cribchronicles.com

it was this morning, after i dropped the kids off.

i pulled up at the stoplight just a second too late to coast through the grace period left behind in the wake of a turn signal.  i was too busy cursing out the dawdler ahead who had damned me to a whole forty-five seconds of waiting to even notice her at first. i am not good at waiting. i harrumphed.

and then some motion, her posture, drew my attention.

she was to my right, in a boxy American sedan of a certain age, waiting for the green. there was a booster seat in the back of the car. she was alone.

she was weeping.

or rather, she was bawling, howling, self-immolating in the driver’s seat of her car. weeping sounds demure. her shoulders heaved and shuddered against the back of her seat and her hands fluttered against her face and there was clearly snot in with the tears and my heart leapt out of me in sympathy at the sight of her.

my hands, though, flapped against the steering wheel uncertainly. i felt frozen, as if i’d stumbled upon someone masturbating, or taking a dump: some animal activity we are civilized into pretending none of us engage in. verboten!! my eyes screamed at me, and averted themselves. then i looked back. i could not stop looking. her open mouth – soundless but for the background noise of my local morning radio show – reminded me of my children’s faces, slack and gaping in their sleep.

i did nothing. you do not get out of your car at a light and walk over to a perfect stranger and intrude upon her sorrow, whatever it may be. you do not.

but sometimes, when the strange hermetic veil that bestows order on us all lifts for a moment, you will want to. your breath will catch and your knees will shake in correspondence with the Other and you will know that there is no Other, only elaborate acts of Othering we all engage in in order to survive.

i mouthed words to her, though she did not see me. I am here, i said, kind of stupidly. then, whispering, You will get here. it was a prayer. then i added, i moved the bedroom furniture around last week.

the light changed and the car behind her honked and she lurched away. i watched her taillights and exhaled.
***

i moved the bedroom furniture. finally.

five years ago, i drove to the paint store a few days before Mother’s Day. the paint had been ordered weeks before. Dave had rushed in in the interim to try to ensure that the kitchen colour wasn’t too school-bus-yellow, and to choose a primer, but he was back at work that day. i had thought i should leave the house.

i’d never painted a room in my life. i’d never owned a house before. the girl behind the counter lined up four bright cans of paint and a can of primer and issued a barrage of how-tos into my gaping, blinking face and i nodded obligingly and took the brushes she proffered and the rolly thing. she asked if i had any plans for Mother’s Day and my mouth hung open further and i shook my head and felt my entire nervous system jangle, barbed wire tugging my spine. i fumbled for my bank card and punched in numbers i could not quite see.

then, behind me, somewhere in the store a baby cried and, like a valve, the pressure behind my swollen left breast let go and i stood there, a flower of milk expanding darkly on my tshirt.

i stood there holding a can of grass-green paint for the nursery. for one beautiful stark moment i saw the store as a Jackson Pollack canvas, spattered violently with green paint and droplets of milk. i wondered how hard i could throw the can, whether i could break glass. in my throat a dragon rose, ready to take wing.

i knew if i tried to speak him free, no words would come; only men in white coats.

and so i hefted the awkward paint cans and my bag of brushes and i hightailed it to my car. there, in the pretend sanctuary of that parking lot, in the cloister of an ugly blue Hyundai, i cried raw and hopeless and despairing, until the dragon was spent and my shoulders heaved back against the seat and i was alone.

i had given birth to a son six days before, the same day we took possession of the house. my firstborn. our first home. my first Mother’s Day.

but my child was gone, and i had only the uselessness of milk, and a house full of boxes, and nursery paint, and i did not give two shits whether i ever got out of that car again.

that first Mother’s Day came and went. i painted a lot of the house, those first weeks after Finn’s death. none of it was, contrary to what polite society might prefer to believe, particularly cathartic. grief itself is a learning curve, as is surviving it: having to attend to the house at that time and continually confront my own ineptitude was like insult to injury. but perhaps anything i did in those days would have felt like that.

then i finished, and things gradually found a place and we were moved in. we got on with living. and for five years, i have lived in this house like a truce.

grief eats energy. even long after you think you’re done with it, you go to lift a finger and find that one small act is just too much, a thread that unravels every effort you’ve made, and you collapse back again into whatever puddle you have managed to form yourself into and you begin again from the beginning.

for five years, Dave & i have slept in a bedroom that is neither especially inviting or comfortable, let alone restful. five years of collecting books and clothing and kid stuff gradually resulted in the room looking and feeling vaguely like a junk room, with the furniture haphazardly arranged and stuff piled precariously on top of other stuff. but every time he mentioned changing it, i bristled.

not because i liked it. not because i’m change-averse, though i am, in many ways. but i was once an inveterate re-arranger of rooms, a person who found joy in creating space, however humble.

instead, for five years, grief and its long fucking aftermath have made me slow and weary and unable to even contemplate how i want the damn bedroom, let alone able to actually drag the bed from the corner and confront the dust bunnies lurking there. i don’t want a different bedroom, my brain would lash out at me in the early days, i want my CHILD. even long after i accepted that he was gone and never coming back, i’d have cheerfully burned the house to the ground just for daring to remind me of its artifactual self. stupid world’s greatest consolation prize, i called it, in my heart. and so i taught myself, without even thinking, not to confront it. i cleaned it, tidied it, refused to engage with it. if Dave brought up making it more pleasurable to be in, i’d close the conversation and turn in on myself, exhausted by the mere idea.

until last week, alone with the four walls for the first time in what felt like far too long, i stood in my bedroom and dared to actually consider what the bed would look like on the other wall. then i stopped and waited for the exhaustion and the snark and the hurt to swim back in over me.

nothing.

i took a deep breath and i nodded to the strange land of my own psyche and the house itself and to whatever of Finn remains within these walls that should have been his first home. and i smiled and started pushing furniture and possibilities and myself, past the sorrow that claimed me in the car that day five years ago and into a world where bedside lamps on either side of the bed are no longer too big a deal to think about.

grief recognizes its own. sometimes, though, there is still nothing to say, or no space to speak within; sometimes you have nothing to offer to the suffering of somebody else except words that trail out into silence long before they hear them.

someday, lady at the red light, i hope you can rearrange your furniture too.

i dreamed last night that she was all grown up.

i wasn’t any older. or i don’t think i was: i never caught sight of myself. the only reflective surfaces were her eyes. her exact blue almond eyes, only bigger, like anime. i could not see myself.

my imagination balks at the conjecture of my own becoming, of looming middle age. but this was Josephine, no other. just the two of us, in women’s bodies, in some timeless place.

they were beautiful eyes. i told her so. she glared back at me, baleful and adolescent, wary of being made out to be something other than she was. i met her gaze and for a moment i was confused, bewildered, bereft. how had we gotten here, to this squared-off stance, to these opposite sides in a conversation i couldn’t even remember? hadn’t she only that morning propelled herself small and round and  into my arms, tiny hands flapping, all glee and shouts and prime directives?

i reached out for her. there was glass between us, suddenly, primary colours washing her skin. and i was afraid.

some part of me knew i was dreaming. some other part of me knew better.
***

i didn’t think i was afraid of the teenage years.

i work with late adolescents, just starting out at university. i used to teach high school. i remember, still, vividly, the angry, caged, abandoned howl that choked the words off in my throat at fourteen, when the teacher slammed me up against the cinderblocks of the school gym and i knew there was no recourse.

i entered parenthood afraid. the first time i laid eyes on Finn, he was being whisked away from me in a shower of blood and alarms. fifteen yellow-suited specialists ran into the room in a neonatal code ballet. they took him away, to the NICU. one came back to say he would not make it through the night.

we had our hour, where i held him. i sang. mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat…and if that billy goat don’t…

i didn’t know what came next.

i didn’t know what a child would want with a billy goat, or a diamond ring, for that matter. my child needed lungs better than those he had. i had only stupid billy goats to offer, and my arms.

i held him until the machines said he was gone, until the nurses said go to bed. it’s nearly morning.

the one bargain i have with the gods and the fates is this: please let that morning be the hardest i ever know as a parent.
***

when Oscar came, and Posey after, there was colic. long nights i revisited my own blind helplessness. i was desperate to salve and soothe and ease. i could not. the billy goats and looking glasses could not. even my arms made no appreciable difference.

i was afraid.

but these two i kept, they grew. they began to laugh and speak and interact, and i did not feel so helpless, so afraid. i know them, now. their curiosity, their sweetness. they are ying and yang all mixed up, risk-aversion and fearlessness, stubbornness and patience, each a wonder and a challenge. Josephine tests the scope of her small voice, gleeful and shouty. she slaps her thighs, kicks at the world. she knows exactly where she wants to go, repeats every word i say. i call her my mockingbird, and the sting of the song eases just a little.

i have been thinking it will get easier, this gig. i have been thinking that i will rock at parenting teenagers, because i know how to sit alongside them when their shoulders hunch and they lash out or turn away. i am better with a crying teenager, i tell myself, than a crying baby.

i begin to believe that the dumb luck that got them here will hold, that my days of fear are done. that my hardest morning as a parent is behind me.

then i read about Henry Granju, nineteen and beautiful and brilliant and drug-addicted in spite of all his mother’s love and help and hope, and i see. you do not get to pay your dues and just walk off into the sunset.

i dream of Josephine, grown and unreachable. and i wake and think of Katie Granju on this hardest morning of her parenthood, waking to the realization that it is true and Henry is gone.  and i whisper to the ether, mercy.

go hold her up, give her your billy goats and your arms. make no mistake, there but for the grace of god or fates or sheer dumb luck go we all.

five years ago tonight i’d been in the same hospital room without leaving for more than two weeks. friends brought Lebanese in for supper, we laughed, one commented lovingly on my little belly, which was finally blossoming past the pudge stage to a belatedly discernable bump. i talked to Dave on the phone: he was staying at my father’s, ready to rise and shine early and go get the keys to our new house, our first home.

i watched a Law & Order-style show of some indistinguishable flavour on the tiny hospital tv. i was restless. i spread earphones over my middle, played a little EmmyLou Harris for Runt. Red Dirt Girl.  the baby i thought was my daughter kicked, and i patted back in time with the music. i still believed the first ultrasound was right, that he was a she. i still believed it mattered, just a bit.

i still believed a lot of things. i believed, with all my cynical heart, that everything would be okay. we were 26 weeks. 75% of babies born at 26 weeks survive without significant complications, i’d read just that morning. there were no signs of labour, no signs of infection. i was adjusting to the institutionalization of bedrest, had recently had the quarantine imposed by my just-out-of-Korea status lifted, and was as prepared as i could be to sit on my enlarging ass right through April and May and well into Gemini and straight on til morning.

i went to sleep earlyish that night. i wish i hadn’t.

five years seems incomprehensible, as if now-me must be some time traveller from the future. it can’t be five years. it’s like yesterday. i’m no different.

that’s a lie. i’ve been different ever since. the girl-woman who fell asleep that night has been gone ever since, as gone as Runt, who became Finn, who made me a mother and changed me once and then twice with his own metamorphosis.

i am wary of wishes. from the day Oscar was born healthy and breathing, and his sister after him, i made myself stop wishing. playing Sophie’s Choice with the living and the dead scares me. from the day Oscar was born, i did not dare wish for Finn.

but tonight, here on my couch, i sit baffled at the affront of time. five years is too long. too strange, that it can be true. and i wish, just for a moment, that i could time travel; that i could lift the veil between me and that creaky hospital bed i’m so sure i see clearly. the stark spring light, sun late in setting. the navy velour hoodie that stretched over my belly. how connected i felt to those little kicks.

i would not erase this life i live now, this half-decade that has passed since that last night before i became a mother. my wish is not to change the outcome. that seems too big, somehow, beyond the scope of my altered capacity for belief. just a night, just a few minutes of an ordinary Thursday night in April.

i’d change only one thing: i’d stay awake.

i’d sit vigil with my son on the eve of his birth, because i’d know that instead of a beginning, we were at an end of sorts. i’d know that we were parting, and i’d sing to my belly, rub gently, drink some juice just to wake him up. he liked cupcakes: i’d scrounge some, somehow. cupcakes are small change compared to rips in the space-time continuum. i’d finish the little Runt Runt story i started in my hospital notebook, the one that still sits upstairs in the drawer, by the memory box. i’d tell it aloud, so he could hear my voice. he would know i loved him. and just his presence would comfort me.

it was the last time that he was with me, not hurt and broken. neither of us hurt and broken.

i sit vigil anyway, here on this other side of five years, remembering. the veil flutters. i squint, close my eyes, try to feel the memory of that first-time belly under my hands. i fail, mostly. but not entirely.

five years later, my eyes squeezed shut, i almost feel it. him. us. i smile through time. wish granted.

happy birthday, littlest.

i am heavily asleep, each time, somehow. this is not possible, and yet i would swear it true.

after three wakeups in the same night, deep sleep only occurs right in those precious three seconds before the next bloodcurdling scream of ma-mAAAA!!!!  i lift my head as if from a pool of sticky cobwebs. i blink, shake. wet dog. my feet are on the floor before i know where or who i am.

Shakespeare was a pansy, or MacBeth was allegory. motherhood murders sleep. end story. curtain.

my brain finally catches up with my ears about the time i hit the door to the kids’ room, and i pause. odd.  it is the elder child calling, the one who for two blessed years has slept like a rock, at least until quarter to crocus each bleary morning.

i creep in, floorboards creaking. i take the little body in my arms, note both how big he suddenly is and still how small. he sobs, falls into me. i wedge myself into the toddler bed beside him, because this is the third time he has been awake. i hold him, rubbing my hand across the spacemen that dot his pajamas.

i mutter, for the third time in as many hours, bad dream honey?  what happened? you tell mama.

but the horror of the unspeakable holds him in thrall. he shudders. we drift.

one of my earliest memories is a recurring dream i had around Oscar’s age. a giant carnivorous dinosaur, cartoon green, would emerge from behind the giant KFC bucket that hung suspended on a pole along my tiny city’s main thoroughfare. i would be driving my little red car. its enormous teeth would loom in front of my windshield, and then it would eat me.

sleep is a Pandora’s Box that unlocks our fears, all the busy-ness of our minds.

it occurs to me that he may not have the words for what has unfolded in the theatre of his own head.  so i ask again, differently. what scared you, buddy? it’s okay, whatever it is. you give it to me. i can help. i can listen.

the little shoulders shake again. and then the deep inhale.  it all tumbles out in a cry.

mommy and daddy got eaten by a shark. with big teeth. eaten up dead. and Finn died. and will Great-grandpa die soon? or Nannie? how do we know when we die anyway? and – this last with the sob of deepest fears given voice – when daddy dies, will he still be his…b-b-b-buddy?

my heart.

he is not yet four. and he is staring down the abyss.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

and my answers are shreds, Kleenex to mop up a river.

love stays with us, i whisper, even after people are gone.

no, we never know how long we have, honey. i don’t know when i’ll die. i hope not for a long time. but i don’t know. i can promise you my love will still be with you even if, someday, i’m not.

yes, Nannie will die. yes, mama too, sweetie. someday. probably not soon. people only die when their bodies are done, sweetie. sometimes that’s a surprise. usually not. my body is strong, baby. i’m very lucky and healthy. just like you.

yes, usually people die when they’re old.

no, Finn wasn’t old. Finn died when he was just a new baby. he came early, before he was ready, sweetie.  his lungs weren’t strong. your lungs are GREAT. blow. see? those are some serious lungs.

yep, he’s still my baby, sweetie, still a part of our family. we still love him. yes, we would love you even if you died. you’ll always be my son, forever. whether we’re alive or not.

yes, i miss him, sweetheart. you miss him too? i bet you do. oh, you’d share your dinosaurs with him? WOW. i think he’d have liked that, Oscar.

well, i don’t really know if he liked dinosaurs. but i bet he would.  he was just a baby, sweetie. he was little, very little. he had brown hair, like Josephine’s, and a cute little nose like yours. just like daddy’s. what did he do? well, he held mummy’s finger. like this. very tight. isn’t that neat? he could do that. but no, we didn’t get to find out if he liked dinosaurs. i would have liked the chance to read dinosaur books with him, yes. i love to read dinosaur books to YOU.

where is he? well…um…some of his ashes are out under the maple tree in the backyard, honey, helping it grow strong. everything that dies helps other things live.

is he here? he might be, Oscar. he might be. sometimes i think that. i would like that, to believe he was here with us, in the air we breathe.

he’s here though, in my heart, Oscar. feel my heart?  there’s love in there for all three of you, you and Josephine and Finn. my babies. no matter how big you get or how long you live. nothing takes love away. i’m sure of that.

yes, Great-grandpa loves you. no, he probably won’t be eaten by sharks. mummy or daddy either. there aren’t really any sharks around here, buddy. the water’s too cold. i promise i won’t go swimming with any sharks, okay?

yes, daddy will be your buddy as long as you live, your whole life. whether he’s here or not. you’re his special buddy, and he’s yours. that’s forever.

it’s okay, sweetheart. you sleep now. it’s gonna be okay.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

it is true, and it is not.

i lie there in the darkness, thinking of all i do not know. whether his brother watches over us.  what days are granted to us.  whether it is better to lie to a not-quite-four-year-old asking about death, or tell the lonely truth: we do not know.  you are loved, and yet alone. this is the human condition, the nightmare we never fully wake from.

i think of my friend Whymommy, fighting cancer for the second time in just under three years. i wonder about 3 am at her house and my heart catches. i say aloud, It is Not Fair.  i feel small and stupid and unforgivably lucky, just for clinging to the belief that it somehow should be fair.

i think of my friend Sue and her sister. my coworker’s dad, whose leg will be amputated tomorrow. the friend who just lost her third baby in a row.

i breathe deep into my son’s tangle of sweaty curls, and unfold myself from his tiny bed.

the spacemen rise and fall peacefully, and i watch in the blue glow of the nightlight. i am remembering Finn’s chest, punctured by tubes, his tiny fingers blackened from lack of oxygen, all just as beautiful to me as this boy.

your father would’ve called you little buddy too, i whisper to the air, just in case.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

only stories comfort this oldest of aches. what do you tell yourself at 3 am? and what do you tell your kids of fear and love and loneliness, and cabbages and kings?

when my grandmother was in her last years, and failing, she lost everything she cared about.

except my mother and i, who sat vigil at her bedside as her entire world narrowed to those two iron rails. but there was only so much we could do to stem the tide of what slipped from her, day in, day out.

first, the house, the house she’d been born in nearly a century before. the driver’s license she’d gotten only at 68.  her card nights. bowling.  a few years later, the apartment, independence itself. her marriage bed, her pots and pans, a lifetime of odds and ends collected over 90 years. no more fridge of her own, only a tray brought to a room in a “home”; a tray like all the other trays, a room like all the other rooms. then the health to go for drives and complete her crossword puzzles and enjoy All My Children in the afternoons. the pain began; it wasted her.

through all of it, seven interminable years of relentless, incremental loss, she struggled with despair and shame at her increasing inability to do. when you are ninety and have outlived your spouse by decades and watched your friends weaken and drop around you, your independence and strength become fierce components of who you believe yourself to be.

i suspect the rest, the whoever you might have been in the long life before, has to be left behind in order to survive the foisted cruelties and indignities of old age. nobody alive remembers that person anyway. and eventually, neither do you.

and if you are a relative of mine, it appears that at the centre of your fierce independence is the belief that you are tough enough to simply die in your sleep when you’re good and ready.

my grandmother didn’t get to do that. in the last year of her life, she lay confined to a series of nursing home and hospital beds, little bird bones poking through her skin. i watched her pull herself present through hazes of morphine to meet my gaze. she had blue eyes. in their reflection, i was always beautiful.

let me die, she would whisper. i’m done.

i love you, i would say in response, irrelevant and yet all i had to give. i refused to look away. i’m so sorry.

she was ashamed of being what she thought was a burden. i was ashamed at my powerlessness, my lack of courage to do for her what she could not do for herself.

seven years, it took.

my grandfather, from the other side of my family, turned ninety last month. his wife died nearly 22 years ago; he has lived since in the house they built together in the 1960s. every corner of it remains a testament to the glorious sleekness of the Bungalow Era. moss-green shag blends living room and family room. the space-age proto-microwave in the kitchen wall sits lonely, waiting for an opportunity to unleash the wrath of its radiation. he has not cooked since she died. not using that microwave may be the secret of his longevity.

he was a spy in WWII, a British Secret Intelligence Service agent who worked out of New York and Camp X, the commando training centre in Ontario from which Ian Fleming would later cobble together the mythology of Agent 007.  in the middle of the war, he married an 18 year old girl from the farm down the road. she had barely been to the metropolis that is Charlottetown;  three weeks after their wedding she found herself in an apartment in New York City. he was called away on a mission – Top Secret – the morning after she arrived. he could not tell her a thing about where he was going – she stayed on alone, in the city that never sleeps. it was six full weeks before he returned.

there has never been anyone else for him.

the war ended. my father was born at Camp X in 1947, while the Cold War took shape. in 1949, the British closed Camp X and burned all the records, and my grandfather turned down the offer to join the fledgling CIA . his wife was done roaming and wanted to go home. he and my grandmother moved back to PEI, bought a little brick house for $6000, raised four kids. he worked as a mechanic from that day until last week. yep, last week. at ninety, he was still going into the mechanic shop a few mornings a week. he likes his routine, my grandfather. he likes to be useful. he has no coping mechanisms for any other state of being.

my grandfather had a heart attack on Friday.

it was a reasonable-sized Cardiac Event, as evidenced by the levels of troponin in his blood yesterday indicating muscle death. he wasn’t in much pain, but his breath short and fast, and his colour gray.  he spent the night in hospital. i was there when the doctor came the next day at noon, saying “Lovenox and a few days and we’ll see and you can probably go home then.”

my grandfather heard only the “probably”. and by the time i returned after supper he was high-tailing it down the hall, hell-bent for leather on going home. NOW. against medical advice. with no chance of continuing the Lovenox once he rendered himself an outpatient.

my father arrived. a close family friend, who’s also a nurse. the three of us tried for an hour, together and separately. i made him look me in the eye, said, i love you. i’m worried about you. i know you’re afraid that this is your only way to control the situation. but i’m afraid this may mean you don’t heal enough to STAY independent.

he looked at me like a hunted animal.

we brought him home. and kept him home last night. he couldn’t breathe, he was panicky, having to struggle his way out to the cold air to catch his breath five times in the first hour. in his socks, in the snow. he wouldn’t let me put his boots on. he wouldn’t let me bring him a blanket. he was agitated, shocky, a clear candidate for oxygen and hospitalization and possibly some form of sedation.

i did not let him see the tears in my eyes.

i don’t know if the choice he made, in his own mind, was the choice to go home to die, or the flight reaction of a terrified human being who wants things desperately to revert to normal.  his face told me that either way, for him, it was a zero-sum game. there would be no argument. none of us have power of attorney, and i doubt one of us who loves him would begrudge him the end of his own choosing, would that we could only grant it.

he picked his hill to die on, and we brought him home.

but i learned, with my grandmother. life is not always so benevolent, nor ends so final. they can trail out, cutting you down body and soul with a thousand bloody, cruel little scratches. that is what i fear for this man who cannot stand to sit idle, whose heart – damage or not – is big and free, loyal as a labrador retriever.

he is home tonight, breathing a little better. the cigars sit, rejected. he had a little food. he is trying. and i sat beside him today and believed, for a few minutes, that this is not the end, maybe only the beginning of the end.  i hope it’s true.  i am not ready, never ready.

but whenever that good night does come, i hope it falls swiftly for him.  the losses all at once, clean and silent.

ours, not his.

around here, most of the Christmas lights stay up into January.

tonight, Old Christmas, the twelfth day in the ancient festival, is the end of it all.  the orange glow of electric pillar candles will disappear from the windows of the city tomorrow; the neighbour’s spruce will no longer cast a pall of sparkling blue on the snow by our driveway. the strings of outdoor lights, unplugged, will mostly hang around ’til spring, increasingly unseasonal decorative accents waiting patiently for their owners to drag them from the meltwater and retire them in favour of lawnmowers. but after tonight, few will shine.

it is Epiphany, the revelation of god become man. or the commemoration of the wise men’s visit, or the baptism of Christ, according to what sources and what heresy you go for. or the day my true love’s supposed to pony up for a whole truckload of lords a leaping, for the girl who has everything, you know.

i am a modern breed, me. no Old Christmas at our house; i stripped the tree and the decorations last weekend, before i went back to work. the outside lights are still up, admittedly, half-frozen to the rain gutters, but i have forgotten them already.

which is why, had you seen me earlier this evening in the cold, crusty wet slush of my backyard, scrabbling around under bare birch trees for a small wooden ornament shaped like a moose – and, separately and with some cursing, for the missing wooden leg of said moose – you would’ve been excused for not recognizing the passion play at hand as a Christmas celebration.

we had a storm last week. snow and rain, a mixed bag. but mostly wind. the highest winds in years, so wild the house shook and air seeped in, squealing. i loved it. until tonight, in a sudden panic, i remembered what might have been lost in that storm last Saturday and went leaping, not at all lordlike, into the snow in hopes of rescue before Christmas was officially over and i could be said to have just forgot.

every year for the past five Christmases, we’ve hung the moose on the trees in the backyard. for Finn.

i have no idea why it’s a moose.  the ornament came from Dave’s side of the combined family collection, that much i remember. he comes from moose country. and perhaps there’s something dark and ridiculous enough about the big, loping creatures, deadly yet not predatory, that seemed like a fit back that first Christmas Eve when i worked up the voice to ask him, sidelong and on impulse, if he wanted to come outside with me to Finn’s trees. his parents, visiting, had gone to sleep. i was pregnant again, tired. and so desperately sad i could barely breathe.

our first Christmas in our first house. our first Christmas after the birth of our son. and he was ashes in our bedroom, and under those trees.

the moose made Dave smile. we hung it on the maple between the birches. we each spoke our Merry Christmases, aloud.

we came inside, went up to bed. i drifted to sleep, Finn’s name quiet in my mouth, the little moose swinging from the tree. the act of including him was the most important thing i did for myself in that bleak midwinter of magical thinking.

the following Christmas was Oscar’s first. and we made the same pilgrimage with the moose, out to the trees late at night after the house had fallen to sleep.  that year i’d planned it, looked forward to it in the way of those who believe they’ve come to terms with what they can and cannot have.

the house was decked and warm, the tree laden with more “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments – all gifts – than any plastic conifer with any dignity would bear. toys in shiny paper awaited the morning, the fat baby hands, the joy.

and then we trekked out in the snow to hang an ornament for our dead child. a single wooden moose, left out in the sleet.

i wondered and worried, before Oscar was born, if i would love him enough…if i would love him as i did his brother. after Oscar was born, i wondered and worried if i would keep loving Finn.

that Christmas Eve, i came inside and sat upstairs by the little urn i hadn’t touched in months,  rocking like a child. howls came out of me, raw and ragged. i can not believe Dave’s parents slept through. but they know what it is to be bereft.

i had a baby sleeping warm and safe in the little room down the hall. and a baby whose spirit i was still close enough to my own grief then to feel, viscerally, who had no place in that house we’d once bought for his coming. i was his mother. and for Christmas, i brought him a moose, and left him in the cold and the snow.

the cruelty of grief is in the helplessness.

i have never been comfortable with the external role of the bereaved.  letting Finn slip entirely into silence and memory would have been, socially, the far simpler choice for me. even with Dave, who loved him too, i always choked a little, wary – with no reason, no justification – of being judged for my weakness, my altered status.  i feared being dramatic. i feared being maudlin.

but he was my child.  even now, when it no longer hurts to think of him, and his absence is only a normalcy to me, the spirit i once felt mostly a closed door, he was my child. my love for him still is. it never got to grow, to deepen and delight in his idiosyncracies, his selfhood, in the way it does each day with his brother and sister. but nor does it end.

that awful wonderful Christmas of one sweet boy and one frozen moose, i decided – however empty, however pointless it felt, even to me – that i wanted to hang the moose outside each Christmas, with Oscar and whatever other siblings Finn might someday have. so that his name would be said. so that his absence had a space, all its own, no matter how stupid and shy i felt carving it out.

so like a child laying out shoes for Saint Nicholas or a stocking for Santa, i trot out the moose every Christmas Eve. we round up the small ones, and we trudge to the yard and we say, quietly, Merry Christmas Finn.  and there we all are for a second in time, our little family, the ones who breathe and the one with a moose and some trees for a stand-in.

(i found the moose. and his leg. they were under the snow, damp but none the worse for wear. some glue and a dry cloth, and i will wrap them in tissue and lay them away now, for another year.)

i am his mother. it is what i can do.

i lean against a toyshelf that was once a changing table in a playroom that still contains within it an office. a child clambers over me and a sippy cup drips rice milk into the suit i never bothered to change after work, while the other child beats my head cheerfully with a hairbrush. brush mommy’s hair gently, i chirp. she pauses, cocks her head to peer at me, then swats.

jenNEE? she inquires solicitously. i beam. gently, i say.

we talk, now, she & i. we talk.

my brain flits for a moment on a memory of eighth-grade science class and a mustachioed teacher labouring over arcane powders and the mystery of States of Change. in the scene, thirteen-year-old me  sits slackjawed, nonplussed, an empty thought bubble half-deflated above her.

thirty-seven-year-old me ponders the conversion from gas to liquid and dismisses it.  rather ostentatiously showy, really.  hell, we’re all in a constant science experiment of State Change: life would’ve been simpler if they’d just laid THAT out in junior high rather than bothering us with all that garble about kinetics and theories of matter, whatever those were.

i am matter. my children are kinetic. never the one shall catch the others, nor keep them still and static. memorize that, kids.

world’s Slowest Ever Esprit d’Escalier. so there, Mr. Plaid Pants and Moustache.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dave is at his desk two feet away, lord of itunes. he is at home this month, washing my delicates and harnessing GoogleWave as a home project management tool, meaning i can sit at work and pile pearls of  inspiration like “buy baby wipes!” onto his list rather than my own sad little daytimer. we’re four days in and he is rising to the occasion with grace. i gaze at him and imagine he sits in his chair slightly differently, more aware of the house around him, of the overflowing trash can sulking at his feet.

i hum a little Rocky Horror, slightly altered to suit:

in just seven days i can make you…a wi-i-i-ife.

i thrill, and wonder if he’ll start meeting me at the door dressed in fishnets, casseroles in his oven-mitted hands.  then i realize he needn’t bother with the fishnets. i am so goddamned tired i have the libido of a wet, dead mackerel.

time change is a cruel instrument of torture dreamed up by sadists. since Sunday morning, my children have not slept past the new 5:45. at night, they’re wired, exhausted, a once-peaceful bedtime degenerating into a drawn-out circus.

dear powers that be: i’m already coping with a chronic case of State of Change. nobody needs to fuck with my clock, too.

it’s a good thing i have a wife, even temporarily. it would be better if anybody was getting anything resembling a decent night’s sleep.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dave reaches out an arm and scoops Oscar up to the computer, brown head and blondish one close together. Josephine beetles away from me, off to thwack her hairbrush on some unsuspecting inanimate object.

the music catches me off guard – the opening chords of the first pop song i ever loved. Annie Lennox’s voice thrums up through the synthesizers.

i want to walk in the open wind
i want to talk like lovers do

like lovers. ah, lovers.

i remember being perhaps twelve, in my bathtub, still ignorant of chemistry and States of Change but shaving my legs for the very first time, Eurythmics my soundtrack for this rite of passage.  i ran a finger up the expanse of one wet, newly shorn calf, trying to inhabit the song, to imagine – from a vantage point of utter innocence, pure tabula rasa – the exotica of whatever it might be that lovers really did do. then i looked over my shoulder, mortified, and broke down in giggles in my bubble bath.

“lovers” meant sex. whatever that was.  but…they talked? like in sweet nothings? what would i say to a lover? another empty thought bubble hung limp above my adolescent head. so much is unimaginable when the mind is young.

sitting on the floor, though, soft and tired and sticky with sippy cup spillage, i understand the lyrics for the first time.

i remember waking languidly and looking for his eyes. i remember being two, just two. i remember that once upon a time, i saw nothing in a room but him. the memory is so vivid i almost glance over my shoulder as i did at twelve, embarrassed to be caught out naked with my own thoughts.

i could spit across the room and dirty his shirt. but i barely see him. and the lovers we once were feel as far away from me as that bathtub where i first shaved my legs twenty-five years ago.

i would not trade. but oh, god, i would like to visit.

next week, we escape to Montréal for five days. just us. in a city, gray and anonymous and magical to me, sleeping late in hotels and buying baguette for breakfast.  cafés.  wine.  nowhere to be.

and maybe we will talk like lovers do, up late, lost again in a world of our own creation. maybe. maybe the constant State of Change can circle round.

i would rather that than a wife, even. and that’s saying something.

some things come easy.

it is fall again and the light is yellow and crisp and i swear i only brought her home yesterday but there she is, Josephine walking, tottering like a blithe drunk about the house, careening into everything faster than my hands can catch her.

she took her first formal steps, the first real replicable confident stutter from here to there, exactly on her first birthday. a true Virgo, fastidious and precise and on time. two weeks later, she is unstoppable, a whirlwind. she is delighted with herself. i am delighted in her.

it’s easy when thing line up tidy-like. smugness rises like cream, unbidden, unintentional. i have to slap myself.

i suspect that some poor lost Virgo – perhaps the part of me from which Josephine’s timeliness sprang - lurks under my Aquarian skin, trying to run a Prussian train line through the soup that is life. my inner Virgo wants to believe that someday all the books will not only be shelved but alphabetized, that the dishwasher will empty itself, that everything will go on schedule, that there will be an Answer.  all the things i just never made sense of in this big ol’ game of Go Fish, she’s been tallying, saving up, waiting for me to put in order.

this Virgo, she gets louder and more anxious every year. virgins are like that, i retort. she glares, haughty, above me.

but she forgets too easily, this Virgo. she lets herself believe that order=safety, that norms=virtue. she lets herself believe in the medieval laws of hermetics and falls prey to the mugs’ game of pride in random milestones, mistaking them for a promise that all will continue.

normal only means the bus hasn’t hit you yet.

normal is a trick of the mind, one that lets you believe yourself cossetted from the awfulness you glimpse now and then at the periphery of things. yet it is normal to have suffering come for you eventually, not only in the thud of mortality but in the hundred shocking ways a world can be swept from under you.

when you know this, and make yourself remember, nothing comes so easy. first steps – on a first birthday or months before or later – are a marvel, a quiet, private symphony unto themselves.

my Virgo, trapped eyeless under my skin, cannot see this. her lens turns only inward, tallying these small blessings gifted me by my children, and nodding yes, yes.  she believes she is due.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

each September for the past few years we’ve gone apple picking in the same orchard not far from the city; a wide, sloping place that veers down towards water, all small, twisty trees abundant with fruit.

there are few things in my adulthood i’ve done five years in a row…i have not stayed still long enough for that kind of consistency, ’til now.  but this local teacher-turned-farmer and his earnest operation of organic apples keep us coming.

Oscar’s first year in the orchard he slept against his father’s chest, cheeks like apples peeking out above the carrier. two years ago he was just big enough to ride on the little apple basket trolley without toppling. last year, he batted at the trees and filled the basket mostly with half-eaten remains of all the apples he tried, while i carried eleven-day old Josephine in her sling and tried to pick one-handed. this year, even my baby girl took a chomp at temptation, her cheeks shuddering when the tartness hit.

the first year, though, we went without children. a friend dragged us out in our crappy old station wagon, her energy buoyant enough to break through the cloister we’d imposed on ourselves those months after Finn died.  i was newly pregnant with Oscar, as fragile and closed as an eggshell, emotionally, but the apple-picking pleased me, comforted. the small trees and the low-hanging fruit were easy, the first thing in that long season of drastic change and adjustment that seemed to come without undue effort. we filled baskets, the sun shone, i smiled. and then we paid and drove away and our friend said i know the prettiest country road.

isn’t that how Deliverance starts?

we were playing Lucinda Williams on the stereo. raw, reckless, rollicking Lucinda, wailing I think I lost it, lemme know if you come acrost it, lemme know if i let it fall along a back road somewhere… the only song i seem to remember from the haze of bewilderment and grief that had been that summer of ’05.  our friend Christina, with pipes like a church choir, competed with Lucinda from the back seat. i droned happily in my three-note warble.

and then a bang and a metallic ripping sound. the car bumped gracelessly to a halt. the scenic red-dirt lane had torn the ass-end straight out of our vehicular lemon and we were a good few miles from nowhere without even cows to gaze upon our distress.  Christina sacrificed a belt to try to tie the necessary underbelly back onto the car, to no avail, and Dave plucked at a barbwire fence for the same purpose. i did nothing. i had, with the very first bang, gone under.

normal may be an illusion, but there are times the human brain can only sustain so much of its absence. i just moved continents, been airlifted and lost my hard-scrounged job all in the same breath, had a child and had that child die in my arms. but it was our poor old fugly station wagon – bought for a baby who never rode in it – that sent me off the rails.

i didn’t do much. you wouldn’t have known, to see me. i sat by a ditch, patting my bag of apples, still singing Lucinda Williams. but inside something had snapped, gone rogue.

the Virgo had been telling me all my life that if i just worked harder, tried harder, was better, things would work out. the universe, though, was seemingly expending all its energy thwarting my need for any sort of positive outcome or expectation of normalcy whatsoever. or that’s how it felt, then, at the side of that dirt road.

and so for a minute, i gave up. i dropped my head to my knees and breathed deep and jagged and stared into the red mud puddle between my feet and forgot, briefly, that i was verklempt and bereaved and hopeless and apparently cursed of god and Hyundai, both.  i picked up a shiny, crisp apple, fresh from the tree, and bit it.

my brain said, this is nice.

the Virgo heaved and gnashed her teeth. i heard her, vaguely, through my chewing. you are sitting in a mud puddle! lost in the backwoods! your baby died and you’re broke and your ridiculous life makes no sense at the moment! and you had such POTENTIAL! did i mention that tow truck is going to cost a fortune? and that you’re IN a mud puddle?

i looked at Dave, ten feet away, trying to clean the barb wire rust off his hands. i looked at Christina, fearless in the face of our sadness, who had befriended us when we had nothing to offer except need. i looked at my apples and decided i could walk back to civilization on apple power if i had to.

i thought, these will possibly be the darkest days of my life.  i felt almost eager, thinking it, delusional and free, like a glimpse into some other time usually veiled from my eyes. i watched the sun play on my hands and realized i was going to live through these rotten, ludicrous days, even if they didn’t come easy.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

states of grace never last, at least not for me. i told the Virgo to fuck off, and it was good. but she was back the very next day.

the places in me where she is woven deepest i still rise, indignant, at any sign of my own bad luck, any sign that i am again cast beyond the bounds of what i deem normal for folks to have to bear. i know better, and still i fall for it, the old line that i have somehow paid my dues and am exempt from future suffering.

someday, if we are lucky, we will all be old. and we will suffer. to be old is to ache, to lose one’s loves, one’s friends, one’s independence. i sometimes wonder if we have our goals straight.

but for right now, in this gift of my neglected functional body, and the healthy maelstrom of short legs that is my children’s sweet solidity and simple, easy development, i am replete. the Virgo be damned. i see blessings.

razors pain you
rivers are damp
acids stain you
and drugs cause cramp
guns aren’t lawful
nooses give
gas smells awful
you might as well live
- Dorothy Parker

i have always thought myself a cat person. and by some alchemical trick of metaphysics and assumption, my medieval mind has occasionally, therefore, convinced me that i am thus – metaphorically, of course – a cat.

it is only when things change drastically that i am forced to notice one significant problem with this little identification of the heart: penchants for napping and sloth and shedding notwithstanding, i am no feline. felines, thrown through the air, make graceful arcs and solid landings, all twenty-plus paw pads absorbing shock.

pretend felines, thrown through the air, claw and shriek and flail, spinning paws in mid-air like old LooneyTunes characters discovering the earth has given way beneath them. then they go splat.

both kinds of felines, the real and the ones with pretensions to cat-ness, then retire to corners to lick their wounds in private.  when one is not a cat, this can take awhile.

all this to say, i have been quiet, learning yet again that i am not a cat. and that landing on one’s feet is not a graceful process, when one is not a cat. seismic shifts disrupt my comforting routines and leave me anxious, unstable, vulnerable.

uh, yeh.  who, me? a tissue? don’t mind if i do.

but then this strange new world begins to take shape and its reflection in the mirror grows less foreign and i begin to understand the ways i can be competent with this, the ways not all is different, the gifts and possibilities of what this new will be. and my equilibrium recalibrates and i find my balance and stop kicking in midair, stop licking my raw spots.

when one is not a cat, one sometimes realizes one is an old dog, struggling yet again with these damn new tricks.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Friday, 3:56 pm
with a little wincing grimace that means, “i’m really sorry i’m leaving with a pile of painfully tedious data entry left to do so students can register Monday especially since i already left early Wednesday but Dave’s in Vancouver so i HAVE to go get the kids ’cause the sitter’s on summer hours” i wave happy weekend at my poor, patient, beleaguered boss – left sitting in the disorganized pile of new Soviet prison furniture dumped in my office earlier that day – and race out the door.

starting work has been easy, really.  the office is both familiar and welcoming, the culture there affirming and social and all i’d hoped and remembered it would be when i took the job. i’m taking over from a person who is tidy of mind, and working for a person who’s been the closest thing to a mentor i’ve found since i moved back here four-and-a-half years ago. my bestest friend, lifelong, is in the office next door. the data entry part of things literally nearly blew my brain wide open for a couple of hours until i pried it open and personally lobotomized a few errant and unnecessary bits i wasn’t using much anyway, but other than the fact that they have no couch for me to recline upon and Gulags R Us designed the gray aesthetic anaesthetic that passes for new desks there, i’m happy.

the rest has been harder. Dave was away. kids weren’t sleeping, either at the new sitter’s or at home. time was suddenly chewed up like an all-day pizza and come 9pm i’d find myself at the end of a long, long road of supper/tidying/bedtime/laundry/prep for tomorrow and staring down the prospect of watering my poor sunbeaten pansies and tomatoes and wanting to wilt myself for want of sweet downtime.  Oscar grew dawdly and i found myself frog-marching him through our hours together, trying desperately to get me and two kids dressed and fed and out of the house with all we needed for the day by the hour that two weeks ago meant we’d be sitting down to breakfast. Posey cried whenever she saw me, and my heart ached and fretted and pined for her, for the impossible assurance of a good decision made.

Friday 4:09 pm
i wedge the children and their daycare bags and the dirty-diaper bag and my own work bag (which is, ahem, actually still my regular diaper bag/purse/chasm of magical disappearance) into the sun-stroked, stifling car. four years ago, when we bought the cheapest car on the market, paying $1000 extra for A/C sounded like the most ridiculous idea i’d ever heard. now, of course, the most ridiculous thing i’ve ever heard is the whimpering of my sweaty baby slowly cooking in the back of a non-air-conditioned car because her mother is a cheap sow, but i digress.

the baby’s dress, i notice as i strap her in, is covered in a sticky brown substance that is unmistakably either Fudgsicle or chocolate ice cream. Oscar cheerily informs me that he didn’t nap today because a movie was on during quiet time.

my brain conflates these two pieces of information and comes to the logical conclusion that my children spend their days drinking Coke and watching soft porn and will grow up to skin kittens with their teeth. my spirits slump on the steaming, filthy car mat.  i wallow in the certainty of my own failure.

Friday 4:25 pm
the hot little car of misery and chocolate stains arrives at my grandfather’s cottage, because PEI actually is only three apples wide.

the cottage – and i use the term loosely, as “rustic plywood shack” might cover it better in some estimations – is a living testament to my late grandmother’s foray into creative needle art of the 60s and 70s. the curtains are faded brown and orange op art specials, the walls plastered with crewel work depicting owls, turtles, boats, and various other flora & fauna. souvenir ashtrays abound, relics of guests long since forgotten. the faded patchwork couch, a Coat of Many Colours for the furniture set, was replaced two summers ago by well-meaning family friends who meant to surprise my grandfather, but i think he misses the zany, threadbare thing. i do.

Rusty greets us at the door, from a prone position in front of the fan, towel laid over his hind end. in German Shepherd years, Rusty is about 107. he’s my father’s dog, though my grandfather’s soft spot for him is notorious and deep. they are the patriarchs, my grandfather and Rusty. he calls Rusty noble, and i sometimes wonder if he isn’t fishing for the compliment to be returned.

i met Rusty first as a pup in the Yellowknife airport in the summer of 1996. it was early August, tail end of the midnight sun, and i was flying back north for a second year of teaching. i crossed paths with my father’s clan on their way back from PEI to the town they’d called home for ten years. my half-sister had sweet-talked them into a puppy, and he sat bouncing in his cage, smiling at me.  when he licked me, i laughed, and was surprised.

Rusty still has the same open gaze, the same trusting brown eyes.  i’m not a dog person, have never been a dog person, but Rusty’s sweetness charms me. and even splayed on the orange shag rug in my grandfather’s cottage, his bounce long since gone, he charms my kids. Posey puts her hand on his nose and he bats his eyes at her like a scene out of Disney.  Oscar, upon discovering that Rusty can no longer swat flies away with his tail, fans them for him dutifully.

Rusty is a dog on borrowed time. his left back leg stopped working awhile back, and on Wednesday my father and stepmother had planned to make that last sad trip to the vet to put him down. there is a point after which sustaining life is no mark of love. but mercy is a tricky thing. when Rusty perked up and started enjoying his food, stopped showing pain, they decided a last week at the shore might be nice for all concerned.

at 89, my grandfather has to pick his way down the crooked steps to the beach with a cane. my father brings the old sky-blue motorboat in from its mooring, readies it, helps his father in. but once in the driver’s seat, my grandfather drops thirty years. he is still the best waterski driver i’ve ever seen – patient, smooth, able to read the pull on a rope and adjust accordingly.

Friday, 4:45 pm
Rusty can no longer go down the steps to the beach. when the crew make their way down the sandy red cliff – Oscar included, life-jacket-clad, in my stepmother’s arms for his very first boat ride ever – Posey and i stay behind with the old dog. he whimpers at them leaving. he is a water dog, a people dog, part lab, part shepherd.  this being left behind alarms him, say his big brown eyes.

i look at him and feel as if i’m looking in a mirror. i feel grizzled with exhaustion, with heat, with the anxiety of inexorable change and my own inability to keep up, to land easily on my feet anymore.  i reach out and rub Rusty behind the ears, where he’s still soft. i coo a little song of “we’re here, buddy, it’s okay,” though he is long since deaf. and we are companionable, two old dogs; one who thinks she’s a cat, one who’s sure he’s a person.

then i hear the boat grumble to life down in the water and i forget Rusty because it is Oscar’s first boat ride and i want to know that he is okay, want to mark with my eyes that he once rode in the boat with my grandfather at the helm so i can tell him someday. i step out the old screen door with the baby in my arms and it slaps shut behind me and i am peering, craning out to see the small form in the seat beside my grandfather when i hear the door creak again and it is Rusty nosing it open, unwilling to be alone.  he pauses at the small threshold between cottage and porch and then leaps, old strong front legs carrying his bulk despite the dead hind end and he crashes down beside me apparently unfazed and my jaw hangs open and i turn my head in strange respect so he will not see my tears.

Posey claps in delight.  and my grandfather’s boat speeds away over the water like it has done every summer since i can remember but this time with my son in front, so small and riding away from me, wind in his hair. and i sit with Rusty in his reprieve, in his last days, and ruffle his fur.

when one is not a cat, all you can really do is get through today and keep leaping, no matter how graceless your landing.

back a few years ago, when i was still frequently startled to discover that there were other people out there in this online thingy box, i woke up one morning to find i’d been given an award. i was more delighted than was strictly necessary, but the world of memes and blings was still a vast untrodden snowfall for me, and it looked right pretty. the bestower of said award had honoured not just me but another writer, so, curious, i clicked the link and wandered over to check out the company i was keeping.

and that was how i first stumbled across Vicki Forman. Vicki wrote a column called Special Needs Mama, part of the Literary Mama e-zine family, about parenting her son Evan.

in an ensuing email exchange the likes of which i never seem to engage in anymore, alas, i discovered that Evan’d had a twin, Eleanor, who died a few days after birth. and that Vicki’s elder daughter was Josephine.  had Finn been a girl, i wrote back, he’d probably have been Eleanor. or Josephine.

it was early 2007. it was the first time i had seen any shadow of my own reflection – in name tastes or in loss. and i found the idea that Vicki was out there somewhere immensely comforting, normalizing. i also found it thought-provoking.  she brought dignity and unflinching matter-of-factness to her narratives of Evan and her role as parent to a significantly disabled child. she did not pander to people’s pity, or expectations of a fluffy, inspirational happy ending. reading Vicki, i began to take steps towards writing my way out of a box i’d seen no other other exit to.

one of the most surreal parts of having lost Finn, for me, was the silencing effect it had. it created a space around me that felt filled with cotton batting, or a choking kind of insulation.  a dead baby is the conversational equivalent of a cement truck. i did not know how to introduce the subject in relation to myself, did not know how to negotiate the weight it carried without feeling awkward or skinless or somehow miscast. i was neither serene nor destroyed, which were the main culturally available motifs for my new role. i was simply…messy, then.  too messy and too vulnerable to even begin to invite attention to it all. and so this tremendously important part of me, the struggle with my grief and anger and fear and sorrow, became isolating and…unspeakable.

i was lucky, in that i was surrounded mostly by kindness. but people who knew me and knew of Finn skirted the subject, probably afraid of hurting me with reminders, probably afraid of saying the wrong thing.  i understood that. but in the midst of all that well-intended ignoring of the elephant in the room, i sat smothering under the silence and the elephant itself; the face i presented to the world a mask that ellided everything underneath.

i’d allowed my grief to be socially relegated to a little airless box, and i was choking in that box.

so i started to write about it, face-on, to allow myself to begin to explore here the things i desperately wanted to and needed to, but couldn’t, not aloud. and in doing so, i started to integrate my inner life back into the face i wore to the public, even this small, semi-private, semi-anonymous public out here online. it was enough.  i believe writing here kept me from suffocating  in my own bewildering loneliness and sadness.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

mostly i think i’ve absorbed Finn’s death. sometimes, though, i’ll catch a scent in the air at a particular time of year, or read a story, or hear a pregnant woman dismiss risk as if she were immune, entitled, and scenes crash in on me, the horror reel of it all going wrong.

the grim neonatologist who came back to the delivery room to tell us, bluntly, that he would not make the night and then walked away. my baby’s tiny, punctured chest, only an hour old and already his body breached and bloodied while we were not even there to comfort. the machine-gun gasp and pound of the ventilator.  the  nurse who told me his blackened fingers and toes were a sign of something congenitally wrong, then the other nurse – when i finally got up the courage to ask – who stared at me surprised and said, no, he’s perfect, it’s just oxygen deprivation. the swell of fear and rejection that backed up in my throat the first time i saw him there in his isolette, splayed out, red-raw, so compromised, and how my mind hissed you’re going to die at my newborn son before my hand reached out without me and touched his and his fingers wrapped around mine and i was lost, in spite of myself, to wonder and tenderness, to loving him. the confusion of it all, the helplessness. the feeling of somehow having being stripped of the right to compassion by the crisis, and stripped of the right to hope.

all these swarm in and punch me in the gut and i am left gasping, stunned by what my memory has secretly stashed away.

i thought maybe i was crazy, the kind of closet cat lady who looks perfectly bland from the outside but one day snaps and ends up on the nightly news because the picture bombs in her head finally exploded.

apparently not. apparently it’s just my amygdala, a part of the brain “so ancient and original it’s present even in lizards,” where the raw fight-or-flight emotions triggered by significant trauma are preserved and kept alive. the brain cannot integrate or defuse those emotions. there they sit, preserved in neurotransmitter amber.

i have Vicki Forman to thank for the comfort of the amygdala, because Vicki published a book this summer, a book called This Lovely Life: a memoir of premature motherhood.  and i ordered it and ate it up and found myself reading it half in her world of the summer of 2000 and half in my own of spring 2005. and then she explained the amygdala, and i felt…once again…just a little more able to breathe.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Vicki’s book is not an easy read.  there’s no enlightened, illumined mama guru enriched by the smiling happiness of her disabled child. rather, the book tells the story of the trauma of the twins’ birth, Ellie’s death, and the unfolding story of Evan’s blindness, seizure disorder, and survival in a light that most of us would shrink from shining on our egos, our mother roles.  it is one of the most honest and troubling and beautiful stories i’ve read in a long time, and though Vicki is the figure at its centre, it is the evolving relationship between her and her son that the book stands as paean to.

in one of the cruel twists that life deals out sometimes, it seems that Vicki had just finished this book and landed a publisher when Evan, days short of his eighth birthday, died suddenly and without warning.  i read the book knowing that the child whose survival seemed so uncertain would grow to become the boy his mother wrote about at Special Needs Mama, but also knowing the heartbreak at the end of the story, the coda that even the writer of the reflections in its pages couldn’t see.

i want to thank Vicki for sharing Evan. i want to thank Vicki for consistently, at Special Needs Mama and in This Lovely Life, carving out a space of words and dignity that has helped me with my own processing, my own healing, my own understanding of how vast and fraught and boundless the word mother can be.

i want to encourage you to read this book.