On being open again

You bet we want more.

Call us crazy, but we are still all for having a family. When I had my six-week checkup with my OB in November, she asked us what our plans were. She said that people who go through a loss like this may want time to process, while others want to launch straight back into babymaking. We were somewhere in between, wanting time for me to recover and heal physically, and also time to deal with things emotionally while not also contending with a torrent of hormone-induced vomiting episodes. But we also need to balance this with the reality that we're contending with the calendar: statistically, there may not be a lot of fertile years left.

It has been both good and necessary to take some time to grieve and not to worry about when we want to add to our family, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that this is a process that will ever reach some kind of finality, that we will ever wake up one morning and say, "Hey, I think we're done being sad about Ewan's death now. Let's start having some more children."

So as we approached nearer to the point where Ewan would have been six months old, in my mind, we were "trying." It only took two months of this to realize the "trying" mentality was an incredibly bad idea for me emotionally and psychologically. With "trying," a negative pregnancy test feels not just like a failure, but also a lot like loss for the child that "could have been". Honestly, I was obsessed. Tears and anger ensued when discovering that month's negative results. I could see and feel that this mentality was unhealthy, but I was so caught up with "trying" and felt like I couldn't let go of it even though I saw how it was harming me.

But I have let go of it. It was surprisingly easy once I recognized it for what it was. I've let go of "trying" and am embracing "being open" instead. This attitude of being open is how we found ourselves expecting Ewan, after all. I'm not going to cease in my efforts to ensure that my body is an optimally healthy environment for a baby, but I'm releasing the death-grip I had on the effort to achieve pregnancy within a certain timeframe. I'm going to enjoy the fact that I get to share life with an amazing husband and invite that love to bring more children our way.

Ewan taught me so much, and continues to teach me. Though unlikely, it is possible that what happened to Ewan could happen to another child of ours. We decided early on, however, that we weren't going to make our decisions from a place of fear, but rather from hope: hope that we could have a "normal" experience, hope that next time, we will have a child at home -- except after Ewan, normal wouldn't be normal at all. Normal would be extraordinary. Because of Ewan, to say I can appreciate that now is a terrible understatement.

When that day comes, there will be a lot of wondering, and a lot of waiting. Breath will be held until we can see and know (in as far as we can know) that that little beating heart is whole. And when that day comes, it will be worth it no matter what happens. For me, Ewan is proof enough of that.

Pieces

On Friday, it was five months since he died. Five months. The description of how much time has passed between that day and everything that came after seems rather arbitrary. If you told me it had been five minutes, or if you told me it had been nine years, I would have believed you either way.

On Friday, I looked at the pictures of him. I remembered his birth, his warmth, and his sweet new baby scent. I remembered stroking his hair, kissing his forehead, and nibbling on his toes. I remembered the way his skin changed when he died, turning dark and dusky as life gave way to death and I held the body that, just over two weeks prior, had been safely nestled in mine. I called my Mom from my office that day, voice cracking. I don't understand. I just don't get it. How did this happen?


And I fell apart again.

* * *

I get e-mails telling me about how Ewan's story inspired a positive change, a reconciliation. I hear about how he saved a life. These things are good and I never tire of hearing them, but there is bitter along with the sweet. These good things are born of his death and our loss.

* * *

We gave Ewan the middle name "Eliezer" after Abraham's servant in Genesis. In Chapter 24, Eliezer is sent on an urgent errand for his master Abraham: to find a wife for his son, Isaac. Eliezer journeys on camelback to Mesopotamia, to the city of Nahor where he found Rebekah, the one who would become Isaac's wife. The journey demonstrates profound faith and tremendous humility, qualities in Eliezer that we admired enough to give the same name to our son.

Eliezer's journey from the side of his master to the well where he found Rebekah was sixteen days. Sixteen days is also the length of Ewan's journey here on earth.

And as Eliezer was to depart Nahor to return to his master with Rebekah, he said: "Do not delay me. The LORD has made my mission successful. Now let me go back to my master." (Gen. 24:56)

And so he did. And so did Ewan.

On the writing

The book project is slow going. Making the decision to start with one of the more poignant scenes from our narrative (our last night with Ewan) was a bold decision and I think, the right one. In theory, I know what to write and have sufficient skill as a writer to describe those final hours with passion and precision. But in actual practice, it is extraordinarily difficult. The most I've written at any given time is 800 words (about one page, single spaced) and  after each attempt, I find myself depleted, angry, sad, and unable to sit at the computer without feeling as though I'm tempting a torrent of tears to explode out of me. For several days after each of these sessions, I find myself unable to think of approaching it again.

In the immediate aftermath of that final night, I was able to write about it more easily. There was plenty of emotion behind it, but it was not nearly as excruciating as what I experience now. In those initial days, I understood what had happened. I knew he was gone and not coming back. I was with him, holding him, looking at him, and remaining present in each of those agonizing final moments. I saw him in the casket. There was no mistaking what had happened.

For all that awareness and understanding, I concurrently have no doubt that in those initial days and weeks, I was in a state of mental and emotional shock. I couldn't possibly take in all at once what was happening and how it would change my life. To experience all at once what had happened would be overwhelming to a degree I couldn't comprehend. In a matter of three weeks, I had given birth, waited through a number of surgeries and invasive procedures my son was not expected to survive, gotten spotty and irregular sleep, and buried my child. Over time however, the shock (much like an anesthesia) wore off and I felt everything. Literally: everything. Tears required little to no inducement, mornings were greeting with a sense of foreboding and dread. I often wondered, what wouldn't I feel today?

Nearly five months have elapsed between then and now. I have experienced and continue to experience every possible nuance of sad or angry emotion that you can think of. And so when I look back on that night, it is through a lens of all I have experienced and felt since then. Rationally, I understand exactly what happened. But emotionally, it is completely incomprehensible to me that this could have happened more than once in the history of the world. It is that profound, and now that I've encountered hundreds of other mothers who have experienced the same kind of grief, the incomprehensibility gets deeper and heavier for me. So when I look back, I feel it all. I remember that night, I am in it, and I feel everything with no shock to protect or numb me. It is like undergoing surgery without the anesthesia.

I've journaled and pondered about my feelings and how best to proceed. I need to be honest, which means I can't detach myself and write clinically about that night. If I did that, you would know it and quite rightly throw that book across the room or in the bin. I've come to the conclusion that I have to keep going back there, and that it's probably not going to get any easier. I will probably exit those writing sessions with waning energy and more tears than I can possibly hold. That's going to be part of my cost. I will need to go gently and slowly. But it's worth it. I was there and I've seen what has happened in the wake of Ewan's life and death. And I remain convinced: it's worth it.

Healing in Small Ways

Connecting with old friends, meeting new ones. Laughing. Staying up late, eyes watering with jaw cracking yawns, but can't go to sleep because the conversation is just that good, and it's been so long. Waking up to see a different slice of the sky than the one you've seen a hundred days in a row before this one. Feeling all through the body: this is so good.

The gospels tell stories of dramatic healing: the lame man who can suddenly walk, the man born blind who can see just a blink later, the lepers whose flesh is made whole. I've envied them, hoping vainly that  I will wake up one day and find that suddenly somehow, my heart does not feel like a balloon that has lost its ability to float.

The movement is so gradual that from one day to the next, it's difficult to notice the change and impossible to quantify: to find that on this day, my heart does not hurt so much as it did the day before, or the day before that. Is it because we are somewhere new that I've noticed?

Hmm.

I am someone who has survived something, and that means I don't expect that I will ever experience life in the ways I did before I was pregnant. I imagine the same thing is true of anyone who lives through a thing that they once expected would kill them: life never becomes again what it once was. It is an altered normal, a picture of the world that looks essentially the same, though captured through a completely different lens. And though this will always have at least a tinge of pain to it, I cannot convince myself that this is a bad thing. When you're someone who is healing in small ways, getting to this place is victory and perhaps, no less a miracle than the healing that happens in an instant.

Learn to Carry

Nighttime can be the hardest sometimes. A day can be filled with activity: working out, meeting up with people, e-mailing, doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, getting things done. But when night falls and everything slows down, it's more difficult to shove off the sadness that's been lurking just over my shoulder all day, waiting for me to slow down enough so that it can wrap itself all around me, bind my limbs and squeeze my heart until it feels as though it will burst. It's missing Ewan, and it's all the other things right now that aren't turning out the way we had hoped. It's all those things that make the idea of giving up so tempting.

It's those things that make for dreadful nights, and mornings after like this one.

And it hits me, what I've said before and am living now: I can never really "get over" this. It's always going to hurt. I'm always going to miss him. It will probably be the case that most nights as I turn over in bed to turn out the light and catch a glimpse of our 4-day-old looking up at James and holding on to my index finger that my chest will cave in a little and my eyes prick with tears. I don't expect there to be a day in my life where I wake up and don't feel some sadness when, in the midst of all those new-morning mercies, I realize again that I have been widowed in my motherhood.

I remember going to see our chiropractor for the first time after Ewan died. Dr. Doug had been praying for us and for Ewan, and we dreaded giving him the news. His eyes filled with tears when he entered the room and told us about the 3-month-old daughter he and his wife buried over twenty years ago. Before that day, we had no idea.

It will never stop hurting, at least not altogether. But I can learn to carry it: to walk and breathe with it, to sleep with it, to wake up to it, and to get through each day with it, even though there might be a lot of days where it feels like having a sack of bricks tied around my neck and both ankles. I'm learning how to do it, and will keep on learning.

I cannot find what I'm looking for.

Sometimes, without realizing it is what I am doing, I find myself looking for something -- anything -- a quote, a picture, a poem, a melody, a scent, a divine revelation, some secret stash of special knowledge -- that will spirit away my sadness, that will make me feel like I haven't had a limb cut off. But there is no such thing, and I know this. Flesh that has been cut and bled may bind itself together (and we presume to call it "healed"), but the scar that forms can't help but remind the bearer of her brokenness, that once upon a time, her flesh was torn. The skin that once was smooth now bears a fleshy ridge that survives as a token of the trauma and how she survived it. The flesh may bind and the wound no longer bleed, but she can never be unscarred.

So it is with the brokenhearted. Their wounds may not always visibly bleed or fester, and perhaps with tears and talking it out and time, there will come a day when the thing that hurts like a phantom limb will not hurt quite as much anymore. They may even laugh and smile in a way that isn't forced. But the heart can never be unbroken. And could you peer inside those chests, you would find the tissues of those hearts are not smooth, but have those ridged and jagged places that once upon a time, were broken and bleeding but have mended, continuing the work of lub-dubbing blood through the body only because scars formed over the places where they were torn apart.

Life must go on, someone says.

I don't know if it must, but it certainly does. That's what C. S. Lewis said in Shadowlands just after his wife Joy died. And so he does, after some time and tears and talking it out. But it wasn't because his loss was undone. I imagine he had broken places that mended slowly, and that ached with little to no inducement until the day he died.

The thing I am looking for -- the thing that will unbreak a broken heart -- does not exist. So why do I keep looking? I already know: I am not going to find the one I miss.

Let It Be

Let it be to me according to your word.

Those were the words Mary spoke when an angel came to her and said she had been chosen to bear the Messiah. She said yes, and maybe she understood then what it would mean for her: her reputation called into question, the rest of her life turned upside-down in a way she had not anticipated.

From what I've read, the Beatles did not have the Virgin Mary in mind when this song was written. Apparently "Mother Mary" refers to Paul's mother (Mary) coming to him in a dream during a time in which there was a lot of conflict.

But as a Catholic, it's hard not to think of Mother Mary as Christ's mother, and her words to the angel: Let it be to me according to your word.

Let it be.

This song has been in my head a lot this past week. There are a few important things beyond our grief over losing Ewan that just aren't turning out as I had hoped and prayed they would. I'm disappointed and my heart is tired, trying again to accept the opposite of what I wanted.

And so I listen to this and can't help but think of Mary's words: let it be, hoping that wisdom is what is needed at this very moment.

A New Year

Whenever New Year's Eve is imminent, I typically have trouble remembering what I did the year before (not because I've had too much fun, but because we typically don't do anything memorable). Did I do anything fun? Did I stay awake until midnight? Was I at a party? There have been a few such eves that I remember: five or six years ago, a girlfriend of mine and I went to Vegas and rang in the new year at the House of Blues with the Goo Goo Dolls. This year was one I'll remember as well.

Every year in Seattle, they hold New Year's at the Needle. Radio stations and TV hosts come out and in a crowd of tens of thousands, the new year is ushered in with a fantastic fireworks display from the Space Needle. I've never gone before, not being one who enjoys crowds or the crush of people pushing and tugging at each other. My sister had talked about going and since we live so close, we figured this would be the year to do it.

We came equipped with layers of long underwear and thick wool, hand warmers filling our pockets with a toasty heat that was welcome in the bitterly cold 22-degree weather. We wondered at the sanity of those who we guessed were half our age or a little more, wearing tiny strapless sequined things and stiletto heels. Finding our spot on a patch of lawn with a good view, we waited with everyone else for the countdown to midnight.

I still wonder at the appeal of a new year since it might also be regarded simply as one day passing into another, one minute becoming another, just as it has all the year before. But for so many, myself included, there is something about one year passing the baton on to another that is fraught with expectation and something like hope. It's as if a slate is wiped clean and a new beginning is offered to those in need of one.

I wanted to remember this passage in particular, to mark it in a way that would stay in my memory. And I do sense something a little like hope on the horizon. I say that without even really understanding what it means. "Hope" is one of those words that I've used without a concrete idea of what it implies. I hear it a lot from other people too, and given the year we've had, I have to ask -- really press the question: What does that even mean? Hope in what? For what?

There are a lot of Sunday School answers that would get a gold star and an approving nod from the teacher, but after a year like we've had, they are just not cutting it. I think that if I hope for things to get better in the here and now, I'm going to be terribly disappointed. If anything, I guess I'm hoping that what we've been through is not and has not been in vain, that it will make us stronger people, that one day, there will come a time and place where we will be satisfied.

But it is not here. It is not now. Hope or something like it is on the horizon, a light that has pierced the darkness and illuminated everything around me. It is not because my circumstances have changed, but because I have changed. 2010 taught me many things. It taught me a lot of what matters, about what I really need and how much I don't. It taught me that being blessed isn't so much about getting what you want, but getting what you need -- even if it hurts like hell. So much about me was burned away -- things that needed to be burned away, things that were binding me, things that I'm better off being rid of.

It's never been clearer to me than it is now how this place is not my home. And so I put my hope in heaven, for the return of Christ, for the resurrection of the dead -- because quite honestly, that is the only thing I dare put my hope in anymore, and the only thing that can satisfy me now.

Relentless Internal Dialogue

Sometimes I feel like I've been plopped in the middle of a large windowless room with piles of mess all around me: things of different colors, shapes, and sizes; paper, boxes, toys, framed photos, string, blankets, old bills. Piles and piles of them. There is no order, only chaos. Before the door is shut, I'm told by a stern-looking woman with dark-rimmed glasses hanging halfway off her nose: Organize this! And don't come out until you do.

Self-portrait: February 2010

Where do I begin? I look around me and can't even think of how to find anything resembling order or peace in a space as frazzled as me.

Ewan's death precipitated for me what is turning out to be one of the most introspective periods of my life. I have always, as far back as I can remember, been an introspective person: aware of my thoughts and feelings, aware of many of my faults and shortcomings, aware of my own hangups and peeves. But now it's as if my whole skin has been turned inside out. Everything is exposed, everything is incredibly tender to the touch, and I see so many things at once, I wonder where and how in the world to begin. Could all these revelations please line up in single file?

Here is one single thread in the tangle of threads inside my brain:

Sometimes I feel like I can't see past the end of my own nose. Is this selfishness, or a natural by-product of woundedness -- or some complicated mixture of the two? I know I need to focus on healing, and I know that if I don't grieve Ewan now that it's going to come back to bite me one day. There is no avoiding feeling hurt. I feel that's what this time needs to be for.

And then I feel terribly when I really want to be happy for someone who just found out they were pregnant or who just brought their new baby home, but what I feel is hurt. Bitter, sometimes. Envious. Their joy always points to my loss. I hate that when they are celebrating, all I can think about is what I've lost. Why do my thoughts always turn to myself again in those moments?

And then I wonder if I should back off of social media for awhile -- avoid the constant and rabid influx of news and updates, drop off the radar for a bit until I find I've regained some equilibrium, some homeostasis and balance. People who go through major surgeries or who are recovering from serious injuries take time for healing and rehabilitation. They aren't expected to be up and at 'em, running hurdles and bench-pressing ten-year-olds two weeks after a physically traumatic event. Maybe the grieving need to have some equivalent of that in order to move through the world again without falling apart like a soggy tissue.

We did keep to ourselves for a bit: took a several days just spending time with each other before we went "out there" again. But I felt like I needed to do it -- I was going to have to see babies and interact with people I didn't know again eventually. I was going to have to figure out what to say when people ask me if I have any children, and how to handle it when I saw a baby boy dressed in one of the same outfits we had for Ewan. I'm glad I did it, because then I knew for sure when something was a sore spot, and what wasn't. And I learned also that those things hardly ever remain in the same category. One day I might coo and smile at a cute baby, and the next I might get away as quickly as I could, thinking get me out of here, get me out of here, all the while trying not to put on a serious display of hysterics.

And then I wonder if I'm just thinking about this all too much -- if I just need to learn to gauge moment by moment and day by day what feels right and helpful. Perhaps I'm too worried about overcoming those post-traumatic hurdles too soon, and am not concerning myself enough with doing whatever it is I need to do (or not doing whatever it is I need to avoid) so I can rest and heal, and in due time, regain some strength -- and not exacerbate the injury and consequently, put myself in an even worse spot.

Yes, that sounds about right. Test my strength, but don't expect too much too soon. Learn where my weaknesses lie and try not to lash out like a wounded animal when those places are exposed. Rest when I need it. Cry when I need it. Stay away from those things that feel harmful, but recognize that pain is part of any recovery. Do those things that might not make empirical sense or that might sound downright crazy -- like cleaning his room, washing and folding his clothes -- but that feel good and helpful to do.

I also have to remember that pregnancy and birth and the post-partum period are all very physically taxing things. Many powerful hormones are involved, as well as several substantial physical changes. I can't expect to snap back like a rubber band physically or emotionally. Would I expect so much of a friend who had gone through the same thing? Would I tell her she just needed to snap out of it, get over it, get past it, and pick herself up by her bootstraps? No? Then why do I seem to be demanding that much more of myself? Truth is, I'm really not in a great position right now to be trying to extend myself and help out in a lot of places. This is not a time to be a hero. Sure, I have moments here and there where I can help out, but on the whole wouldn't the world and I be better served if I just took it easy for a bit?

But but but ...

And then as if hands are raised in a "stop" position to calm the din, I hear from somewhere outside me: Hush. Breathe deep, breathe deep. Go gently, my soul. Go gently.

Surrender

"...emotions like anger or self-pity, however natural and legitimate, do not define reality. Our feelings do not determine what is real, though the feelings themselves are real. We cannot ignore these feelings, but neither should we indulge them. Instead, we should acknowledge them without treating them as if they were ultimate truth. The feeling self is not the center of reality. God is the center of reality. To surrender to God, however contrary to our emotions, will lead to liberation from self and will open us to a world that is much bigger and grander than we are."

A Grace Disguised, Jerry Sittser

Surrender. I've thought about that word a lot lately. Sometimes I picture a battlefield, smoke thick and hanging low, the crackle of gunfire reverberating long after the fighting has ceased. As the smoke clears, someone raises a white flag, waving it tentatively. This is the sign of surrender, of granting victory to the opponent.

Sometimes I simply picture open hands, the context of surrender not always being combative. In this way, it is acceptance of the way things are, a relinquishment of the insistence on having things my own way. It's feeling all the emotions, accepting them, understanding them and living with them in such a way that they do not dictate reality. This is hard work. It is exhausting. And it is anything but simple.

As time marches on, the losses compound. No Thanksgiving, no Christmas shopping for Ewan. More babies being born, more pregnancies announced. All the simple unspoken hopes I had as a mother -- imagining family photos, rocking my baby, reading to him, bathing him, seeing him smile and hearing him laugh -- continue to rise to the surface, and each must be acknowledged and for now, buried again. I get angry, and sadness is my constant companion (even in those times when I smile and laugh). 

It feels like just about everyone but me are having healthy babies. It seems like so many others are enjoying with relative ease the life that I fought for, but lost. God makes healthy babies all the time, and yet He gave me one that was too sick to live. It feels sometimes like God forgot about me, or wants to watch me writhe in agony.

This is not reality. These feelings are not the truth. Surrender, again and again.

The truth is I am not the first to have suffered such a loss, or to feel so singled out in what I grieve. The truth is I am not being punished, and neither was Ewan. The truth is, when it comes to suffering and loss and grief, Christ went there first.

Perhaps this is part of why grief is so exhausting: the emotion speaks so loudly and convincingly, begging to be heard, and sometimes goes so far as to call the truth into question. The truth has not changed, but the world seems so upside-down at times that it's tempting to think that it has. It is a constant tension of acknowledging the feelings and checking them against what I know to be true. And so surrender is hearing the feelings, and then acknowledging and affirming the truth, over and over again, no matter what my feelings have to say.

In due time, I hope to experience that liberation Sittser speaks of, of seeing a world that is grander and bigger than I am, bigger and grander than I ever knew. Instead of being trapped and embittered by the loss, I hope with God's grace that I will let it transform me.

And so I learn to surrender, again and again.

What Is, What Was, What Was Supposed To Be

In many ways, the grief feels a bit fresher these days than it did when the loss was newer. In those early days, there might have been a bit of shock, the newness and quickness of everything that happened acting as an anesthetic that protected me from the fuller weight of grief. But now I see babies, and my eyes sting with tears. I walk into his room, and I remember what -- in my mind -- was supposed to be.

He was supposed to be here.

And I mourn the loss of a million different little things.

This was his blanket the day he was sent off for emergency surgery, and we weren't sure he would ever come back.

This is the monkey he clung to so fiercely after his surgery.

These are the diapers we were supposed to use when he came home.

This is the chair I was supposed to rock him in.

These are the images of some of my favorite memories of him, and consequently the ones that make me cry the most.

I don't avoid these things. I look at these pictures and go into his room on purpose, confronting the evidence of the hope we had on his behalf. As long as there was life in him, we fought for it. As long as there was the smallest shred of hope, we clung to it. But in the end, it became clear that he was not meant to stay with us long. This is a difficult truth to contend with. I still fight it -- and I never win. In the end, I have to continue to learn to let go, both of him and of the desires that arose in our own hearts because of him.

My God, this world is a hard place to live sometimes.

Not Broken Enough

That word has been floating around in my mind a lot lately: broken. If someone asks me how I feel, that is the most honest response I can think of.

It's not a bad thing -- at least not in my mind. In fact, it seems fitting. When reality deviates this much from our most visceral notions of how things ought to be, it seems only fitting to be broken in response.

Even though my ability to extend myself outward is limited right now, losing Ewan has given me a broader perspective. When I think of all the parents before us and all the parents after us who have or who will have lost a child, it is far, far too much for me to take in. When I consider the collective weight of grief people are bearing, I am amazed that the world does not sink under it.

When I look out at others now, I wonder what they have suffered or who they have lost. I wonder how many times they, like me, have exhausted themselves with grieving.

This happens every day, and I was inoculated from it. I have experienced different kinds of grief and loss in my life, but this one shattered my illusions like nothing else. It took those sterile categories of "grief" and "loss" and obliterated them. It softened my heart. It made me consider other parents who have experienced the complete upside-downness of choosing a twenty-four inch coffin, or who have held a dying child in their arms. It is impossible to fathom: this happens every day.

Losing Ewan taught me that if anything, I wasn't nearly broken enough.



Lord, have mercy.

Dear Ewan

Dear Ewan,

It's been just over a month now that you have been gone. The leaves have turned and are falling off the trees, leaving many branches bare. The days are shorter and occasionally punctuated by brightness. It is too quiet here. Before you were born, I knew it might be like this one day -- your dad and I living in a too-quiet space surrounded by your unused things -- but knowing it might be coming and living with the reality of your absence are two very different things.

I think often of the last day I had with you when your eyes were open and you were so alert -- how you moved your mouth as if trying to form words and how I just talked with you: asking you questions which I knew you could not answer, telling you how much you amazed me and how much I loved you. I knew from conversations with the doctors that the odds were stacked against us, but I still had so much hope for you. As long as I could look into those eyes, I could not dream of letting you go.

But it seemed clear that no matter how hard we fought to keep you here, there were some setbacks from which your poor little body could not rebound. For your heart and lungs, your liver, your kidneys, and your brain it had just been too much. Even your blood. I was there by your bedside that Sunday afternoon when the most optimistic doctor you had said that any hope we had left was not in medicine.

I miss you, Ewan. It took some time for me for the shock of all that happened and how quickly it happened to wear off, but I knew it would. At first, things had to be done and planned and organized. E-mails had to be answered, calls made. Now life has slowed, and tears rise even more frequently than before. The hurt is settling in more. I have to let you go every day, over and over again.

As I sit here and stare at the screen and beg words to form, knowing I have more to say to you, they won't. The words don't come, and my eyes fill with tears. I know days will come where remembering you will be easier and the words will pour forth freely. But for now I will let all of this remain wordless, and instead let my heart ache and my eyes sting.

It won't always be this way, I know. Even now, we are able to welcome laughter and life into our days. But it does not surprise me that most of the time, I need to let the newness of it all settle more into my bones, and I find myself needing to let go again and again.

If I don't have much to say ...

... it's because my friend is here to help me cry. 

The place where he is laid to rest

It continues to be the case with me that the things I expect to be difficult (going into his nursery, visiting his grave site, seeing babies out in public) aren't as difficult as I anticipate them to be. For me, the difficulty continues in those unexpected moments of stillness and silence and remembering. The tension between the truth of what he now enjoys and the loss we must endure continues to pull at me.

Sometimes the hardest thing is just to let that tension be -- not to ask the feelings to surrender to the truth or for the truth to surrender to the feelings. Just to let them both remain.

Autumn, Etc.

Autumn has arrived. While we have enjoyed a surprising number of sunny days for this area at this time of year, northwest Washington has not been remiss in showing its true colors. Even as the leaves have changed into brilliant and fiery hues, there have been many days where the rain pounds relentlessly and the wind blows. The clouds hang dark, low, and heavy.

It is difficult to explain how it is possible to spiral through dealing with this loss in such a way that the passage of time increases the difficulty instead of lending ease to it. Given the intensity of our two weeks in the hospital with Ewan, I wondered if I might initially be experiencing shock -- not able to fully absorb what had transpired and who had left us. I wonder now if the same shock that I imagine protected me at first is now easing -- if now, I'm feeling more of all that happened. More of everything.

The clouds hang dark, low, and heavy. The jewel-toned leaves seem out of place in an otherwise gray world.

Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints. In the Catholic tradition my husband and I follow, this commemorates all those saints who have gone on ahead of us and now enjoy the presence of God. As a baptized person who committed no sin, we believe this is what Ewan enjoys now. And we believe that one day at the resurrection, his body will rise whole and healed. This is a good and joyful thing. These are bright and brilliant points of light in an otherwise dark place.

Even so, the celebration of this Mass was bittersweet for me yesterday. As the litany of saints played, as I choked out the words We come to know our rising from the dead during one of the hymns, my tears flowed freely, dripping off of my face and soaking my shirt.

While I embraced the joy at knowing that my son now enjoys heaven, and hope at the prospect of his soul and healed body being united once again, I hate the reality we must live in now: separation, death -- the reality that is not fair, the very one which causes us to clench our fists and scream in our souls: this is not how it's supposed to be. That has us making choices on his grave marker instead of his Christmas stocking.

What They Said

This is one of those times where I have few words of my own to offer and instead defer to two people who have, in very different ways, "been there and done that." This is when I say: what they said.


"That night I looked up the original Hebrew for the word trial in one of my big fancy books (OK, one of Todd's fancy books). I hope that as you read these words, you will know the way he quieted me in that moment.

TRIAL (Old Testament) noun: from the Hebrew word sara which comes from the root srh, which means, "to bind, tie up, restrict." Thus, the noun comes to denote a narrow place in life where one is bound or restricted ...

I carried this image with me for days, saturating myself in the truth that I discovered about what it means to be walking where I was. I thought of sweet Audrey, unable to grow, restricted, as bound and helpless as Isaac. As we walked this "narrow place," I was reminded of the power of being still and submitting to the God I trusted more than I ever thought I could. During these days I walked moment by moment with the God of the universe."

Angie Smith, I Will Carry You (pp 46-47)
Angie blogs at Bring the Rain


"Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren't all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing to do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on."

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Because it All Happened So Quickly

Before Ewan was born, I had a decent grasp on time. I ticked off my pregnancy in weeks and halves of weeks. I counted down the hours of each working day, enjoyed each day in the weekend, and longed for several extra minutes of sleep each morning. But those measurements mean little to me now. Time is all messed up. Measurements of time have diminished relevance. It has become difficult to distinguish an hour from a minute from a week.

Remembering: I was there.

As a first-time mom, I expected to go late into my pregnancy. I honestly believed Ewan would stay content in my belly until 41 weeks or so. But then he came a bit early, shortly after my pregnancy had just passed the 37-week mark at which I was considered term. He did things in his own time, just as we expected. The same with his emergency surgery. While in the cath lab for a routine procedure, things deteriorated to the point where he needed surgery immediately. There would not be the benefit of a predetermined plan developed between surgeons and cardiologists. And so came the long night I will never forget: increasingly hopeless updates and then ... he was out of surgery and alive. He was on ECMO, but all things considered, doing okay.

Every day in the hospital with Ewan was one in which we were discussing with doctors and surgeons options for treatment. Every day we were making decisions that had to do -- quite literally -- with life or death. There were multiple victories and multiple setbacks. We rode the roller coaster that is well known to any parent that has a child in the ICU. We went into every day deprived of sleep. We went into every day knowing it would be intense and demanding.

And then came the day we knew we needed to let him go. Another long night, but one marked by peace and the love of family and caregivers. We went at our own pace. For once, we were able to take the time we wanted. There was no rush.

Ewan died on October 4 -- a full day before his due date. I had been so fixated on going a week past the due date and he was gone before it.

We were there. We saw it happen. We planned the funeral, saw his body in the casket. We were there when it was lowered into the ground. I watched as James and his dad and mine each shoveled dirt into the hole where he was buried. I put the spray of flowers from his casket on top of the grave when they were done. I kept telling myself: This is real, this is really happening.

But there have been so many times over the past three weeks where none of it has felt the least bit real. There is something about the experience that has all the qualities of a very vivid and terrible dream. Were it not for the pictures we took and the dark line that still goes down the center of my belly, there might be times in which I could convince myself that it didn't really happen at all. It could be shock or a side-effect of the grief, or a product of the intensity and pace at which everything happened.

It is so strange, this knowing and not-knowing, these moments of intense awareness and moments of feeling like we are each waking up from a shared nightmare. I look at the calendar and consider what each one of those boxes represent. Each day checked off the calendar means something different here in our apartment than it did in the hallways of the hospital. The notion of "one day at a time" held no meaning for us when we had learned to hang on to minutes. And now days pass in which the minutes pass (for the most part) uneventfully.

What is a minute (or an hour, or a week) anyway? I'm sure I don't know anymore.

Grief of a Maternal Sort

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.

-- C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Life will never be the same. Our pastor said this at Ewan's funeral. It didn't require any analysis on my part to be convinced it was true. Everything has changed.

Comforting him

From a superficial point of view, our lives really do not look any different than they did before I was pregnant. I'm not working right now and for the time being, several kindhearted people have relieved us of the burden of making dinner. But aside from these things, our lives appear to be much as they did before Ewan was conceived. I've got less than ten pregnancy pounds to shed and I no longer have to worry about what I consume getting in my breastmilk. We sleep through the night and do the same amount of laundry that we did before. From the outside, we look just like any other thirty-something childless couple.

This makes me want to scream sometimes. On those occasions where we go out for coffee or go to the gym, I want to tell everyone I see that I am a mother, that there should be a baby with me but there is not, and how they too should notice how very off balance the universe is as a result. It seems that it should be more obvious what is missing. But unless they know me, there is nothing that will indicate to them that I am an amputee, a mother who has been unmothered, a woman whose heart limps along in its lub-dubbing, aching as it does for her dead child.

I miss Ewan terribly. While my faith provides me the comfort and assurance that he now enjoys the highest possible good, I still live with his conspicuous absence. He has gained, and I have lost all that I hoped for when he was born: the chance to experience motherhood and family. And while I will always be a mother, for now I am one in name only. I never brought him home. I never got a chance to feed him or change his diaper. I never bathed him or fell asleep beside him. I can count on one hand the number of times I held him. I could not do anything to alleviate what he suffered for the sixteen days he was with us.

Whenever I contemplated the notion of motherhood before Ewan came along, I was always fascinated with the notion that an entirely new person was formed out of the parts of two: someone with his own specific personality, a unique soul and identity. I always wondered about who that child of ours would be. As familiar as I was with his in utero antics, I was particularly excited to meet Ewan and to discover him. I desperately wanted to know who he was and to nurture those things that were uniquely him. It is impossible to describe just how much it saddens me to know I'm missing out on this now, and for the rest of my earthly life.

Even I try to offer myself the comfort of "someday," looking forward to the hope of eternity, but there is a bittersweet pang even to this. Ewan does not need me, and I can no longer care for him, even as I still carry around in my body the maternal desires and instincts that drive me to do just that. As C. S. Lewis says, that "specifically maternal happiness must be written off."

And so I learn to walk with a limp.

Paradigm Shifting

It might be difficult to admit, but it's true. If Ewan were born healthy and whole, if I had sailed through my pregnancy over smooth waters and under sunny skies, I can tell you what the tenor of my dialogue might be right now.

4 days old

I'm so tired! My nipples are sore. Ugh, that was the nastiest diaper. And did I tell you about how it got everywhere when I was out running errands? I can't get even three minutes to myself anymore ... and the spit-up got everywhere!

Even if it were not my intention, I would quite likely be taking my healthy child for granted, making the minor complaints that I've commonly heard from those with a newborn. I probably wouldn't have stopped to take notice of each kick and movement like I did when I was pregnant, and probably would have been lamenting my sore hips a whole lot more.

But when you get news like we did, it cannot help but change the eyes through which you view not only your experience, but everything around it. Suddenly, everything I had been so worried about before seemed impossibly small. I could not even remember what many of those things were.

Before Ewan was even conceived, it was most definitely the case that he was wanted and deeply loved. We made every possible preparation we could to ensure a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. And what we learned was that what happened with Ewan's heart was entirely out of our control -- and I mean entirely, determined by the two cells that came together to make a new little person. There was not a single thing we did to cause it, nor anything we could have done to prevent it or make it better.

This is comforting. 

There is nothing we did to cause this, it didn't happen because of something harmful or wrong that we did.

This is aggravating.

There is nothing we could have done to prevent or change this, and nothing we can do to ensure it doesn't happen again. 

This is completely humbling.

We really have no control over any of it.

These are painful lessons, and it kills me that it takes something like this to get me to pay attention and to stop fretting over whatever those piddly little nothings were that were so terribly irksome before. When I looked into those blue eyes of his, I saw wisdom and beauty and love and everything that matters in life, telling me

This is now. Soak it in. Don't miss it, not a single breath or heartbeat.

Those eyes will be teaching me for the rest of my life. I don't want to miss it: not a single breath or heartbeat.

Integrating Loss

Sometimes, the passage of time makes the loss feel more difficult to bear. Instead of giving me time to become accustomed to the fact that Ewan is not with us, I feel more new reasons to mourn the fact that he's gone. As we pass would-have-been milestones and significant markers in time, I think of how old he would have been, what he would have looked like. What we would be doing right now if he were at home with us.

He would be a month old now. Maybe we would be looking for the right pattern of sleep and waking and feeding. Maybe he would nap in my arms. Maybe he would make faces at me while he slept. Maybe he'd be wearing this or that little outfit. Maybe I'd be lamenting sore nipples or the lack of sleep. Maybe he'd smile at me.

3 days old

A friend and I were talking about loss and grief this weekend. She told me about a book she read that treats grief and loss not as something we mourn and eventually "get over," but as something we mourn that becomes a part of who we are. Instead of shaking it off, we assimilate it -- it becomes something that we learn to integrate into our identities and daily lives.

As difficult as it is to think of carrying grief around with me, the alternative is unrealistic and ultimately unthinkable. When we lose anyone we love deeply, it sounds simply ridiculous to me, this thought of "getting over it." Instead of attempting to shake off the burden that loss creates, we must learn to carry it, and in the learning, become strong enough to keep it with us always.

There are many things in the past month for which I was convinced I was not strong enough: an unmedicated birth, waiting a long night while Ewan had open-heart surgery and the outlook was grim, letting him go that last night in the hospital, and eventually burying him. I cannot tell you how many times I cried over and over from the very bottom of my soul: I can't do it!

And then I did. When someone tells me they could not have done what I did, I am compelled to tell them two things: first, it's amazing what you can do when you are called upon to do it. And secondly, I did not do it alone. It was only by the grace of God and an amazing network of support upholding me from every side that I was able to do any of what I did. It even sounds silly and a little untruthful to me to say "I did it," because I know just how weak I can be and how much help I needed.

As impossible as it sounds now, as much as I cry over and over how I cannot learn to carry this grief, I know that I will -- that just as Ewan was a part of me for ten months, the loss of Ewan will become a part of me. Just as I carried that swollen belly and learned to navigate through life with it, I will (with much help) learn to carry this, too.