Category Archives: Memories

The Shaking Tree

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????“Family isn’t something that’s supposed to be static, or set. People marry in, divorce out. They’re born, they die. It’s always evolving, turning into something else.”  Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key

“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”  Frederick Buechner

Pregnancy’s ineluctably relational nature means that once it begins, it can never be completely negated…  In any case, in any outcome, there is a relationship the woman has to do something with–  mourn it, celebrate it, try to forget it, dismiss it, accept its loss.  Daphne de Marneffe, Maternal Desire:  On Children Love and the Inner Life


Family trees are overrated.  That’s my opinion about the traditional ones anyway–  the kind that kids are asked to do in school and the ones touted on ancestry websites.   I get that they can be useful for teaching us something about where we come from and some of the characters in our family history.  I understand that the information may be rather poignant or interesting (e.g. my first relative to enter this country was a stowaway on a ship– I love to travel on the cheap– any meaningful connection there?).  But when the background of our clan is drawn up in terms of births, deaths, marriage and divorce only, it seems to me to be a skeleton– with some bones missing– view of a family.  There’s just a whole lot that remains unseen.

Maybe you were raised by your Aunt Fanny or your grandparents.  Maybe your parents forgot to get married or divorced.  Or maybe your parents couldn’t get married or you were conceived with the help of what psychologist Dianne Ehrensaft terms a “birth other” (donor or surrogate) or have more or less than two parents who are raised you.  The authorities who track the comings and goings of our lives are likely to miss such details.  The lines running between our hearts and those we love may be very different than what shows up on a traditional family tree.

Historically and today, a baby loss may not be noted in a family record.  Depending on whether the loss was during or after pregnancy, whether a birth or death certificate was made and who all was told, it may be an off the books experience.  The fact that it may go undeclared and unwritten matches the ambiguous quality that can be a part of baby loss.

Not every pregnancy loss is seen as a loss of a person and it doesn’t need to be.  We each have an individual understanding of our loss and may hold it as more of a loss of a dream or a version of one’s future.  Even infant loss, depending on cultural and individual differences, may be viewed as something less than would the loss of another family member.

But even when the occurrence is documented minimally or not at all, a baby loss still shakes the family tree.

Perinatal loss is often felt as a family crisis at multiple levels.  When a baby is expected or recently arrived, new tendrils of feelings come out of family members.   The feelings may be simply love or something more complicated, but a course is charted for a relationship and its accompanying emotions.

When a baby dies, everything changes.  After excitement, planning and attachment, there is a space.  There may be very traumatic memories and almost certainly very sad ones.  There is hurt and shadow hanging over at least some of the family members.  There may be a name that will rarely be said, family pictures that will have someone missing and ongoing relationships that will not develop.

All the hopes and dreams of one part of the family story are altered.  The identities of mother, grandmother, uncle, etc are questioned or shifted as family members consider how a place will or will not be held for the baby in the family history.  The ambiguity of a relationship starting and not continuing in a tangible manner may lead people to minimize the experience, but that won’t make it a non-event.  The loss to the family at large of a baby may be a confusing experience to articulate, but that doesn’t diminish the reverberations.

One consequence of a baby loss might be the test of our family member’s emotional responses in time of crisis.  We often have years or decades between big moments of birth and death, coming and going, beginnings and endings in a family.  Baby loss may trigger a sense of fast forwarding through these types of experiences.  We attach and change, grieve and stumble, show up for each other or don’t.

As with any loss in the family, we also run the experiment of testing out whether our mourning can be done while we stay connected to life and to each other.  We find out if we can be open to joy again as we still grieve.  Expecting and losing a baby makes us trot our heart quickly through its paces of the highs and lows of love.

At the end of it all, as the old bumper sticker tells us, love is what makes a family.  All of this family drama may include family of various descriptions.  The VIP list in your heart and star placement on your family tree can always include a list of less than traditional players.  It could include the teacher who changed your life, your AA sponsor or your best friend.

Your family tree may also proudly feature someone you never met.  It may include someone who changed you both physically and emotionally and taught you about attachment, priorities and loss.  It may be the person whose presence made you both a mother and a bereaved person.  It may be someone you never held, but who you will always hold close.

 

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.

Looking After

“The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.” —  William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

 “She took a step and didn’t want to take any more, but she did.”— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief 

“It’s neither kind nor effective to bitch-slap yourself into a better way of living.”—  Your Exquisite Self-Care Inventory –101 Ways to Love Yourself More Deeply from Life After Tampons Blog by  Jennifer Boykin

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About a decade ago, there was a morning where I found myself eating breakfast in a hotel ballroom in another part of the country while a speaker (whose name I can’t remember) stood at the podium and talked about exquisite self care.  The audience for the conference was a mix of people who had experienced perinatal loss and those whose work focused on perinatal bereavement.  The woman doing the keynote that morning promoted the idea of exquisite self care as necessary for coping with grief and as well as for working with those who are grieving.  She spoke about accepting and validating increased needs after a significant loss, and suggested creative and heartfelt ways to increase both practical and emotional support in one’s life.

I remember liking the word exquisite being used in this way–  it added an element of relief to picture something of beauty, sensitivity and discrimination associated with what can feel like the belly crawling time of coping with acute grief.  I understood her premise to be that individuals can cultivate self-compassion and enlist it, along with other types of efforts, to stay afloat in the world.  It expanded my idea of the long hard slog people can have with the basics of eating, sleeping, safety and support after a loss.  The word exquisite made me consider space and grace seeping into the herculean efforts of those who are in crisis and who are attempting to get through the next moment or hour.

Exquisite self care also seems appropriate for attending to another need after baby loss, one that goes beyond the usual understanding of basic practical and emotional requirements.  It’s something less tangible and probably presents uniquely to each person.  I’m talking about how we care for the bits of involuntary interior remodeling of the self that happen after we lose our babies.

This remodeling may be big or small, have short or long term aspects and, sort of like the Winchester Mystery House, it may be ongoing.  For some of us, we may feel a permanent change in the internal landscape.  My own experience has been feeling that something was dug out inside me as a result of my losses and that the space has undergone many shifts.  Early on, it was more like a situation room.  Everything inside vibrated with intense feelings while plans were made, scrapped, and made again to deal with the circumstances at hand.

Now I think it’s more a room of requirement, a la the one found in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.  It fits the needs I have for it at different times.  Sometimes it is a place where I meet others to hear and feel their stories and sometimes it is a place for me to sit with my own memories.  It is simultaneously a space and an addition.  It is a part of me shaped by a painful and significant part of my history.

Exquisite self care sounds like an appropriate way to tend to such a place.  Some things are forever removed from the interior self post loss and some things should never be removed.  It is a place deserving of respectful tending, which means not overlooking it, fearing it or forcefully messing with it.  We look after it by gently looking inward.  Sometimes we may nod to the space, make a quick round with a dust rag or take a minute to notice the current furnishings.  Maybe other times we pull up a chair and sit awhile because something leads us there and it’s a fine place to visit.

Either way, a bit of tenderness and awe would not be out of line here.  We can show some deference for our selves shaped, but not taken down by grief.  We can remember our dreams and our babies and respect that we loved them and ourselves enough to make room for them.

 

Glimmers

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“But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.” Ariel Levy, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia”

“You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.”  Stanislaw Jerzy Lec


“I don’t want to forget her.”

“I can’t stop thinking about my baby.”

“Remembering and being sad makes me feel connected to him.”


Sometimes I get questions about what it’s like further down the road.  People want to know what it will be like after years have passed and they become older and are people who did or didn’t have more babies and who have had more life happen to them.  They wonder what it will be like after they have lived a long time without the baby they lost.  Will the memories of their baby or pregnancy fade away?  Will they remain all too vivid?  What will they feel about it all?

For any given person, I have to say that I don’t know for sure.   I can’t know.

There are things we know about what usually happens.  People don’t stay in the worst part of their pain long term.  Most people don’t get post-traumatic stress disorder after baby loss.  For those who do there is treatment.  Most people eventually return to their baseline of happiness. Again, help is available for those who need it.

And, as usual, life will continue to involve a lot of fluctuations between the zoom and macro lens view of our lives, including our losses.

When it comes to baby loss experiences, we tend to be ambivalent about our memories.  Losing the memories would mean that nothing remains of the relationship and experience.  The disappearance of a memory, as in the movie Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, would mean the disappearance of part of our lives and part of us.  And the too vivid version?  We’ve already lived that experience and were probably terrified of being stuck there.

A memory and its accompanying feelings can sometimes attack us with devastating intensity. This tends to happen more often in the early weeks and months, or in response to anniversaries or other specific triggers.  However, these strong, surprisingly painful “grief bombs” (as labeled by one of my clients) may be an ongoing, occasional, part of our lives.  These  sudden attacks can feel upsetting but they can also feel like a time of connection to the baby and an important part of our history.

Memories may also be sought out– by bringing up the baby in conversation, poring through pictures or writing down what we recall about the baby or pregnancy.  For some people, the need to honor and share about their baby is passionate, overt and embedded in their daily lives.  (An excellent example of being “out” in this way can be found in Cherie Golant’s article “My Baby Died and I Can’t Shut Up About It” on Medium.com.)

For others, the honoring and remembering may be a more private, although no less sacred part of life.  Support groups, whether online or in person, can often help such people in providing a safe place to express memories and feelings to those who are most likely to be able to understand and bear witness to the pain.  Yearly memorials may serve a similar purpose.  Others may find journaling or art to be the most effective routes to connect and think about their babies.

Connecting with and remembering a baby can also happen in very subtle ways.  Every spring, I look for the tiny blue flowers that were in bloom when my baby died.  When I see them I feel a small, strangely comforting sense of visiting the events of that time.  I think about the experience of carrying and losing her and the mixture of sad and loving feelings I continue to hold.

Memories can pass through and briefly light up something in us.  They can remind of us what happened and how our lives have been changed.   They might be reminders about connection, impermanence, enduring love, staggering pain or the capricious nature of the world.  They might be about living through hell and still living.

You will look back as you move forward.  Sometimes you’ll smell something, feel something, know something because of where you’ve been.  The part of you that loved and lost someone will still matter.  Like the feeling of warm concrete against bare feet after the sun has gone down, your senses confirm what you know, that the glow was there.