK again.

At the time, the two experiences seemed worlds apart.  As I think about this now, it seems clear that it was two sides of me loving and losing someone dear to me.  The memories now are held as interrelated and coexist as important part of my life.

When we are in a great place, it can help to remember a little about the other side and appreciate our time away from it.  When in a tough place, it can help to remember the light of past and future, and that it’s as real as anything else.  If we are in pain, it’s our time to breathe through the experience until we find another feeling.  If we are in the best of times, it’s time to breathe it in, noticing the hell out of it because we will need some in reserve pretty soon.

Whether it is a time of celebrating or grieving, thriving or enduring, I think there is something to gain in being aware of what lies on the other side of the line (and the dot that is a little bit on our side).   We can appreciate knowing there are limits to whatever we are feeling now, knowing at some point the game of tag will continue and the other side will be “it”.  Being aware that there is a  finite time when we’re in the worst of our pain makes it bearable.  And remembering that our time on the sweet side is temporary can help us savor it a bit more.

Those Plans

h“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”  –Mike Tyson

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”  –Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Oh Harold, that’s wonderful.  Go and love some more. –“Harold and Maude”, movie written by Colin Higgins, line performed by Ruth Gordon.


FYI– this is NOT going to be a post about the futility of plans.

I am as fond of plan-making as the next person and I have a lot of admiration for the planners extraordinaire who walk into my office.   Many of those women and men have developed and executed plan after plan in their lives.  They are often impressive plans.  Some people have gone to graduate school, some have found fulfillment in volunteer work, some have traveled extensively, some have developed exciting and rewarding careers and some have done all of the above.

The plans we make show something about us.  They are our articulated hopes and intentions that we may have been lucky and motivated enough to manifest.  The plans we make about our babies are particularly special.  These plans tend to involve our most tender feelings of love, hope and a desire to care for someone.  They are far reaching, shiny, and beautiful.  They involve dreaming on a big scale for something dear– a conjuring of a new person and beloved family member.  And when the plans go awry, when we lose our babies, our world gets a little dimmer in a particularly painful way.

Getting punched in the face (and I’m going to go with baby loss as a metaphorical face punch), as Mike Tyson points out, doesn’t put us in the best place to think about plans.  We are hurt and knocked off course.  We get taken to a different level of experience.  Some energy is shifted away from thinking and put into feeling.  We stagger back and reevaluate what we have sent out into the world.  Stunned and wounded, we wonder what’s next.

When confronted with the grief of baby loss, we often want to jump right back into planning mode.  We look for the fast track of grief, the short cut, the best way of doing it.  After all, we know how to get things done.  If only we could think or plan our way out of pain.  If only we could get some assurance of how long, how challenging this road will be and then get to the finish line as soon as possible.

I think at the juncture of being thrown into the grief of baby loss, a moratorium on planning is in order.  At least a temporary ban on heavy lifting types of planning.  This can be really hard to do.  Anxiety and desire to move on to some other experience may drive you to want to keep planning. The pain may feel unbearable.

Realistic concerns about wanting to try again soon for another pregnancy due to age or other factors may also be occupying your mind.  You may just be terrified of stopping and feeling.  These are all understandable worries.  And some distractions, denial and other ways of getting through your day are fine and may be really important.  But I do think grief is an experience where it’s really true that “you can run, but you can’t hide”.  Some wandering in the pain without looking for the exit is necessary.

So what would I suggest you do instead of rushing to make more plans?  I would start with spending some time breathing into your pain and uncertainty.  (Sorry if that sounds too groovy but literal breathing while feeling something is the gist here.)  I would encourage a respectful mental bow to the you that invested, that tried, that gave your heart to something so lovely.  The innocent you that didn’t know you were going to end up here deserves a moment of reverence.

Spend time remembering your pregnancy or your baby as much and in whatever way is right for you.  For many people, finding ways to honor their babies is a lifelong priority and this is a good time to start.  It’s also a way to honor yourself and your ability to love.

Pretty soon you’ll start working on some new plans.  That’s what we do.   We move toward the future by zig zagging in the way we think will help us get to the place we think we want to be headed.

You may be especially fearful that your next plan may not work out.  You may be especially aware of how wonderful it might be if it does.  You may know that you have been changed by letting yourself have plans that were big enough to fail and still matter.   But when you’re ready, your head and heart will tug at you again, leading you toward something worth the risk.

 

 

 

 


 

 

Preparing for Take Off

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“The Guide says there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything 

“I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings.  Coming down is the hardest thing.”  Tom Petty Learning to Fly


The pilot in my life has tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to teach me the physics of flying.  So far there is only one fact that has really stayed with me.  It’s this:  after we have put fuel in the plane, ensured all the parts are working, buckled in, started the propeller, communicated with the tower, moved the throttle, flicked lots of switches and gone skittering down the runway in that wonderful, jerky fashion of small planes, after all of the steps and effort are made by the pilot to leave the solid surface of the earth, it is the air flowing over the wings that pulls the plane off the ground.

This piece of knowledge is remarkably unhelpful in moving me toward my goal of being able to land the airplane in an emergency, but it does help me make sense of some other things.  It’s a great reminder to me of how our piece of an endeavor may be big, complicated and important but, ultimately, not the whole thing.

Sometimes when the pilot and I intend to go flying we are stopped by clouds, wind or VIP events declaring jurisdiction over the air we wanted to travel through.  Once, we got in the plane, did all the steps to run up and were sitting on the runway when it became clear that an instrument wasn’t working properly.  Uncertain of the cause, we had to scrap the flight.  The last time we planned a weekend trip, changing weather forced us to decide against three successive destinations and we ended up driving to a nearby town instead.  Being a small aircraft pilot is both powerful and humbling– you get to do big things much of the time but are also always at the mercy of greater forces.

As a clinical psychologist, I feel that I have an honorable and important job.  I spent many years learning about human behavior and theories of how to help people.  Psychotherapists are given trust, privilege, and responsibility as we sit with people and look into their lives with them.  We are capable of having a great deal of influence over others and the results can be life-changing.  But the impact of our work is still limited by multiple factors.  Timing, skill, communication, chemistry, intention and motivation and other issues between a client and therapist might affect how things progress in a given moment or session.  For better or for worse, the result can never be entirely in our hands.

After baby loss, people are always trying to do something.  It’s usually a big thing, even if it doesn’t appear that way to others.  Sometimes it’s a bunch of big things.  It may be letting themselves feel more pain than they have ever felt before.  It may be trying to find a way to get through much of the day without crying so that they can return to work and keep their job.  It may be walking into an AA meeting for the first time, because the way they have been trying to cope isn’t working.  It may be sitting with that weighty decision of whether or not to try for another baby.  And whatever they are trying for may or may not take off.  Chance, effort, ability, help from others, and grace may all factor into the final result.

Living after baby loss, like living the rest of life, is about trying for the things that matter to us.  It just tends to be a hell of a lot harder than most of the other chapters we’ve lived.  We don’t know if we’ll get what we’re trying for, we just get to do the part that is ours to do.  We can only try to be there in the right position, moving at the right speed and holding on tight.

 

Here Now

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And it’s too early in the morning

And too late in my life

To write a different story

To hope for different lines…  

Cindy Bullens, The End of Wishful Thinking

“Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle.  On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustice.”     Paul Tournier


I visited the New York City 9/11 memorial and museum a few weeks ago.  It was the first time I’ve visited a memorial to events that were clear in my memory, albeit experienced from across the country.  The pictures I saw there were jarring reminders of what so many of us saw on TV back in September, 2001– the planes crashing, the survivors running away from burning buildings, the family and friends frantically searching for news of their loved ones.

One exhibit featured photographs of people who were standing on the street that day in Manhattan watching the events as they unfolded at the World Trade Center.  They were in the middle of watching the world go off the rails and it showed in big eyes, crumpled faces, hand-covered mouths.  It made me marvel again at how anyone ever goes from such a moment, of seeing the unthinkable, feeling the unbearable, to having a good life.

There are some lines in life that we cross and from which we can’t backtrack. Those people on the street that day in NY can’t unsee what they saw on that sunny morning and I don’t know what their lives are like today.  I imagine that they range from struggling to doing quite well.  I think about how they did it– how they made room for so much.  I think about how others I have known have gone through so much and kept living and growing.  How did they ever start on that road?

The word that keeps coming to my mind is acceptance.  Acceptance in the sense of that simple and challenging task of allowing into your reality that this is actually where you are and what is happening.

I have met many people who have faced losses that they thought would take them down permanently.  People who were sure that the unimaginable big awful that had invaded their lives was not a thing they could make peace with, and certainly not something they could do something with.  That overwhelming pain in front of us can look like a bed of nails.  We are certain that only a cushion–  substances, denial, work, distraction, sleep, something, anything– can make it bearable.  We feel a need to steer away from the pain, feeling that meeting it head on will bring disaster.

What I would call acceptance, or being emotionally open to the reality that we wish was so different, doesn’t seem wise at first.  Who wants to get an up close look at all that pain?  But it is the one way to know what we feel and that we can live with it.  If we don’t want to play a lifelong game of whack-a-mole, where our suffering keeps popping up in different areas, I believe that the answer is to live our reality and know the part of us that feels broken.  Feeling it, and processing it through time and with support, moves us to feel something more than our hurt and more of what life has to offer.

In his book, The Gift of Grief, Matthew Gerwitz makes a case for what he calls “Surrendering but Not Giving In”:

“…the counterintuitive stance of openness, vulnerability, and engagement with our pain is actually the source of genuine healing–the approach that takes us beyond survival and back to living.”

Whether called acceptance or surrendering,  this is something that can be practiced.  We’re still going to feel overwhelming feelings and need to take breaks from them.  Defenses serve a useful purpose at times.  But we can start to invite ourselves to be open to acknowledging the places that hurt.  We can practice noticing where we are right now, without  filling in the space between what we think we can stand and reality.

How might this apply to the experience of baby loss?  Here are a few thoughts pulled from working with those who are working on acceptance after perinatal loss.

Tangible reminders of the pregnancy or baby can be useful in taking in the experience of loss.  Many people naturally do this and some push themselves to do it in small doses.  Looking at pictures, clothing or baby toys puts us in touch with the fact that it all really happened.  Whatever the good parts of the pregnancy or time with baby and the terrible ending were, they were real.  It’s all part of our life and part of us.

Connections with others can support us and facilitate our acceptance of the loss.  This can mean connections with the baby, such as visiting the grave, looking at ultrasound pictures or speaking to your partner about your memories of being pregnant.  Sometimes people find invaluable support from others who have been through similar losses, which can happen either online or in person.  It can also mean connecting with other loved ones who reinforce both the reality of what you have been through and that you are still upright and alive.

Notice thoughts that are taking you too far away too often.  It’s normal to start thinking about trying again immediately after a loss.  It’s usually extremely compelling.  Other thoughts of the future might also have a magnetic pull on you right now.  It’s often useful to question how much you’re shifting attention away from the present.  What are you feeling about your life right now vs. what might lie ahead?

I think Tournier was on to something in his quote about acceptance as different from resignation.  It’s too late to change the lines of our story to date and that can be fiercely painful.  But it’s not a white flag of surrender or retreat to accept our life in all of its alarming reality.  Instead, I think it’s another way to practice compassion and respect for ourselves while continuing to heal and grow.

And Then…

“Grief is in two parts.  The first is loss.  The second is the remaking of life.”–              Anne Roiphe

“It’s the song that I sing because I have to.”–  Cary Ott,  I Wouldn’t Do That To You


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Unexpected loss shatters the story of our lives.  We are left to stare at the pieces, and at the new absence– twisting our heads to try to understand what happened and what can be done.  We hurt and we wander around inside ourselves.  And then?

Something else certainly follows, but I’m not sure that it happens in the way Roiphe describes above.  How does one remake a life?   Is a remake what we really need?  Might this second part of the grief thing be more about accepting and being in our changed life vs. remaking it?

Or maybe grief is never really any two parts, stages or any other neatly organized idea.  Maybe it’s just a hot, turning mess that we crawl, climb and pull ourselves through as best we can.  And maybe the weirdest part of grief is that it’s not outside of our lives at all, but just sharing space with everything else in it.

The book Knocked Up, Knocked Down (2010) by Monica Lemoine chronicles the lives of the author and her husband as they are hit by multiple pregnancy losses.  At the memorial for their stillborn son, Lemoine’s husband reads the following letter which speaks to the challenge of needing to both mourn and live:

Dear Son,

Forgive me when I cry.  It’s certainly not what I would have taught you to do.  Occasionally, I can’t help it.  I can’t help it when I see your mother’s face fill with pain.  I can’t help it when I replay her phone call in my head.  “There’s something wrong with the baby,” she said.  I can’t help it when times that were supposed to be so joyous are filled with crushing disappointment–the day of your baby shower, your due date, the three months of paternity leave that we would have spent together, all the baseball games that we would have watched and played.  Forgive me when I cry, and know that I’ll never forget the seven and a half months of joy you brought us.

Love, Dad

Dear Son,

Forgive me for the times that I don’t cry.  Most of the time, I can’t help but be happy, and it’s hard not to feel guilty about that.  I can’t help but be happy when your mother dances in the living room.  I can’t help it when family and friends visit and bring us food, prop us up with support, watch football and play ping-pong with us.  I can’t help but be happy that I’m married to your mother and knowing that we’ll make it, stay positive, and have more kids in the near future.  I can’t help being happy because it’s my nature, and your mother brings it out in me, as she does in everyone else.  Forgive me when I don’t cry, and know that I’ll never forget the seven and a half months of joy you brought us.

Love, Dad

This letter moved me the first time I read it and I returned to it later to consider what was so compelling.  I do find the immediacy of the grief touching.  But what stands out for me in a second look is that it’s a beautifully simple description of what it means to love, lose and then keep the door propped open to whatever feelings come calling.

There is no shying away from emotion in the words spoken by the Dad to his stillborn son.  Instead, there is an open acknowledgement of attachment and feeling.  He honors the baby who brought joy to their lives and the father-son relationship that exists (even without a living baby to make it tangible to others).  He also is open about his considerable pain as well as periods of happiness as he sits with a bewildering absence.

It’s so easy to do a “pile on” after baby loss– giving ourselves a hard time for having a hard time.  I hear this from the women and couples I work with in questions such as “am I dwelling on this?” or “how do I stop feeling this way?”.  Anxiety about “moving on” or “forgetting/betraying” the baby make emotional movement to the other side (feeling less intense sadness) a landmine too.  I remember feeling the same way.  There is nothing clear or elegant about the acute grief experience with all of the accompanying pain, fear and confusion.  It often makes a mess of us, at least for a while, and we want it to stop.  I wish I didn’t know what I look like when I cry and brush my teeth at the same time, but alas, from my time of living with the grief of losing my daughter, I do.  It’s just not a graceful time of life.

So I don’t expect anyone to have a composed or enlightened version of their grief.   I don’t find it useful to tell people how to feel.   But I am likely to suggest that they  notice what they feel.  I’m also likely to remind people that whatever our emotional state is right now, it will change.  The intensity of  pain we experience in grief doesn’t stay the same because it can’t.  And eventually, at whatever pace we need, some other feeling will appear.   The emotional song you are compelled to sing at any given moment may be one that makes you cry or one that makes you smile and the next song may be quite different.  It’s enough to keep a heart very busy.

Living with grief can certainly feel messy and chaotic.  It may make you feel a bit crazy to have your emotions become so unruly.  But it’s still you living a chapter of your life.  You may be flooded with feelings about your past and reliving memories sweet or tragic.  You may be full of  hopes or heart-fluttering fears about your future.  These are all signs of life.  The next chapter, whatever it is, is going to be more of you living, and by surviving whatever you feel right now in this moment, you’ve already begun.