Cancer Revisited

Posted on May 10, 2017 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Featured Content, Slider Content • Tagged cancer, children, death, dying, Mary Ann Palmer, mother son, relationships, toddlers • Leave a comment

By Mary Ann C. Palmer

I was little, just five years old, alone in my bed, lying on my back with the covers pulled up to my chin; eyes wide open. The sharp scent of night seeped in through my bedroom window. I wanted my mother. But that was impossible. She had died a few months earlier and I was living with my Aunt Florie and Uncle Joe. My room filled with shadows. I couldn’t swallow; it was as if a hand was grabbing my neck. My heart raced, thumping hard against my back. My thoughts were shouting at me. Within minutes, I was swallowed whole by fear. I jumped out of bed and ran to Uncle Joe screaming.

“You’re just having a bad dream,” he said. But I knew I was awake. I knew it. This scene repeated itself. I would learn later that I was having panic attacks.

I practiced not crying over my mother. I practiced how to bury my feelings. The events, however, were stenciled in my memory, not fully formed, but etched there just the same.

***

I would sit on my mom’s lap; just the two of us on our living room sofa, she clapped my four-year old hands together and sang, “You better not shout, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why…” I giggled and collapsed into her soft blue cotton robe. I nuzzled in as close as I could, inhaling the soft powdery scent of the skin on her neck. She must have just taken a bath because her hair was wrapped in a twisted towel. Then Nanny, my mommy’s mom, called me for lunch. I skipped into the kitchen.

***

I stood by the window in my brother’s room with my mom. She was dressed but wearing the twisted towel on her head that she always wore now. We watched from the fourth floor as my 8-year-old brother Gary, in his yellow slicker, walked out into the rain, down six steps–one, two, three, four, five, six we counted together–and then down the block on his way to school. We sang, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day…” Just mommy and me.

***

Wandering into the bedroom I shared with my mom and dad, the crib I still slept in tucked behind the bedroom door, I looked for Poochy, my well-loved stuffed dog with floppy ears, but I couldn’t find him. I looked everywhere. I finally found him on my mother’s dressing table, right next to one of her bras. The bra looked funny to me, one side was filled with something. Why does mommy have wood in her bra, I wondered. Somehow I knew not to ask. So many things were secret now.

***

Aunt Anne, who’d been around a lot lately, had to leave before my grandma got here. “Will you be okay?” she asked my mom. Why wouldn’t she be okay, I thought. Aunt Anne left. My mom was sitting in my dad’s upholstered armchair in her blue robe and the twisty towel on her head. I sat on the arm of the chair to get closer to her. She was very quiet, and then I noticed tears rolling down her cheeks. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” But she didn’t answer; she just kept crying. Grownups aren’t supposed to cry. So I cried, too. I was scared, like when I was sure monsters were under my crib. But then my mom’s tears stopped. She put her hand under my chin and said, “Why don’t you go get your doll out of her carriage and show me how you can change her diaper.”

***

While my mom was sick, I spent more time with my grandma and her sisters. We went to Prospect Park and one day we even went to see the Statue of Liberty. After our outings, I remember opening the door to our apartment and looking straight through the living room to the bedroom to see the shape of my mother’s legs under the blankets through her partially opened door. I was always happy to come home to her. I loved my grandma and aunts, but I wanted to be with Mommy.

***

Dad lifted me, limp as a rag doll, out of my crib. My head rolled onto his shoulder. He carried me out to the living room. My brother Gary was already up, sitting in his pajamas on the floor, playing with his Legos. I was placed down next to him. My grandparents and a priest were sitting on the sofa. The priest went into the bedroom with my dad.

Gary and I played with his Legos. We made leprechaun houses out of the little white bricks. We made little cots for them out of folded pieces of paper. I didn’t see the leprechauns, but I believed they were there. Gary said they were. I wonder if he knew at 8 years old that if you catch a leprechaun he must grant you three wishes.

I would learn later we only needed one.

***

On my 5^th birthday Gary and I were at Aunt Florie and Uncle Joe’s house. Even though my mom and dad weren’t there I was hoping I would have cake. Aunt Florie and Uncle Joe did a lot of whispering that day. Maybe there would be a surprise. And there was. That night all of my relatives came over—aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was late. “I’m five now,” I thought, “so I guess I get to stay up late.” I never had a birthday party at night, and never with so many relatives. Everyone was dressed up, wearing black. My Aunt’s high heels clicked on the gray and white linoleum floor. The basement party room was smoky from cigarettes and cigars. Ice clinked in highball glasses. I pretended my Mary Jane’s were tap shoes as I made my way around the room. One by one, the adults wished me a happy birthday, then whispered something to each other.

***

The next day Gary and I were brought to stay with one of my aunt’s sisters; I didn’t know her but she and her husband were nice to us. Their grown-up daughter was there. She sold costume jewelry and she let me choose a ring from a big blue velvet tray. It was a long day. When we finally went home, I was surprised to see our living room filled with relatives, but the first thing I looked for were my mom’s legs under the blankets in her bed. She was not there and the bed was neatly made.

My father called me to sit on his lap. I asked him where Mommy was. “She went to heaven,” he said. I didn’t know where heaven was.

“When is she coming back?” I asked.

“She can’t come back,” he answered.

“Why not? I want to show her my new ring,” I said.

“If she comes back, she’ll be sick again. You don’t want that, do you?”

I knew it would be selfish to want my mom to be sick again. This was a big decision to make. I sobbed. The adults tried to get me to stop. “Look,” they said. “Gary stopped crying.” I tried to see reason in that, but I couldn’t. I shut down. I stopped crying. And did not cry again. “Look how good she is,” everyone said.

***

I wished my family had told me the truth. When I was old enough to read I found one of my mother’s funeral cards with my birth date on it. I realized the late night birthday gathering was not for me; it was for my mom. I still didn’t cry. So what should have been loss and grief morphed into fear and worry. I continued to have panic attacks. I worried about getting cancer my whole life, even as a child. Every little lump or bump was cause for alarm. And then I did get cancer, ovarian cancer, when my youngest child, Michael, was four. I became my mother, and Michael became me. But I thought I could do it better. I could protect this four-year old. I see now I was naÃ¯ve. Caught up in my own fight, I didn’t fully see at the time what Michael saw.

II.

At 37, I had surgery for what was supposed to be a benign tumor. It wasn’t. When I got home from the hospital I explained to Michael I had a tumor in my belly, and I had had an operation to remove it.

“What’s a tumor?” he asked.

“It’s like a little ball inside my belly that’s not supposed to be there.” I explained that I had to take strong medicine to make sure I got all the way better and the medicine would make me feel sick.

I couldn’t use the word cancer. I would fall apart. I knew it was very important not to cry in front of Michael. My mom tried not to cry in front of me, but she did, leaving me frightened and helpless, too little to understand.

***

I crept into the bathroom, holding the wall for balance, trying not to wake my husband Bob. The night was slanted, unfocused. I pulled myself up to the bathroom sink, balanced myself with one hand on the counter and adjusted my blue turban with the other. I looked in the mirror, half expecting to see my mother’s face gazing back at me. A wave of weakness passed through me; I needed to get back to bed before I passed out. I took small steps and deep breaths. I almost reached the foot of the bed when I collapsed. The fall at that point was almost a decision; I just didn’t have the strength to do this anymore. Bob rushed to me. I was still conscious, sprawled on the floor, and aware my turban had landed a few feet from me. Bob ran down the steps, returning with his mom and dad still in their pajamas, panic in their faces. Bob called ahead to the hospital, scooped me up and rushed with me to the car, his mother following with a blanket for me before she went back to the house. I was grateful she was there to take care of Michael. In the morning, she would tell him I went back to the hospital and get him ready for school. But I later learned Michael woke up first, padded up the stairs to my bedroom in his little blue feety pajamas to look for me, and I was gone. It wasn’t the first time.

I came home from the hospital that afternoon. I had been severely dehydrated, again, and was given IV fluids. Michael ran to me as soon as I got inside the house and hugged me with his whole body. His arms and body not quite enough, he wrapped one leg around me as well. He followed me upstairs, sat on the carpet in front of my bed and watched Ninja Turtles, his favorite show, while I slept.

***

A week later I had a fever. The chemo depleted my white blood cells, leaving me susceptible to serious infection. When my temperature reached 103; I called my doctor.

“Come to the hospital,” he said. “Enter through the emergency room and I will meet you there.”

It was early afternoon. Bob was coming to pick me up but I needed to make arrangements for Michael. Bob’s parents had gone back home to Clinton, NY, seven hours away. Michael would be home from nursery school soon. I called my friend Celeste.

“Can you take Michael?” I asked.

She always said yes. It was never even a question. Michael blended in easily with her five children. Five or six didn’t make a difference to her. But it mattered to Michael. “Mommy, I don’t want to be with Celeste. I want to be with you.”

***

I lay on the sofa watching Michael play as the late afternoon sun angled into the living room through our greenhouse, now empty. I no longer had the strength to tend the geraniums and spider plants. Hunched over on his feet and hands, Michael trotted around the living room. He occasionally scampered over and put his head on my tummy. I’d pat his head, and tell him he was a good little dog. He panted; I giggled. He was not just pretending to be a dog; he actually believed he was one. Michael embodied his fantasies; it was one of the things I loved most about him.

I waited for Eugénia and Ely to arrive, two of my best friends from when we lived in East Hampton. Older and nurturing, I looked forward to their company. When they arrived they were visibly alarmed by what they found: a too thin, exhausted woman laying on the sofa, a little boy playing at her feet. I was actually feeling pretty good that day, happy to be spending time with Michael. Eugénia immediately went to the kitchen to make me something to eat. Ely sat with me. As we talked Michael galloped in and out of the room, letting out the occasional bark. Our conversation faded as we focused on Michael playing, so obviously joyful, creating his own little world. Then Ely said, “Who knows how this is going to affect him.”

***

Eight months passed; it was time for my final surgery. I had prepared Michael over the past few days as best I could for the separation. The day I was due at the hospital I showered, dressed, adjusted my wig, and went downstairs to say goodbye. Michael was still sleeping. I woke him up. I didn’t want him to find me gone in the morning again.

“Michael, sweetie. I’m leaving for the hospital now.” He looked stunned. His eyes filled up as he clung to me.

“Why are you always in the hospital?” I held back my tears and told him I’d be home soon and in the meantime Grandma was going to take him to the Nature Center to see the owls. I knew from my four-year-old self that distraction only worked in the moment, but doesn’t touch the fear and anxiety. The talking we had done about mommy leaving hadn’t made any sense to him; only the visceral was real, the separation. Still, I thought, he can handle this.

***

The year ended. I survived. On a warm, sunny day in April, Michael turned five. His fifth birthday would be very different than mine had been. I gave him a black standard poodle puppy we named Harpo, who would become his constant companion for the next 15 years. We had birthday cake and he blew out the candles. Michael’s whole family attended the party—grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, not unlike all the relatives at my fifth birthday. But my birthday marked the end of my young life as I had known it. I would never see my mother again. Michael didn’t understand at the time, but he had what he wanted most for his birthday, the same thing I had wanted but didn’t get. Mommy.

***

Michael’s panic attacks started that summer. From our front porch, I saw my husband running up the long driveway carrying him. They had been out for a walk, holding hands and scouting for dogs, Michael’s favorite pastime even though he had his own dog now.

“Michael’s hyperventilating,” he said as he ran to meet me. I looked at Michael, gasping for air, his eyes frantic, pupils dilated. I recognized the panic. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a paper bag.

“Breathe into this, Michael,” I said as I held the bag around his nose and mouth. He began to relax, his breathing slowed.

This would be the first of many panic attacks, the trigger obvious. I thought I had protected him. I did all the things my mother was not able to do: I had explained I was sick. I made sure he saw a child psychologist once a week. And I lived. Michael did not lose his mother.

But had I really protected Michael? He saw me rushed out of the house for emergency treatments. He saw me throw up in the kitchen sink because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. He saw me wearing a turban on my head, just like the one my mom wore. He saw me lying on the couch for the better part of a year, and he saw the shape of me in bed, my legs under the blankets when he ran up the stairs to my room.

“Leave mommy alone. Let her rest,” I had heard his grandma say again and again.

Michael saw what I saw when I was four. I couldn’t prepare him for separation during a time of such intimate mother-child bonding. I couldn’t prepare him for the loss of routine, for the comfort of his mother kissing a scraped knee or lying down next to him at night to protect him from the monsters under his bed. Four-year olds can’t merge reason and emotion. I’m not sure anyone can.

Author’s Note: A child is born and we pray he or she will be safe and healthy and that we will live to see that child grow. We imagine a charmed life for this little boy or girl. A life free from harm and the traumas and mistakes of our own childhood. Then life happens. That is how the child really grows.

Mary Ann is currently writing a memoir about coming through life’s adversities with love, hope and spirit intact. “Cancer Revisited,” taken from that memoir, marks her first published essay. Mary Ann has worked as a book editor and tutor and currently is the owner of Synchrony LLC, a boutique agency specializing in web development and online marketing.

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History of David

Posted on November 17, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Blog, Brain, Child, Featured Blog Posts, Highlights • Tagged adoption, brother, brother and sister, death, Easter, grave, Kris Rasmussen, loss, mother son, mother-daughter, sister, snow, spring • Leave a comment

By Kris Rasmussen

I know you only from the April showers that always flowed down our mother’s face, but never fully drowned her sorrow. By the lilies she places on the your grave each year;the only evidence of your few breaths on this planet.

Tonight, a snowy-mix fills the Michigan spring night, and Mom mentions you to me in a moment of spontaneous reminiscing, the kind she has too frequently these days. “Dr. Frye revived his body three times, you know. He decided that was enough. I always had to hope he was right.” Then she notices how dirty the front windows are looking.

I, too, notice the smudges and streaks clouding our view of the sturdy maple and the precocious squirrels racing around it. I don’t answer Mom right away, because middle age brings its own wistful wanderings. I list all the ways someone I never met has marked my life.

I would never have been delivered to our parents’ doorstep from the William Booth Hospital for Unwed Mothers.

I would have remained Eleanor, a name I despise but was given to me by my foster mom.

I would have missed Coming Home days, which were, as I smugly told the kids at school, way better than birthdays.

My birthday featured all the traditional trappings of cake, parties, and gifts. My Coming Home Day, January 28 included indulgent after-Christmas bargain shopping for more presents, and permission to gorge myself on macaroni and cheese and Chicken in a Biscuit crackers until I almost puked. One year, I forced my brother to sit next to me while we went to see 101 Dalmatians, just because it was my day. (He was adopted, too, so don’t worry, he had his day as well.)

Mom never forgot your birthday, but it was marked by screams, tears and, occasionally , broken dishes, not wrapping paper and bows. Every April Mom would say the same thing by way of explanation, “Well, the anniversary of David’s birthday is this month. What do you expect?”

What did I expect? Nothing. Our mother was the only one in my family who even spoke of you. Grandpa and Grandma Smith, Dad, Aunt Paula and Uncle Harold never mentioned you. Hundreds of photos of camping trips, hunting trips, fishing trips still exist, but not one photo of Mom pregnant with you – as if that might have been some sort of jinx.

Yet you lingered along the edges of my childhood anyway.

I felt your breath exhale from our parents’ lungs every time I asked to ride my bike beyond the usual boundary of Jennings Avenue to venture some place all by myself, like to the corner of Myrtle Street. Their response: “It’s too dangerous.” Doctors tried six different times to fix a chronic condition in my knees growing up. Before each operation, you flickered in our parents’ eyes along with their anxiety. At 21, I was rushed to the hospital after being pummeled to the pavement by a sedan. Despite the searing jolts of pain, I refused to tell the police officers how to call Mom and Dad because I didn’t want to upset them. They had lost one child, but they were not going to lose me.

When my brother rebelled, fought someone in school, shoplifted from a grocery store, Mom hugged me too tightly and said “Losing David was a sign I shouldn’t have been a mother after all.”

You were the one God sent us because you were just what we needed, Dad scribbled on a card to me once.

You told us that before you came to live with us you were walking around in the woods with Jesus, my mom would remind me, shaking her head in amazement.

Surely it was this religious fervor over my “filling in” for you that somehow contributed to my stellar GPA and pristine high school reputation.

Tonight, I press Mom for details about your life. I’m learning almost too late that stories can drown in bitterness, wither from neglect, and vanish from inevitable forgetfulness. If I don’t learn your story now, it will die with our mother. One way I can honor you both is to find out the history of your life.

Mom snaps out of her reverie to tell me more.

Dr. Frye actually forbid Mom to become pregnant. Her high blood pressure and high risk of eclampsia made her a poor risk. “You’ll never make it to term,” he’d warned. If there is anything you should know about Mom, it’s that she listens to no one when she really wants something. She wanted you more than anything, so you were conceived after years of our parents dodging the shame-filled question, “Why haven’t you started a family yet?”

The two of you made it only to twenty-four weeks. Mom never saw your face. Neither did Dad. Convinced he was losing both his wife and his son, he huddled on his knees in a janitor’s closet. Meanwhile the Catholic nurses, some my mother had worked with for years, refused to participate in the emergency procedure which saved her life – barely – but couldn’t save yours. She never forgave them.

Arms empty, Mom refused to sign a consent to have her tubes tied. Did I mention Mom was – and is – a stubborn woman? But Dad won this argument – in fact, this may be the only argument he ever won – when he told her he would never touch her again if she didn’t have the surgery.

Which brings your story back to me, sitting here in an olive and mustard living room, weary and striving to hold onto one more piece of Mom before it’s too late. I allow myself to dwell on one final connection you and I have. Someday I will likely be buried in a plot next to yours.

I wonder what our stories will mean to anyone else then.

Kris Rasmussen is an educator, playwright, and freelance writer living in Michigan. Her creative nonfiction work has been published in magazines and journals such as The Bear River Review and Art House America. She was a contributing editor for the multi-faith website Beliefnet for several years. In addition, her dramatic work has been by produced by the Forward Theater Company in Madison, Wisconsin and published by Lillenas Drama. She is grateful to authors Lauren Winner and Charity Singleton Craig for introducing her to the work of Brain, Child. You can follow her on twitter @krisras63 or visit her website at www.krisrasmussen.net.

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The Bittersweet of Motherhood After Loss

Posted on September 27, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Brain, Child, Featured Blog Posts, Slider Content • Tagged baby death, death, Kathleen Sullivan, mother, son • Leave a comment

By Kathleen Sullivan

“You know when you’re in the moment, and things seem perfect, until you realize your life will never be?”

No, I didn’t understand. Yet. My husband Brian and I were at our first bereavement support meeting. We had just lost our firstborn son Liam to a congenital heart defect. He was nine days old.

The woman — I forget her name — continued on. She told us about the contentment of watching her two children laughing and playing with their father. However, there was a crucial piece missing: the daughter she lost.

Back then, I couldn’t even think about the process of having additional children. Honestly, I thought our lives were completely over. I wanted to die.

That was eight years ago. Today, I spend most of my time chasing the two children that I was eventually blessed with. I get it now. The woman was absolutely right.

My living children bring me great joy. In many ways, they saved my life.

My daughter, who arrived first, was born thirteen months after Liam’s death. She gave me something to focus on besides my own grief.

It wasn’t over, though. I was still angry. I was bitter. I couldn’t face seeing another red haired little boy. I cringed when I heard another mom call after her Liam. I was resentful of friends and family who had living children. It was unfair. It always would be.

I still cry. However, my Julia and Owen keep me laughing too.

Almost eight years ago.

In some ways it feels like yesterday. In others, it feels as if a lifetime has passed.

I am noticing that family and friends don’t speak of Liam much anymore. Eight years ago, if I had asked our parents how many grandchildren they had, they would have definitely included Liam as part of the troop.

Would they do the same today?

I have been writing about loss for several years now. I was told early on that the pain would “soften”. Although I didn’t believe it at the time, I do now.

That doesn’t mean that the pain is not present everyday in some form.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t break into sobs from time to time.

In fact, I did so last week. I came across Liam’s death certificate. I couldn’t stop staring at the time of death.

His death.

My son died.

In talking about my journey, I have sought to help others. I don’t know what I would have done without the support of some special friends early on.

I call these amazing people “the friends I wish I had never met.” Losing our children is what brought us together.

As I sit here writing, my two living children are tired and content. It was a great day. We went to the movies and had ice cream.

Regardless, I did feel it.

The missing piece.

The heavy burden that I carry every day.

The guilt.

A therapist once told me that it was okay to have some sadness, yet still celebrate happiness. I didn’t believe her then, but it is true. Emotions are strange that way.

Mostly, I am happy for my living children. They did nothing wrong and our tragedy should not take away from their joy.

Not to say that I don’t have to fake it sometimes. I have become very good at forcing a smile.

As my children are getting older, they are starting to ask questions. We also try to go to the cemetery when we can.

They are fully aware that they had a big brother and his heart didn’t work well. My six-year-old tells me that makes her sad.

I see her sadness. I also see her happiness. She experiences both, just like my therapist told me.

As parents, my husband and I will never “have it all.”

Recently, a family member gifted me with a special bracelet. It was a “penny from heaven” and had Liam’s name and birth. I wear it every day.

The token brought me joy, comfort and sadness. I can’t carry Liam physically, but I can carry him in my heart.

I promised him that I would. I promised him that I always will.

For Liam, my heart will always ache.

Still, because of Liam, Julia and Owen my heart will always be full.

And I couldn’t ask for anything more.

Kathleen’s work has appeared on: The Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, Club Mid, Mamalode, Parentco., and Your Tango.
I am also the creator of the blog: www.threekidsonehusbandandabottleofwine.com

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Waiting for Lilacs

Posted on July 15, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged #modernlossdying, Andrea Mullenmeister, death, lilacs, loss, mother-daughter • Leave a comment

By Andrea Mullenmeister

A swath of springtime sun filtered through the curtains and bathed my mom in dust motes as she rocked back and forth in the chair. Her yellow skin clung to her cheek bones, and she smiled.

“I’ve decided to put the hospice bed here so I can look out the window and see the lilacs bloom,” she said. Every morning, she looked out to the gangly bushes with anticipation, and every morning their stubborn buds failed to burst.

“Hopefully tomorrow, mom,” I told her, pretending I thought she would make it.

Five days after she decided to live for the lilac bloom, she surprised me.

“Let’s have a party,” she announced. She could barely get out of bed. She hadn’t eaten for days. Her skin was grayish now, and her cheeks were hollow. It really didn’t seem like the best time to host a party.

“Well, we do love parties in this family,” I conceded, “but I don’t know…”

“We’re doing it,” she interrupted. I think she was afraid that the cancer that was killing her body was also killing her legacy – she needed to know people hadn’t forgotten about her, that she still mattered.

So, I began planning my mom’s final party.

We invited everyone she knew to her “living wake.” Would anyone come? Not many people are comfortable with an obvious manifestation of death, and here death was, laying in a hospice bed waiting for lilacs and parties.

The morning of the party mom’s eyes were slits, and her body was motionless. I stared at the long list of RSVP’s and I got nervous. Did we really want 100 people in our house right now? “Are you sure you still want to have the party?” I asked.

“Yes. Party,” she said. Her voice cracked and I sponged water on her lips.

Those were the last words she ever spoke to me.

Long afternoon shadows climbed through the window and the dust danced. Visitors poured through the door. The sound of jokes and laughter mixed seamlessly with quiet reminiscing and tears. Her wake was exactly how she had lived her life, filled with people and activity. But instead of fluttering around, laughing and talking with her friends, mom slept on the hospice bed, breathing but unresponsive to the party that was happening in her honor.

Early the next morning, my brother and sister and I sat next to our mom’s bed. Mom had told us over and over that she wasn’t afraid to die. She was only 53 years old, but had made peace with her early demise. She had lived her bucket list and made amends. During the two years since her diagnosis, she had made the journey to God. She believed in Him and in angels. She felt safe.

As we sat around her, each lost in our own thoughts, she suddenly sat up for the first time in days. Her arms reached towards something we could not see. She frantically grabbed and clawed at the air around her. Was she afraid now that death was closing in? She moaned and reached towards the window.

The lilacs. They hadn’t bloomed yet.

Mom slumped back in bed, defeated. Her labored breathing began to slow…gurgle, huhhh…just when we thought it might be the end, her chest would rise again in a futile rally cry of “please, just one more day.”

I whispered “It’s ok mom. We’ll be ok. You can go now if you’re tired.”

The gentle spring rain splattered the window and eventually, she just stopped. We didn’t realize it at first because it was so peaceful but then a thunder clap rattled the windows and the skies opened up and it began to pour. She was gone. Gusting wind ravaged the budding lilac bushes outside and the curtain of rain couldn’t compare to our tears.

The next morning, I awoke exhausted and red-eyed. I looked out the window and stared at the brilliant purple flowers that bounced lazily in the breeze. The goddamn lilacs had bloomed. I threw my pillow at the window. Once my favorite flower, the lilacs were mean and ugly in the wake of my loss.

Cancer robbed my mom, and me, of so much more than just the lilac bloom.

Four months later, on my wedding day, I laid a white flower on my mom’s empty chair as I walked down the aisle.

Three years after that, I slumped next to my son’s incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit. The sounds of the NICU pierced my soul and a nurse elbowed me out of the way while she tried to convince my one-pound baby to breathe. I slunk into the background and stared out the window wondering if my child would ever feel the sun on his skin or smell the lilac bloom.

I haven’t held you yet, little boy. I haven’t even loved you.

His tiny chest rose and fell with mechanical precision now; the ventilator was doing the work of living for him. His labored breathing…whoosh, wheesh…filled the room and I wished I had ear plugs. I didn’t want to listen to another person die.

The sharp sting of grief scavenged my emotions, tricking me into believing I wasn’t worthy of being a mother anyway. “You can’t do this,” said Fear. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Doubt chimed in with a vengeance. Even if my son lived, how would I raise him without my own mother to help?

I glanced into my son’s incubator, a tangle of wires and tubes hid his face, but each heartbeat lit up his transparent skin with the bright reminder of blood and life. His tiny foot kicked a tunnel through the wires and flailed into the air.

“Just one more day!” his tiny body screamed with a force that knocked the wind out of me. My son was alive. This was not that rainy spring day where life lost. This was a bright summer day where life was winning.

Just yesterday, that same little boy bounced over to me, laughter bubbling from every inch of his healthy, strong body. The gold flecks in his gray eyes shone like the rays of sunshine that streamed through the window. His tornado-like entrance stirred up all the dust and the particles twirled. His pointy chin jutted proudly like mine does and like his grandmother’s did.

Mom was worried people would forget about her after she died. But no one has forgotten, least of all me. The dust settled on the window sill and I ran my finger through the thin coating, leaving a lasting impression.

Butterflies danced in the springtime breeze and fluttered in and out of our view. Even though they disappeared from our sight, we knew they were still there. “Look mom.” My boy pointed to a branch, bursting with fragrance and color.

The lilacs had bloomed.

Andrea Mullenmeister writes about her family’s story of love, hope, and survival at www.AnEarlyStartBlog.com. Her essays about motherhood, prematurity, and parenting a child with extra needs have been featured nationally.

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Losing A Child Who Was Not Mine

Posted on July 11, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged child, death, Joanna Laufer, loss • Leave a comment

By Joanna Laufer

In a Texas hospital room, my husband and I met her: the birth mother who had asked us to be the parents of her child. She had just given birth to a baby girl. We stood by the hospital bed eager to hold the baby, who was still in the hallway nursery. We knew, before we flew to Texas from New York, that this was the birth mother’s condition of our adoption going through. “I need to see her in the arms of her mother,” she said.

Meeting each other for the first time discharged something deep in us, awkwardness and confessions we didn’t even try to hide. My husband and I gushed out our gratitude, our promise to devote our care and love; she reciprocated with her gratitude, her plans for college and a career. We were raw, open, strangers linked in the most intimate way. She told us, almost apologetically, looking sheepish and crushed, that her boyfriend – the father of the child – hadn’t shown up for the birth.

“Who does this?” she asked me, as if we had known each other for years. “Am I pitiful if I call him?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Maybe he’ll even call you.”

I had no idea whether or not her boyfriend would call. I wanted to say something consoling, and this seemed to put her at ease. Those few words, and others that flew out later, were words I would come to regret.

This had been a recent and rushed adoption match. We had made a connection with this birth mother, through an adoption agency, a week before she was due to give birth. Paperwork had been faxed and over-nighted to us, which covered only the basics. We knew each others ages – she was 20, we were in our mid-thirties at the time – and we received the birth mother’s medical history. The agency had sent her photos of us clipped to a letter we wrote about the love and good life we felt we could give to a child.

We had one phone interview, which seemed to go well. She said she chose us because she saw we love children from the photographs of us hugging our nieces. Photos of the two of us in a rowboat in Central Park convinced her that we’re happy and close. She was sure about choosing us after reading that we’d provide a good education and nurture a love for the arts. She even liked the design of the paper we wrote the letter on, the swirl of pink colors along the border. We’d been advised by the agency to pick paper that would be enticing and stand out. We were told that this would actually make a difference.

“Should I even speak to him?” she asked, and then started to sob. “He’s actually an amazing guy.”

I nodded. I told her I’d give him a chance to explain. I added that it was wrong and unfair that she’d given birth alone, but seeing their baby being born might have been too painful for him to face. “Despite what it looks like right now,” I said, “He might still be that amazing guy.”

She seemed comforted by this, which is what I had hoped for her to feel but, again, this was something and someone I knew nothing about. All my husband and I knew about her boyfriend was that, included in her plans, she wanted to have kids with him in the future.

My husband and I had spent our 20s and part of our 30s sometimes wavering, sometimes adamant about putting our careers before having a child. Once the desire grew strong and we weren’t able to conceive, we went through a year of tests, ovulation kits, and seven months of artificial insemination. Though we felt a great loss, each month, not conceiving a child, we declined fertility drugs and extensive treatments. We weren’t invested in having to have a biological child, so adoption was a choice we welcomed. We cringed when hearing concerns from well-meaning people, their comments about the risks of raising a child with unknown genes and unfamiliar personality traits. We heard a litany of adoption stories gone bad, sensational ones seen on the news, about birth parents returning and kidnapping their children.

We dismissed these warnings as best as we could. We argued that when it came to genes, including ours, there were never any guarantees. As for kidnapping, we went on faith that this wasn’t in the cards. We had all agreed to a closed adoption.

I was dying to hold the baby and kept looking for the nurse. This was a huge moment for my husband and me. We were finally close to becoming parents and to putting a tough adoption process behind us. Just as past or recent breakups are topics to avoid on first dates, we didn’t mention the hardships with prospective birth mothers before her. One woman had a miscarriage. Another woman we had gotten attached to left her premature infant in the hospital and couldn’t be found to sign the consent forms.

A nurse wheeled in the baby on what looked like a changing table. She had thick black hair with a little clipped-on pink bow. I couldn’t take my eyes off her face, her precious oval yawn. My desire to pick her up was excruciating to restrain, but this was the first time her birth mother was seeing her, too. “Do you want to hold her first?” I asked.

She stayed consistent with what she had requested all along, to see the baby one time only, and only in my arms. “No,” she said. “Just you.”

Holding a child you are going to adopt, even for only a few seconds, is different than holding someone else’s child. My heart opened instantly. I held her head gently against the nook of my throat. I kissed her and she flinched. “That’s a kiss,” I told her. I assumed it was her first. She fell asleep in my arms.

I looked up at the birth mother. It seemed too clinical, at this point, to think of her as birth mother. As she watched me hold the baby she had just given life, her heart opened instantly, too. She was crying, but attempted to stop. Crying was replaced with something like prayer. She kept saying, “I want her to have,” and “I’m grateful she’ll have,” before filling the sentence with her priorities for the baby: two loving parents, self-esteem, a good future without needing welfare. She took a deep breath and nodded, finding strength from these words. Then she said them again to the baby.

She asked not to be called or considered mother, or the alternatives: first mother, natural mother, or real mother. She said it would be unfair and misleading to the baby, and to me. She didn’t mind the woman who gave birth to the baby. I thought she deserved something more, though I’ll admit I was relieved. Being called adoptive mother made me uncomfortable, too. I wanted to love, raise, protect, and nurture my child. If she was the natural or real mother, who was I?

I held the baby close. I inhaled her sweet smell. My husband leaned into me and put his finger in the baby’s tiny hand. I placed her, fast asleep, into his arms.

We had started preparing to bring the baby to our hotel the next day, and home with us soon after. Texas law required us to wait 24 hours, from the time the baby was born, before the adoption consent papers could be signed. We had already bought formula, receiving blankets, onesies, wipes and diapers, and a pink and white stuffed lamb rattle. We’d rented a car with a car seat and had a crib set up when we checked into a residence hotel. As we were leaving to go back to the hotel, her cell phone vibrated. “Oh my God,” she said. “Thank God.”

She made a hand motion requesting we stay, while she answered the call. She tearfully told her boyfriend (mouthing “thank you” to me first) that she would give him a chance to explain. We listened to her listen, sensing where this was heading. Not because we heard anything her boyfriend said or could tell much from watching her face. We sensed where this was heading because our deep-down fear, as adoptive parents, was that we didn’t earn or deserve a child that was handed to us, no matter how much we wanted a child. We could tell ourselves that we’d leave the next day with a daughter that was ours, but we knew she’d also always, in some way, be theirs.

If it had gone the way it was set up to go, nothing and everything would have changed. She would go on to college as planned and would forever carry on her shoulders that she had a child she didn’t keep. Instead, her boyfriend came to the hospital after we left. When our social worker went to her room with the consent papers the next morning, she brought back only a note. It said: Thank you. We held the baby all night. We’re both really, really sorry.

We called her room several times, but no one picked up. We then went on autopilot while handling loose ends. We returned the baby book our social worker had given to us, a gift for clients to record memories and milestones. My husband called our family and friends, who’d been waiting to hear good news. We returned the car seat to the airport at Dallas-Forth Worth. We barely spoke on the plane ride home.

I imagined what I might have said if she’d answered the phone. It might have been something pleading, urging her to reconsider. Or something stoic, forcing myself to say that she and her boyfriend should follow their hearts if they wanted to raise their child. I actually tried to talk myself into believing that this was true. I moved through grief and anger, seeing, as never before, that being told you were “chosen” didn’t come without a price. You can be un-chosen, without warning, and without a say. A child who is adopted also comes to know what being “chosen” means. If someone chose you and really wants you, someone else out there didn’t or couldn’t.

As soon as we returned to New York, I closed the door to the room we’d set up for the baby. Yet some nights, I found myself walking inside. I’d sit on the rocking chair I had pictured myself rocking her on. I spent many hours there hoping her parents would change their minds. It was a strong desire and one I struggled with, knowing that what I wanted was in no one’s best interest anymore, that I would become her mother only if, after finally coming together, her family would be broken apart.

Three weeks later, after another rushed adoption match, we were back in Texas. The hospital had a room set up for us to sleep in, before the consent papers would be signed. My husband and I knew, discussed, and weighed the risks. The birth parents still had time to change their minds in the morning after we’d have been with the baby all night. It was pain we didn’t want to feel again, but we knew we’d regret declining if this was our child. We agreed, for the sake of what could be our daughter, and what did turn out to be our daughter, that it was a risk worth taking.

We have learned through time that adoption, our greatest gift, is also hard to get right. We might have gone overboard making sure our daughter felt that our ties are as strong as blood ties. That she is our heart and light. Instead of telling her we chose her, we said families form in different ways and ours was meant to be. Whether she fully understood this or not, when she was 9, she told this to a friend and her friend accused her of lying. We were at Parents Observation Day at The Alvin Ailey Dance School, where she studied ballet and West African dance. Most of the kids in class were African American, and my daughter, a pale-skinned, blonde-haired girl, wearing a West African lapa while she danced for the parents, could pass for looking like me.

“You’re not adopted,” her friend said. “You look like your mom.”

I told her friend I was flattered she thought I looked like my daughter, and my daughter and I both smiled. But what I didn’t say, before her friend walked back to her parents was, “Yes, we did adopt her.” I was proud that we did and never hid this fact, but sometimes I just didn’t want the questions and stares. Sometimes I didn’t want to be reminded that she might look like someone in a family that isn’t ours, one that might long for her and wish they would have changed their mind, or might have moved on and tried not to look back. That, despite our fierce love, there’s a missing piece for her, an identity involving blood and birth that we are unable to give her.

At times, I wonder what became of the baby we didn’t take home. What had once been unbearable for us we could now be grateful for. A family was born that day, one we weren’t meant to be part of, and it led us to our daughter. She is 23 now, no longer looks like me, and is finding her own way to make sense of her story. As we have had to make sense of ours.

Joanna Laufer is the author of the book Inspired and of short stories and articles that have appeared in various publications. She lives in New York City with her husband and adorable cat. www.joannalaufer.com

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Alive and Breathing and Happy

Posted on June 17, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged death, only child, Sarah Kilch Gaffney, single mother, widow • Leave a comment

By Sarah Kilch Gaffney

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I attended a birthday party held at a cute little downtown arts and crafts studio. The birthday girl was turning six, and ten little girls gathered around the craft-paper covered table to make glitter-and-jewel studded shadow boxes out of recycled tins. Giant magnets were adhered to the tins so that their creations could then be displayed on each girl’s home refrigerator.

A few of the other mothers stayed and the rest departed. My daughter was shy at first, but eventually settled in. We mothers moved about the table, helping the girls with each task and reminding them to listen when the studio owner gave the next set of instructions. We joked about how happy we were that the vast quantities of multi-hued glitter were here and not in our homes. After the projects were complete, the girls moved on to snacks, cupcakes, and gifts

The studio was dog-themed, with dog paintings, photographs, sculptures, and trinkets abounding and we began chatting about pets. I noted that my daughter frequently insists we need another pet despite the fact that our home menagerie currently consists of two dogs, two cats, and four chickens (and a preschooler, I usually add).

One woman casually remarked, “But just one child, right? That’s not too bad.”

“Yes,” I replied, and left it at that as my mind teetered within my skull.

There was so much more that I could have said. I didn’t hold it against her, though, as there was no way for her to know. This type of thing happens to me all the time.

Part of me wanted to say, “Yes, I only have one child, but it’s just me now. My husband is dead. I have all these things to keep alive and breathing and happy, and it’s just me.”

A smaller part of me wanted to say, “Yes, I only have one child, but my dead husband and I wanted another baby, very badly, and it didn’t happen. We tried, we attempted a mini-IVF procedure, everything failed, and then he died.”

These are the facts that I face every day of my life, but I didn’t say any of these things. I didn’t even mention the simple fact that I was widowed. The only people I knew at the party were the birthday girl’s mother and grandmother. They know my history intimately, but everyone else present was oblivious, and I know facts like these often make people intensely uncomfortable.

Sometimes I bring up the fact that I am widowed (it is an enormous part of my life, after all) and sometimes I don’t. I am in my early thirties, so it is almost always a shock when it comes to light and every casual conversation is a potential minefield.

As I buckled my daughter into her booster seat that afternoon, she laid her head on my shoulder and sighed, a little overtired from the day’s events, and said, “Mama, I miss Daddy.”

“Me, too, babe,” I replied, “me, too.”

Early on in my widowhood, I almost always brought it up when I met someone new. At that point, it related so directly and intensely to every single aspect of my life, and my grief was such a raw and gaping wound, that I felt I had to tell people. The wound was enormous, but also invisible; if I didn’t say anything, it didn’t exist.

Acknowledging it directly was the only way for everyone I interacted with to understand, even just a little, where I was coming from and what I was wrestling with. Even when it brought me to tears and felt like rubbing salt in the cut, it also felt like affirmation: please see that even though my life is a horror, it is mine, and I am doing with it the best I can.

Eventually, my need to tell virtually every single person I encountered lessened. There are still times when I bring it up, but it is now often a choice rather than a desperate need.

A few days before the aforementioned birthday party, the local school called to schedule my daughter for her kindergarten registration day. We scheduled the appointment and the woman kindly detailed the items I needed to bring. Before we hung up she said, “Oh, and I don’t have her father’s information here, so I’ll need that.” I explained the situation, that my husband had died nearly two years prior and so there was no pertinent information to give. Awkwardness and social fumbling ensued, and before the conversation was over, I had apologized to her.

Later that night, a dear widow-friend and I had a good laugh about the transition that had occurred: when we started apologizing to other people for the deaths of our husbands. We had reached a point when the facts of our widowhood became far more uncomfortable and panic-inducing for others than they were for us. It’s not that we’re no longer sad or no longer grieving, it’s just that the facts that often make others squirm have become our new normal.

I am a young widow with a young child, so strangers frequently ask if she is my only child, or how many siblings she has, or if I plan to have any more; they ask what my husband does for work; or they make some comment related to the nuclear family because they just assume that we are part of one. When they learn the truth, they find themselves flabbergasted and at a loss for what to say, and that’s okay, because I know it is atypical for a preschooler to have lost a parent and someone my age to be widowed.

Sometimes I wish people would generally be more aware of what they say, but mostly I just try to let it all go. While I have had complete strangers and close friends say innumerable insensitive things over the years, to my knowledge no one has ever done so intentionally. When you fall outside the norms of society, this is just what happens.

Most of the time, if people notice at all, the transgression has already escaped their mouths. I could spend endless hours of every day offended and appalled at the things people say to me, but I have absolutely no desire to live my life that way.

I find that my situation has also made me particularly aware of my own assumptions about people I don’t know, and even the ones I do. No matter what presumptions are playing around in my head, I tend to be quite conscious of not voicing them.

If someone wants to offer information that they feel comfortable sharing, that’s wonderful, because I love to hear people’s stories and discover connections. If they don’t want to share, that’s their prerogative. Regardless, I try to keep to myself whatever narrative I’ve woven in my brain because I know that impressions do not equate to truth.

The trajectory of my life will always be a bit of a conversation-stopper and jaw-dropper. People will never get used to hearing that my husband was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor at 27 and that he died when he was 31. They will never be comfortable with the fact that I was widowed at 29 and that my daughter lost her father when she was barely three. The important thing is not how others feel, however, but that I am now comfortable and at peace with these aspects of my life.

And as much as it pains people to hear the story of my widowhood, they love to hear about how my husband and I fell in love in the woods and got married on a mountain; how selfless, unflinching, and humorous he was right up until the end; and what an amazing father he was in the time that he had. These are the facts I try to put my focus on.

Though I had little choice in the way things played out, I am now choosing to be happy and fulfilled despite the tragedy and grief I have seen. I am choosing to move forward and to embrace the changes as they come, and I am trying to see a little more light than dark in the world. The often inflamed and sometimes barely perceptible emotional limp of grief and loss always comes along with me, but that is simply part of my story and part of my truth, part of me.

Sarah Kilch Gaffney is a writer, brain injury advocate, and homemade-caramel aficionado living in Maine. You can find her work at www.sarahkilchgaffney.com.

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Short-Term Memories

Posted on June 8, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Brain, Child, Featured Blog Posts, Slider Content • Tagged addiction, DARE, death, Donna Brooks, drugs, mother-daughter • Leave a comment

By Donna Brooks

You went down on August 26—my 29^th birthday. That’s what the doctors and nurses kept calling it, anyway. It didn’t take long for me to understand that this is one of many ambiguous terms medical practitioners use to speak without saying anything.

Jack and I got the call around 9 p.m. and drove through the night; buzzed on the champagne and bottles of beer we drank to celebrate the last year of my twenties, despite it being a Wednesday. In the middle of nowhere Iowa, your doctor called to ask my permission to use life-saving measures while they transported you from the VA hospital in Des Moines to the neurotrauma unit at Mercy. I gave it, even though I promised you eight years earlier that I’d never let you live in a vegetative state. DNR you had me repeat to you over the phone. Do Not Resuscitate.

I found you drenched by the rising sun, entangled in a menagerie of machinery. Fate found us together again at Mercy, as we were on that very day 29 years before; the hospital I was born in.

Black circles of dried blood ringed your nostrils. When I asked why they hadn’t bandaged your engorged, bleeding ear, which had nearly tripled in size, a blonde nurse said, “She was down for a long time. Maybe eight hours. The blood coming from her ear is the least of our concerns.”

I had an overwhelming impulse to slap her, but buried my fingernails into my palm instead. My little brother is on his way for God’s sake. I moistened a paper towel and eased the blackness away.

A machine blew air into your lungs. A machine cleaned your kidneys—the first organs the body lets go of in an attempt to preserve the lungs, heart, and brain. Your body was the most impressive machine of all.

The neurologist and nephrologist told me to go get some rest—I’d need it for making big decisions. Big stroke. Big sister. I drank instead.

Your MRI showed what they called Shower Emboli; twelve strokes at once. The glossy photograph of your brain looked like a series of constellations mapped in a wrinkled galaxy. The doctor said your heart collected these shooting stars for years, maybe decades before the big bang. Blood pumps in quicker than it can pump out, sloshing and coagulating in the meaty basin of your left ventricle. Atrial fibrillation, he called it, a result of habitual drug use.

His tone carried a tinge of delicate inquiry, just in case the news he was delivering might come as a surprise. As if we could have possibly overlooked the last twenty years of our lost childhoods. Or maybe missed your propensity to, repeatedly, choose meth over motherhood; prison and halfway houses over our upper-middleclass suburb; crime over comfort. Dallas and I nodded. He looked relieved.

I wanted that image—my brother and I sitting there, hunched and raw, on the couch in your hospital room—to be used in D.A.R.E. programs across the country. Particularly in the Midwest where methamphetamine continues to turn mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends into the poison it’s made of. The message: Meth will come back to bite you. Sometimes, years after you quit using it. It destroys everything, inside and out.

Meth changed the beat of your heart.

I prayed for the first time in years. Prayed for your recovery. For your forgiveness. For relief from my opaque guilt for casting you out of my life. Jack read to you from your worn and heavily annotated bible Cousin Angel brought from Spring Hill. His voice was low and soft, a relief from the sterile, rhythmic reminder that you were not breathing on your own. Your bookmark was a picture I’d sent you from the night Jack asked me to marry him. It held the place of Corinthians 13:4-8. Love keeps no record of wrongs.

For ten days this went on. Sooner or later, the doctors said, this stroke will kill your mother. Don’t talk to me like I’m a child, I snapped, and immediately felt guilty, because I am a child. Your child. We agreed to extubate.

She may not breathe on her own, they said. You did.

She will be paralyzed on her left side of her body, they said. You are not.

She will have substantial brain damage, they said. You do.

You’ve lost your ability to create new memories—anterograde amnesia—which is pretty much on par with the cruelty life has shown you. What if, I thought, you awoke with a blank slate? Unburdened by the abuse of your childhood. The suicides of your brothers. The manic depression. What if we could meet between the wrinkles of time and start again.

Donna M. Brooks holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. She was a 2013 finalist for the Iowa Review Award in nonfiction and a finalist for the Santa Fe Writers Project Award in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Mamalode. She lives in Sioux City, IA with her husband and daughter.

Through My Mother’s Dying Eyes

Posted on June 3, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged daughter, death, mother, mother dying, Shira Nayman, terminal illness • Leave a comment

By Shira Nayman

I’ve just returned from a trip home to Australia to say goodbye to my mother, who is in the final stages of terminal cancer. The twenty-two hour flight has never seemed longer. And back in the US, on vacation in Ithaca, NY, I find that the world looks different: I feel as if I’m seeing everything for the last time, as if through my mother’s dying eyes—sunlight filtering through the trees, the lake ablaze in the late afternoon. Smells, too, and sensations of all kinds, coming at me in a rush of vital intensity, as if every mindfulness meditation I’ve ever done has taken roiling, permanent hold. It’s all too much: too bright, too loud, too beautiful, too there. And also, soaked in grief, whispering—no yelling—that it is all about to be swept away, heaving waves dragged by an undertow that is both life’s great, howling bellows, and also the final, crashing end.

I am prisoner of my mother’s dying: a hostage born of our deep connection. From the moment I could think, when my first memories were slicked into place, I was electrically attuned to her quicksilver moods–cyclings of passion and frustration, her own artistic strivings thwarted by the demands of motherhood and marriage.

Visiting her in the nursing home aroused the kinds of emotions I imagine most people feel in a similar situation—including disbelief that the powerful woman of my childhood memory would be reduced to this, to requiring help going to the bathroom, to struggling with her walker to get to the dining room, where this once superb chef and lover of fine cuisine now dutifully, gratefully, eats soggy vegetables, tasteless mashed potatoes, and every night the same desert of tinned fruit and store-brand ice cream.

But there was something else, something more existential. I was free to come and go, to return to the world of the goal-oriented jugglers of multiple demands, each adorned with an exclamation point: Career! Children! Marriage! Creative endeavors! Volunteering! The ongoing striving for success! Travel! Plans! Big and bigger plans! But now, out in that heady, jostling, accomplishing, forward-looking world, from which my mother, no-longer-fully-of-this-world in her infirmity, was now barred, I myself felt like the ghost–one of Wim Wenders angels from his film Wings of Desire, sent down from a gritty, earth-worn heaven, aware of the flimsiness of everything, tuned in to the cares and struggles and anguish, but most of all knowing that for me, at least, everything was already over.

I know rationally that it is my mother who is dying, not me, and yet emotionally, her story is simply my story; I find myself moving through the world as if I am myself looking through the window of her little room in the nursing home, no longer fully one of the living. We have always had an uncanny connection—not unusual between parent and child (I shudder to recognize this same kind of bond with my own children; work against it, an inner voice whispers, one day, when it is me dying, let them not feel “this”). My psyche has always had a parallel groove, her experience somehow silently sliding along within or beneath my own. Though the Pacific Ocean has separated us all my adult life, I have known when she was unwell or unhappy. I have startled awake many times, minutes before an urgent phone call came in; I have felt dogged by black clouds I knew were not my own, troubled by anguish that was hers. Though the ocean did not muffle the power of the psychic connection, it has served me well—the earth’s largest moat—allowing me peace enough to get on with my own life. Only now, when the coordinates of her life have shifted into that final, two-dimensional arrow, pointing to the grave, that parallel groove has taken over.

As the long-ago established holder of my mother’s psyche, I seem unable to push aside this crushing approach of death (and the fact that death awaits us all gives credibility to my experience). I feel it as a struggle for breath, aware that soon, the air will not move in and out of my mother’s lungs. I feel it as a panic that I’ve not appreciated life more (though I’ve appreciated it a great deal), that I’ve not given full flower to the many opportunities I was, by chance of my birth, accorded–not treasured every single second of motherhood myself, aghast in confronting that my own children are grown, or nearly so: that I’ve not fulfilled—I don’t know, the privilege of life itself, though I’m not sure what it would mean to fulfill this. I am staring, through my mother’s eyes, at the reality that life is almost forever over, the final wrist-slap of death itself.

My own voice booms in my ears: see this hand, typing on the computer keyboard? The hand that holds my lover, that once held my children, that clapped with joy or fluttered with despair, that makes a living, cooks meals, that reaches out for life, ever more life. This hand, my mother’s hand really, since it came from her, since it looks a bit like hers once looked, will soon be cold flesh in damp dirt. Thoughts that come from a life that is now filled with the approach of death.

And since I’ve looked for so long through the eyes of my mother, I suppose I can’t really imagine how the world will look when her eyes are no longer there to see. And now that she will never again see the beautiful lake I am looking at in upstate New York (she saw it once on a shared vacation long ago), I am channeling it back to her, trying, in some Twister-like contortion, to reverse the configuration—to have her see through my eyes, since hers, soon to be sightless, are confined to a space dominated by limitation, suffering, indignity.

I can’t help thinking about how the world will look when her funeral is underway and I am standing at her grave. Knowing the gaze that was the very first sight of my own blinking, newborn eyes, no longer exists: her beautiful eyes—loving, angry, delighting, rejecting, searching, aching, always alive, ever seeing—now inanimate beneath the earth. What will happen to the sunlight, when she is no longer there to see it? What will happen to the sight of my own eyes, which lay claim to the world, from the start, through hers?

Shira Nayman is a Clinical Psychologist and the author of three books, A Mind of Winter and The Listener, (novels) and Awake in the Dark (novella/stories). She has published fiction and nonfiction in The Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Boulevard and elsewhere. She lives with her family in New Jersey.

Will Daddy Die?

Posted on April 21, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged death, dying, faith, Lea Grover, loss, religion, twins • Leave a comment

By Lea Grover

“Mommy? Will you still love me when you’re dead?”

My six-year-old asks me this question a lot. She is a little focused on whether or not her parents will still love her once they’ve died. I’m 100% certain this is because her father has brain cancer.

I’m Jewish, and I often think of myself as an atheist, and that means I have pretty complicated beliefs about what happens to a person when they die. I try to be honest about death as much as possible, letting my children know that every single person dies, because life isn’t and can’t be forever, and that’s okay. I let them know that being dead isn’t scary, it’s just what happens when you’re not alive anymore. I desperately don’t want them to be afraid of death, or of somebody they love dying. I don’t say that when she asks me, though. I usually say, “Yes, honey. My love will always be there, and I’ll love you forever and ever and ever.”

My six-year-old and her twin sister both show signs of the strain of living with their father’s astrocytoma. One is fixated on the idea that we will all love each other even after we’ve died, an idea that gives her a great deal of comfort. Her twin has internalized the strain, and instead shows it by becoming hyper-emotional over increasingly minute elements of life she wants to control.

Her kindergarten teachers have taken me aside a few times to let me know she needs help controlling her emotions. I don’t tell them it’s hard to control your emotions when you know something big and scary is happening, and no one is capable of explaining it to you.

As much as I want to, I am doing a terrible job making their daddy’s cancer understandable. What we know as adults is that cancer is never something you can rationalize. I don’t want to scare them, so I tell them he’s getting better, which is only a half truth.

He is getting better, or rather, he’s not getting worse. That’s not what they want to know. What they want to know is what happens if he doesn’t get better? What does that look like? What happens to them? I have told them that lots of people get cancer, and lots of people get better. I haven’t told them that lots of people with brain cancer get better. I have told them that sometimes people die from cancer. I’ve told them that daddy has a device he wears on his head to help his cancer get better. I’ve also told them he probably has to wear it forever.

The looming unanswered and unasked question is, “Will daddy die?” And I have skirted it as much as I can, because I don’t want to answer it with any phrase other than, “Everybody dies, someday, probably not for a long, long time, and that’s okay.”

It’s a hard thing to live with as an adult, the idea that somebody you love is seriously ill, and going to be ill until they pass away. It’s a hard thing to live with when it’s you, when it’s your spouse, when it’s your child. But as adults, we are capable of so much. We can do our own research, we can express our fears and confusions to others in a way that can be constructive. We can run marathons or donate to charities or shave our heads in solidarity, and it makes us feel better to be doing something, anything, to make sense of the helpless feelings that come with this experience.

My children don’t have that, because these are new emotions for them. Learning to live despite constant, nagging fear is something that has taken me years to achieve. My six year old twins hardly stand a chance.

So when the kindergarten teacher tells me my kid had a meltdown about nothing in the playground, that her whole afternoon she was anxious and quick to cry, I don’t talk to her about daddy’s illness.

I wait until her twin sister asks me, as she does whenever emotions run high, “Will you love us even after you’re dead?”

“Yes, honey. I’ll love you forever and ever, even after I’m dead, and after that, and after that.”

Lea Grover is a writer and speaker living on Chicago’s south side. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, on websites ranging from Cosmopolitan to AlterNet, and soon in her first memoir. She speaks about sex positivity in parenting, and on behalf of the RAINN Speakers Bureau.

Art by Mary Ann Cooper

A Birthday In The Park

Posted on April 5, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged baby death, birthdays, death, girls, Lori Wenner, loss, siblings • Leave a comment

By Lori Wenner

The din of the birthday party seemed to fade as a cloud of primary-colored balloons drifted high above the treetops, slowly disappearing into the azure sky. We’d enjoyed birthday cake, sung “Happy Birthday” in a large circle and then released the balloons. But something was missing: the birthday girl was absent from her party. As the last balloon vanished, I heard a voice whisper, “I’m okay, Momma. I love you.”

The birthday girl was Alexa Christine, my first daughter and she had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome a year before when she was eleven weeks old. My husband Rohn and I had decided to observe her first birthday with a gathering at her grave. We couldn’t bear the thought of the day passing unnoticed, as if she’d never existed. But I worried what others would think; I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. Rohn had reassured me, with his typical confidence, that our loved ones would approve and attend. He was right. We marked Alexa’s birth as she deserved and received love and support that our friends and family would never have known how to give to us otherwise.

The dazzling summer sun spilled over our gathering and a breeze from the nearby Neches River granted us a reprieve from the southeast Texas heat. The mood was light with laughter, conversation and hugs. Our many guests mingled under the towering pine tree standing sentry over Alexa’s grave. The party also served as a send-off: Rohn and I would depart that afternoon for a Colorado holiday where, pregnant with our second daughter, Caitlyn, I looked forward to relaxing in the cool mountain air.

The cemetery where Alexa is buried is as green and lush as a city park. Pine and live oak trees shade the grounds, which are dotted with picturesque flower gardens. The grave markers are uniform, flush with the ground allowing an unobstructed view as the land slopes gently to the river below. Here, it’s easy to forget you are in a graveyard. When Alexa died, we chose four paired burial plots near the river, arranged head-to-foot. We buried Alexa in the middle of two plots; the other two were reserved for Rohn and me. I buried Rohn in his plot seventeen years later, when, at age forty-eight, colon cancer ended his life.

We celebrated Caitlyn’s first birthday fifteen months after Alexa’s. On that crisp, sunny October day, many of the same guests from Alexa’s party milled about our backyard, laughing and talking. The birthday girl, fashionably late after a long nap, entered the yard with her chubby hand in mine. Rohn videotaped her toddling by my side, capturing her pale pink smocked dress, her lacy socks, her white Mary Janes and the pink bow in her curly blonde hair. I presented the group with the queen of our world, my heart full to bursting.

Our family grew by two over the next six years, as Caitlyn’s sisters Jillian and Zoe were born. Big sisters and an ever-expanding cast of cousins increased the fun as we celebrated first birthdays with elaborate cakes from Beaumont’s best bakery and new dresses for the birthday girl and Mom. We chose Blue’s Clues, Jillian’s favorite Nickelodeon show, for her first birthday theme; the birthday girl wore an aqua, green and hot pink dress to match the chipper puppy and a headband that tamed her thick, black hair. At her own first birthday party, Zoe wore a vintage-inspired linen sundress, white sandals, and a white bow in her blonde hair. Rohn photographed her seated on our dining room table near her two-tiered pink cake, which she quickly devoured with both hands.

After celebrating Alexa’s first birthday with our friends, we honored the occasion each passing year with a dinner with my parents. In the early years, we also visited her grave. But, as time passed, I didn’t feel the need to visit Alexa there. I felt closer to her in our home giving her sisters the love I couldn’t give her.

Following his death, we celebrated Rohn’s birthdays at his favorite seafood restaurant, with his favorite cake: lemon with chocolate icing. Rohn had wanted these flavors for his groom’s cake, but for once, I’d said no to him. I would have been better off suffering through that cake once. When he didn’t get his requested groom’s cake, Rohn felt entitled to a lemon cake with chocolate icing for his next twenty birthdays. We continue this tradition now, reminiscing about Rohn’s other odd food combinations, like Steen’s syrup and cheddar cheese atop pancakes. In her first year away at college, Caitlyn marked her Daddy’s birthday by baking his favorite cake in her poorly stocked dorm kitchen and sharing it with her friends.

Caitlyn’s, Jillian’s and Zoe’s birthdays have always been about growth, hope and life; each represents another year that a child of mine has flourished. Since his death, Rohn’s birthdays have been about remembrance and gratitude. I often mention him to friends on his birthday. We laugh together, remembering the kind, gregarious, creative and unstoppable man we all loved. Rohn’s life was cut short, but he packed everyday of it working hard, playing hard and loving even harder. It is sad to remember Alexa on her birthdays and there isn’t laughter when I do, so I only mention her birthday to a few select friends.

Losing Alexa remains an agony, even after twenty-three years. I can easily recall the happy times in her short life, but I keep the the unvarnished fact of her death hidden away. I know that my daughter is dead, but I rarely access that reality. When I do, I say the words my baby died aloud. The intensity of my grief shocks me. Then I recall Julian Barnes’ thoughts on mourning: “It hurts just as much as it is worth.”

Alexa’s birthdays are not about a baby who didn’t get to grow up. They’re not about what might have been. After the initial devastation of her death, I wrestled with a heartrending question: Would conceiving and loving other children betray my love for Alexa? With time, I have come to believe that each unique child’s conception is only possible at one precise moment in time; a child conceived at any other time is a completely different person. If Alexa had lived, I would not have become pregnant so soon afterward and Caitlyn and her sisters would never have been born. In this way, I have come to believe that Alexa was meant to live for only seventy-seven days. This is a sadness I can bear; what I cannot bear is the sadness and regret of a life not lived.

A nursery RN for thirty years, I usually choose to work on Alexa’s birthday. I recall my first pregnancy, labor and delivery as I walk past room 319, the room where she was born. The babies I care for comfort me. At times, I see a whisper of Alexa’s spirit in their faces and for a moment, it’s as if she’s there with me.

Lori Wenner is an RN/lactation consultant who lives in Beaumont, Texas with her three daughters ages 22, 18 and 15. Her work has appeared in Mamalode, Nursing for Women’s Health and MEDSURG Nursing.

Finding Hope in Parenting After Loss

Posted on March 21, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Brain, Child, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged baby, birth, brainchild, death, essays on mothering, infancy, motherhood, mothering, pregnancy, stillbirth, Tara Shafer • Leave a comment

Art: Linda Williis

By Tara Shafer

My second child was stillborn ten years ago.

A decade out from loss and this is what I know.

When a sonogram showed no heartbeat, I understood I had to deliver my baby.

If I try hard enough I can put myself back there, but I can’t stay. The horror of the moment makes me resist. It propels me like a magnetic force or a backdraft – away.

That day I was admitted to the hospital. I lay in Labor & Delivery stoned on Valium. I was in labor with a dead baby. I remember falling in love, observing great beauty, and getting my heart broken.

I looked out the window at the orange glow of urban pollution against platter-sized flakes of snow that made up a muffled peaceful hush drifting upwards like specters.

Time was vaporous. I had been induced to deliver with Pitocin. My body had come undone. I waited for contractions to start.

I cried for my dead son. I cried also for my two-year old son, Reid. He had never been away from me and now we were forced apart without warning. That morning he and I had walked through the Central Park Zoo. We passed the carriage horses on the way to a medical appointment and Reid watched them eat oats out of big buckets.

I closed my eyes. These children. I did not know how to occupy both the lands of the living and the dead. I could not be in two places at once. I looked at my heavily pregnant stomach. Then, I remembered the little red sweater Reid wore when he waved and left the room, glancing backwards.

I can no longer remember the sequence of what happened or when. What I remember most vividly about my son’s (still)birth is playing with the edges of things – discovering all sorts of peripheral realities where death meets birth.

As I labored I imagined stranger hands on him. He was mine but I could not keep him. I tried to imagine this infant, alive, asleep at home.

On television that night John Lennon was being over-remembered on the anniversary of his shooting. Lennon singing Imagine was on news clips over and over again. I was drawn to the tinny end-of-the-world music box quality of the song.

After many hours my baby was born. We named him Dylan. I did not even anticipate the sound of crying. Still, the silence was shocking. In the room there is no one talking. My devastated husband Gavin was there. The nurse readied the receiving cart but without a sense of urgency. She was somber and deliberate in her movements. She swaddled him in standard issue hospital blanket and put a hat on his head. She looked more like an undertaker than a nurse.

In holding my son, I was aware that there would be no second chances. I did what I could to stay present even as I left behind the life I had been leading until that point.

After a while someone (I don’t remember who) asked, “Are you ready?”

I suddenly understood what it would have felt like to give up a child for adoption when adoption was secret and mothers too young. You hand your baby over.

As I did. But I knew he would never grow up. He would never find me.

“Are you ready?”

It is a terrible way to phrase this question.

We cremated our baby. We returned to our life with Reid. We tried to figure out how to explain the death of a baby whose existence had had never known to a young child. A play therapist assured us that young children do not see death as either permanent or negative. Several days later we explained that the baby would not be coming to live with us. That night as I lay in bed, soapy softness wafting off of him, I asked Reid whether he would crawl back in to my stomach and be a baby once more. Not my finest moment as a mother. He answered, “yes Mommy, so I could die and die and die.”

When we tried again, sex was multi-faceted. It was recreational, procreational, and post-traumatic.

When we did get pregnant again I had difficulties processing this reality. I took Reid to a nearby orchard and sat we sat there. I tried to understand that the coming months would be living moment to moment. I thought about the fear I would face as I waited for fetal movement. I thought about how this was the gift of another chance. I considered this all under the kaleidoscope sky with the apple trees, and the earth smell of fall everywhere. There were creeping early shots of colors in the trees as they prepared to burst into color and then retreat – a half death – until the spring. I looked at the weeping willows tacked up perfectly against the blue fall sky settling down from the scorch of summer; the world around began to recoil temporarily.

Reid grounded me and I had to let him.

I hid the fact of pregnancy for an absurd amount of time. Depending on the moment in the day, I loved or tolerated or survived this pregnancy. I learned to exist in crisis mode. Phone calls made me jump. It began to feel like alarmist Zen. I did weekly non-stress tests at the hospital. I gazed upon my baby on an ultrasound screen in sanity-saving weekly ultrasound appointments. He was so near and so far. I could grow him but I could not save him if it came to it. I was more voyeur than mother.

These were hard months, but so too, were they full of grace.

As the days before birth approach, I found I could not stay present. There was a biblical storm and the rain came down in sheets. Non-essential travel in New York State was officially discouraged.

We drove slowly from upstate New York to the city hospital on the flooded roads that were looking delta-like. There were houses sticking up through water. I half-expected to see destitute children sitting atop roofs without shoes. I glanced at Reid in the rear view mirror and I thought about his sustaining love and how he could never know the impact of his presence. I was shocked at the finality of and the force of regret I suddenly felt at what will be lost between he and I.

As panic at the thought of the alternative rose like bile within me, I tried to steady myself. I told Reid how very much I loved him.

He looked into the rear view mirror and placed his fingers on his eyebrows and moved them around.

“Mommy?” he said. “Did you know that my eyebrows look like corn cobs when I do that?”

At the hospital my husband and I stood outside in the early spring wind blows dampness around imagining the promise in existence everywhere. People walked by, hospital staff stood smoking in scrubs, the lights of a diner flickered. I remember thinking that I had never seen anything more beautiful than this. The rain was stopping but rainbow colored oil slicks ran down in rivers towards gutters on the city streets.

The next day, my son David was born and they put him on my chest.

He was so small. I had forgotten what newborns felt like and how much like a petal their skin is.

I lay there, an infant at my breast and I again recognized that humans are frail. There is honor in trying to become strong.

A few years later another baby would be placed on my chest. This one would be a girl. Isabelle, like her brother, would be born in a snowstorm. However, she lay next to me fully in my possession.

My family is growing up. I can’t even believe how old my children are now as they set their courses. I try, as all parents do, to provide perspective. At the Haydn Planetarium there is a plaque that describes the potential for interstellar life and how little we know yet about galaxies. Part of it reads: “The stars in the sky seem permanent and unchanging because it takes millions and billions of years for their lives to unfold.”

I have a memory from childhood. There is nothing significant within it except that I understood something abstract without being told. I was walking with my father once in mid-winter at dusk. The snow was blue against the winter sky and the embers of the orange light were fading and strewn across the sky. The blueness of the snow looked like the sea but perfectly still, beautifully captured imprisoned and resolute. It had stored the light from the sun and it was still there within, beneath despite the general appearance of death, of nothing stirring. My father told me, “This is the harsh beauty of winter.”

I understood that the scene was both beautiful and harsh and that these two things could easily be fused. What is absent can be just as glorious as what is present. On that rising hill beneath the sky there was lots of life but it was suspended, waiting. The winter was the victor there and it contained much in the way of dormant things all trapped within it. For all that winter freezes, it coats and protects.

Without all that is absent – what is taken from us – we do not know the truth about what is present. These losses, these tragedies, provide a context. They give the gift of hard-won self-knowledge too important to bury or obscure.

Tara Shafer is the co-founder of Reconceiving Loss (www.reconceivingloss.com) an online resource center to support families coping with baby loss. Her work has appeared on the New York Times and Mashable. She is a contributing blogger for BabyCenter, Huffington Post and Psychology Today.

Soulmate

Posted on February 18, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged death, family, grief, Lexi Behrndt, loss, marriage, motherhood, mothering • Leave a comment

By Lexi Behrndt

I never knew a son could be a soulmate

I spent my childhood dreaming of a soulmate. Someone who would be a new oxygen to fill my lungs. I read Wuthering Heights and swooned over the passion between Catherine and Heathcliff, and I knew in my bones that my person was out there. He had to be.

At eighteen, I fell quickly for a boy I thought truly saw me for me, the look in his eyes one of love. I married that boy, and what followed was the opposite of my dream. I spent years cursing myself for my idealistic tendencies, and wishing away the idea that my true love was somewhere out there. Our marriage was over before it was over, my hope for a soulmate long gone.

Together, we had two sons. One and then the other, fifteen months apart. When my first son was born, I was surprised by motherhood, and all that came with it. It was as though I had grown into my true self for the first time, loving and giving all I had to another. I could not get enough. When my son was six months old, on a hot July morning, I took a pregnancy test, and when the two pink lines appeared, instead of the fear I maybe should have felt at a poorly-timed pregnancy, I was overwhelmed with a deep sense of joy. I knew this baby would receive all the love I had to give, just like his brother before him.

And when he was born, one cool April morning, he was placed on my chest, the powerful love rushed in, and then, the fear. The room quieted as I asked, “Why is he purple?” I watched as medical team members swarmed around him like bees watching their hive fall. Frantic and hurried, yet calculated and somber. I was forced to say goodbye to him repeatedly over his first few days of life, instead of wrapping him in my arms and holding him close for one, long, never-ending hello.

What followed was six and a half months of living in a pediatric cardiothoracic ICU as he battled congenital heart disease and pulmonary hypertension. Six and a half months of victories, hardships, setbacks, sweet kisses, moments my heart lurched out of my chest with contentedness and love, and moments my lungs deflated, suddenly unable to remember how to breathe. We bonded with cords and monitors, and I sang him songs repeatedly, if only to cover up the noise of the alarms. And when I entered his tiny, sterile hospital room, he always seemed to know, his eyes searched the ceiling, as if they were waiting to lock with mine. I was his, and he was mine. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to keep him with me, healthy and whole. But then, after 200 days, the fateful day came, and I watched all the dominos fall as I held him in my arms, and while everything screamed and raged within me, I told him it was okay to go.

I left the hospital numb with my mother and my older son beside me, with nothing but a lock of his hair, his favorite socks, his stained swaddle blankets. “This is the end of it all,” I thought.

But it wasn’t.

If you had told me two years ago that inside the sterile walls of a children’s hospital I would be forever changed, I never would have believed you. I gave birth to a little boy I had to give back, and the living and the giving was my saving grace. Somehow, my little boy with sick lungs and crummy veins taught me exactly what I needed.

He taught me to fight. He taught me to love without fear. He taught me to find my voice and stand my ground. Before him, I was stuck and desolate, and I didn’t even know it. He took care of his momma more than I took care of him. A little boy with the biggest blue eyes took my life by storm, and made sure he left me stronger, braver, kinder, and with more love than I realized my heart could hold.

I received a card after my son’s death, from a friend who had also lost her son. Her sentiment was simple yet profound, one lovely sentence that has stayed with me in the year since his death.

“I never knew a son could be a soulmate.”

I never did either, until I met mine.

Lexi Behrndt is the founder of Scribbles and Crumbs and The On Coming Alive Project. She is a single mother to two boy—one here and one in heaven, a freelance writer, and a communications director. Join her on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Things No One Told Me About Grief

Posted on February 10, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged children and childhood, death, family, friendship, grief, life after loss, loss, parenting, Rachel Pieh Jones, relationships • Leave a comment

By Rachel Pieh Jones

C.S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me grief felt so like fear.”

No one ever told me grief was so physical. I feel it in my bones, they ache. I feel it in my muscles, they are sore, as though I’ve run a marathon. The few times I have tried to run, I struggle to see the ground through my tears and my legs feel weak, my pace slow but my body screaming that I’m trying as hard as I can. I’m dehydrated from crying, from forgetting to drink enough water. I’m hungry but can’t eat, nothing looks appetizing. I haven’t slept all the way through the night since the day my daughter’s friend fell.

What is it for anyway? Who cares if I’m in shape or strong or feel the wind in my face? The child of my friend is gone, my daughter’s friend is gone. My 5k pace is irrelevant, sleep a luxury repeatedly interrupted by damp cheeks and a runny nose. Grief forms in a lump in my throat and lodges there, moving in uninvited. It fades and comes back and it is hard to swallow food, to force sustenance past the sorrow.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me grief felt so like fear.” No one ever told me that, either. Fear of how to respond, fear of how things will change, fear of fragility, fear of how to respond to my daughter’s grief while facing my own.

No one ever told me grief was something you owned (or does it own you?), something that settles in and takes up residence like the lump in my throat and the dampness around my eyes.

No one purposefully neglected to tell me these things about grief. Loss, pain, sorrow, heartbreak, they are all simply topics that aren’t discussed in depth and that are experienced in both unique and universal ways. To say: this is how you will experience grief robs it of the unique, yet to say: this is how we mortals experience grief is to give the gift of not being alone. How do we talk about things for which there are no words, in any language that can capture the whole of it? The pain of tragedy burns so deeply and transformatively that we pander around in art, movies, poetry, flowers, songs, essays, trying to grasp the unfathomable. That’s what tears are for, they are the words of the utterly crushed.

But now I have to talk with my children about grief, about endings, about things that cannot be changed. There are so many difficulties in life but the only thing that cannot, ever, be changed is death. For those with faith, there is hope of life after death but this is not the hope of a miraculous physical resurrection in the days before the funeral, before the burial. Death is final, the last word before eternity.

How do I talk with my daughter about her friend? She hasn’t wanted to talk about what happened or what she is feeling and thinking. She resorts to action in place of words and so I’ve been letting her light candles and stare at them, her eyes full of wonder, confusion, and sadness. She taped photos to her bedroom walls and filled the first pages of her Christmas journal with cutouts from the memorial service bulletin and notes on what their friendship meant to her. She found a small bag of gifts her friend had given her and buried it deep in her dresser drawer. She showed me some selfies they took together.

I’ve told her about how my body is reacting to this sadness, she knows. She sees me crying while I do the dishes or yawning in the middle of the afternoon after a sleepless night. She hears me talk about the messages passed between the adults involved. We share memories of her friend, pictures, words that feel both full and far too empty. I don’t know if, as my daughter grows and faces more loss, she will remember these discussions or her current sadness, she is only ten. She struggles to articulate what she is feeling. Later, she might feel like no one ever told her grief would be so physical, so close to fear, so inconvenient, so exhausting.

Though I don’t know exactly how to talk with her about grief and loss, we still talk. I tell her about the accident, I answer her questions. How is a body transported internationally? What happens at a funeral? What does her friend look like now? I don’t know how to answer all her questions but that’s what I say. “I don’t know.” This is one thing I want my daughter to know. When she experiences sorrow, now and in the future, it is okay to not know everything. It is okay to be surprised by what sadness feels like, or doesn’t feel like.

The friend who died lived in a different country and one day my daughter said, “I don’t miss her today because I didn’t see her every day. But when I go there to visit and she is gone, I think I will feel sad again.” The words had a question mark in them. I think she was asking, “Is that okay? To not feel sad now but to feel sad in a couple of weeks?”

This is another thing no one told me about grief but it is something we all know. There is no timeline, no proper moment to start or end the mourning. It becomes part of our days, woven into the sunrise and the dirty dishes and the photos on our computer screensavers.

C.S. Lewis also said, “To love is to be vulnerable.”

It is scary to raise my daughter to love, hoping she will stay tender and vulnerable, in other words able to be wounded. But this wounding love is also what makes us strong. In love we build friendships and communities and when grief takes our breath away, these connections step in and become our strength. We are so easily broken but when there is no strength to stand, the communities that love us move closer, tenderly gather the shattered pieces, and hold us.

No one ever told me that explicitly, either, but I think I’ve known it all along. That love both breaks and heals. Walking through loss with my daughter and sharing our grief is strengthening our relationship. Even though it won’t miraculously heal scars or close up black holes of loss, shared grief is what love looks like.

Rachel Pieh Jones lives in Djibouti with her husband and three children: 14-year old twins and a 9-year old who feel most at home when they are in Africa. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, FamilyFun, Babble, and Running Times. Visit her at: Djibouti Jones, her Facebook page or on Twitter @rachelpiehjones.

A Namesake for Nonny

Posted on January 21, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged death, family, grandparents, loss, Mimi Sager Yoskowitz, names, namesake, pregnancy • Leave a comment

By Mimi Sager Yoskowitz

At 32 weeks pregnant, I board a Chicago-bound plane from New York, teary eyed and wary about leaving my husband and traveling this late in my pregnancy. I’m heading back to my hometown to celebrate turning 30 with my high school girlfriends. We planned this getaway before I told anyone I was pregnant, so I never raised my concerns about the timing. But the timing turns out to be a blessing of sorts. My 94-year-old grandma has been in and out of the hospital, and this trip provides me with an opportunity to spend time with her.

Nonny’s apartment in the assisted living facility has a view of Lake Michigan. We stare out at the waters together, and she places her wrinkled hand on my burgeoning belly. Just as she settles in to check for some movement, her future great-grandchild kicks out a giant thwack!

“That’s a boy,” she says chuckling.

“You think so, Nonny? How can you tell?” I can’t help but smile.

“It’s so active.” Her tone is matter-of-fact as she rubs my pregnant middle, seeking out more signs of baby.

“All right Nonny, we’ll find out soon enough.”

I wonder if her old-fashioned stereotype will prove to be true. My husband and I are going the traditional route and not finding out the gender of our baby. And so it will be another few weeks before we know if my grandmother’s prophecy is correct.

After I return to Manhattan, Nonny and I start calling each other more frequently. It’s a mutual check-in; we are each concerned with how the other is faring. It seems that while my baby grows each day, getting ready to enter this world, my grandmother becomes weaker, getting ready to leave it.

“Hello?” Nonny answers the phone.

Cars honk and buses screech in the background as I walk home from work, but her voice still comes through stronger than the last time we spoke. Hopefully that means she is doing OK.

“Hi Nonny. How are you?” I ask.

“Oh, you know, Mimi. I’m waiting. I’m waiting until June 1.”

June 1 is my due date, and soon these words become her standard reply every time I ask how she is feeling. It’s just like Nonny to come up with a clever way of expressing her desire without being too emotional. Her love and determination remain strong, even as her heart weakens.

The special bond I share with my grandma dates back to my infancy when I served as a source of comfort as she grieved my grandfather’s sudden death. There are photos of us snuggling on the couch while she reads to me. Those cozy moments on her lap morphed into shopping excursions, sleepovers, and later, after I graduated from college, evening visits when I’d stop by her apartment after work.

As grandmother and granddaughter, we can do no wrong in each other’s eyes. For both of us, she has to meet her great-grandchild who is growing inside of me.

On Mother’s Day, my husband and I head to Buy Buy Baby to complete our registry and take one more gander through the mega store that seems to hold all the paraphernalia needed to calm our first-time parent jitters. After combing the aisles filled with every possible stroller, breast pump, burp cloth and car seat known to parent-kind, we hail a taxi and head back home.

“Let’s finalize our boy and girl names and be done with it.” I have my husband cornered in the back of the cab. He’s been avoiding a decision, wanting to wait until we are closer to the due date. Now I waddle instead of walk, and my belly tightens with Braxton Hicks contractions. It’s time to decide.

During the course of my pregnancy, our conversations about our baby’s name ranged from calm and funny to heated and frustrating. We’ve combed through multiple baby name books, searched the Internet, and drawn up lists. Our preferences vary from the traditional, like Jacob, to the more modern, such as Talia. We discuss naming the baby for the grandparents we have lost, though I’m too superstitious to even consider naming for Nonny. At this point, it’s been weeks since we last broached the subject in any way. But something about that taxi ride seems to do the trick. By the time we arrive at our apartment building, our soon-to-be born baby has a name.

Once upstairs and giddy about our choices, I call Nonny to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day. She can’t get to the phone, her caretaker tells me she is sleeping, but I should try again later. For some reason or another, I never do.

My father’s phone call wakes me the next morning.

“She didn’t make it.”

My friend who lives one floor below tells me she heard my wails through the walls.

I beg my doctor to let me go to Chicago for Nonny’s funeral.

“You can’t travel at this late stage of your pregnancy,” she tells me.

We’re too close to that June 1 due date Nonny was trying so hard to reach.

Jewish custom calls for mourners to bury the deceased using a reversed shovel until a mound of dirt forms on the casket. Since I can’t be there in person to say good-bye, my pen acts as the reversed shovel, and my words are the dirt I use to help lay my grandma to rest. My brother reads the eulogy on my behalf, and I listen in from my Manhattan apartment, my cell phone on speaker. It isn’t the same as being there, not nearly, but I hope I’ve given all those gathered a sense of how much Nonny meant to me.

Nonny’s name was Cecelia, though she went by Cel for short. After her funeral, my husband and I toss out the names we finalized on Mother’s Day and come up with a different list of names that begin with “C.” Nonny didn’t make it to see the baby, but my first-born child will be her namesake.

Up until delivery, I debate whether I can name a girl directly for Nonny or if the pain of her loss is too raw for me to call someone else Cecelia, even my own child. But we do choose a boy name, Caleb, which means bold and devoted, two traits my grandmother embodied. She was brave attending law school in the early 1930’s, one of only two women in her class. She was brave when she wed my grandfather in secret at the age of 23. As a medical resident, he was not allowed to be married, but their love transcended the rules. Nonny remained devoted to him up until her last breath, and she always put family first.

It turns out Nonny also was good at predictions. Four days after my original due date, I give birth to a baby boy. Though they won’t ever meet, Nonny and her great-grandson will always be connected by their names that start with the letter “C.”

Mimi Sager Yoskowitz, a former CNN producer, is now a mother to four children ages 10 to 4. Her writing can be found on Kveller.com, the 2016 “28 Days of Play” series, in the forthcoming HerStories anthology, So Glad They Told Me, and on her blog, http://mimisager.com.

Mourning Alone

Posted on January 20, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged death, divorce, family, grandparents, grief, loss, Marcelle Soviero, mother-in-law, parenting • Leave a comment

By Marcelle Soviero

“I don’t want to watch Grammy die,” my son said as he got out of the car, dirt-dusted from his afternoon baseball game.

“I know you don’t buddy.” I took his hand and we walked into the house. “But Grammy had a good life. Ninety-two years is a long life.” My ex-husband Larry’s mother was now in hospice care in Chicago, halfway across the country, and Larry wanted the children to be able to have their last good-byes.

I gathered my three children, Johnny, Olivia and Sophia, ages 9, 10 and 11, into the living room; I got a good look at the three of them seated in a row on the couch, each face punctuated with worry. Tear dots on Olivia’s cheeks.

My ex-husband Larry would be here in an hour to go to the airport. Though I had been divorced eight years, I had long adored my mother-in-law, and I was sad of course, but perhaps even more anxious than sad. I was unraveling knowing I would not be a part of what would be my children’s first attendance at a funeral. But this isn’t about me, I thought. Then again, somehow it was. This would be a major event in my children’s life, their first experience with a death, besides our family pet, and I would not be there.

I had asked Larry if I should go, but I knew I would not, our divorce had been court-worthy contentious, and we still spoke only if we had to. No, we would not fly as if a family to Chicago, instead the children would have their father—a no doubt distracted father—to care and console them. Who would really watch the children on the plane?

But it was more than this. Larry did not believe in a heaven of any sort; our misshapen souls do not rise. I knew matter-of-fact answers would be the only consolation offered from father to child—the details of the aorta, collapsed ventricles and how blood circulates through the body. I knew this because just after Larry and I married, my father had died young of heart failure. Mourning his death was made harder by the fact that Larry would not support speculation on an afterlife, while heaven was the only concept that was helping me through it. After a few weeks, Larry had told a tortured me that I needed to move on. I knew then that the marriage would end, not then, but soon.

“It will be hard to say goodbye to Grammy,” I said to the kids now believing each sentence I spoke would invite more questions in their minds. Perhaps I was hoping for that. Evoking questions and memories so they could mourn with me in advance. I knew Larry would get through it, his coping mechanism would be to intellectualize the death.

“She’ll die and we will never see her again?” Johnny said.

“That’s right, but she had a good long life.”

“Will Daddy be busy being sad?” Olivia asked.

“Yes,” I said, “But he will be OK I promise.”

Johnny twirled the fringe on the couch pillow. I sifted my words, deliberately dumbing them down in an effort to explain the unexplainable.

“I believe in heaven,” I said. “Your father may think differently and that is OK. You can believe what you want to believe.” I went on and on, this would be my only chance to ever tell my side of the heaven story. “Every time you think of Grammy she will be alive again in your memory.”

The concept of heaven wasn’t an entirely new idea for my children, we’d lost our dog years back, which had required some explanation on my part. I was able to persuade Larry then that the children did not have to hear the clinical aspects of how our dog died.

“Grammy will be watching you from another place, she will see you grow. She will watch over you, you’ll talk with her in your mind, not face to face.”

“I love Grammy,” Johnny said.

“Me too buddy,” I said. Then I surprised myself by taking out every cliché I had in my purse—This is for the best, Grammy will be at peace soon—until I was clichéd out.

Larry came to get the kids at 6:00. Again came the clichés, I was so sorry she was nearing the end. How could I help? Polite conversation, then me escorting the children gently to the car, remembering every other time I piled them into the car to see Larry on his weekends.

The Jeep etched out of the driveway, and I went back inside. I cried anticipating the sadness my children would carry witnessing their grandmother’s death. I cried finally too for my mother-in-law. She was a charming character with good intentions, our only contentious moments being my decision not to breastfeed any of her grandchildren, and my decision to divorce her son. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to him,” she once said, my first and only Jewish mother.

An hour later Sophia texted me. They were at the airport—Grammy died. They had not yet boarded the plane. Neither they or Larry would have a chance for that one last visit.

I clenched my hands, which had already begun to sweat, the kids would not get to say goodbye to Grammy after all. I selfishly consoled myself with thoughts that their grief would be closer to home, closer to me now. Grammy was from New York, the services would be here so they would not board a flight and mourn across the country.

The next day Larry texted the particulars. The services would be on Wednesday.

Nine-year-old Johnny got on the phone next with questions.

“Yes honey, the funeral will be in two days, on Wednesday,” I said.

“Did Grammy go to heaven already or will she go on Wednesday?” he asked.

Marcelle Soviero is the Editor-in-Chief of Brain, Child Magazine. You can connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo: Gary Rockett /unsplash.com

Pieces of Him

Posted on December 21, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged birth story, death, labor, pregnancy, Sara Tickanen, stillborn • Leave a comment

By Sara Tickanen

The apartment felt empty.

It wasn’t that it was empty, per say. It was that any items that spoke of babies had been removed. There was no Winnie the Pooh wallpaper. No toys. No onesies. No crib. Gone.

It was my condition for coming home.

There were, however, brownies: three pans of them. Their pans lined the breakfast bar side by silver side, as if their mere presence could replace what had been lost. Apparently, it was now a custom in America to bring brownies when somebody died. Who knew? What people didn’t understand was that no amount of gooey chocolate was ever going to bring my baby back. It would be better if they stopped trying.

But trying to stop the memories was like trying to stop a torrent of rain—impossible.

***

Four in the morning, two days earlier.

There was something wrapped around my arm that felt heavy and completely out of the ordinary. I opened my eyes, but the Ambien they had pumped into me turned everything into a strange purple haze.

“Sorry,” said the nurse, removing a blood pressure cuff I didn’t remember her putting on. “I was trying to be careful.”

I closed my eyes. Sleeping was easier.

“We need to talk about something anyway.”

Curse her; real world be damned. I opened my eyes again.

She asked if we wanted to do an autopsy. I heard the words, and I understood the words at their basic level, but I couldn’t wrap myself around them. An autopsy. Crap. It was too much. I opened my mouth to answer, but no sound would come out.

An autopsy was what you did when somebody died.

I looked across the room. Max—the husband—wasn’t awake. This was on me; we’d put it off as long as we could. I shook my head vehemently.

You can’t cut him up. Not my son.

No.

***

“No.”

Max looked at the stick in my hand and then back at me.

I shook my head and leaned against the doorframe, slapping the test against my hand. I was three months along. Max was right; it was way sooner than we thought we could get pregnant.

“Yes,” I said back. I didn’t think it would happen this quickly either.

“Our marriage isn’t great to begin with. I don’t really know that this will fix that. I don’t know.”

“You don’t want this.” It wasn’t a question.

“Do you? Want this?”

I couldn’t show him how much I did, indeed, want this. This was a baby. Not a thing. I felt a deep bond already, like the baby belonged to only me. I nodded; silence was the only way I could hold back my emotions.

“Are we ready for this?”

“Who’s ever ready to have a baby?”

Max got up, his eyes locked on mine. His hand slammed into the wall next to my head, and I shrank back. He had just missed, but that was intentional; he was in control and he wanted me to know. “Might be better if it hadn’t happened. If you’d never gotten pregnant at all.”

It. It was a person. I bit the inside of my cheek, trying not to cry. I put my hand over my belly to shield our baby from the harsh words. “The baby can hear you. What if something happens?”

“Whatever.”

He turned back to his computer, signaling the end of the conversation. I left his office, went to the bathroom, and turned the shower on full blast. And then I cried.

****

“Do you want to take a shower?”

The question came from yet another nurse.

Did I want to take a shower? What a ridiculous question. I wanted to curl up in a ball and die. Who needs a shower when they’re about to die? I was going in the ground, in the dirt. I didn’t need to be clean for that. I didn’t need anything at all.

I waited while she buzzed around the room with annoying quickness, gathering up all of the needed supplies. There was a chair in the shower if I wanted to sit down. And there was the chain I should pull if I had an emergency while in the shower. There was the hamper where my dirty clothes would go. And there were my new clothes, including new underwear and a giant pad that looked like an adult diaper.

Diapers.

Fuck.

***

The week before, I was sitting in my car under the church awning after my baby shower, eating a gooey double chocolate brownie and letting my sister and everyone else load up the diapers and other baby goodies into the backseat. The bounty was piled so high that I couldn’t see, and I prayed that I wouldn’t hit anything as I backed the car up into a close parking spot to park while I said goodbye. My friends struggled out the door with fistfuls of balloons, determined to shove them into my backseat with all the other gifts. The balloons were the most adorable things I had ever seen, red and gold with intricate depictions of Winnie the Pooh to match our nursery theme.

I waved my hand to dismiss the balloons; there was no room for them at home. My sister pulled nail scissors out of her purse and clipped the strings, and we watched the balloons sail into the sky. I wondered offhandedly where they might be going. Did balloons fly up to heaven and get stuck there? When we die, are there balloons? Do we see them up in heaven? Too many questions.

***

It was earlier; time was out of order.

My head was out of order.

There were too many questions: did I have allergies, did I have this, did I have that, did I want hospital clergy, did I want family? I tuned it all out; I couldn’t focus. The day was not what I had expected it to be.

I called the husband that day from the OB appointment, and he hadn’t been happy to be disturbed while in his sound engineering studio. But I hadn’t had a choice. One minute I was going in for an ultrasound, and everything was fine.

The next, I learned that my baby’s heart was no longer beating.
There had been no easy way to tell Max. When he showed up at the hospital, he wasn’t speaking to me. I didn’t know why. Granted, I wasn’t speaking either, to anyone. I hadn’t uttered a single word since the phone call. What was the point?

The nurse was giving me a lecture on pain medication, but I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t in labor. Almost. But not quite. She kept insisting that the medication would make me sick without food. Pointing at the menu, she offered to get me something to eat. I looked at the menu, and I wanted to spit on it. People in hospitals weren’t happy, and they certainly weren’t looking for up and coming cuisine. I pointed to a salad and almost threw the menu back at her.

Our son was dead.

Our son was dead, but I still had to go through labor.

Salad came. The lettuce was wilted and sad. I felt sick. I pushed the tray so that it spun out away from the bed, grabbing my phone to play with so that I wouldn’t have to look at the disgusting normalcy that was food.

The nurse was still talking, but I hadn’t heard a word. “The pill that they put inside of you is basically telling your body that it’s time to go into labor. Your water should probably break soon, but if it doesn’t they will break it manually. Things will progress like normal labor.”

Pill? What pill? And normal labor? Nothing here was normal. I should have paid better attention. I was so stupid.

***

Our son was dead, but I still had to go through labor.

When Max said to wait on the labor and delivery class, I listened. Now look where I was. I didn’t know what to do. Labor. Having a baby. Jesus. I didn’t even take the class. It was my fault; I was unprepared. The husband wasn’t going to help me. He never did.

Maybe they were wrong. Maybe the baby was still okay in there, and they just couldn’t find him. Maybe it was really important for me to know what to do; everyone else was certain he would be born dead, but I was certain he had to be alive. I was the only one who knew.

It seemed really important to know what to do. Otherwise, what good was I?

***

It was worthless, all of it. So worthless. The contractions were getting closer together— labor was full on, but nothing good was going to come of any of it. I bit down so hard on my lip that the sharp, metallic taste of blood flooded my mouth. Minutes turned into hours. People came in and out. Everything inside me was numb, physically and emotionally, and not from the epidural. There was a television show playing, something about naughty dogs and a woman who was training them towards becoming good doggy citizens.

Max was pecking away at the keys on his laptop, typing quickly. Like little chickens attacking their food. I could almost picture the little chicken heads on his fingers, a side effect of the medication coursing through my system. They pecked away, and the unwanted food delivered by the nurse taunted me from where it had been abandoned on the bedside table. I grabbed the plate and threw the entire thing against the wall; it shattered into an infinite number of pieces and the salad scattered everywhere.

The husband didn’t respond.

***

“Holy cow. Your baby is coming right now.” The nurse was nameless, faceless. The world was whitewashed.

The head was out. His head.

The husband didn’t respond. He never responded.

“I’m so sorry you had to see that.” Nameless told the husband as she helped him sit in a cheap plastic chair. She was hitting buttons on the wall, making everything light up. The room filled with people; they were magic people summoning light-up buttons. I couldn’t think clearly enough to understand what she was doing. Things were happening too fast.

Twenty two hours of labor ended in minutes. There was a flurry of activity at the foot of the bed, and the doctor was holding something in his hands. “Cut it,” he told Nameless.

The cord. Cut the cord. Wasn’t the husband supposed to do that? Where was he? There were too many questions. Did I want to hold the baby? I did. But I wasn’t sure that the words had actually come out of my mouth until the baby was in my arms. He was wrapped up in a blue-for-boy blanket. As Nameless placed him in my arms, I was worried that I wouldn’t know what to do, but when he was settled against my chest it all seemed to come naturally. There was no movement, no breathing no crying. His eyes were closed, and he was really gone. Unnatural.

The room emptied. I lowered my head down until my face was almost buried in the baby, filling myself with his scent. He was still warm; it was almost like he was there, almost like he was alive. I stayed that way until Nameless came back. She had a camera, even though I hadn’t really wanted pictures.

His hands; I had to see his hands. I asked her to help me with the blanket, to help me see his hands, but I again wasn’t sure the words had actually come out until she peeled the blanket back. His fingers were tiny and closed, and one of mine filled his entire fist. His were long though—good cello fingers, or piano—just like mine.

The husband brought the in-laws, and they passed the baby around like some sort of disturbing prize. The numbness was so encompassing that I didn’t realize I was crying until I couldn’t breathe. They were passing him back and forth, and it was totally irrational, but I was afraid that he was going to be scared or cold without me. I just wanted him back in my arms.

***

His fingers were tiny and closed, and one of mine filled his entire fist. His were long though—good cello fingers, or piano—like mine.

He was mine. His fingers, and every part of him. Mine.

When I finally had him back, I held him for several minutes, my face pressed against his tiny body. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He wasn’t breathing; I wasn’t breathing. He was mine; he was me; I was his. He was dead. I was dead.

I wanted time to stop so that I could stay always in that moment, my face hidden in his blanket. But I knew that couldn’t happen. I knew they had to take him then, or I would never let him go.

I would never see him again.

My son was dead.

***

It wasn’t how I thought I’d be bringing our son home. Dead. Who thinks that that’s going to happen to them? I don’t think any parent does. Doctors and nurses said goodbye to us as we prepared to leave the hospital. Friends sent us well wishes.

The day was full of “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“It’ll be okay.”

I wanted to smack someone in the face. And not just one someone. I wanted to smack them all, every last one of them, just to punish them for their happiness.

The valets drove cars in and out of the circular hospital driveway, running back and forth between cars and the hospital entrance. I clutched the box in my hands. It was his life, all that he had of it. Pictures. His outfit. A lock of hair. His entire life fit into one tiny shoebox, and it didn’t seem right. It wasn’t fair.

There was no way I could go home. Not without him

I can’t. Just. Can’t.

***

Apparently, it was now a custom in America to bring brownies when somebody died. Who knew?

The box sat on the kitchen counter, right where I had placed it when we got home the day before. There really wasn’t an appropriate place to keep the remains of a life other than next to the brownies. Those damn brownies. The pans were multiplying, and we would never eat them all. They should be donated, given away. When someone dies, you donate their things.

I was dying. I needed to donate my brownies.

Until the brownies left my sight, they were nothing more than memories of his death. Chocolate reminders. I stacked them one on top of the other in the fridge.

***

From what the nurses told me, when a baby dies, it doesn’t go to the morgue. They store it in a fridge before it is taken to the crematorium. A small empty, food-less fridge, like the ordinary kind you would find in a kitchen. With wire racks and white walls.

I don’t know why they told me that; it isn’t fair. Now, whenever I open a fridge, I wonder.

I wonder if he was cold there.

***

Author’s Note: During a pivotal Creative Nonfiction course at University of Wisconsin, Parkside, my undergraduate writing professor, Nick, gave us an assignment: we were to go to the student art galleries, find something that inspired us, and write about it. I chose a work called “Bits and Pieces.” It was constructed using bits of found wood, all rearranged and spliced together to form something that resembled a house when you studied closely. It’s really easy to just look at something and take it for face value, but if you take into account each individual piece, you gain a completely different picture. The art was a perfect parallel to the disconnection that occurs when someone we love dies, and my notes eventually evolved into this essay—a way to honor my son.

Sara Tickanen is a graduate student at The New School, earning her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The Rectangle and Gravel. She currently resides in New York with her cat, Polly, who helps craft every essay by draping herself across the computer keyboard.

Artwork by Mary F. Reilly-Riddlebarger.

Return to the September 2015 Issue

All God’s Children

Posted on December 7, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged Amy Roost, cancer, death, dying, mother son, mother-daughter • Leave a comment

By Amy Roost

My brother remembers that I never picked up after my kids when we came to visit mom. He remembers that after we left, the cleanup fell to him.

I, on the other hand, remember that nothing brought mom greater joy those last few years than spending precious time with her precious grandbabies.

Between visits, I remember taking her to the oncologist and pain specialist on my “days off.”

During these same years, I remember the empty Stoli minis in our neighbor’s side yard next to our driveway tossed there by my husband who passed out on the sofa most every night whilst I made airplane noises so my infant son would “open the hanger” and eat his peas.

I remember every detail of my firstborn’s spindly body after we brought him home from the hospital. I remember the surgical scar on his chest running 180° from front to back, the hole where feeding tube was, the red abrasions from tape that held in place the tubes that kept him alive those first three weeks.

I remember carrying 115 pounds on my 5’10” frame and friends telling me I was too thin, for once.

I remember the sound an epipen makes when I’d inject it into the thigh of my two-year old son who has just ingested a Valentine treat containing peanuts.

I remember the improbable phone call I received from my brother whilst dropping my dog at the groomer, informing me that mom had fallen, was on the kitchen floor and would I call an ambulance.

I remember dropping my kids at a neighbor’s who was preparing a meal for her father-in-law who was dying.

I remember getting to my mom’s house and finding her lying on the Italian tile in a fetal position, moaning.

I remember finding my brother in his upstairs bedroom shaking nervously as he raised a cigarette to his lips and his protestations that he couldn’t deal with mom because he was suffering from a poison oak rash.

I remember the beautiful hunk of an EMT grabbing my brother by the front of the shirt and ordering him to get his ass into the ambulance with mom because he had treated broken hips and he had treated poison oak and he guaranteed my brother that my mom was in far greater pain than he was at that moment.

I remember going to gather my children before heading to the hospital only to learn that my neighbor had left for another hospital with my son. He’d touched a tabletop that had traces of shelled peanuts on it. Ones the dying father-in-law had eaten earlier in the day.

I remember not knowing which hospital to go to first, the one where my mother was or the one where my son was being pumped full of prednisone and epinephrine.

I remember the broken hip was the beginning of the end for mom and I remember visiting her at the rehab center in Golden Hill.

I remember the enormous centerpiece I won at a dinner auction and took to her on my way home. I remember standing outside the locked sliding glass doors after visiting hours in my eggplant-colored cocktail dress and high heels and the kind orderly with a thick Jamaican accent who let me in.

I remember the smile that spread across mom’s face when she opened her eyes and saw me, and the flowers.

I remember her staying with us after she was released from rehab and a well-meaning friend telling my three- and four-year-old boys, “your Nana is dying.”

I remember the boys sitting on the side of her bed, my bed, and asking “Are you dying Nana?” And her telling them “Yes” and asking them if they would keep and care for her two beloved cats after she died.

I remember them both earnestly shaking their heads ‘yes’ and I remember thinking they had not the first clue what the word “dying”meant.

I remember mom’s last trip to the hospital when the doctors told us that the cancer had spread everywhere.

I remember my evangelical Great Aunt Edith trying to convert mom, asking her to accept Jesus Christ as her Savior. And I remember mom saying in her weakened voice there was no way, and Edith persisting and my having to ask my once-favorite aunt to leave the hospital room.

I remember my brothers and I gathered in that same room at Harborview Medical Center making confessions to mom about things we’d never told her, but somehow she knew anyway. Who knew that the night she came home from her job as a banquet manager at the Kona Kai Club and found me praying to the porcelain god, who knew as she stroked my back and held my hair, who knew that she knew I did not have the stomach flu, rather had been drinking fruit daiquiris all evening with my girlfriends?

I remember the hospital bed in her dining room that hospice delivered. I remember the round-the-clock vigil we kept, her brother, sisters, friends and children.

I remember being thankful she had a few days to say her goodbyes before losing touch.

I remember crawling into her hospital bed, spooning with her and whispering into the curve of her ear how much I loved her, how I was going to miss her so, and the boys were going to miss her. And how all would be okay, somehow. And that it was okay for her to let go.

I remember her restlessness and distress at 2:00 am, despite the Fentanyl patch and morphine.

I remember the hospice nurse arriving at 3:00 am and checking mom’s vitals. I remember her telling us that mom was attempting to leave her body and that for some it was more of a struggle than for others.

I remember knowing then that soon she would die.

I remember waking the others camped out on sofas and chairs and I remember someone saying “where’s Bobby?”

And I remember calling Pacer’s strip club and asking the bartender if my brother Bobby was there and would she please ask him to come home because his mother was about to die.

I remember the shot of morphine the nurse gave her being twice the normal amount.

I remember during those last long breaths praying but not hoping for the next inhale.

At 4:12 am there was no next inhale. I remember that. And holding her hand as it turned cold.

I remember my boys and their dad arriving before the sun and before the coroner. I remember taking them to her bedside to say their goodbyes.

I remember my three-year-old turning to me and asking in a somber voice he must’ve sensed was appropriate, “did Nana die?”

“She did,” I told him. And I’ll never forget his response: “Yes! We get the cats!”

I remember a few days later peeing in the powder room off the living room at mom’s place and my four-year-old coming into the bathroom and asking “what are all of Nana’s things doing in the bathroom?”

I could tell by the way he asked the question that he still didn’t understand what dying meant. So I explained what I had resisted explaining. “You understand that when people die they don’t come back?”

“Jesus came back,” he said plaintively.

“Yes, honey, that’s true, but Jesus was God’s son, you understand?”

“But mommy, we are all God’s children.”

How do I tell my four-year old that Jesus was God’s favorite? I just told him, “That’s true. We are all God’s children, but Nana’s not coming back.”

I remember a few weeks later while packing up mom’s closet finding a tiny white eyelet dress stashed in the back corner of the top shelf. I asked my mom’s sister who was helping me sort, “whose dress is this?” For I knew, having been 12 pounds at birth, that it couldn’t have been mine.

“That was Rebecca’s,” my aunt explained.

Rebecca. The baby girl my parents adopted before adopting me. The baby girl my mother loved with all her heart. The baby girl she and dad did not learn was half black until weeks after they brought her home from hospital. The baby girl the social workers pried from my mother’s hands so she could be placed with a black family for “her own good.” The baby girl my mother never talked about except that one time when my brothers had teased me mercilessly that they’d had another sister before me. And so I asked mom if it were true and she said, “I’m only going to tell you the story once.” And so she did. And kept her word.

And because our church pastor advised her to relinquish Rebecca, that it was in everyone’s best interest to do so in 1960 suburban Chicago, she never went to church again. Nor did my son, who still hasn’t forgiven God for playing favorites.

I remember all of that.

What I don’t remember is not picking up after my kids. Perhaps it just didn’t seem a priority at the time.

Authors note: Memory is the main character of this piece because as with any main character, the reader must grapple with its nature its malleability and fickle tendencies, how it can be manipulated to subjective favor, how it clashes with another’s memory and somewhere in the unattainable middle is the truth with the capital T. One capital T truth is that my son never forgave God for playing favorites, never returned to church–not even for the donuts.

Amy Roost is a technical writer living in San Diego. She recently won a call for podcast proposals sponsored by NPR and is currently working on the pilot episode of Finding Rebecca, a serialized account of the early civil rights movement, adoption, abandonment, and redemption due to air in Spring 2016. She has written for MariaShriver.com, themanifestation.net and Huffington Post, and is a co-author of Ritual and Healing (Motivational Press 2013). You can find her at Twitter at @sweetsweetspot.

We Both Got Sick, But I Didn’t Die

Posted on November 23, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Highlights • Tagged cancer, children, death, ill, illness, Jennifer Moses, sensitive, sick • Leave a comment

By Jennifer Moses

You can’t pee lying down on your back, which is something I’d never thought about before until, recently, I found myself marooned atop a bed pan unable to produce a single drop despite my bloated and distended bladder. I’d just had a hip replacement, and had someone come along and offered me a quick, painless way out of this life, I’m not sure I would have refused. I was on the young side for a hip replacement—and otherwise healthy and fit, and yet couldn’t fathom how I could survive the pain.

During those three post-surgical days in the hospital, I gobbled Vicodin, Percocet, Dilaudid, Tylenol. I peed and pooped in pans and pots, sometimes with only my elderly, Italian-speaking roommate in the audience, and other times—who knew? There was a whole world of orderlies and nursing assistants and cafeteria workers out there, in the hallway, just beyond the open door.

I was born pigeon-toed, and spent my first year or so in a metal brace designed to give me a more dignified gate. What followed were the usual childhood illnesses—flu, mumps, chicken pox, and many episodes of what my mother called “the whoops,” as in: whoops, gotta puke. And it was during this time that I realized—because it was glaringly obvious—that illness had its upside. In my case, it meant not only avoiding the terrors of school, but also being fussed over by my mother on the one hand, and our housekeeper, Mae Carter, on the other. I’d lie in bed while first one and then the other brought me Jello and soup, read out-loud to me, and best yet, let me listen to story-records on the family record player that they’d schlepp to my room. Danny Kaye. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Bill Cosby doing Fat Albert. Later the record-player was upgraded to the portable TV, and I’d idle my mornings away with an endless lineup of sit-com reruns. And it would be like that, all day long, until, sometime in the late afternoon, paradise was shattered by the return, first, of my three siblings, and a few hours afterwards, by Dad.

Who said: “You’re looking better already! You’ll definitely be able to go back to school tomorrow!”

“But I’m sick. I have a temperature.”

Ignoring me, he’d continue: “You know what Brave Mister Buckingham would say, don’t you?” Of course I knew what Brave Mister Buckingham would say. I, along with my siblings, had been raised on Brave Mister Buckingham, a truly monstrous fable of said Mr. Buckingham who, as he goes about his day, suffers one physical calamity after another, until, by the end of the book of which he is the titular character, he appears to have lost most of his limbs. Nonetheless, after each attack on his person, he looks up and says: “THAT didn’t hurt!”

“THAT didn’t hurt!” my father would say. “You’re fine.”

And maybe I was, but that was hardly the point, now was it? Because the point, and something I felt that my father could never understand, was that I didn’t really belong out there in that rough-and-tumble world where Brave Mister Buckingham gets conked on the head by a falling safe and nevertheless bounces back up with a shit-eating, can-do grin. I did not belong in the world I was in; where swift, blonde athletic children routinely terrorized and humiliated slower, darker, non-athletic ones; where the prizes went to those who mastered their multiplication tables and fathers routinely disappeared to work not to be seen again until bath-time, or perhaps even later.

I liked it at home, in the sun, with my fairy-stories, my stuffed animals, and my mother.

There were any number of differences between the way my mother and the way my father saw and reckoned with the world, but the one that, I think, had the biggest impact on me and my siblings was that Mom believed that we could and would get sick, and that doctors could be useful in resolving matters of illness; whereas Dad didn’t. He’d lie for hours, flat on his back in the garage with spasm, rather than admit that perhaps he needed help or that something was wrong. And that’s because those with backbone, those with grit, didn’t succumb to something as trivial as illness or injury.

I have a fair number of friends who tell stories about going to school with 101 degree fevers, or taking out the garbage with a broken wrist, but on the whole these stories come from people who grew up in a home with either two working parents, or a single mom. A sick kid meant a missed paycheck. Then there are those whose parents just didn’t want to deal with the whining and sweat-soaked sheets. But it was a little different in our family, because in our version being sick didn’t mean missing a paycheck and didn’t pose an inconvenience. It meant a day home with our mother, who was fully up to the job of tending to a sick child. Because if ever there had been a woman who was born to take care of her children, it was mine.

Despite my inchoate longing to get something serious enough to merit sympathy, or even better, admiration—how I envied those lucky kids who came home from skiing vacations with a broken leg!—I never managed any real illness at all. Until, in the sixth grade, I did. I got an ulcer, and once it was identified as such, the rewards began to flow: unlike all the other kids, I got to choose my lunch from the teachers, lunch table, where they had such sophisticated offerings as cottage cheese and endless amounts of canned fruit cocktail; kids who’d formerly tormented me for my lack of athletic derring-do tiptoed around me, as if in silent communion; and at home, not only did my mother go around telling me how stupid she’d been not to have initially taken my complaints seriously (until she did, and took me to the doctor) but even Dad, I thought, felt contrite. At least he stopped talking about Brave Mister Buckingham.

Then, nothing. For years and years, I enjoyed blissfully good health. True, my first pregnancy was a drag, with morning sickness and full-bodied queasiness, bloating, and bouts of panicked terror as I contemplated the ridiculous fact that I, who was wholly unready for it, was soon to be someone’s mother. But the kid popped out all perfect and within a few months I was perfect too. So it wasn’t really until my second pregnancy, with my twins, that I got to be sick again, and that was because their idea of growing into healthy fetuses involved sending me into spasms of nausea and vomiting so violent that, towards the end of my first trimester, I landed in the hospital, badly dehydrated. Still, by the time I was allowed to return home, Mom had once again come to the rescue, providing me not only with help in the form of a woman named Cheryl whom she’d hired to look after me and three-year-old Sam during the long days when my husband, like my father, disappeared into Downtown Washington Lawyer World (when I say “hired” I mean “hired and paid for,”) but also with the treats of my childhood sickbed: chicken and dumplings; chocolate pudding; decorating magazines; and most of all, herself—Mom, in all her wonderful, glorious Momness. She simply knew how to nurture, how to say the exact right thing or keep silent or just look at me in the way that made me know that everything was okay. Night, night. Sleep tight.

Whereas several months later when I was eight months pregnant, Dad called one day to tell me that he and Mom were about to go to Maine for a two week vacation, and explain that, while they were gone, he expected me to water his flower gardens, in Virginia, about 7 miles away.

“But Dad,” I said. “I’m on bed rest.”

“Hmmph!” he said. “Stuff and nonsense!”

Naturally, the twins, born full-term and healthy, didn’t give rat’s ass that the blobs of warm softness that provided their mouths with that sweet juicy utter perfection had spent the past nine months alternatively praying for a miscarriage—please dear God anything to end this puking—and begging God to ignore that last one—and we all just kept keeping on with the usual minor scrapes and cuts, fevers and colds, until, nine years later, when the now-five-of-us were living in Glasgow, Scotland, during my husband’s sabbatical year (he was by then a law professor) I was diagnosed with breast cancer. By then, though, Mom had cancer also, only her cancer, which had been diagnosed years earlier, was a killer. Dad, in Washington, sent emails telling me not to let Mom know that I was sick, explaining (rightly so) that this was information that, if shared, wouldn’t be good for either of us, and additional emails telling me that, like many women of his acquaintance, I too would “bounce right back,” I had surgery, then six months of chemo, then a month of radiation, and it was behind me. By the time my mother died, in February of 2004, my biggest health issue was that I couldn’t stop crying.

And also, my hip hurt, and as the years passed, it began to hurt so much that walking became problematic. Was it genetic? The result of my own bout with chemo? My decades of depression? Who knew?

My husband contends that I like to be sick because some small part of me still thinks that it’s only through sickness that I can get the attention I still crave, that sense of being a beloved child safe at home and under the watchful eyes of its doting parents. Or, in my case, parent—because my father was mainly at the office, and nursing wasn’t exactly his specialty. Though I like to think that I’ve outgrown the little girl who’d pour Baby Powder on her face in the hopes that she’d look pale enough to miss a day of school, my husband isn’t entirely wrong, so much so that I was actually looking forward to my hip replacement, to what I was imagining as a vacation from trivia—there I’d be, lying in my hospital bed, blissed out on addictive pain killers, while my loved ones fussed around me, and sent me flowers. Which wasn’t exactly how it went down at the hospital, in part because my blood pressure kept bottoming out so I didn’t get to have enough of the really good drugs, and in part because, no matter what, the first few days after hip replacement surgery are nasty. My 84-year-old father, who’d sworn he’d be in the hospital to greet me when I swam up out of anesthesia, was felled by a stomach bug, though, not that he admitted it, and had to make do with phone calls that I was too weak to take and flowers. But once I was home, he and I started bonding over my recovery.

Me: “Guess what I did yesterday, Dad?”

“What’d you do?”

“I walked to the bathroom!”

“That’s my girl.”

“And this morning I walked without my walker.”

“You’re a champ.”

Or: “That bitch nurse kept me on a bedpan for forty minutes. I thought I was going to die.”

“Sounds dreadful.”

“But now I’m back and running Dad—the home health rigged up this old-person’s toilet set, so I can go any time I feel the need.”

“Now you’re talking! You show them!”

And so here we were, at 54 and 84, hurdling and hurtling back through the decades, spinning and tumbling all the way back, until we arrive, again, to the early 1960s, where the grass is always green, and the sun is always shining, and my beautiful young dark-haired mother confers with Mae in the kitchen over what to prepare for dinner, while at my end of the house I’m learning to walk and to use the toilet, only this time, instead of being downtown at the office with all the other dads, my father is at home, with me, in the Enchanted Pee Pee Forest, the same place where my siblings and our dog George and our several bunny rabbits and my own special family of stuffed bunnies live, in an endless round of snack time and clover-smelling time and nap-time and story-time.

“You can climb the stairs by yourself!” Dad says on the phone. “Wow! That’s marvelous!”

And what neither of us says is that, though Mom took every form of chemo available to her, that she spent years suffering from nausea, pain, various infections, loss of hope, bloating, emaciation, bruising, punctured veins, burning sensations, and sheer, raw misery, it did hurt, and she was never all right again, until, by dying, she slipped through her pain, and, leaving us, left us forever.

Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of Tales from My Closet, Visiting Hours, Bagels and Grits, and Food and Whine. She’s also a painter. She and her husband live with their two dogs and cook a lot for their grown children, who like to come by to do their laundry and get fed, in Montclair, NJ.

Braving the Impossible Together

Posted on November 16, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged death, friendship, grief, Lexi Behrndt, loss, motherhood, pediatric cardiac unit • Leave a comment

By Lexi Behrndt

We are made to carry one another when we’re too weak to go on. This is community. This is survival through the pain.

We met on the 11th floor of the children’s hospital. It was in the summer, I remember but not because of the weather. It could have been storming or blazing hot outside, but we never would have known the difference. Our entire worlds were wrapped up in those tiny, sterile rooms with the rock-hard, pull-out sofas, monitors beeping at all hours, and the sticky hospital floors. Our children were both inpatient, receiving treatment and care for complications surrounding congenital heart disease. Our “home” was the pediatric cardiac unit.

When it came to other parents, I generally kept to myself. It’s not that I wasn’t friendly; I like to think of myself as a generally extroverted and warm person. But it got old after four months of seeing so many families come and go, sick babies in, generally healthy babies out, all while my infant son lay in the same bed and only moved as far as from floor 10, the ICU, to floor 11, the recovery floor. My friends were the staff. They were the constants I had and held onto, as they cared for my son Charlie; they popped in to visit and check on us day after day.

One morning, my social worker asked me if I would be willing to reach out to another parent on the floor. I had picked up my home, which was two hours away, and relocated to live next to the hospital, so that even when my son was well and discharged, he would be close enough in case of emergency. This mom, with a three-year-old who was a “frequent flier” at the hospital, was in the process of doing the same. I hesitantly agreed to meet her, and she came down to my son’s room.

She walked into his hospital room, and it was like looking in a mirror. Hair thrown in a disheveled ponytail, sweatshirt and yoga pants, dark rims beneath her eyes, and a mixture of ease and exhaustion. Like me, she was young, and like me, she had spent enough time in the hospital to have grown accustomed to the environment. Her name was Makenzie. Her little three-year-old, Jaedyn, a feisty red head, would eventually need a heart transplant. It could be years, but it was her airway issues that were causing her frequent hospital admissions.

Makenzie and I talked that day, and we bumped into each other a couple more times as we met over the community coffee pot in the early mornings, desperate for friendly conversation and caffeine. Jaedyn was discharged a couple weeks later, and they made their way back to their current home in South Dakota to tie up ends for relocation. Meanwhile, my Charlie stayed. Two weeks later, he moved from the recovery floor back down to the Pediatric Cardio Thoracic ICU where there he stayed.

The months went on, and sometime in mid-October, I parked my old minivan in the hospital parking garage. On my walk to the elevators, I ran into Makenzie and Jaedyn, who were leaving after a quick appointment. We talked briefly and casually, completely unaware of what the coming days and months would hold in store. Neither of us understood the weight of those days. We do now.

A quick conversation in passing, and we had no idea the significance it would hold. Charlie passed away the next Monday morning.

Jaedyn was readmitted to the hospital and put on the transplant list in February. Makenzie and I had lost contact, all except for casual conversation through social media. We had never talked much to begin with, besides friendly conversation over morning coffee, but the death of Charlie only created more distance. We were living in two different worlds, she was fighting for her child’s life, and I was aching to have mine back in my arms. She may have reminded me of what I still could have, and I may have reminded her of what she could lose. But when I learned through Facebook that Jaedyn’s condition worsened, and she became critical, I lost it. I texted Makenzie, called her, and I did whatever I could to support her, because Charlie died, but Jaedyn wasn’t supposed to. And I knew the pain, the deep, deep pain, and I did not want Makenzie to feel it. Ever.

I could barely think. It put me right back in Charlie’s hospital room, standing over my child, oscillator running, barely able to hear my own thoughts. ECMO (life support) on, blood being pumped through his body by a machine, oxygenating and giving life and beating his little heart.

And when Jaedyn died, I was there— not there with her physically— but I was jolted right back to the room where I held Charlie for seven hours after he died. I couldn’t let go. I knew Makenzie couldn’t either.

And it was in those moments, after losing Charlie, after supporting Makenzie through losing Jaedyn, that I made a vow. We couldn’t have our babies, but we sure as hell had to make sure the other made it out alive. She was stuck with me. The bond we shared is a bond of pain and loss and heartache, and I vowed to never let her face it alone.

We are made to carry one another when we’re too weak to go on. This is community. This is survival through the pain. This is the bond between grieving mothers—the soul tie exchanged between moms who have to kiss their babies goodbye, who have to give them back, who have to walk away, who have to live with the constant ache. We don’t have to face the impossible alone. I’ve seen that with so many strangers who have become sisters along the way, and I’ve seen it especially with Makenzie, the mom I met on the 11th floor.

We stood together on the side of life, while both our children lay in hospital beds, three rooms apart. And now we move forward together, with ashes, memories, slightly morbid senses of humor, and broken hearts, clinging to hope, and holding just enough joy to share with one another when it’s too hard to go on alone.
Lexi Behrndt is a single mom of two boys (one in heaven), a writer at Scribbles and Crumbs, and a communications director. Connect with her on Facebook.

The Last Stories

Posted on November 8, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Featured Content • Tagged Anna Belle Kaufman, death, death of a child, dying, mother son, toddler • Leave a comment

By Anna Belle Kaufman

“Zackrabbit,” I say to the five year old seated behind me in his car seat, “I have another stop to make. But I can see you’re tired. If you don’t feel up to it, just tell me and we’ll go home now.” I glance back at my son in the rearview mirror.

My boy is no longer an eager little bunny. His once glossy bangs are now a limp curtain across his brow, dancing eyes are dulled by Dilauded (a powerful narcotic), the mischievous grin all but extinguished by pain. His neck and right cheek are bandaged, swollen and purple with infection. Zack, cradling his constant companion – a small stuffed panda bear named Bumby – thinks for a minute, rubbing Bumby’s nose, then says, “I am very powerful Mama, I can hold in my tired.”

Heading towards our small home in the hills above Hollywood where the sun burns bright through smog, we drive through streets of MGM Technicolor: garish billboards, magenta bougainvillea, people bright as tropical birds in their shiny turquoise and pink spandex eighties aerobics wear. I, however, am living in different movie: one filled with the chiaroscuro nightmare and impending doom of Film Noir. The color leached from my world a year and half ago, on the day – right before Zack’s fourth birthday – that my son was diagnosed with AIDS. In 1987 there are no treatments of any kind. Nothing.

I have grasped at whatever I could find: special diets, supplements, energy healing – anything that might help keep him alive until a medicine was created. But when Zack became too ill to attend kindergarten in the fall, I knew it was hopeless. Now, I only hope that he’ll be able to enjoy one last holiday season and not suffer.

The sense of doom heightens for me as each day winds toward dinner hour. The ever-present lump in my gut tightens with the sound of the liquor cabinet opening. My husband Gerry, working less and drinking more since Zack was born, is, at best, checked out after four or five, and can be a mean drunk (although never to Zack, who he adores). I never know if he will start an exhausting nonsensical argument or angry tirade or how ugly it will be. I must negotiate a minefield, caring for Zack and trying to avoid explosions which, though not directed at our son, affect him. Gerry denies illness and death as much as he can. He says “I don’t do grief.” Now, even as help is obviously never going to come to save our boy, he forbids me, fiercely, to ever mention the D word with Zack.

So I must help my son on my own, covertly. But how? Although I have prepared Zack for numerous surgeries, helped him work through medical traumas with play and stuffed animals and blood made from paint, I have no experience or familiarity with death. I was not around my grandparents when they were dying, nor have I any religious education or community to draw upon or turn to. I don’t even know what I believe about death, if I think anything continues on. My pre-Zack career as a designer of costumes and sets did not prepare me for this; there is no script to study. I know the power of the right story, but what story is developmentally appropriate for a kindergartner? There are no children’s stories that I can find about dying that are not of the rather vague seasons variety with illustrations of trees losing their leaves – a metaphor that is useless to my suffering boy. Our Pediatricians never mention the D word and no one at the hospital is of any help. Internet groups, chat rooms and Google have yet to be invented. Bookstore shelves in the 1980s are not stocked with volumes on dying and grief. Except for one.

I manage to find the number for Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s office in Virginia and leave a message. Surprisingly, she calls me back almost immediately and we talk for quite a while. She gives me her home phone number, saying “Please, call me anytime, any hour of the day and night that you need to. I just ask one thing: don’t give my number out to anyone else.” Then she adds “I’ve written a story for another little boy. It’s just what you need, I’ll send it right away.” Zack’s anxiety level, as well as mine, has increased as he feels worse and I am relieved when the package arrives, a story bound like a pamphlet, illustrated by Elizabeth herself.

When Gerry is out of the house, I read “Letter to Dougy” to Zack. In it, Elizabeth explains that when one doesn’t need one’s body any longer, your spirit leaves it to go to God, like a caterpillar leaving its cocoon to become a butterfly and fly away. We study her pictures of butterflies drawn in brightly colored markers. When we are through, Zack looks up at me with his old twinkle, smiling through the swollen cheek, in spite of the pain.

“Momma, when I die, we will go to Grandma’s and you will take the station wagon and I will fly and I will get there first!”

Glad that we had some private time to have the death discussion, I am, however, unprepared for it to come up around Gerry a couple of days later. I am seated in the back seat of the car next to Zack while my husband drives along Santa Monica Boulevard. Zack turns to me and asks, in his piercing high chipmunk voice, “Momma, when I go to God, will Bumby come with me?”

I feel that too-rapidly-descending-elevator feeling sink in my middle: there will be hell to pay tonight if Gerry finds out we’ve talked about death, or God, in whom he does not believe.

Speaking quickly I answer, “Of course.”

Zack gives me a look and says “But Mom…. he’s a stuffed animal!”

Busted. By a five year old. The one time in his life I’ve given him the brush-off. Luckily, Gerry seems to have not heard us and, relieved, I quietly reply,

“I believe that if you want him there with you, he will be.”

I wonder if Zack understood the message underneath the brush-off, because he never raises the topic again in his dad’s proximity; his dying becomes a new intimacy between us, after those of pregnancy and breastfeeding. The following week, while visiting Zack’s grandparents, my mother and I are in the bedroom discussing her health problems and her grandson’s worsening condition in lowered voices while Grandpa and Zack talk in the dining room. I suddenly become aware of a palpable silence beyond the closed door and open it to find Zack standing there, anxiously shifting from foot to foot, rubbing Bumby’s threadbare nose. His Grandpa, absorbed in snacking and reading the paper, has neglected his frightened charge who now wants to go home, tears running down his cheeks.

“Zack, Did you think Grandma and I were whispering about your illness?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to to wonder, or hear accidentally. I’ll tell you everything you want to know and I will always tell you the truth.”

We talk about his illness. He already knows that his blood was poisoned by a transfusion when he was a baby but I have been careful never to use the word AIDS. People are terrified of AIDS and AIDS patients, fear they can catch it from mosquitos, shared potato chips, a hug or a kiss. Even some nurses at our hospital won’t go near children they once cared for when those same kids were diagnosed with HIV. I don’t want anyone to shrink from a child who – in spite of lengthy hospitalizations and traumas in his first two years – became an exuberant extrovert, a charmer who used to love to work a room. A boy who, just a year ago, had bolted in the mall, zooming up to a complete stranger to introduce Bumby. I watched while the woman in the elegant pantsuit appeared alarmed, then smiled, and, by the time I reached them across the food court, was ready to sign him for her talent agency. Being small for his age was an asset, she said, handing me her card. One month later, I found out why he’d stopped growing and told her we’d have to pass on her offer to to make some college money. (Zack, acutely aware that he was shorter than other children his age, explained it to me — and to himself. He would grow on the day of his birthday, when he turned five.)

Now, at this moment at Grandma’s, sitting on the bed clutching Bumby, Zack asks me “And can I die?”

Other parents, who might also pause if this question is raised, are able to answer “Not until you are very old, not for a long long time.” But I have promised to tell the truth.

“Yes Zack. Your body can become very sick and tired and painful and your spirit might want to leave it, like the butterflies leaving their cocoons. Or like taking off and dropping a heavy coat you don’t need on a hot day at the beach.”

He nods, he loves the beach. Grandma then joins in, talking about heaven, telling Zack and I that we will all be together there someday and that when she gets there she’s going to find a great big beautiful piano and practice all day. And if she gets there first, she will be waiting for him. Zack, relieved and cheerful, says “Okay, Mom, let’s go to Century City now.” And I push him in his stroller to the outdoor mall to see the holiday decorations.

But as fever and pain intensify, his fears about dying return. After coughing badly he asks “Do I go now Mom?” Then again, the next morning he asks me “Am I dying now, Mom?” He doesn’t want me to leave him, even for a few minutes, and I realize that he thinks death is imminent and he is afraid that it will happen to him if or when I leave the room, or leave him alone. We have another talk.

“Zackrabbit, Death won’t sneak up on you and surprise you. You will know if it is coming. You’ll decide when you’re ready and you will tell me.”

I believe this to be true. And it is. The first time is just a hint: I am rummaging in the hall closet when Zack creeps up behind me

“Momma, what is it like to be a let-go balloon?” Because Zack pronounces L as W, it takes me minute to understand what he has said: a balloon that has gotten away from it’s owner. I see a forlorn pink balloon, lifting out of the extended hand that held it and is still reaching for it, getting smaller and smaller against a threatening gray sky. I don’t share my image, but ask “What do you think, Pumpkin?”

Zack says that he thinks it would feel good to float free and fly up in the sky. He is telling me obliquely that his body, tethered to earth by pain, would welcome release. I, however, am the hand that holds the balloon. I don’t want to let go. I know it is only a matter of time before my balloon escapes from me, disappearing into nothingness while I remain helplessly earthbound.

He next tells me — although certainly I see him failing — through a story. Not one that he makes up, but one he chooses: Watership Down. At the foot of his bunk bed stands a green oxygen tank I have decorated with a drawing of a purple panda, and a small television so that he can be distracted from pain. From all the videos, Zack only wants “Watership Down,” ignoring even former favorites like Dumbo, that has a train in it. We rewind and repeat to watch Hazel, the rabbit heroine, die. It reminds us of the story of the butterfly. We study the part where Hazel’s body, hurt and sick, remains on the ground and the Black Rabbit – the angel of death- flying, comes for her. Hazel’s spirit self – a more transparent version – flies gently up out of her body into the sky and leaves with the Black Rabbit.

Our last story is the one that allows each of us to say goodbye.

It is December, 1987, evening. In Zack’s room the only light comes from the colored globes of the balloon man lamp on the night stand. Zack and I have watched Watership Down a few times in the past two days. It is clear to me that Zack is so terribly ill that he should have left by now. At his last visit to Cedars-Sinai a few days earlier, the pulmonologist listened to his chest and couldn’t hide the shock on her face. Perhaps he is hanging on for my sake; I worry that he thinks it is not okay to leave me, or leave without me. And, of course, it is not. But I can not bear for him to suffer more than I can not bear to lose him. He sits on the potty next to his bed, belly distended and aching, eyelids swollen with edema, eyes unfocused black dots beneath lank bangs. We are alone.

So I tell him a story. It is the story of his entire life, in third person – I never say it is him. I tell him about a little boy who was born early, who spent lots of time in the hospital and who had many surgeries and was very brave. A boy who had a tube in his tummy and then a silver trach in his throat when he was small. A boy who went to St. Thomas School and learned to ride a big trike. A boy who has a panda bear that he loves and carries everywhere, and who makes waffles with his Grandma and silver jewelry with his Mom and computer drawings with his Dad, and who loves trains more than anything. A boy who loves his Momma very very much and whose mother loves him more than anything else in the whole wide world. His mother understands that it is time for him to leave his body behind because it is very sick and it hurts. It is okay with her. She will be all right.

Only the end is fiction: the biggest lie I have ever told or will ever tell in my entire life.

“Zack, do you understand the story?” He doesn’t speak, seems only partly conscious, the whites of his eyes rolling up, but he nods yes, and I know he comprehends exactly what I am trying to tell him.

The next night, at 3:00 am, the Black Rabbit flies to our house; it comes for him while I hold him in my arms, singing his favorite lullaby.

Hours later, after the death certificate has been signed and his body and Bumby taken away together, I sit on Zack’s empty bed in the dusk of the early December evening. Outside, just past the window, a monarch butterfly flits around and around and around, making figure eights below the porch eaves. It flies like that for a long while, thirty minutes or more, as if it is trying to get my attention. Then it settles on the eave closest to the bed, folds its wings, and remains there while I finally fall asleep. It is gone the next morning.

On Christmas morning, a week later, my husband and I distribute Zack’s still-wrapped gifts to children on the pediatric ward at Cedars. I return home to find, among the condolence cards, a gift package with my name on it. Unwrapping a small but heavy box, I lift out a dense object that lays smooth and cold against my palm: a black glass figurine of a rabbit.

On the phone, the woman who sent the gift explains that she sent different glass animals to everyone on her list. Not knowing why, she sensed the black rabbit was right for me. She has neither read nor seen Watership Down although she also has a young son, and is amazed to hear the story.

***

When I told the last story to Zack, and in the even darker time after, it was unimaginable that I’d ever be okay. But eventually I learned that what I thought was a lie was simply truth that took a very long time to reveal itself.

Now, so many years later, on my desk next to a photo of a little boy with an impish smile, a shiny black rabbit crouches on its haunches, nose in the air, gazing at me. It silently prompts me to tell the tale I’ve never told before. You know the one. About a mother, some butterflies, and a rabbit, and the stories that came when they were needed.

***

Author’s Note: Six weeks after Zack died, I met Elizabeth Kubler-Ross at one of her retreats. She gave me a scarf that she had knit, made from the wool of her sheep, in pink – Zack’s favorite color. Her teaching story for the group was about a black rabbit.

Anna Belle Kaufman is a retired art psychotherapist who lives in the country in Northern California with her second husband, dog, and two pet goats. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The Sun, Calyx, the Utne Reader and the Networker.

My Son Lived

Posted on October 29, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog • Tagged cancer, children and childhood, death, friendship, grief, loss, motherhood, Nicole Scobie, parenting • Leave a comment

By Nicole Scobie

We are cancer moms. We didn’t break down, at least not in front of each other. Those are tears that, once begun, can’t stop.

Most mom friendships are formed because of a shared mutual experience, like two kids in the same daycare, the same class, or team. The moms get to know each other, first exchanging a few words at drop-off or pick-up, then warming up over a cup of coffee. Over time, they become friends. The shared experience of their children’s similar activity creates a bond that can last for years, as the moms watch their kids grow up together.

Natalie and I met that way, when my son Elliot was 5 and her daughter Zoé was 4 years old.

Our kids had shared the experience of cancer.

Elliot was diagnosed two weeks after starting school. A 6-inch tumor in his abdomen, multiple smaller tumors all over his lungs, making it stage 4. Zoé’s was in her bone marrow, requiring high intensity treatments.

Almost a full year of some of the hardest days (and nights). I held my son’s hand as he asked why this was happening. I talked to him about life and death, telling him how brave he was, while I was shaking with fear inside.

Friendships between two moms born this way are like no other — there are so many things that fall away when you’ve seen each other at your worst, at your angriest, at your most anxious and at your most relieved.

Bizarrely, despite the horrific situation we found ourselves in, the thing that drew us closest was laughing together. Nothing beats watching your child squirt a syringe of liquid at the doctor with another cancer mom there to witness it and laugh hysterically with you later. Laughing is great — I actually think laughter might just be the antonym of fear.

The downside of these friendships is that you now worry for another child. The burden is huge — knowing just how serious the situation is, feeling the fear because it is so bitterly familiar.

And then, the magic word: remission. No cancer left. Clear scans.

Both our kids entered the world of “normal,” where they could play outside with other kids again, where their hair started to grow back, where they, and we, were free of the hospital except for the regular three month checkups.

Natalie and I founded a non-profit organization together, to raise funds for research and help other families. One out of four children with cancer will die — we wanted to change that. We worked endless hours at it but still laughed at some of the ridiculous situations we found ourselves in. Speaking in front of large groups, for example, something we both hated, became a regular thing. What a strange path our lives had taken.

And meanwhile, there were always those three month checkups, to make sure the cancer hadn’t come back. The stress of watching Elliot lying on that table, me standing nearby with a heavy lead vest on. The technician telling him over the intercom, “Ok now lie very still.” The table sliding through the scanner. “Now take a deep breath and hold it.” The table sliding back through the scanner. “Ok now breathe.” I’d exhale. “Now we’ll do it again, lie very still…”

And the wait until days later, when my husband and I would be escorted into the oncologist’s office to get the results. Scanning the face of the doctor and nurse for some sign. Relief streaming out of me like hot air from a kettle after finding out all is clear. No relapse. We were free to go, back in three months.

First thing out of the meeting with the oncologist, as we walked down the hallway and before we got to the hospital elevator, I texted Natalie. We were both thrilled, relieved.

And then, a few months later, I got Natalie’s message, when she was in the hallway of the hospital.

But it was not good news this time.

Zoé had relapsed.

The cancer was back.

You are expecting me to write that we cried together and supported each other, like close friends do in the movies. But we didn’t. We are cancer moms. We didn’t break down, at least not in front of each other. Those are tears that, once begun, can’t stop. And won’t help anyone get through what happens next.

We didn’t cry. We fought back. We rallied. We researched and learned about this cancer, about the treatments. When one treatment failed we were ready for the next. Up until that last day when Zoé had bravely endured a brand new promising treatment and her parents went in for the results to see if this time, it had finally worked.

And I got the message from Natalie. I can’t say what I felt. Empty, I think.

The cancer was still there. The scan showed a little 4-year-old body, full, from head to toe, with cancer cells.

We knew even before the oncologist officially said it that there would be no more treatments.

Zoé died in her mother’s arms two weeks after that text message. I spoke at her ceremony. I couldn’t face the audience so instead I turned and spoke to the big, poster size photo of Zoé on the altar next to the flowers and toys placed there. I thanked her for what she had given me, the chance to have known her, the friendship with her mom, and I thanked her for her laughter. Zoé laughed a lot too.

My son lived. Her daughter died. There was no logical reason for it to turn out that way. It just did. We got lucky with one and unlucky with the other. Despite it all, we are still close friends.

Almost two years have passed. Elliot has checkups every six months now. I text Natalie right away, and she’s relieved.

Our non-profit has grown and now funds critical research, and supports families while their child is in treatment. It’s what we always wanted. Even though things didn’t turn out how we wanted.

Nicole Scobie, mom to three great kids, one of whom is luckily in remission from stage 4 cancer of the kidney.

Author’s Note: Nicole and Natalie now run zoe4life.org, the non-profit organization that supports kids with cancer and their families.

Photo: Samuel Zeller

The Gorilla in the Room

Posted on September 26, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged an elephant in the room, death, mother-daughter, roller skates, roller skating, roller skating rink, Vanessa Phillips • Leave a comment

by Vanessa Phillips

I killed my mom when I was 11.

My mom was a beautiful woman. When I was young she had blonde, bouncy hair, 70’s feathery type. In later years, she wore it short and sophisticated. She was attractive with any length of hair, but her pixie cut was sweet and polished and complemented her fun and lively personality. She was 5’7″, slender and though her teeth weren’t perfectly straight, she had a smile that filled any room she was in. Everyone adored her. She was kind and compassionate, generous and nurturing. She was a preacher’s wife and an advertising executive at a firm in downtown Columbia, Missouri. She’d done well for herself and family and balanced her duties as mother, wife and career woman with the help of a weekly cleaning lady and a great after school babysitter. Mom was doing it all.

I loved her more than anyone in the world.

When I was 10, I auditioned for the Nutcracker and was cast as the mouse that carried the white surrender flag in the heart-stopping battle of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Mom and I were excited not only because I was in the ballet, but because she and friends could easily identify which mouse among so many on stage, was her little girl. Performing in front of a paying audience, she told me, meant I had made it big time.

Every time I went grocery shopping with her, she gave me a quarter to put into one of the toy or candy machines at the front of the store. One day I put a quarter in and hoped for a key chain or a shiny necklace as displayed on the machine’s front, but instead got a pink car with wings, smaller than the size of the coin I used to buy it. My mom and I thought it was ridiculously funny looking, but so was wishing for a gold necklace for 25 cents. When we got home, I asked her what I would do with this weird toy as throwing it out was not something I considered. My mom had taught me through her own actions to be grateful for all gifts no matter how small or how big. After quickly surveying our newest gift, she responded, Fly it, of course. And she took off across the living room, holding it in the air yelling, zoom zoom zoom zoom! She flew it over to me and I took over, adding the dining room and kitchen to its flight path. We laughed out loud as we did so often together and named it our zoom zoom car; a silly name for a very silly car.

I recollect a menagerie of memories about my mom and me, but the one I recall most often is the memory of all that was Saturday February 23^rd 1985. You see, that was the day I killed my mom. It was a day I remember in great detail, for it was also the day King Kong was killed in our living room.

The room was dimly lit where my brother Philip, 9, and I, 11, sat entranced too close to the TV, our fists propping up our chins, elbows delicately balanced on legs crossed Indian style. In the rain-darkened room, King Kong climbed the South Tower of the World Trade Center. He gently released Jessica Lang from his grasp as she begged him not to. With bouncy blonde hair and a slender build, how much Jessica reminded me of my mom in appearance. As I was a mirror image of my mom, I felt a bit like Jessica too.

King Kong ignored Jessica’s pleas to hold on to her and he released her. Immediately after, just as Jessica had predicted, bullets pelted against his leathery skin from the plane circling above. He bellowed in pain. It was a grisly cry he screamed and tears ran down my face and over my hands as fast as the black gorilla fell from the tower to the concrete ground below. Jessica screamed and cried onscreen and her pain and grief tore at my stomach. It was too much for me to handle alone.

I sprang from the floor and ran quickly but quietly to my mom and dad’s bedroom, desperately needing my mother’s comfort, but not wanting to startle her awake on this early Saturday morning. Whimpering I crept to the bed. I softly tapped my mom’s shoulder through the comforter and whispered, mom? She opened the covers knowing instinctually that I wanted to snuggle into the warmth of her body and nestle in her chest. What’s wrong? She asked tenderly. As I wept, I explained King Kong’s demise and how unfair I felt his death was. How Jessica Lang begged him not to let her go. Why did he let her go, I asked, as I tried to grasp the concept of action and consequence. Her nightgown became drenched in my tears as she said over and over again, it’s ok, it’s ok sweetie, it’s ok.

I begged my mom to take my brother and me to the roller skating rink. I loved roller skating and I needed terribly to remove the haunting image of a black gorilla falling to his death from the sky. My mom had no desire to go out into the dark storm that had not stopped gushing rain since dawn, but I begged, and begged and begged. And she finally acquiesced and drove us to the roller rink and dropped us off. We were to meet her at 3:00 at the front door.

My brother and I skated for hours and I had come close to winning the limbo contest so the afternoon had been a success. When my brother hollered it was time to leave, I had to have one last go round and then I rolled fast off the rink onto the carpet and plopped right onto the bench to remove my wheels. Back in our street shoes we walked to the front door and waited.

And we waited. We waved good-bye to friends as their parents pulled up to the double glass doors to take them home.

And we waited. We craned our heads outside the door to stretch our necks to the main road looking for her car coming up the hill.

And we waited. We poked one another and dug into the worn carpet with the toes of our shoes and we got irritable.

And then, when hour two of waiting passed, my brother said what we both felt.

Something happened to mom. I know it. She is never late. I told him to be quiet; she was fine, just late. When our mom’s best friend Joan pulled in to pick us up, I believed my brother and I hated him for being right.

The road our mom traveled to pick us up was covered in layer upon layer of rain and the ominous black sky kept spewing out water adding new layers to create streams out of winding roads. A young, newly licensed driver sped towards my mom from the opposite direction and began to hydroplane. Scared, her passenger grabbed the wheel to stop the car from sliding toward the family car and, in her inexperience, pulled the steering wheel the wrong way. Instead of removing herself and her best friend from an accident, she created one.

The car with two 16 year olds, crashed head on into my mother’s.

The papers the next day said the first person to the scene, a passerby, tried to pry open the locked door to help my mother, but couldn’t. Paramedics arrived shortly thereafter and later reported my mom was DOA. They said no one could have saved her, but they were wrong.

I could have saved her.

Author’s Note: In February of 2013, I gave birth to a beautiful little boy we named Charlie. In becoming a mother myself, my understanding of that day, so many Februarys before, began to change. It was not my fault.

Vanessa Phillips works out of her home as the Department Head of the Client Relationship Team for a small global immigration company. She.lives in her husband’s hometown of Annapolis, MD with her two-year-old son, Charlie; husband, Brad; and two rescued pugs Mel and Dasha. This is her first published piece.

A Last Meal

Posted on September 9, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged cooking, death, family, grief, Indian cooking, Indian food, loss, Naseem Rakha • Leave a comment

By Naseem Rakha

Two days after Dad died, he made us dinner.

We sat at my table and we ate a feast of Qabooli Biryani and Mirchi Ka Salan, both dishes typical to Hyderabad, India where Dad was born and raised.

Qabooli is a lentil Biriyani made with basmati rice and channa dal. It requires a careful hand washing of the rice, rinsing out all the starch from the grains until the water runs clear. It requires a sorting and picking of the dal (golden lentils), ridding any that may be of poor quality. Then the two, the rice and the lentils, must be drained and let dry. The same must be done with the finely sliced onions, squeezed of excess liquid, they must air dry before they are carefully set in a half inch of sizzling hot oil and stirred to a delicate golden brown. The Qabooli requires garlic and ginger to be peeled and puréed into a fine paste, and then a grinding of spices. It requires a precise measurement of turmeric, cardamon, coriander, cumin, cayenne, mint and fresh squeezed lemon. And then, and this is critical, it requires that both the rice and channa dal be par-boiled to a place that is not quite done, so that once the five elements—the rice, the dal, the golden onion, the garlic/ginger puree, and spices are all layered together, and then drizzled with an infusion of cream and saffron—it can be covered, and sealed and baked to the exact point in which when a spoon breaks into the it‘s golden surface, each hand washed grain emerges tender and whole and separate and distinct.

The second dish, Mirchi Ka Salan or Green Chili Curry, is the equivalent of creating a Mole, it is time consuming and complicated to make. The paste itself has more than 12 ingredients. But the end product is unique and flavorful; it is one of my favorites.

When my sister came home on Monday the 12th of January, Dad was in the kitchen preparing to cook. It was 6:30 in the evening, the College Football National Championships were on the TV, and Dad was at his cutting board preparing the onions, his kitchen towel characteristically tossed over his shoulder. When Shameem asked what he was starting, she felt exasperated that Dad had taken on such a big project so late in the day. She had worked all day, she was tired. But, this was her dad. And we all knew his days were limited. There was the kidney disease, the heart problem, the iron build up from transfusions, the fatigue, the pink hospital form taped boldly to his refrigerator: Do not resuscitate. So Shameem set aside her exhaustion and spent the rest of the night cooking with Dad.

What surprised my sister most about the meal, she told me, was how much food he was preparing. This was not just for the two of them. Dad clearly had something else in mind. Perhaps a party the coming weekend. She didn’t ask. Instead they chopped, and stirred, and fried, and mixed, and boiled, and baked their way through the might. Finally, somewhere around midnight, they finished and put it all in the refrigerator for another day.

That day came the following Friday, 45 hours after Dad died from a tumble on a Portland Streetcar. Earlier in the day my family and I had gone to the funeral home and arranged for his cremation. Then, before heading back to my house, we went to Dad’s place, opened his refrigerator and took out the last meal he had ever prepared.

When my father came to the United States in his early 20’s, he had no idea how to cook. In his home in Hyderabad, India cooking was the work of servants, not the family and definitely not the men. Still he attempted to replicate the food he most missed. But trying to cook Indian food in the 1950’s and 60’s in the US, when Indian spices were not as ubiquitous as they are today, made the process of cooking a challenge. Yet he did not give up—collecting recipes and spices and experimenting at every opportunity.

One of Dad‘s favorite things in his later years was to have friends and family over for large meals, even though those meals, particularly as he got older, would often take him more than a week to fully prepare. It frustrated him that his arthritis made it slower to peel and chop, or that the onions would seem to burn more frequently, or that he‘d forget ingredients, or would sometimes spill an entire meal trying to transfer it from one heavy pot to another. It frustrated him that cooking would make him so tired. Still, just the weekend before he died, Dad told me he wanted to make Shrimp Pulau one last time. It is another time consuming dish, and it is also a dish, due to his very limited diet, he could no longer eat. Yet, that is what he wanted to make, for us, his children, all of us in our forties and fifties now, all watching our father with greater and greater levels of anxiety and sadness and love.

Unfortunately, Dad never got to make the Shrimp Pulau. Two days after he made the Qabooli and Green Mirchi Ka Salan he had his fall while riding the streetcar. At the hospital he refused treatment. He told us he was going to die that night. We fought him. We wanted him to live. But he knew better. He understood that his fall was a way out from the longer more agonizing death he faced, and then four hours after sunset, with Portland‘s lights glimmering out the hospital window, he died. His breathing became more and more labored. We could not imagine saying goodbye. And then, he was gone.

We brought the meal to my home after the funeral arrangements were made—three tired, distraught children, heads spinning, knees wobbling, all in need of comfort, and not knowing how to find it. And there it was, seeping into the house from the oven, the scent of rice and dal and ginger and onion. Saffron and chile, turmeric and cardamon. The scent of Dad bent over a stove, cooking for us one last time.

Naseem is the daughter of Mohammed Allah Rakha and Beverly Francis Schafer, both of whom are now gone. She raises her 15-year-old son with her husband in Oregon. She is the author of the award-winning novel, The Crying Tree, and is a journalist and geologist and naturalist. And she spends her free time backpacking, gardening, knitting, reading and writing. Dad‘s recipe for Qabooli Biryani and Mirchi Ka Salan, can be found on Shameem Rakha‘s blog Scratch: For the love of all things homemade .

Where We Go

Posted on July 27, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged children and childhood, death, grief, loss, motherhood, mothering, Sarah Kilch Gaffney • Leave a comment

By Sarah Kilch Gaffney

I knew it would come back to haunt me. I knew that I would wish I had come up with a better, more personally truthful explanation to give my daughter, but at that point it was the best I could do, so when prompted to talk about where Daddy had gone a few days after he died, I took the easy route and answered: heaven.

It felt like such a moment of weakness. Even in the thick of the worst days of my life, I had always told her the truth.

I am a spiritual person, but I do not believe in God. I do not believe in heaven or hell, angels or demons. While my spiritual beliefs are still evolving, I do know that I believe in love, and positive energy (whatever form that may take, be it prayer, meditation, or simply good juju). I believe there is another aspect of our beings that is beyond the body, but I do not place my belief in God.

My daughter was barely three when her father died, however, and I was at a loss for what to say to her. Death and permanence are difficult concepts to comprehend at that age. After having the “Daddy is dying” talk, I wasn’t sure how much more I was capable of. A tiny part of me still didn’t believe that it was actually happening, that there was going to come a day very soon when my husband’s body would finally fail.

Almost all of the kids’ books that we had read together about death and grief talked about heaven, so she was at least vaguely familiar with the concept, and “heaven” seemed like an easy answer during an extremely difficult time.

Most people would probably struggle with the idea of wanting the love of their life to die, but I have been there and come through the other side. The day before he died, I told my husband he could go, that I loved him and that he could go. He seemed to know we were there briefly that morning and then he was gone again. He was no longer aware of the world, was in constant pain, and had not been able to speak, eat, or move in days.

I laid down with him in his hospital bed, my head on his shoulder and my hand on his chest, the way we used to lay together in the old days, and I gave him my blessing to die. I wanted him to die. The state he was in was not life. He was ready and I was as ready as I was going to be, and it seemed that all that was left in the meantime were varying degrees of suffering.

I called time of death the following night at 9:40 pm.

Fourteen months later at the dinner table, my four-year-old daughter asked me where Daddy went.

“I know it was the cancer that made him die,” she said, while spooning macaroni into her mouth, “but where did he go?”

I started explaining again how when some people die they get cremated and their bodies become ashes. I talked about how we had spread Daddy’s ashes in the places he loved most. This was a conversation we’d had many times before. She knew what had happened to his body, and it became clear that wasn’t what she was asking.

“But where did he go? Did he go to heaven?”

“Some people believe that when we die, we go to a place called heaven,” I said. “And Mama doesn’t believe in heaven, but she believes that Daddy isn’t hurting anymore, and that all he feels now is love.” She nodded.

“We’re always connected to Daddy through our hearts,” I continued, “because we will always love him and he will always love us.”

“We feel him right here,” she said, placing her small hand on her chest.

She was content with my answer and we finished our dinner talking about school, friends, and princess books, but I kept replaying the conversation in my head. Was I saying the right things? Was I giving the right answers? Did right answers even exist?

I don’t know how to explain suffering of that extent to my child, and I don’t know how to explain a religious place where the dead go that I don’t believe in. There will always be difficult questions, and I know that I often won’t have the answers, but I do know that I am doing the best I can.

I have seen and felt my husband since his death: in a sole firefly floating through our bedroom on a dark summer night; in a beautiful Luna moth clinging to a tree when I suddenly felt compelled to turn around mid-step on a trail; in a bottle of bourbon opened the night he died that inexplicably exploded while every other bottle in the cabinet remained intact.

Our daughter will grow up to develop her own beliefs about spirituality, religion, and death, and I hope she does plenty of exploring and inquiring in the process. It’s okay if she doesn’t end up on the same page as me, as long as she finds her own truth in the end.

In the meantime, I teach her about the good in people and about being kind to others. I talk to her about the wonder of life and about the beauty we can find in the world. I give her all of the love and energy I have to give, and then some more I didn’t even know was there.

Sarah Kilch Gaffney is a writer, brain injury outreach coordinator, and homemade-caramel aficionado living in central Maine. You can read more of her work at www.sarahkilchgaffney.com.

Photo: Kundan Ramisetti

Stealing Dirt

Posted on June 8, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged adult children, death, Lydia Kann, mother and son, teens • Leave a comment

By Lydia Kann

Let’s say the phone rings in the middle of the night and you are shocked out of a sound sleep, that just-fell-asleep sleep, pre-dream, pre-restless, pre-subconscious insight, and your hand reaches to find the cordless, somewhere, it’s somewhere on the nightstand, and maybe you knock over the cute little lamp with the blue and green painting of a beach scene, and finally you find the phone, lift it to your ear and go, huh? And it’s the police.

“Huh?”

“Hello. Is this Lydia Kann? This is the Hadley police calling about your son. We have him here…”

“Huh?”

“Ma’am, we have your son, Mickey, at the police station and would like you to come pick him up.”

Now you, or more to the point, I am up. Woken. Awake. “What?”

“Your son has been involved in an incident…”

“What happened? Is he okay?”

“Yes, ma’am, he’s fine. We are impounding the car…” The policeman must be covering the mouthpiece because all I hear is a muffled, “What is it?” And then he comes back on, all cheery like, “and the wheelbarrow, as evidence.”

“Evidence of what? What happened?” I am hyper alert by now, heart bumping, breath short.

“Ma’am, can you come in to the station, and we’ll explain it then?”

Great. I had been sleeping the sleep of the innocent, assuming my son was safely in bed after an evening out with a friend. Isn’t that what all the parents say after… after horrible crimes are committed by or against their children – I thought he was asleep in bed?

Let’s say you get in the other car, the small sporty vehicle you bought to replace the huge minivan when the boys got their licenses – you get in the vanity car, let’s be honest here, and hustle yourself down to that police station, a place you have never had the occasion or necessity to notice.

And as I drive my sweet little car down the dark abandoned streets – it’s only 1:30 in the morning, but these are small New England towns I am traversing and most folks are happily tucked into their warm beds. As I drive, I scan the possibilities, and know that whatever Mickey has gotten himself into, I am to blame.

I am the mother. Have been for almost nineteen years, since the arrival of my first son. So much has been said about mothers, and yet not enough. Or is it that more could be said about mothering, a godlike state, the wonder, the innocence. There you are, left with a tiny body so fragile that any movement, any decision – shall I carry him in this arm or on my shoulder, shall I go when he cries or wait, shall I let him sleep in my bed or draw a line – each lifted eyebrow of reaction leaving a residue of consequence that will live on until your death. A snake of responsibility lying coiled in the corner, not visible until it attacks, venom, toxic serum infusing your blood, your head, your heart. There is no return from this land, galaxy. And all of it, the whole experience – the anxiety, the decisions, the guilt – is so damn normal. Common. Who isn’t a mother, after all?

The police station is cold and bright on this dark late spring night. Fluorescent lights ricochet off the white cinder block walls. The officer behind the glass window – they’re not taking any chances in this tiny harmless town – stands up when I announce myself and says he will get my son.

My son. Taller than me by a head. Gangly. Is that a smirk on his face or embarrassment? Or are those the same thing? The obstetrician predicted a girl when I was pregnant with Mickey seventeen years ago. The way I was carrying. He put his stamp on it. “A girl for sure.” I already had a boy, my firstborn, his pulsing male nature overridden by a golden temperament – most likely a result of a Leboyer birth – a technique, trendy at the time, of placing the newborn in a warm bath and promising a gentle transition from the womb to the outside world. And therefore, a calmer child.

I had been raised alone by a woman, my mother, and there were no men to be found. Sameness permeated my days. No collision of strange body parts, of voice tone, of scent, no testosterone-fueled exuberance or aggression. Women reflected off mirrors as far as the eye could see.

When Mickey arrived into the cold January light of that hospital room, the most noticeable characteristic visible from my vantage point was the blood red balloon sized sack between his legs.

A second boy. A boy so different and yet familiar. A boy designed by a Dennis the Menace screenwriter to ask of me a kind of forbearance uncalled for previously. A challenge, as they say. Clearly the choice to forego the Leboyer birth here – a decision based on the predictable exhaustion of a second delivery in less than eighteen months – had its projected outcome.

“What happened?” I now ask, for the third or fourth time. The police officer, who has entered the room with Mickey, looks quite serious. He is also young enough to be my son, but he expands himself into the stern demeanor required of his profession.

“Mickey was apprehended at the Garden Center on Route 9, trespassing. An officer patrolling nearby noticed the minivan in the parking lot. Your son was found inside the premises, having scaled the fence, it appeared. He had taken three forty-pound bags of soil.”

Okay. An answer, but not really. I am confused. “I don’t understand. The Garden Center. Huh?”

I sound and feel inarticulate. What is expected under these circumstances? Anger, compassion? What would I be angry at? What did he in fact do? And most obviously, what the hell was he doing breaking into the Garden Center? Dirt?

The officer reiterates that they will need to hold on to the car and the wheelbarrow ‘as evidence’ until the hearing, but we are free to go. He gives us some papers about the legal process and returns to his desk.

We leave in my car, Mickey silent in the passenger seat. “I’m sorry, Ma.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“Sorry you had to come get me.”

“What happened? Why did you want dirt?” I am moving toward a slight hysteria, wanting to either yell or laugh.

“I can’t tell you.” He is staring out the front window and speaks with no inflection.

“Why not?”

And that interchange becomes the template for the many future conversations about the incident. After we found a lawyer to represent him at the hearing and he was acquitted, thanks to his spotless ‘good kid’ record. After months of silence about the issue, then years of refusal to come clean.

I am a mother. I have theories I comb through. Was he stealing dirt with someone else and protecting him or her? Was he planning to grow some pot and read somewhere that he needed clean dirt? But then why wouldn’t he just buy it?

The whole event was symbol of what can’t be found, or understood. A manifestation of the mystery of where I end and he begins. My son.

Years after, many years, my son, now in his thirties, and I stand at the grave of my mother. A raw fall day, rain drenching our flimsy jackets, hands icy from holding umbrellas aloft. It is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and I suggest we do a little ritual, Tashlich, which traditionally is practiced on Rosh Hashana, ten days earlier, but I had looked it up and it’s acceptable until Sukkot, a holiday a week after today.

None of this matters, in fact, since we are atheists, but we are on a search for something together, a way to make contact perhaps. It is a quick visit for my son, the first in months, and this will be our one chance.

Mickey agrees. According to local custom, one throws bread or food into a body of water to symbolize casting off the sins of the year before. Our version is that we each name three sins of the year before and three intentions for the coming months. We then each take a noodle from a Thai noodle take-out we happen to have in the car, place the noodle on my mother’s headstone and then pour water from a water bottle on the noodle and say a baruch atah adonai facsimile. Cute but functional.

And it’s in this primitive ritual that it happens. A kind of touching. The final sin we each speak is in relation to the other.

“I always thought that I didn’t give you enough credit, Ma, for what you did right. For all the ways you are so able. And that I couldn’t get past your weaknesses, the way you…” He went on to tell me what drove him crazy about me. No big surprises there. But then he said, “I think about what I will tell my children when you’re dead, about the kind of person you are. And I realize that it wasn’t that I didn’t give enough credit – I always gave you so much credit for being strong that I couldn’t forgive you for the times you didn’t hold it together. I couldn’t let you be human.”

If I say I was blown away, if I say I was moved, if I say I wept and then spoke my piece and then we hugged, if I say all that, it wouldn’t be the whole truth.

To be seen – as in vision, as in heart, as in soul – for one moment, by another, to be recognized as worthwhile, as having substance. Is it that there is too little time, or too little language, or too much distraction? Let’s say it’s all of the above and more. Three bags of dirt and the search for an answer. In the end, it turns out that my son, too, must be human. And the dirt is the ground in which he grew.

Author’s Note: Having adult sons offers a surprising mix of distance and closeness. One minute they seem like strangers, these grown men with beards and massive shoulders, working, partnering, and so thoroughly independent, but then the next moment something splits open and there we are, as close as when they were tots, and for those brief interludes all the mystery evaporates, and it’s pure honey love.

Lydia writes fiction and creative nonfiction and has been published in literary journals such as Threepenny Review, Nimrod International Journal, and the American Literary Review. Lydia is also a psychotherapist and visual artist.

Nearly Drowning

Posted on April 13, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged beach, death, depression, flawed, insecurity, mother-daughter, suicide, summer, swimming, toddler, Vera Giles, working moms • Leave a comment

By Vera Giles

I sat next to the learner’s pool, opposite my instructor for Overcoming Your Fear of Water.

I was 40, married, the mother of an almost-two-year-old boy. A few months earlier, I’d been laid off from my job and couldn’t seem to make myself look for a new one—but for some reason, I was also afraid to be a stay-at-home mother. Instead, Sammy went to an excellent day care, which we could afford thanks to my programmer husband, Aaron. I felt like the world’s worst mother.

I had tried several times in the past to learn how to swim. Now, I thought, since the rest of my life seemed stuck, maybe I could at least learn this one thing.

The instructor, a small, muscular woman, spoke with a friendly German accent. “Tell me why you’re here today.”

I wanted to tell her that when I was six, my mother took me by the hand and walked me into the ocean and kept walking until my aunt stopped her. That my mother was suicidal and eventually killed herself. Instead I said: “I’m afraid of the water, but I want to learn.”

“Our goal is for you to stay centered in your body. You can’t learn if you are afraid. Are you ready to begin?”

We walked to the edge of the pool.

I shivered in my new black bathing suit. It was morning and the room was cold. Small waves caused by other swimmers slapped the sides of the pool, a metallic sound with a deeper note of water sloshing in and out of the overflow vents. The instructor smiled. “Shall we go in?”

Gray daylight poured through the large side windows. The room smelled clean and wet. Accent plants softened its sharp lines. “I guess so,” I said. Was it really this simple? No fanfare? But it felt right.

“Here,” she said, extending a hand. I held it and felt small and safe. Everything about this woman told me she was there to take care of me. “Let’s walk down the steps, one by one.”

I stepped down and submerged my feet in the water. We stopped. “Remember,” she said, “we’ll go as fast as you are comfortable. You can’t learn if you are not fully present in your body—all the way down to your feet. How are you feeling?”

I felt excited and calm at the same time. Could I feel my feet? Yes, they were cooler than the rest of me, firmly planted on the tiles. My hand was in her warm, sure grip.

“Yeah, I feel good,” I said, wanting to go on but self-conscious about seeming to rush. “Let’s go deeper.”

Down we went, step by step, until the water was at our waists. There were my feet. I still felt them. We walked further into the pool.

A rising anxiety finally surfaced, and I spoke. “I can’t hold your hand,” I said. I knew immediately this was a trigger, the memory of holding my mother’s hand, of being forced to go deeper and deeper into the water that day.

She looked surprised. She thought for a second, then crooked her arm. “Can you hold my elbow? Would that work?”

It felt odd, but I no longer felt coerced or restrained. I relaxed. “Yes, that will work.”

Like blind people walking somewhere new, we continued, navigating through my phobia. I let the water reach the middle of my chest—felt it move my body. I kept checking in with my feet. After a while, my instructor said, “You’ve made amazing progress. Look how far you’ve come! It’s time to get out now. Shall we?” She held out her hand.

This time I took her hand and we began walking to the stairs.

Something broke open in my chest. My eyes stung, and a warm feeling spread through my body. A mother was taking me back to shore, holding my hand to keep me safe.

I wanted to cry. For the first time, some little part of me felt secure instead of scared. I was going to be OK.

The next day, I remembered more of what had happened in the ocean.

***

I was six. My mother and I were visiting my Aunt Anni in Israel.

I loved Mama and she loved me. We understood each other. We shared secrets and told each other how we really felt. Some days she was very sad and everything seemed to go away. She just sat there and I felt very alone. But then she came back and she started to smile at me and laugh at my little jokes and I knew again that she loved me. I was very good at taking care of her.

Mama was the most beautiful mother in the world. Everybody said so. Her long blonde hair and beautiful dresses and lovely laugh charmed everyone.

Her older sister Anni was loving and distracted, her dreamy voice low from cigarettes. She smelled like perfume and tobacco and the oil paints she used in her studio. Blonde and the same height as my mother, she looked like Mama’s twin. Anni and Mama laughed a lot and shared makeup and jewelry. I loved Anni, too. She was gentle and safe and acted like I was a wise and wonderful person.

It was sunny and warm with cool breezes near the shore, so we were at the beach. I was playing at the edge of the surf, trying to step into the foam as it dissolved, wanting to feel the bubbles on my feet.

Then I felt Mama standing behind me, staring out to sea. She walked next to me, took my hand, and kept walking into the ocean. I didn’t want to leave the surf, but I was used to doing what she wanted.

At first it was fun, bobbing around as we got deeper, but I didn’t like how hard she was holding my hand and I started to pull away. She wouldn’t let go.

I was mad now. I started whining. She wouldn’t let go.

I got scared. The water was pretty high now. She wouldn’t let go.

She kept walking. It got deeper. I was screaming and panicking now. Some part of me was so terrified that something clicked in my head and I started feeling far away.

Water got in my mouth. I swallowed some. I couldn’t keep my head above water or my feet on the ocean floor. She wouldn’t let go.

I kicked and flailed and screamed, breathing in water and choking and swallowing water and drowning. She held my hand and her arm was stiff against her side and as I floated in the water I kicked her leg, hard, and it felt rubbery and she didn’t react and that scared me even more and I was drowning and I couldn’t breathe and this was way worse than asthma and I started to float high above my own head and watch myself drown, just my head, the crown barely breaking the surface as the water around was choppy with my struggles.

My mother stood there, holding my hand in a death grip, her arms at her sides. The water was at her chin. She was staring out at the horizon, completely gone.

Anni came and got me. She put my arms around her neck and walked back to the beach, as I coughed and hung there limply. I started to shake as she bundled me in a towel and tried to get me dry and warm even though it was a lovely day and the water had been perfect.

I fell asleep, from shock.

***

I was able to come to that swim class because Sammy was in day care—even though I hadn’t had a job for six months and should have been taking care of him myself. I felt like a terrible mother.

My friends, my family, and my husband all told me I was doing a great job with Sammy. I was not an alcoholic (like my mother and father). I did not abuse Valium (like my mother). I was not depressed (like my mother and father). I was not mentally ill (like my mother).

I did not commit suicide (like my mother).

She was 38 and a half when she killed herself. Coincidentally, when Sammy was born, I was 38 and a half.

Despite years of therapy, I was still terrified that I would repeat her mistakes. I might hurt Sammy. I might even kill him. This was crazy. Why did I feel this way?

When I was laid off six months earlier, I had been back from maternity leave exactly one year. I was 39 and Sammy was 16 months old.

“At least you’ll get to spend more time with Sammy,” my coworkers said.

***

When I was away from Sammy, I wished for more time than the squeezed hours I had with him. I craved him like a drug. I wanted to be there every morning when I got him, giggling and kicking with delight, out of his crib. I wanted to read him bedtime stories and sing him songs every night. I delighted in his expressive face, when he grinned or rolled his eyes or scrunched his nose with mischief. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his rosy, round cheeks, his enormous brown eyes, and his dirty blond hair. He was perfect.

But I couldn’t stand to spend more hours with him.

“Didn’t maternity leave just fly by?” the same coworkers had asked me a year earlier. My reply—”No, my God, every day was an eternity”—killed their sympathetic smiles. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to discuss what it was like to enslave my brain to someone else’s needs. With Sammy, I was no longer a mind—I was torn and aching breasts, tired arms, a hoarse voice, sore legs. I was chained to his schedule: hovering over him when he was awake; wishing he was old enough to play with toys or even just focus on my face; returning home every three hours to keep the agony of breastfeeding to myself; constantly caught up on the laundry because I was so bored and lonely during his short naps.

By the time I was laid off, Sammy was older, but I still felt like I was failing. Each time he was home all day, I had to get him out of the house or he would drive me crazy and I would begin snarling at him. The kid never sat down. He started walking at eleven months and never stopped. So we would go somewhere we could walk, and walk, and walk. When he napped (thank God he napped), I fell into a stupefied sleep as well. On days when I was alone with him, I choked on my own panic. You can’t leave me, I would think as Aaron walked out the door. I’m an only child. You’re an oldest brother. You’re the one who knows what to do with babies.

There were so many fears. Was Sammy eating enough? He’d been born five and a half weeks early. Every milliliter of milk we got into him was hard-won. Now his toddler schedule of three meals and two snacks a day was grueling. How could I offer him different foods and balanced meals each time? I was a bad mother if I didn’t.

Was he sleeping enough? Everyone knows kids never sleep when you want them to. (Never mind that my child is in fact the most reliable sleeper in the world. Don’t hate me—I have no idea how this happened.) What if he suddenly stopped sleeping well? How could I keep nap and bedtime sacred?

Every mother has these fears, my friends told me when I wailed to them. But the stakes felt impossibly high. What was normal? I once had a mother who let us run out of food and kept me awake at night to talk about her problems. All my fears and worries told me that I was a bad mother like she was.

So many parents said that Mother Love made having kids worth it—but they were wrong. When I first experienced those primal, almost preverbal, feelings—Love. Hold. Mine. Protect. Fight! MINE!—I fell off the platform of sanity I had worked so long to build, into a wild, angry ocean. Even as I craved my son, my fears of all I was doing wrong with him triggered my Mother Love to protect him from the biggest threat: me. I knew I would somehow hurt him. With my inability to care for or feed him properly, I might even kill him. I had to leave him to the experts.

Day care was a better parent than I was. Day care fed him without angst. Day care had playmates he could socialize with, and teachers who were more patient and better trained than I was. Day care had structure and rules and activities, and didn’t get anxious about doing things wrong or rotating the toys or cleaning up messy art projects. Day care hadn’t lost a mother to mental illness and suicide, and didn’t have an ex-alcoholic father who lived mostly in his head. Day care didn’t take years to learn to get along with its stepmother, or spend years in therapy to keep its issues from contaminating the kids. Day care was calm and kind and good and never, ever depressed.

More than anything, I was afraid to lose day care. Because if I lost day care, I would have to be a full-time stay-at-home mom. And then I would have to face the reasons I knew—with a cold, insane clarity—that I couldn’t be a good mother.

***

I was 41. My husband, Sammy, and I were visiting with my cousins from my mother’s side of the family in a rented house on the New Jersey seashore. Over several days, I got the courage to tell them the story of Mama nearly drowning me—and they believed me. Some of them remembered her. All of them knew how private their parents were about the past. They knew that Mama could have done this, and that Anni could have hidden how serious it was. Some of them were not surprised.

One afternoon, most of us went to the beach while Aaron stayed behind. We got to the ocean and Sammy, now a tall, adventurous three-year-old, wanted to go in. With me. He wanted me to hold his hand.

I still didn’t know how to swim.

I still didn’t feel like a great mother.

I still didn’t have a paying job. Instead, I had started writing a memoir.

And yet I was getting somewhere. The day before I had stood waist-deep in the ocean, talking to my oldest cousin Andreas about our family and my mother’s childhood. Andreas was at ease in the water. In the middle of the conversation he watched me bobbing with a smile on my face as a rogue wave reached my chest. He said, “You’re doing quite well for someone who has good reason to be afraid of the water.”

Now here we were on the beach, Sammy and I. The sun warmed our backs and the seagulls coasted right and left above us. The surf pushed and pulled, repelling and coaxing.

“I wanna go in da ocean. C’we go in, Mommy? C’you hold my hand?”

How could I let Sammy trust me? Had my mother been so far gone that she didn’t know she was holding my hand in the water, so desperate to kill herself that she almost took me with her? The same thing could be inside me, waiting to destroy us both.

How could she try again and again to leave me—succeeding in her third suicide attempt after I turned eight—when I had loved her so much?

Or maybe I did understand. Maybe I was doing the same thing to my son by running away from him to protect him from myself—putting him in day care, telling myself that Aaron was the one who was good at raising babies.

I looked into Sammy’s wide brown eyes and chose. I chose life.

“OK, Bud. Hold my hand and don’t go in too deep, OK?”

“OK.”

We walked toward the waves, wobbled a little on the shells. Sammy squealed in delight when the surf tickled his feet.

Despite my fears, I smiled back. I could do this. I could hold his hand. I could keep him safe.

I could be his mother.

Author’s Note: I still have moments when it’s hard to stay engaged with my son and to have faith in my ability to mother him. But over time I am noticing little ways that our relationship is growing stronger: more hugs, more play together, even more confidence in the face of his ordinary rebellions. I am struck by how resilient he is, and by those little moments of wisdom that pop out in the middle of being an ordinary loud, funny, defiant preschooler.

I’m accepting that the important thing as a mom is not to get it right the first time, but to learn from my scars and mistakes. It’s when I recognize that I’m going off track that the healing can begin.

Vera Shanti Giles lives with her husband and three-year-old son in the Puget Sound region of Washington state. She is writing a memoir, Crazy Sane Mama, about overcoming the ordinary and extraordinary anxieties of motherhood—resulting from her mother’s mental illness and suicide—to raise her son with joy and humor.

Fighting Dragons

Posted on April 13, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged birth, death, father daughter, mothers • Leave a comment

Illustration: The Manitoban

By Amy Cissell

When I was nineteen, my father gave me a portion of a poem to remind me to never give up.

And sometimes when our fights begin,

I think I’ll let the Dragons win…

And then I think perhaps I won’t,

Because they’re Dragons, and I don’t

— A. A. Milne

I hung this in my dorm room, and in my first apartment, and in my home office, and in my heart.

***

My Dragons started to appear so slowly. They snuck up on me and took hold before I even realized they were there. Only by looking back can I see how they crept in without a fight.

I can tell you about the awful third trimester of my pregnancy. How everything hurt and I couldn’t run and I could barely walk. How my father was diagnosed with cancer—brain tumors, the scariest cancer of all—had surgery, had chemo, had radiation, entered hospice, died. How the death of my father on March 19, 2012—two weeks before my son was due—was devastating. I can tell you that complications with my pregnancy meant that I never got to see my father between his diagnosis and his death.

I can talk about the labor and delivery. About my mother being in the room and stressing me out because she was so sad. About the intensity of pain that I had not anticipated. About finally getting an epidural after nearly three hours of pushing so the baby and I could rest. About the rapid deceleration of my baby’s heartbeat, the emergency C-section, the hemorrhaging. I can talk about lying on the operating table, hearing the doctors talk about not being able to get the bleeding stopped, and how I didn’t know if my son was alive.

I can paint the picture of the first time I saw my son, no worse for wear after the craziness of his entry into this world. How my arms were shaking too much to properly hold him. How I cried so much in those first weeks as I looked for signs of his grandfather in his face. How so many people needed him to be a symbol of something that made my father’s death O.K. How I felt that he was the trade-in, a newer model, and how that made me feel guilty. I can tell you that the fact that he was born on Easter Sunday was given special significance by people who wanted to believe that there was a just and loving God.

I can give you that glimpse into my soul and how much I struggled with my feelings of intense grief and ridiculous joy.

I can even tell you what happened next.

The autumn after my father’s death and my son’s birth, the Dragons made themselves known. They crept in gradually. I have never liked bridges. I have other fears: ostracism, irrelevance, spiders. But my number one fear is plunging off a bridge to my death, sometimes in a ball of fire; more often quietly, unnoticeably.

I live in Portland. City of bridges. To get to work, I must drive over at least one bridge. And so I do. But that autumn, the fall of death and birth, it started getting harder and harder. I had panic attacks while driving across the Marquam Bridge. The anxiety started spreading. Slowly, like fog on little cat feet. Creeping into everything.

And then there were whispers.

“You are a terrible mother who can‘t even produce enough milk for your son.“

“Your constant anxiety is stressing out everyone around you and they‘re starting to resent you.“

“You‘re about to get fired because you‘re doing such a terrible job.“

“Your friends are sick of your bullshit.“

“Your husband wishes he‘d never met you, much less married and impregnated you.“

“You are a terrible wife.“

“Everything would be so much better if you weren‘t here.“

“You are an awful mother.“

“You shouldn‘t be here.“

The whispers grew louder each day, until they drowned out the echoing sounds of bridge traffic. I started wondering if they were more than an evil internal voice that always tries to fuck things up. I began to believe it was real, that she was real—a voice of authority and reason. I started avoiding. I fantasized about running away. Sometimes those fantasies would include taking the baby and driving south until I found a place to hide. In other fantasies, I thought it would be better if I left him behind; I was obviously not stable.

I noticed my driving was becoming more erratic. I told my husband I couldn’t drive the baby anymore. I wasn’t always sure who was in the driver’s seat.

The running away fantasies met and mated with the plunging-to-my-death anxiety, and it got harder and harder to not plunge to my death. It would be so easy to just speed up and flip over the edge. To “trip” while looking down from the top tram dock and fall, screaming, to the grass below. To go for a trail run in the Gorge and not watch where I was going.

A tragic accident.

A release.

A new and better life for those I left behind.

Every day, I got out of bed. I could manage nursing my son only once a day. I dressed him. I went to work. I came home. I fed him (formula this time, such a bad mom). Rocked him. Cried.

I knew I was sinking. I knew this wasn’t right. It wasn’t me. I had a therapist who sent me to a psychiatrist. I got some drugs. I made sticker charts and bought gold stars to chart my Aggressive Happinessâ„¢ plans that involved exercise and drinking plenty of water and taking all my medications.

I stopped talking about my anxiety and depression and weird bouts of mania.

I alphabetized my closet.

I stopped seeing my friends.

I drank.

I fantasized about razor blades and blood.

I decided to become a drug addict. And then I realized that I didn’t know where to buy drugs, so I gave up.

I stopped looking down when driving across bridges lest the temptation to follow my line of sight proved too much.

***

Finally one day, I felt a little like myself. And the next, I was a little better.

It wasn’t a progressive upward slope. It was more a few steps forward, and a slow slide back. Gradually, however, I got out of the hole. I stood up and stretched and looked around. And that’s when I saw them clearly for the first time: Dragons. Hovering silently above the ground. Waiting for me to take my eyes off them, like scaly weeping angels, so they could knock me back down.

I backed away slowly, and just kept backing.

They aren’t gone. I still see them there sometimes out of the corner of my eye. They are waiting for me to forget. I can’t blink. Can’t let them win. Won’t.

There are times I want to pull the Dragons out of the dark corners where they’re hiding and wrap myself up in them. There’s something almost comforting in the thought of being smothered in the numbing fog of mental illness. No one expects too much, or is disappointed, or needs me to be strong.

***

I look for signs of my father in my son, but so far they are absent. There are times I resent my son for preventing me from being with my dad when he died. There are times I resent my father for ruining the end of my pregnancy and the birth of my son. For not living long enough to hold his first grandchild.

Last night, I rocked my teething toddler to sleep and gazed at his face. Even though I’ve been unable to find my father in his face, I felt ready to let go. Let go of the expectation that my son was the consolation prize I received for giving up my dad. Let go of the belief this was the trade-in, the upgrade, the newer model. Let go of the nearly crippling grief responsible for my second guessing all the decisions I’d made in the past two years.

Let go of the fantasy of Dragons and the idea that I might let the Dragons win.

Because they‘re Dragons, and I don‘t.

Author’s Note: In the last month I’ve celebrated my son’s third birthday and mourned the third anniversary of my father’s death. The grief still hits me like a truck from time to time, but it’s no longer a constant presence in my life. Although I consider myself recovered from the postpartum anxiety and depression I describe in this essay, I still don’t enjoy driving over bridges.

Amy Cissell is a Portland, Oregon-based writer whose first love is fantasy. She is hard at work editing her first full-length novel when she’s not chasing around an active preschooler. Find her online at http://www.gazellesoncrack.com or on Twitter @gazellesoncrack

Stopping for Death

Posted on February 16, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged blind, death, Kristen Witucki, loss, miscarriage, mother and son, parenting • Leave a comment

By Kristen Witucki

“Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me”

–Emily Dickinson

On a soft spring morning when sunlight dappled us through the trees, my friend, Anita, and I, both blind, took Langston, my three-year-old sighted son, to the playground at the West Virginia School for the Blind where we worked. I braced myself to cross High Street, the busy street near our house. There are no traffic lights on that corner, so the “rule” is that you wait for a break in the traffic and make a dash for it. This meant that Anita and I listened to make sure there was no traffic approaching before crossing the street. The three of us crossed without apparent incident, but I learned that death had, in fact, occurred. As we continued walking toward the playground, Langston told me, “The squirrels laid down.”

“What?” I said.

“The car came, and it ran over the squirrels. They laid down and didn’t get up. It was on its back with its belly up.”

“He must be making up a story,” Anita said.

“No,” I said, feeling myself hurtling toward an empty space even as I continued to walk in an upright position, my son’s small hand in mine. “He never spoke that way before. He saw it.”

I wanted to ask Langston if the squirrels were bleeding, if any bones were broken, but I wasn’t sure he knew what blood was or if he wanted to stare at or recall broken bones. Not seeing the damage made me reluctant to add extra horror to what he had witnessed, yet not knowing these details made me worry that I was unwittingly glossing them over.

To Anita’s credit, though she is devoutly Christian, she did not talk about death, God or Heaven. Maybe, unlike me, she held onto the hope that Langston was making up a story.

As Anita took Langston on the slides and we sang songs on our favorite swing, the weight of our impending walk home pressed on me; I didn’t want Langston to see the dead squirrels again. Maybe, I thought, one of my neighbors had buried them while we were gone.

No such luck. As we crossed back over High Street, Langston stopped in the middle of the highway and screamed. Just one lone shriek, but so different from the usual cry over small childhood disappointments. And he couldn’t move. I panicked, worried that a car would make a corpse out of him next. “Get out of the street!” I shouted. “We have to get out of the street! Now!” I tugged him to the safety of the curb, all the while thinking, “He is staring down at the face of death, and you’re yelling at him to move. What kind of a world is this?”

When we got home, I asked my neighbors to check out the crime scene for me. “Yeah, two squirrels died,” they said. “It’s O.K., Langston. They’re just squirrels.” On the one hand, I couldn’t help but agree. I had never harbored a particular fondness for squirrels, and I was grateful that Langston’s first encounter with death, aside from bugs, was witnessing the end of two squirrels, not the death of a relative, friend or pet. On the other hand, “just” squirrels? All of the adults standing there valued people over squirrels; only the child truly mourned them. I grieved for all the insects I had killed, the meat I would continue to eat. Yet I couldn’t bury the squirrels myself. I did not have the courage to get that close to the decay.

The day passed more or less as expected—nap, playtime, dinner, bath—but it was peppered with death. Langston kept replaying the scenario, running a plastic toy squirrel over with his tractor. I cringed, worrying that by allowing him to run over the squirrel again and again, I was condoning the violent act. But I was too stunned and fascinated by this development to stop him.

The reenactments led to more questions. “What is dead?” Langston asked.

“The squirrels can’t move anymore.”

“Why did they die?”

“They didn’t know you are supposed to look both ways and listen before you cross the street, and a person in a car hit them.” Was this turning into too much of a cautionary tale?

“The squirrels will be fine soon, right?”

“No,” I said, “they’re dead. They won’t get up anymore.”

I am an agnostic or atheist, depending on the day. In West Virginia, where we lived, our community predominantly consisted of Baptists and Methodists. They would have told Langston that God had wanted this, or maybe even that the squirrels, having done nothing wrong, had gone to Heaven. At the very least, Anita might have ended the squirrels’ story with more than nothingness. I had been raised a Catholic but couldn’t remember how my parents had explained death to me as a small child. Had they ended our cat’s death with a trip to Heaven? As much as I didn’t believe such an ending was possible, I longed to give my son reassurance that it was all going to be O.K. somehow. Breaking my belief in death as an end would have been an act of betrayal on my part, but sticking to my simple story of nothing didn’t make me feel any better.

I emailed one of my high school English teachers, with whom I am still in touch fifteen years after I graduated and who remains one of my life and parenting inspirations. The subject of my email was “Explaining Death to a Very Young Person: a Parenting Qualification I Don’t Possess.” He wrote back with comforting words, reminding me that Langston’s first encounter “with the profound, the existential, and maybe even the ‘void,'” was not an easy concept to explain to such a young person. He recommended we watch an episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood as a possible way into the experience. I was flooded with relief at the chance to approach the subject again with more than just my fumbling words.

Langston and I watched the “death” episode together. In it, Mr. Rogers discovers that one of his fish has died. He removes the fish from the tank and places it in a separate container of water with extra salt, explaining that he has heard it is a strategy for reviving a very sick fish. When that strategy fails, he explains that the method didn’t work this time and that the fish is “dead,” and he carefully buries it in the yard.

Langston asked to watch the episode many times over in the coming months. It gave him a definition for “death” to which he would turn again and again. He ran over his toy squirrel a few more times and created a scenario in which his stuffed monkey died from an unexplained cause and then came back to life again. Because Fred Rogers’s website said playing about death was “necessary and appropriate,” I kept my misgivings to myself. But I wondered how he could really learn about death if the story had a happy ending and the monkey lived again?

Two months later, on a visit to my friend Soxna’s house in Maine, Langston fell in love with her chickens. He loved to watch Soxna care for the hens and let them out of their coop and to help her feed them chicken feed, meal worms and Japanese beetles.

A few days after our return from Maine, Soxna wrote to tell me that Buffy, one of the chickens, had died. She had wandered away from the flock and been eaten by a fox. “Don’t tell Langston,” she added. I knew that Soxna was trying to protect Langston’s feelings, but I seized on the opportunity to speak further with him about death, one he didn’t have to witness.

“Langston, remember Soxna’s chickens?” I asked him later that day.

“Yes.” Of course, he remembered. He talked about them incessantly, and his toy chickens were his favorite farm animals.

“One of them died. Buffy died.”

“How?”

“She walked away from the other chickens and a fox got her.”

“That’s not nice! Why did the fox get her?”

“He was hungry and needed the chicken to stay alive. We eat chickens sometimes to stay alive, too.”

He ignored the possibility that we weren’t any better than foxes. “The fox was bad. I don’t like foxes.”

Langston began a new play scenario. In it, his chickens walked together in a group. Then one chicken walked away and a plastic fox leaped out of his box of animals to attack it. “Run, Buffy! Run!” Langston shouted as the chicken clambered to safety. “She got away!”he told me triumphantly. “The chicken escaped from the fox!”

Langston tossed the toys to the floor and stood up. “Now I’ll be the fox,” Langston said, “and you be the chicken, Mommy!”

In a way, it was exactly what I deserved. Against my friend’s advice, I had alerted Langston to the chicken’s death. Now I was the chicken. The chase was pretty short because, when in pursuit, Langston easily outruns me. When he caught me, he made eating noises. Fortunately, the eating remained imaginary.

That night, while I lay beside him in bed, Langston asked, “What happens to you? Do you keep growing up like me?”

“Not exactly,” I said, “I guess I just get older.” I thought about the way our minds expand as they take in new information, and our emotions stretch as they envelop new experiences, but at the time, I wasn’t sure he would understand that kind of growth. Looking back, I wonder if I underestimated him.

“And then what?” Langston asked. “Do you become a kid again?”

“No,” I said vaguely. I didn’t want Langston to grapple with my eventual death just yet. Wait, I told myself. Wait until he explicitly asks whether you’ll die, and wait until he’s fully awake! Was that inability to face up to the possibility of my own death in front of my son wisdom or merely cowardice?

Day after day, Langston asked if Buffy was OK, needing me to remind him how she had wandered away from the others and had died. The toy chickens became the favorite toy, but Langston didn’t play any form of Fox and Chicken again; the fox had become so evil that it was banished to the depths of his toy chest where he couldn’t find it easily.

Later that month, I found out I was pregnant. I wanted to stop Langston from jumping and rough-housing with me, but I didn’t want to shoo him off with a vague explanation about not feeling well. So despite all the online advice against it, I told Langston he couldn’t jump on me because I was expecting a baby.

Nine days after the positive pregnancy test, I miscarried. As my cramps sharpened and my body removed those few errant cells, I worried about what to tell my son about the baby who was no longer coming.

Sure enough, he asked me how the baby was doing the next morning. “I’m not having a baby anymore,” I told him slowly.

“Why?”

I choked up. “The baby … died.” I wanted to sob. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you about a baby before it was formed enough.”

Langston climbed into my lap and gave me a hug. “Maybe you can make another one soon,” he said.

His childish optimism lightened me. It reminded me that mothering Langston teaches me as I go. I am learning that I don’t always need to end his narratives for him or even construct them. Rather, we will both participate in and observe each others stories for as long as we continue on this fortuitous journey together. Maybe the squirrels, Buffy, the chicken, and that almost-embryo would never be OK, but Langston was still young enough to end his stories—and mine—with the possibility of renewal.

Kristen Witucki earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first book, The Transcriber, is part of Gemmamedia’s Open Door series for adolescent emerging readers. Her essays have appeared on Brain, Child, Huffington Post, Literary Mama and the Momoir Project, among other publications. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and son. Learn more at http://www.kristenwitucki.com.

Photo: canstockphoto

Honoring Our Children’s Desires

Posted on January 19, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged death, Dianna Bonny, loss, loss of husband, suicide • Leave a comment

By Dianna Bonny

Roughly four hours after my husband’s death, I’m sitting in the county coroner’s office in a small, nondescript room. A friend and my 16-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are next to me and across the table is the coroner, who happens to be a young, attractive woman. I am having difficulty reconciling her appearance with the words coming out of her mouth because her beauty is in stark contrast to my preconceived notion of a Coroner’s appearance. She is explaining how my husband died.

Looking back, I don’t know why her looks mattered at all; perhaps my mind was more comfortable processing this trivial information than the devastation I faced. I even blurted out my thoughts, asking how she happened to choose this profession. She chuckled and said she would rather be dealing with people here in this condition than on the other end, before they got here. “It’s a crazy world out there,” she said, shaking her head.

We had gotten off to a rough start a few hours earlier when I called desperately trying to find out if my husband was here. I was refused information because the office believed they had already spoken with me. It turned out I had been impersonated by my husband’s mistress and, as a result, I had to prove I was me. This was difficult given the circumstances and my state of mind: only a few moments earlier, a police officer had pulled out of my driveway after confirming the news that my husband had taken his life.

I clearly remember the sense of yelling at the Coroner on the phone. It harkened from a primal place. I was outraged by this humiliating and preposterous situation, but I do not know the exact words I said.

The coroner greeted us when we arrived, effusive and gushing apologies for the mix up. My head began spinning as she methodically explained the details of my husband’s death. She was nearby working the scene of another death when she received the call so she was at our condo within fifteen minutes. Neighbors had heard the shot fired, so there was no disputing the exact time. She explained the state my husband was in when she found him, as well as her estimation of what happened.

Sitting across from her, I tried to stay present, but my mind wandered along like a curious child as she spoke, evoking vivid images of every detail she mentioned. My husband in his robe, lifeless on the deck of our condominium. The dining table, strewn with papers and bottles. Drops of blood on the white deck.

I was fixated on the neighbors who heard the shot. “Who were they?” I kept asking, but she didn’t have that information.

Slowly, she segued into the business matters of suicide, explaining that although she knew the cause of death, an autopsy had to be performed and a report filed with the county. She handed me brochures for support groups, burial and cremation options and, finally, directions for obtaining the death certificate.

“Do you have any questions?” she asked when she was finished. I had a million questions but I remained silent, knowing she wouldn’t be able to answer the one I desperately wanted to ask. A question that sparked fierce anger in me, making me want to lash out and break things and rant: “Why did he do this to his children?” I shook my head, and then she asked to speak to me privately.

My friend and children stepped outside the room and the coroner leaned in and looked into my eyes to share some of her personal wisdom about the journey I was now on.

“I wish I could tell you differently, but death by suicide can be very difficult for families. It tends to bring out the worst in people. Be gentle with yourself and let me know if I can help,” she said, holding my hand.

Her expression conveyed a compassion that made me profoundly sad for myself, and even more so for my children. I listened to the gentle whisper of her voice and couldn’t help but feel I was being indoctrinated into a secret society that I wanted no part of. She had relevant insight into what we were facing and shared one thing that was particularly enlightening: her encouragement to honor my children’s desire to see the body, if they so wished. One of my children had asked to see him as soon as we arrived, but the coroner had gently explained that it was impossible, due to procedure. I was taken aback by the idea, even somewhat repulsed, but let it sink in as a possibility.

I’d like to think that I would have considered this possibility regardless of her suggestion, but given the various forces that came into play in the post-suicide aftermath, I’m not sure I would have had the presence of mind to follow my instincts and intuition. I am forever thankful for her permission to do what was best for my family.

She explained that in a death by suicide, children often have difficulty believing that their loved one is actually dead. It doesn’t make any rational sense that someone who cared about them would actually choose to leave them behind, so they become lost in a maze of denial and disbelief. Seeing the body offers a concrete and definitive end they can grasp so the work toward healing can begin.

I mustered up the courage to ask my children if they wanted to see their father and four days later we stood in the waiting room of the crematorium. I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing so I went in first, on my own. I wanted to protect them and remember feeling I should bear the brunt of this experience; I did not want them to be further traumatized.

The room was a lonely, empty space that swallowed my courage. I sat in the back for a few moments gathering my thoughts and then approached his body with trepidation, half expecting him to come to life in the casket. Since the night in the coroner’s office, my anger had become diluted by sadness and confusion. There was no sign of my rage; rather I was a humbled and frightened mother in search of answers. I stood quietly next to my husband’s body, staring at the silent shell of a man who had once vividly occupied and dominated a quarter century of my life.

I spoke to him, naively asking for answers. “Why?” I said, over and over, willing him to respond. I didn’t understand then how perilous asking that question could be, nor did I grasp the fact that I was standing on the threshold of a very lonely journey that would yield very few concrete answers.

It became apparent to me that I hadn’t fully accepted the fact he was dead. His choice was so foreign to me that it didn’t, and couldn’t, feel real in my world. I understood what the coroner meant when she said that children often live in a state of suspended denial. I was in that state too.

I returned to the waiting room and my children and I seemed to take steps toward accepting their father was not coming back. I walked back into the room with them and let them take in the scene before them without comment. There was nervous laughter and one of them agreed that he did not look like himself. Thankfully, it was a quick reconciliation with the truth and we were on our way home soon after.

Later, as we drove home up the freeway, I had the sensation of floating, as though there was no safe place to land in my life. Gazing out the window, I couldn’t fathom how everything had changed so radically and irrevocably in just a matter of days. My mind circled endlessly around the thought that I was now a widow and the mother of three children who’d lost a father to suicide. What would become of us?

Mercifully, my mind landed on the most hopeful thing it could find that day, the simple gem offered by the coroner that night, to honor my children’s desires on this journey. I began cultivating and polishing this notion and it has continued to shimmer brilliantly throughout our journey, like a lighthouse on the shore during the bleakest of nights.

Dianna Bonny was inspired to create a better legacy for her children after her family’s life was derailed when her husband took his life. She is an advocate for those who, like herself, are navigating the silent aftermath of suicide. You can learn more about her work at www.livingonthefaultlines.com.

When Her Life Passed Through

Posted on January 12, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged Ann Tepperman, childbirth, death, family, home birth, loss, midwives, motherhood, mothering • Leave a comment

By Ann Tepperman

It’s been 485 days since my mother died.

Four hundred eighty-five days ago I sat next to her on her bed, the only sound in the room the breathing machine and her heavy, thick, watery breaths. Her body was gently propped up with pillows so that she could face the setting sun through her bedroom windows. Her eyes were open and wild and she could no longer move or talk. The blood cancer had seeped into every cell of her. It had won.

I held onto one of her limp hands with one hand; the other rested on my swollen, nine-month pregnant belly. Inside me, swimming in quiet bliss was the daughter who would never meet my mother, her Nonna, except perhaps as spirit floating through the veil into the other world. I recall my mother having two final breaths: the second to last was from this world and the last seemed to be her breathing in the atmosphere from the other. Then she stopped. Then she was gone. And she is gone forever.

We were guarding my mother’s body, sitting next to her until the men in the truck came to pick her up. They wrapped her in a white sheet, preparing her to be taken away, and it was then that I turned my tearstained face to my husband and in agony asked him to help them carry my mother away.

“Will the circle be unbroken by and by Lord by and by, there‘s another home awaitin‘, in the sky Lord in the sky…”

I watched my husband carry her body away in the most reverent and loving way. Even though we had been together for nine years and had (almost) two children together, at that moment we created a deep, inexpressible bond that carried us through this horrible tragedy and everything that was to come.

Three weeks after the death of my mom, my water broke. It was the middle of the night, and I was awoken by a surge of warm liquid pouring onto the bed from between my legs. We called the midwives and my husband began filling the birthing pool with water. Then we waited. And we waited, and waited. But labor did not come. So with a quiet, desperate longing to meet our baby, we retreated back to bed.

A few days later the midwives called. “We are coming over,” they said. “Today you are having your baby.” I scoffed. I was already past due, walking around with a broken bag of waters. I had decided this baby would stay put indefinitely. How could I possibly give birth without my mother?

When the midwives arrived, they handed me an herbal cocktail to induce labor. We sat together on the floor of my living room and I placed the tinctures in front of me. I closed my eyes and imagined opening up the space between the two worlds, a doorway I had locked, unknowingly trapping my daughter. And although fearful and reluctant, I took the herbs, practiced my hypnosis and waited. Slowly, after several doses and a forced inward focus, I began to feel the first twinges of labor.

I had been laboring for a few hours but my labor was inconsistent. I decided that I needed to be alone. I went upstairs, removed my clothing and sat on my bedroom floor. I began to sing. Slowly and quietly at first, the words of one of the oldest prayers from the Torah moved past my lips: “El na refa na la. Please God heal her. (Numbers, 12:13).” This small and powerful prayer was said by Moses to God after his sister Miriam had fallen ill. Like Moses, I was now surrendering to the most powerful force I could imagine. I, too, was asking for help and healing, and the surges of labor increased dramatically with every word of my heartfelt prayer.

Naked, on my hands and knees, my giant, pregnant belly brushed the white, wool carpet. I was gliding in circles, riding the long, strong surges of labor that arose from deep inside my being. I sang out louder and louder into the Universe, my voice embodied with full power and force.

Then time became surreal. I remember the midwives looking down at me from above. I remember the warm tub water. I remember stumbling deep into my husband’s compassionate eyes as I pushed and pushed and pushed. And just when I thought I could go on no longer, I gave one final push.

And she was born.

I had now stood at the gates of the death and birth of two of the most important people in my life.

I looked down at the baby in my arms. I had no idea who my daughter was. Up until then I had only been able to feel her through the veil of my own perceptions. I didn’t understand that the grief and suffering I had felt from losing my mother had been holding her back from entering fully into this world and into her own being.

It’s now been fifteen months since her birth. She’s talking and running, fiercely independent and full of warmth and compassion. I still grieve the way her birth transpired and often wonder if the loss of my mother and the emotional turmoil I suffered has left a mark on her. But just when I am doubting her strength, she shows me her spirit, her individuality and perseverance, and I am amazed. Independent of my life’s story, of all my grief, sadness, joys and losses, she is her own person and I just need to get out of her way so she can be born into herself and thrive.

Ann Tepperman has dedicated her life to raising the consciousness of others through her holistic psychotherapy practice and personal essays. She lives, loves, parents and meditates in Columbus Ohio. Learn more at www.anntepperman.com.

Photo by Scott Boruchov

Hawk Mountain

Posted on January 5, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged Campbell C. Hoffman, death, loss, nature, SIDS • Leave a comment

By Campbell C. Hoffman

If I look hard enough, I can make out the faint spring green underneath the still mostly gray tones of winter. Winter is slow to release its grip, and though it is now April we are just beginning to feel the reprieve. The trees have called us to them and we are answering, thankful to not be forgotten after a winter that was too long.

We drive up the winding forest road to Hawk Mountain, and the kids begin to recognize the place. This hike begins high in the mountains and the car does most of the climbing, making it a bit easier for those kid-legs while still giving the spacious views. My ears pop. We pull into the parking lot, not surprised to see it full. This is the first warm weekend; you can see the hibernation from winter is over.

Stepping out, I stretch my legs, tired and cramped from the travel. Mark releases the kids from the back seat and they bound out of the car, energetic to explore once again this mountain and these hiking trails.

Louisa died four weeks ago. That fact hasn’t left my mind since. Without warning, her four-and-a-half-month old body stopped breathing. Four weeks ago, I answered the phone on a normal Monday morning, and things have not been normal since. Then I flew miles in the sky, leaving my own children, crying most of the way at the distance between us, to grieve with family, to shake our fists together, and then to open them, releasing life into the winds.

Who is Louisa, you ask. I could map out my relationship here, tell you how she is my cousin Beth’s only daughter, making her my first cousin once removed. I could explain the bloodlines, draw out the family tree. I could justify how my relationship with Beth is special, how she was one of the first people to hold and touch my third born, when hers—Louisa—was still just an idea, a twinkle. I could write about my time living only miles away from Beth in the mountains of Colorado, and the sad facts of life that make it so we now live thousands of miles away. But, really, that doesn’t get at it at all. Here’s what you need to know: Louisa was, and is, part of my tribe. She died, tragically and abruptly, though peacefully, when she was four and a half months old, falling asleep for an early evening nap and never waking up again.

I’m here in the wilderness today with this ache in my heart. I’m desperate to receive some beauty from this wild.

At the trailhead, Grant, six years old and with a knack for details and a steel trap memory, reminds us all where to go. This way first to go to the bathroom; that way next to find the trail. He and Renee, his four-year-old sister, each carry a trail map, numbering out the many options for our adventure. Griffin, now two, has gone from a baby-hiker to a little-kid-hiker in the six months since we were last here. This means that instead of being happy to travel in a carrier on my back, he now wants to walk on his own. And who am I to stop him? For this reason, though, it means that we can’t head down the River of Rocks trail, with all its boulder scrabbling and tough climbs. No, today we’ll have to stick to the more populated Lookout trail, with its places to pop through the tree line onto the crest of the mountain and see out over the valley.

We’ve been hiking for about fifteen minutes, though it feels longer, filled with start and stop frustrations. Griffin is being particularly difficult, veering off trail for no other reason than to be chased back. He hasn’t been looking where he is going and has already nearly run into trees, rocks and other hikers. I’m slowly losing my patience and almost run into a rock. That’s when Grant calls out: “Hey, this is the lookout where we saw the snake last year.” I pick my head up to notice that I have stumbled my way to the next lookout, where Grant and Renee are waiting. Grant is pointing to the spot where last summer we watched a snake sunning on the rocks. He is right. He remembered.

When the permanency of most things in my life is questionable, and the delusions I’ve held about security have been pulled from under me, I’m spun in a way that makes it difficult to know what to trust. Being out on the trail, for me, is often about adventure. It’s about exploring a place, and exploring myself. But, as I’m learning now, standing on this place of remembering, it’s also about finding stability. It’s landing somewhere that is harder than I am, stiller than I am. More secure. It’s about returning, and remembering last year, the snake and the lookout, coming back to it again and finding it there still, almost unchanged.

I try picking Griffin up to help him through the rocks, but he will have none of it. “Me do it!” he says, swatting my hand away. I have no other option than to let him. Grant pulls out his binoculars and we sit for a moment, looking at the valley. It looks so different from the last time we were here. Last time, it was the end of summer and the valley was swollen and heavy, weighed down with thick green swaths of life. This time, the valley is gray, or light purple even. The trees have yet to grow their leaves and up close look spindly and strong, but in the mass of the valley they look haunting and ghostlike. It looks the way I feel inside, and I take comfort in this landscape that mimics mine.

Four and a half months ago, I was a fairly typical mother of three small children. Of course, I adored them, but I was bogged down with the daily frustrations. How hard is it to get your shoes on, anyway? I’d bark out orders, snapping at them when they needed help or couldn’t get it right. Then I’d be annoyed at myself for behaving this way. I had been rushing through the motions, checking things off lists, getting it all done, but I was missing the joy. Now, this act of mothering in the face of death has me feeling slightly ghostlike, too. I am haunted by the guilt for how I’ve mishandled these lives.

The beauty of the lookout and the valley is unmistakable, evident, but seems just beyond our grasp. We are off to a rough start. Grant complains that it is hot. Renee says she is tired. Or hungry. Griffin is like a drunk and rowdy college kid, albeit a very short one. The trail is crowded. The peace I was hoping to find seems out of reach.

We pull off to the side of the trail to regroup. Mark and I muscle Griffin onto my back. I dole out pretzels while Mark passes around the water bottle. Griffin is not happy about his loss of autonomy, but we quickly gain momentum and are soon lost in the rhythm of our steps and hypnotized by our surroundings. Griffin quiets down. We all do.

The terrain becomes rockier, more rugged, and I start paying more attention to my steps. The big rocks that had only punctuated this trail earlier become more consistent and the trail climbs higher, steeper. Our family’s chain of hands breaks as we each need our hands for balance. I reach out to grab a thin tree that leans over the trail and feel the bark worn smooth from countless other hikers doing the same thing. The movement of my hand is so slight, but somehow not insignificant when added to the layer upon layer of life that has happened here. How many other hikers have traveled this path? How many eager parents have watched kids revel in the glory of the mountains and the splendor of the snakes?

The sixth century monk St. Benedict reminded his students that they should live in such a way as to “Keep the reality of death always before [their] eyes.” I think of Louisa as I hike. I think of her family, who in their blinding grief, feel the dark edges of this reality. I think of how my life is small in the ways of the universe, tiny in the eyes of the sun or the shadow of this tree. I glance up and see Grant ahead of me, his strides growing confident and sturdier as we climb. I turn and see Mark behind me with Renee, weary from her fearless exploring, hoisted onto his shoulders. They are all so full of life. The blood pumps through their bodies, the neurons explode, rocket-ship-style, in their brains. Unpredictable, wild, beautiful. Alive, like the trees growing skyward, like the hawks catching the wind, all but a breath.

Louisa’s death has left me with little option than to keep death before my eyes. And I don’t like what I see—jagged scars, a void, abyss, darkness. Even the very act of living is a step into the scary world, a world where babies die and siblings are lost. With this reminder of mortality, my heart hardens at the prospect of loss, a protective shell against the death of my own children.

As I hike this trail, I keep my eyes a few steps ahead, looking for the best place to plant my feet. I search out the easy path. My feet inevitably find the worn spot where hikers before me have smoothed this rock. This solid rock, concrete and unyielding in a way that my psyche and heart may try to imitate, has been worn down, cut into by the years of life it has witnessed. Even this rock is not immune to scarring, or softening. Maybe I have a choice as to how to let Louisa’s life and death into my heart. I have to allow myself to be both scarred and softened, too.

I, too, am marking this place. My footprints wear down the dirt and the rocks, keep the vegetation at bay. I am marking these people—my husband, my kids. I’m leaving traces on everything I touch, on my landscape, on the environment of my life. And it is marking me. Insignificant in the scope of the universe, nonetheless entirely significant in the scope of a single life.

The history of this terrain is deeper and longer than I can imagine, with many, many generations having lived in this land. And among them, mothers who have lost babies. We are not unique in our loss and suffering. These trees have witnessed this grief. At home in my suburban community, it is easy to pretend that we have tamed the wild. I see our gardens, made neatly in square-foot blocks, perhaps arranged by height or color. I see our lawn, sprouting with grasses that are probably not even native to our area. Being in that space, I am lulled into the false notion that I am in control of these wild things. Louisa’s death has given any sense of control I have a blow to the gut. I wonder now if we have pushed away the wild in order to bolster our sense of security, to seek immunity from this loss.

At the top of the mountain we sit with other hikers watching the raptors dancing on the wind. I look out at the crest line of the mountain as it curves off to the left and back up again, almost a mirror image of where we sit. There is a trail that follows that line, eventually connecting to the Appalachian Trail. Our trail feels like a tributary to a greater river of trails, stories coming together in a vast history of adventure. A gust of strong wind blows up at us, a brief respite from the unexpected warmth of the sun. The hawks balance in it, tipping their wings slightly to catch the stream. They remind me of the kids, in their wildness and grace, and I want to know: how can we each tip our wings, to catch the wind and balance magnificently in the gusts?

Together, we sit and watch wordlessly. After a while, I catch Mark’s eye, and nod. He steps back from the ledge and together we usher kids back towards the trees.

We choose a different path back down the mountain, this trail a bit more meandering, less steep. Finishing one descent, I turn a corner and stand in front of the flat face of a giant rock, looming twenty feet into the air. This rock is so unique, unmistakable. I call out to Mark and the kids and tell the story, again, of the time on this very trail, more than a dozen years ago, when Mark and I tried, unsuccessfully, to outrun a torrential thunderstorm. It’s one of our favorite family stories, a tale of being young and in love, but in telling it this time I see that it’s also about innocence The kids have heard this story before but here, at this very rock, the past and the present collide and our story becomes part of our children’s history. This is the stability that I have been seeking. I can come back to this place, retell our adventures, consider the change in landscape and mark the growth in time.

With the final steps of the trail in front of me, I let myself, for a moment, imagine that Beth and I have swapped places—that instead of being the one to answer the phone that morning, I was the one making the call. What if her grief was mine? In any moment there is nothing to say that it won’t be. Without the awareness of the absolute fragility of it all, I risk not receiving this moment for what it is: a gift. Can I see the miracle in peanut butter sandwiches eaten at the crest of the mountain? Sometimes it’s easy to see, when my heart feels like it’s floating above my body, and I’m buoyed by my blessings. Other times, it’s harder to sustain. I am being softened, harsh edges of frustration and impatience filed down by the wild gifts of time and life.

Sweaty and dirty, we make it back to the car. The kids climb in the way-back, kicking off shoes and digging around for water bottles. Soon, the highway hums under our tires, and I turn up the music. We are on our way home.

Campbell C. Hoffman can be found with her carpenter-husband on a trail in Southeast Pennsylvania, encouraging (read: begging) her three kids to keep hiking. When she is not hiking, she is on another adventure not altogether different: motherhood. She writes about it at tumbledweeds.wordpress.com and can be found on Twitter @tumbledweeds.

A Broken Ornament

Posted on December 22, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged Christmas, death, Ginny Auer, holidays, loss, ornament, widow • Leave a comment

By Ginny Auer

“I don’t want to go to Nan and Pop’s for Christmas,” Tess said as I sat at the computer making plane reservations. She said it with conviction, her arms crossed and her eyes peering directly into mine.

I tried to put my arm around my daughter to bring her closer. Tess pulled away and plopped down on a chair out of my reach. “I don’t want us to be alone on Christmas day,” I whispered.

“We won’t be alone!” Tess snapped. “You and I will be together! Paul can come too.”

“Paul will be with his family.” Paul was my husband Troy’s best friend and Tess’s godfather. This would be our first Christmas without Troy, who had died of appendix cancer eight months earlier. Four months after Troy died I had had hip surgery. Only 45, I felt 85. I knew I was completely incapable of managing the holiday alone.

Tess ran to her room crying. I followed and sat on the bed beside her. I stroked her hair; she jerked away.

“How about a compromise?”

“What’s a compromise?” Tess said looking up at me from underneath her bangs, her eyes wet.

“We’ll have two Christmases. We can have our regular gingerbread party and winter party at the Science museum and then open presents from Dad’s side of the family before we get on the plane to go to Nan and Pop’s house. Dealio?”

“Dealio,” Tess said quietly. “But I still don’t want to go,” she called as I walked out of the room. Only seven, Tess always had the last word.

The first week of December, Tess and I drove our 12-year-old orange Ford Explorer Sport up the winding road to the Christmas tree farm we always went to. I heard Troy’s voice in my head. “You’re a great mom. You can do this.” I argued with him. “I know I CAN, but I don’t want to! Not without you.” His voice was soothing as he answered, “I know you don’t want to, but Tess needs you. Be there for her.”

High school boys wearing torn jeans and flannel shirts rode around the property on ATVs. A young woman in stylish jeans and impeccable make-up strapped two small children into the back seat of a Suburban while her husband paid.

“Honey, get me a hot chocolate?” she called to him.

“I found one!” Tess danced around a 15-foot Noble Fir. “This is the one we’re getting! This is the one we’re getting!”

“Seriously Tess?” I rolled my eyes at her. “Where do you think we are going to put a tree that big?”

“We’ll just cut the top off,” she said.

We walked through the muddy ruts made by the ATVs. I found a blue spruce tree that was just the right height with a nice shape and good spacing for ornaments. “How about this one?”

“Oooo, no!” She said. “I don’t like that one. It’s ugly!”

We spent another hour tromping through every row of trees on the 10-acre lot, only to go back to the first row. We settled on a 6-foot noble fir. Tess was happy because it wasn’t too “bushy.” Even though I didn’t like it, I was ready to compromise. Troy always cut the tree down himself. Last year Tess “helped.” Now here I was, waving to a strapping teen with acne and blond shaggy hair. He cut the tree down, wrestled it onto the back of the ATV and said he would meet us at the car.

When we got home, I untied the tree and dragged it inside. The pine needles clung to my clothes and made my arms itch. My insides felt like Jell-O as I thought of spiders crawling out of the tree and onto my neck as I lugged it inside. “Damn it, Troy,” I screamed silently. “I need you.”

While Tess settled herself on the couch with cookies and a book, I unearthed the tubs of holiday ornaments in the storage shed. I brought the box full of tinsel, garlands and stockings over to Tess so she could go through it while I looked through the ornaments in the dining room.

I unwrapped a red glass ball with a Santa Claus on one side and 1991 on the other. And then I couldn’t breathe. Troy and I had bought it to commemorate our first Christmas together. Next I found the dozens of purple glass ornaments Troy and I had bought when we first moved to Oregon. We felt so hip back then, decorating an old aluminum tree we got from my parents with purple balls and purple garland.

Troy always sat back and told me where ornaments were needed while I hung them on the tree. We were a team. He had the long view and I was up close. I heard Tess laughing in the other room as she wound herself up in garland dancing to Mariah Carey’s All I want for Christmas is You. I pulled out the construction paper ornament Tess had made in kindergarten and took it to show to her. She followed me back into the dining room.

“Where’s the tree topper? I want to put the tree topper on like Dad and I used to do.”

The tree topper: a simple glass ornament with a red ball shape at the bottom and a silver spire at the top. It probably cost all of $5, but each year Troy would pick Tess up in his arms, hold her up to the top of the tree and help her put the topper on. Afterward, he would give her a big hug and a kiss. I would always take a picture of them putting this finishing touch on the tree.

But in my haste to clean up during Troy’s last Christmas, I had not paid attention to how I had packed it away. I could already see the damage. The tree topper was crushed to pieces. My heart sunk into my stomach. I pushed back tears.

Before I could gather my thoughts, Tess bounded over to me. “Look what I fou…” Then she saw the tree topper and stopped in her tracks. She looked at me with a hurt I hadn’t seen in her eyes since I had told her of Troy’s death. We hugged each other and tears streamed down both our faces.

Tess ran to her room and huddled in the corner of the bed clutching her favorite stuffed dog. I stood in the dining room stunned, berating myself for having been so careless. Troy would’ve taken the time to pack the ornaments carefully. But Troy had been dying of appendix cancer. I was undone.

Maybe Paul could do something. I pulled out a sheet of construction paper from Tess’s art cabinet and lay out the pieces of the broken tree topper. The spire and the bottom round half were fairly intact. It was the middle of the ball that was in shattered bits.

I took a picture with my phone and sent it to Paul.

Paul makes props for a prominent regional theater company and can fix almost anything. He texted me back that he would be off work in an hour.

That hour seemed interminable. Finally Paul, 5′ 5″ tall, with a round face, short hair, and wearing shorts and a T-shirt in the middle of winter, arrived with a ball from the prop shop. He had painted it red to match the color of the original ornament. He held it out to Tess.

“I don’t like the red,” she said.

“We can change the color. I just painted it red because that’s the color it was.”

“I don’t want it to be any color,” Tess retorted.

“Go get the container of gesso in your dad’s studio and we can put that on the ball instead,” Paul said. Troy used gesso to prepare and prime his paintings, and Tess and Paul would use it to glue the pieces from the broken ornament onto the new ball.

Paul set Tess to work painting gesso onto the ball. I watched as they huddled together at the kitchen table, a team. Tess was laughing as she painted.

“Put that piece there!” Tess ordered Paul. “And that one needs to go there!” She looked so confident. She knew exactly where each piece should go. They worked together for nearly an hour painting and gluing. Finally it was done. The topper had been recreated. The silver spire, still intact, was glued to the top with all of the red broken bits glued like a mosaic to a white ball in the center.

It wasn’t the same, but it was differently beautiful.

“Mom,” Tess surveyed her work. “This is a good compromise.”

My daughter spent the next afternoon making a paper angel to sit on top of the spire of the tree topper. That night, I lifted her up to the top of the Christmas tree so she could put the angel on the tree topper. I felt Troy’s presence in the room. He was smiling at me. Paul snapped a photo of just the two of us.

Ginny Auer is a widow and a mother. Following her husband’s death in 2012, she founded livehuge.org, an inspirational website designed to celebrate every day. She is also in the process of writing a memoir.

Grandma’s Secret

Posted on September 2, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged daughter, death, depression, grandmother, grandmothers, illness, Kate Washington, manic, manic depression, mental illness, mother, mother and daughter, suicide • 1 Comment

by Kate Washington

When she was three, my daughter Lucy was interested in many things: fairies, swimming, “Call Me Maybe,” ice cream, the alphabet, families, death. The last two interests led her to asking questions about my mother, who died when Lucy was a baby.

“Mama,” she said, “Who is your mama?” She asked this fairly often, since learning that Grandpa is my father but his wife is not my mother. My mother was missing.

“My mama was Maga,” I said, using the name Lucy’s older sister Nora invented when she couldn’t pronounce Grandma. “You’ve seen pictures.”

“Your mama is dead?”

“Yes.”

“Why is she dead?”

I sighed. “She was sick and her body couldn’t keep working and she died,” I answered, leaving out the fact that my mother’s death was a suicide, by an overdose of antidepressants and blood-pressure medication.

“Because she needed more air in her body?”

“Yes, kind of.”

“Because she drowned in the deep ocean?”

“No, Maga didn’t drown.”

“Because she was eaten by sharks?”

“No, she wasn’t eaten by sharks.”

I think about an alternate reality in which my mother was eaten by sharks. Let’s just say it would not have been very likely to happen. My mother wasn’t the adventure-sports type; she did aerobics. She got seasick easily and didn’t like getting her hair wet in the pool, so it’s hard to picture a shark-infested venue that would have appealed to her. But, for a moment, I imagine my quiet, stay-at-home mother skimming the waves on a catamaran or yacht with wind-filled sails, scuba diving or snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef, surfing off of Santa Cruz, or diving in a shark cage and attracting the attention of a rogue Great White.

It’s not a very pleasant scenario. The shark’s muscled gleam thrashing in the water, its gaping prehistoric maws, those many layers of razor-sharp teeth clamping down. That shit must hurt. The last five or ten or twenty minutes of a life that ends in getting eaten by a shark must really, truly be terrible. But the time leading up to it? That sounds pretty awesome, actually, full of the freedom of the waves and the smell of salt air and brilliant sunshine on tanned skin and the lithe loose feeling of a body moving in the water. If my mom had been living a salty oceanic life, surfing a sunny blue wave or sailing the high seas, surely she would not have suffered the kind of gray dark depression that led her to wish to die peacefully, in her bed, after a hopeless muddy season of misery.

My mother was never one to surf a wave, to glide easily over a crash and break of current and foam. She lived in the wave, wiped out hard; her moods crested and crashed and she was pounded into the sand and finally it got to be enough. She didn’t need a shark to eat her alive; her moods did that for her.

I couldn’t give Lucy that answer, not then. I couldn’t, at first, bring myself to tell her that her grandma had taken medicine that killed her. Someday, I thought, I would tell both my girls about that, but I couldn’t find the words that day.

Nora, who was four when my mother died, had also asked how it had happened when I told her of her beloved grandmother’s death. I was in shock then, the morning after the police found my mother’s body, and I simply said that Maga’s body was sick and stopped working.

Since then, I’ve known I would wait to tell my girls the whole truth. But the time had come, after Lucy’s questions started, I began to wonder if my feeling that a small child can’t handle this information wasn’t merely a product of my own preconceptions about suicide; kids don’t know there’s a stigma attached to it, after all.

I thought that death, the bare fact of it, was hard enough for a kid to understand; further explaining that someone might want to die, and discussing mental illness, felt like too much. But I believe in telling the truth to my kids, hard as it might be. Time, and therapy, had helped me to face up to the facts of my mother’s death and come to a fuller, less guilty understanding of it. I worried that as my kids grew—Nora was seven by then—they were apt to overhear, and possibly misconstrue, adult conversations. I didn’t want them to overhear whispers and conclude either that their grandmother had done something to be ashamed of rather than to grieve, or that we don’t talk about mental illness or acknowledge its reality.

Explaining, however, is easier said than done. As Lucy’s line of questioning shows, death makes sense to children only in the most extreme terms: If a person is eaten by sharks, ripped to shreds by a toothy prehistoric fish, even a three-year-old can understand that that person is not going to come back ready to play some more. Regular, ordinary death, the kind that happens every day, doesn’t make sense: how could a person lie down in their bed one night and then just not be the next morning? The body hasn’t disappeared, but something has ineffably changed. Plenty of grown-ups struggle with that notion too, so explaining it to a kid is extra difficult. Layer on the idea that a person would choose to make that happen, and the explanation borders on unbelievable.

Especially if it’s your grandma. My mother loved Nora so much that her adoration sometimes seemed excessive. Every time she saw her, she wanted to be baking cookies or trick-or-treating or doing something extra-special. As a result, we have lots and lots of pictures of my mother doing grandmotherly things with Nora. There are only two pictures of her with Lucy, though: by the time Lucy was born, my mother was deep in her final illness, manic and difficult, and we weren’t spending a lot of time together.

The warm, cuddly cultural space occupied by the notion of a cookie-baking grandmother is about as far from the idea of suicide as one could imagine. Grandmas are supposed to stick around being sweet throughout one’s childhood, right? Sometimes, on top of all the other feelings I have about my mom’s death, I feel angry that my kids have been cheated out of something special, the chance to have a close relationship with a local grandmother. I never expected to live in the same city as my mother; my husband happened to get a tenure-track job in the city my mother moved to after I left my hometown. It felt like a bit of strange serendipity, when we might have moved anywhere. In reality, though, our relationship was not easy or smooth, so my idyllic vision of three generations peacefully baking together is really a wistful one, but still, I wish my children could have had that.

Now, however, she isn’t here, and my children deserved to know why. My mother’s suicide is part of their medical history, much as it’s part of my own. Suicides often run in families. The thought of my girls, my happy, sunny, beautiful daughters, ending their lives terrifies me so much I can hardly bear to write the words. Fear of that possibility kept me from being more honest with them.

Lucy is now five. Several months ago, she asked again how her grandmother died, and I took a deep breath. “She took too much of her medicine,” I said. “And even though medicine can help you, too much medicine can make your body sick and can make you die.”

Lucy looked at me, unfazed, and came back with a five-year-old’s most frequent question: “Why?”

“She took too much medicine on purpose,” I answered. “She had a sickness in her mind that made her very sad and she couldn’t get better.”

Lucy just nodded; I asked if she had any more questions, and she said no. A few follow-ups have popped up, but for the most part she has taken the information in stride. (I’ve also given a similar, though slightly more in-depth, explanation to her older sister.) Occasionally, if a discussion of medicine or doctors comes up, she will matter-of-factly mention that Maga died from taking too much of her medicine. Overall, I have found that telling my girls the truth has been a relief.

I don’t think answering their questions—which will inevitably get thornier as they grow older and gain more understanding—will ever be easy. But by having a fully honest conversation, I hope I’m taking the terror out of the facts of my mother’s death. The fact of her suicide and its roots in her depression won’t be shameful secrets but just the truth. And both my daughters and I can, I hope, come to a fuller understanding that the sharks that ate my mother were all in her mind.

Kate Washington is a writer based in Sacramento, California. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, Yoga Journal, Sunset, and the Bellingham Review, and she is a contributing writer at Sactown Magazine. She is a co-founder of Roan Press, a small nonprofit literary press.

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Max’s Eyes

Posted on July 14, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged blue eyes, death, eyes, loss, Lynn Shattuck, mothering, mothers, sibling loss, siblings • 9 Comments

By Lynn Shattuck

“Does your husband have blue eyes?” the cashier at the grocery store asks, her brown eyes peering into my equally dark ones.

“Nope, his are hazel,” I say. I paw around in my coat pocket, my fingers reaching for the smooth, thin debit card within. I stifle the urge to make a joke about the milk man being the real father of my child.

“He has such beautiful blue eyes,” the cashier says. She looks at my five-year-old son Max, who is half-hiding behind me, deciding whether to peek out and flash his ridiculously charming smile.

“Does anyone in your family have blue eyes?” she asks.

I pause for a millisecond.

“His uncle does.” Did.

“Okay,” she says, loading my goat cheese into the bag. Mystery solved.

* * *

When Max was born his eyes were a steely blue, as most babies’ eyes are at first. We all waited for them to turn hazel or even brown.

“I’m pretty sure they’re going to turn brown,” my mom said.

“They’re going to be green—I saw a little ring of green around his pupil,” said my husband Scott.

Being an olive-skinned, dark eyed gal, I expected that the fetus who had wreaked havoc on my body for nine months would be a dark little bundle, the male version of me. When my husband handed Max to me for the first time, after three nights of false labor and one night of very real labor, I stared at my new baby. My first thought was that he looked so utterly foreign. The crown of his head was stretched into an enormous cone from all the hours he’d spent trapped in my birth canal. His pale little face and eyelids were swollen, making him cockeyed.

He looked so other, so un-mine.

A beautiful photo of my husband Scott and Max peering into each other’s eyes is perched on our mantle. Max looks like an ancient soul, and Scott looks mesmerized and delighted. “What I was really thinking was, God, all those ugly baby jokes and now I have one,” he admits later.

Swollen and ocean-eyed, coned and tiny, Max looked alien.

With time, he looked more and more familiar.

* * *

“Haha!” Max shouted when he was two, pointing to a picture of my little brother when he was about the same age. It was the kind of ‘standing at the window’ shout Max favored at that age, as if he was an old man railing on about the whippersnappers in the neighborhood. Kids today, he seemed to be hollering.

I followed his gaze and was once again struck by the similarities between Max and my younger brother, Will. Like Max, Will had big blue eyes that seemed to have come from a blip in the gene pool—like me and Scott, my mom has brown eyes, my dad hazel.

“Yeah, that’s your uncle,” I said, trying to keep an even voice. Max smiled at the photo. I took a deep breath. It’s a beautiful photo: my gap-toothed brother, little wisps of hair curling on his forehead as he gazed, smiling at something in his sightline. What Max doesn’t know is that his uncle Will died of a combination of heroin and alcohol at the age of 21. I kissed Max’s forehead, inhaling the earth scent of his skin. I brushed a tendril of hair—medium brown and pin straight—out of his eyes. For a second, I considered the thought that something similar could happen to him, especially given the genetic plague of alcoholism that burns through his bloodlines. I choked on the thought and pushed it aside—or at least as aside as it could go while the picture of my baby brother smiling, unaware of his future, remained visible.

* * *

Fifteen years ago, my phone rang and everything changed.

My mother’s words slipped through the phone: police officer, brother, heroin. Coroner. The words rumbled in my head, black and stilted, colliding into each other. My brain tried to comprehend. “No, no, no,” I said, a mantra. As if I said it enough times, my words could somehow stop what had already happened, what could not be stopped.

* * *

Me, almost three. An only child all this time, forever. The dark comforter of my mom and dad’s bed cool against my legs, bare beneath my nightgown. “Do you want to feel your little brother?” my mom asked. I pressed my palm to her growing stomach, tentatively. Brother. The word sounded wild, yet solid. “Brother.” I tried it on for size. And sister. “Sister” felt like a fur coat, warm and soft and sure. I pressed my palm to her stomach and I felt a small fist or a foot connect with my hand. The orb of her belly where I too had grown, shifted beneath my hand. Everything shifted, or at least it would, very, very soon.

* * *

After my brother’s death, I moved from Maine back to my childhood home in Alaska to live with my parents. I was 24 and blindsided. Flowers crowded our home, turning the air sickly sweet. A box arrived with my brother’s ashes. I sat on the porch and smoked. I watched clouds smudge across the sky and waited for a sign. For the first three months, I slept in bed with my parents like a scared toddler to chase away the dark thoughts that came with nighttime. It was just us three again curled in the dark, and I hated it.

I wrote letters to my dead little brother, and I went to grief groups. I watched my parents suffer and I thought not only is my brother gone, my parents are too. I mourned that the person that should’ve been with me the longest in this life wouldn’t.

“You’ll have good things in your life,” my mom said one day. “You’ll have your own family someday.” I knew she was right. But at 24, I couldn’t picture that someday family. I could only see what was gone.

* * *

I first noticed the resemblance between Max and my brother when Max was several weeks old. He was nursing and I studied him as his eyes darted back and forth, intense with concentration. His almond-shaped, Atlantic-blue eyes were the first part of his face to smile. He looks like Will, I thought. It unnerved me.

When we were kids, people used to bend down to my brother and ask, “Where did you get those big blue eyes?” They’d look from my mom to me, from me to my brother, trying to reconcile the dark hair, eyes and skin that my mom and I had with my brother’s butter-toned hair and big turquoise eyes.

“From God,” he once answered, elevating charming to a whole new level.

Max’s eyes are wide and luminous. A little tease of green still swirls around his pupils. When he’s observing the world, his eyes are big and as round as a quarter. When he’s sad, they crumple and go navy. When he’s happy, they glitter and take on an almost feline shape.

When Max was about six months old, I briefly considered whether he could be the reincarnated spirit of my dead brother. “Will?” I whispered first, then louder. The first months of parenthood were already so otherworldly, it didn’t seem like that much of a stretch. Max kept playing though—he didn’t turn to me with knowing eyes and a wink.

I asked him again when he was a little older, too.

“Do you remember Booger from Revenge of the Nerds?” I’d been asking Scott for some reason.

“Yeah!” Max exclaimed. Scott and I looked at each other and our 21 month-old offspring and started laughing.

“Are you my brother reincarnated?” I asked Max.

“Yeah!” he shouted, just as excited. My eyes widened. I held my breath and thought for a moment.

“Do your toes smell like sour pickles?”

“Yeah!!!”

“Phew,” I exhaled.

And yet, I still sometimes wonder. At five, Max’s temperament resembles my brother’s teenage moodiness. He also inherited my brother’s passion for music. When Max is tossing his body around to “Party Rock Anthem” or thrashing on his guitar while singing “Back in Black,” I’m struck with the image of my brother attacking his own electric guitar, belting out a punk version of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.”

And in my dreams, the two sometimes swim together. “Will!” I call out, then realize it’s Max. “Maxie!” I say, and my brother, once again, disappears.

* * *

One of the hardest, most simple parts of grief is the pure and utter goneness of the one who is lost. My brother was here… where is he now? I know his body was scorched and blazed into soft grey sand. We left a sprinkle at a white beach in New Jersey, and folded handfuls into the damp moss beneath the thick pine trees at our old house in Alaska. But how could he just be gone when he was so, so here before? I am speaking of his spirit, the piece of us that is more than our fumbling, fragile bodies. The piece that brings us dreamscapes that later thud into our waking life, the piece that picks up the slick, cool phone to call a friend just as they are calling us, the piece that is utterly certain we are carrying a little boy fetus long before our eyes rest upon the white glow of bones on the ultrasound, the curves and shadows blooming deep within.

Similarly, I find myself asking Max, sometimes out loud, and sometimes in a whispered string of words that brushes my throat, “Where were you?” Because just as my brother is so, so gone—Max feels so, so here. So vivid, so distinct, that I can’t imagine that the sum of him used to lie split and dormant, half within me, half within Scott, waiting quietly among billions of other possibilities. That he is all split cells and coincidence, a random card plucked from our genetic deck.

When Max was not quite five, Scott asked him why he picked us to be his parents.

“There was no one else left,” he said plainly. We laughed, not caring so much how he had gotten here – just glad that he had.

Max brings great joy to my parents. We visit often and my dad, Max’s Papa, lets Max roughhouse with him. Max runs and lunges at my dad, and they both topple over, laughing. My mom, whom Max has coined, ‘Baba,’ hands over her iPad, fresh mango and popcorn to Max, along with most anything else he asks for. When we leave to go home, their knees ache, but they say the pain is worth it. I know that Max doesn’t replace my brother—no one could. But I like to think that he eclipses the pain of their loss a little bit.

Each night when I used to nurse Max before bedtime, I’d watch his lovely eyes and wonder what he was thinking as another day wound down. Sometimes he would look up at me, a smile curving into his mouth and eyes. I held him close and silently asked for help, from the universe, from Will, from whomever would listen. Keep him safe, keep him healthy, keep him happy. I watched his eyes, near-navy in the dim room, sweet slow songs wrapping around us. Keep him here.

Though we’ve been done nursing for three years now, the prayers remain the same. I repeat them in my mind and in whispers that gather around his bedroom door. With a mother’s force and a sister’s ache, I pour my deepest wishes into small words. Let him outlive us. Let him have a long and lovely life.

Let him stay.

As a mom of two young children, Lynn Shattuck attempts to balance diapers and laptops, yoga and running, and tucks as much writing as she can into the remaining nooks and crannies of her life. Besides writing for her blog, http://thelightwillfindyou.com, she is a featured columnist at the elephant journal and blogs for Huffington Post. Find her on Facebook.

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What The Living Do

Posted on June 30, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Featured Content, Slider Content • Tagged babies, child loss, children, death, Emily Rapp, emotions, grief, loss, motherhood, mothering, pregnancy, Tay-Sachs disease • 6 Comments

By Emily Rapp

“Is this your first baby?” Any woman who is visibly pregnant has likely been asked this question by strangers in the grocery store line, other expecting women at the doctor’s office, random passersby in the street.

Pregnant women are often asked deeply personal questions in public: if this is our first child; how far along in our pregnancies we are; if we’re having a boy or a girl; if we have a name picked out. However indelicate these questions might seem, to some degree they make sense. Pregnant bodies are a visible symbol of life andgrowth. People like to engage with women who are expecting to give birth to another human being, which is itself a way of altering the progress of time, of literally changing the world by bringing into it a new life and new possibilities.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I loved answering these questions. As a woman with an artificial leg, I have had a problematic relationship with my body for most of my life, and was accustomed to fielding questions like “what happened to you?” I was well acquainted with our culture’s prurient interest in bodies that are considered “different” or “strange” or “wrong.” When I was pregnant with my son, I felt that my body was doing something right and good in the world; “what happened to me” was no longer an incident of limb loss that required an in-depth explanation. Instead, I was about to be amother. I finally felt normal.

I am pregnant now with my second child and how to fieldthese questions from strangers has become much more complicated since the birth, and then the death, of my first child. My son Ronan died of Tay-Sachs disease in February of 2013 when he was nearly three years old. Tay-Sachs is an always fatal, rare genetic condition that robbed him of all his physical faculties—hearing, sight, movement, and eventually the ability to swallow and process food. Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old, when he was happy and smiling and seemed “normal,” yet he had failed to meet any of his developmental milestones. Some of my most heartbreaking memories are trips to the doctor’s office where a nurse took his pulse with a tiny finger thermometer as he giggled and baby-flirted with her. Many times I watched that nurse’s eyes fill with tears, because here was a doomed child, a sweet baby with red-gold hair and long, pale eyelashes and chubby wrists and ankles who would not live to be a toddler, and whose life would unravel in a devastating way. It is terrible to look at your child and think he will suffer and then he will die.

“How old is he?” people would ask me when I walked Ronan in his stroller on the walking path near my house in Santa Fe before he began to physically manifest the signs of his decline. When I told them they might say, “Oh, it goes so fast,” or “You’ve got so much to look forward to,” and “he’ll be walking and talking soon,” and I would wheel Ronan home, weeping and furious with a horrible raging sadness about the wrenching and ridiculous unfairness of the situation. Sometimes I told the truth. I’d say that he was dying, that he would never talk or walk, and brace myself for the response, if only because I wasn’t ashamed of my son and didn’t want to act as if I were hiding anything. This didn’t matter to Ronan—his cognitive abilities were stalled at a six-month-level before they deteriorated—but it mattered to me. At home I would pluck him from the stroller and hold him and cry and wonder why this was happening to me, how it could possibly be happening to such a sweet and innocent boy. The whole order of the world was reversed—babies dying while the parents lived on.

Losing a child is every parent’s worst nightmare, but to be entirely helpless as an unstoppable, incurable disease takes a child from you, to be told by a doctor “this child will die,” and then to witness the slow fade of personality and then the body, is a situation that on many days I did not think I would—or wanted to—survive. And yet I did.

My desire to have another child emerged just after Ronan was diagnosed. I wanted to plan for another baby right away. My husband, my supportive parents, many well-meaning friends all questioned this course of action. My therapist, too, cautioned me about having another baby. She warned me about the dangers of having a “replacement child.” I found and still find the idea of a replacement child odious and horrifying although it is a documented term. No child is replaceable. A child is not a couch or a job or a great spot for your next vacation. I was 36 when Ronan was diagnosed. I did not have the resources for the complex fertility treatments that my husband and I would have needed to pursue to make sure that our next child was not affected with Tay-Sachs (both parents must be carriers for Tay-Sachs to manifest, andthere’s a 1 in 4 chance that a child will have the disease when this is the case). When I met with the fertility doctor he cautioned me that the next two years were crucial if I wanted to have another baby. The literature I read online and in magazines assured me that it would soon be too late for me to get pregnant. I was facing the combined loss of my child and my newly formed maternal identity—the future seemed to me a skeletal, miserable existence, a shattered and frightening world.

The only people who encouraged me to have another child in short course were the mothers of other children with Tay-Sachs disease, who understood perfectly. Of course you want to feel life again, one mother told me. I began to argue with my therapist that clinical terms like “radical acceptance” of my difficult situation and “replacement child” were entirely divorced from real-life situations. I wanted another child, in part, to anchor me to the world, to the after life of living without my son, butI never thought a new child wouldreplace him. I would have to live through what happened to him, but did I ever have to fully accept it? What would that look like? Of course these were questions that nobody could or ever will answer.

Although my relationship with Ronan’s father did not continue, we parented and cared for our child until his death. When I look back on those two-and-a-half years of Ronan’s care—the seizures and suction machines and medications and finally, a feeding tube through his nose, it seems thunderous and unimaginable. And yet my imagination conjures up these images with ease and I remember and mourn him all over again. Ronan’s absence in my life is present to me—with varying degrees of force and sadness—every day, and this will be true for the rest of my life. The memory of what was lost becomes its own reality and then lingers. This is true of the leg I lost and it is true of anything precious that is taken from us, any loss that changes our lives on such an epic scale. I don’t believe that people “recover” from loss; we can only hope to absorb it in a way that still allows for daily moments of happiness. Even this is sometimes a struggle, but it is one worth engaging in. We press on. We continue to seek life and love and meaningful experiences. Otherwise, what are we doing?

I met Kent, my current partner, aftermy husband and I had already separated and decided to divorce, putting an end (I assumed) to my hopes of having another baby. At this time, Ronan was still alive but entering his period of greatest and most rapid decline. When it became clear to Kent and me that our relationship was one that we wanted to pursue for the long-term, we immediately talked about having a child together. Both of us were older (I was 38 and he was 58) and we both wanted to be parents, me for the second time and him for the first. I got pregnant four months after Ronan died, in the midst of deep grief but also fully supported and loved by a partner.

* * *

I took the first pregnancy test before dawn. When the stick read “pregnant,” I was gripped by euphoria, fear, guilt and surprise, all at once. I ran into the bedroom and woke Kent up to show him the results. All of the competing emotions rushed in: the impossible desire to hold my son again, in real time, with my own hands, to smell his hair and kiss his face and touch his skin; and the great hope that this microscopic, newly formed child in my body would live on, first in the womb, and then in the world. This child would replace nobody, I realized. Ronan existed, and this child would exist. Yet I still wondered: could I find full joy in this new baby when his or her half-brother had died?

A few days later I didn’t think I’d need to worry about it. My first ultrasound at six weeks showed a gestational sac with nothing inside: no heartbeat, no fetal pole, no signs of the beginning of viable life.

“Well, it’s a no-go,” the doctor said, asif I had planned a party that had suddenly been cancelled. “Probably a blighted ovum.” My friend, Elizabeth, who had come with me since Kent was out of town for work, switched off the video she’d been taking to show him the next day.

I blinked at the fuzzy screen, the great space waiting to be filled. Ronan had been driven away from my house in the funeral home van only four months earlier. I would never see him again. This baby had disappeared—but where? The doctor snapped off his gloves and began to make quick marks in my chart. “I see from your chart that your son has Tay-Sachs disease,” he said.

“He did,” I said, still on the table, undressed from the waist down and wearing the flimsy cloth robe. “He died.”

He looked up. “You must be Jewish,” he said.

“I’m not,” I said. The room was cold. My legs were cold. “People think Tay-Sachs is a Jewish disease, but it isn’t.”

“It is,” he said.

“It isn’t.”

“You must be Jewish,” he repeated. Ilooked at him and repeated that I was not.

Elizabeth, sensing my agitation and increasingly annoyed, said, “Well, I’m Jewish, but I don’t think you can catch it from over here.” The doctor flushed red, said no more, and left the room. I never saw him again.

The next week I went to a different doctor, who found a strong heartbeat—a vigorous rapid thumping—and a baby forming just where it should be. Kent was with me, and when we saw the tiny form on the screen, we cried. Out of relief, disbelief, fear, happiness, and the idea of these feelings occurring simultaneously.

The pregnancy progressed smoothly, as my first pregnancy had. When I began to show and people began asking me if I was pregnant with my first child, I was determined to remember Ronan in my response, no matter how uncomfortable it made the asker. “No,” I replied. “I had a son and he died.” The conversation often stopped here, the narrative halted. When the questions first began I scrambled to make the awkward exchange a bit easier for the other person. “Sorry to throw that on you,” I’d say, smiling. But now I don’t. My new policy is: asked and answered. Or, as a relative of mine used to say, if you don’t want the answer, don’t ask the question. I don’t elaborate on how or why my first child died when some people go on to ask those questions (and they occasionally do); at that point I tell them that I prefer not to say any more. I don’t want to offer up the details of Ronan’s illness like the pieces of a tragic tale. But I want it to be known—to strangers, to everyone—that he was in the world, that he was fully loved, and that he was my first baby.

I believe that the real danger of having a child in the wake of child loss is the idea that the child who came first and was unconditionally loved will be entirely forgotten. This was an idea I could not and cannot bear. Ronan was singular even after his death. His half-sister will be singular as well, just as loved, just as irreplaceable. She is filling no space; she is creating her own, just as Ronan did, just as every child does. No person’s place is taken by another’s presence. I don’t believe a desire to have another child is a way of healing wounds, or a way of mitigating the great sadness of losing a child. This great joy and sadness can coexist, and in fact they must. This is the responsibility those of us who have lost children have to our living children: to remember. To make known to those we love and live with that each life has a precious place in the world and a significant purpose, no matter how short that life is or might have been.

These are uncomfortable thoughts for all of us, especially parents, because it is so painful to imagine the death of our children; we’d rather not think about it. In general we attempt to avoid thinking about death in this culture, and we pass this culturally sanctioned phobia on to our children. We think they can’t handle it, don’t know about it, but they do. They sense it. They’re humans. They know. It is our job to find an acceptable way to tell them; to make them understand the existence of death and life together. Years before I had Ronan, I met a woman who had framed her stillborn boy’s footprints and hung them on the wall between her bedroom and her living daughter’s. I thought that was just right; I thought that made sense. Death isn’t morbid or unseemly.It’s the inevitable end of any life.

To not discuss Ronan with my daughter, as I will one day,is to devalue both of them in some crucial and profound way. That said, it is not an easy story to tell someone. “Mom had a baby with another man before you were born, and that baby died.” I can see her, years later as a writer, trying to tell that story in a novel, in a poem, in some other book. To whom do these stories belong, and who is in charge of their safekeeping? This is not mine to decide. I can only tell my own truth.

What the living must do is remember.

Author’s Note: Writing about our children is a strange and necessary task as writers who are also mothers. When my son was sick and actively dying, I felt it was my duty to document his life in a meaningful way. I couldn’t save him, but I could save his story. After his death, I am still in the process of trying to make meaning from a situation that felt absent of all meaningfulness. Writing this piece invited me to consider again the strange ways in which chaos works, turning us toward joy and despair, and many times in unequal amounts. This idea of chance, luck, karma, however you name it, is one with which I have long been fascinated, and writing this reignited in me that intellectual interest.

Emily Rapp is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Redbook, O the Oprah Magazine, Salon, Slate, and many other publications. She is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. She lives with her family in New Mexico.

Illustration by Mikela Provost

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Breathing Lessons

Posted on June 19, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged children and childhood, death, grief, loss, parenting, Rachel Adams • 1 Comment

By Rachel Adams

“Oh, darn!” chirps my eight-year-old son Noah as he plays Minecraft, fingers darting across the screen, “I was just killed by a zombie; gotta get back to my bed so I can respawn!” Watching him, I’m once again struck by how unconcerned he is about death. Last year when he developed an obsession with the Titanic, we worried that he might find some parts of the story disturbing. Instead, he rattled off facts about death and destruction as if they were baseball statistics. “50% of children on the ship survived” he would report. “Although only one from steerage. Women and children got the lifeboats first so just 128 out of 776 men were saved.” He watched the movie, replaying the disaster again and again, seemingly oblivious to fear, chaos, and devastation. A part of me wishes Noah were more empathic. Another part is glad death is so alien to him that a horrific maritime disaster might as well be a session on Minecraft, where characters die and respawn none the worse for wear.

I don’t remember ever being unaware of death. When I was four, my mother Ruth was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was told there was no cure and died 18 months later at the age of 42. My earliest memories are of my mother’s illness. I remember when she cut off her long hair because she was too weak to take care of it; oozing sores left by needles that tapped fluid from her lungs; fits of uncontrollable coughing.

One morning not long after Ruth died, our babysitter Molly came to work in tears. Her dog Brindle was missing and she was sure he had been hit by a car and killed. My sister and I loved Brindle. We put our arms around Molly and cried together. Recently I mentioned this incident to my father, who told me that Brindle had been found alive a few days later.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked incredulously. “We were devastated.”

“Because your mother had just died,” he said. “We didn’t want you to think there was any chance she might come back.”

Ten years later, Ruth’s best friend Barbara learned she had lung cancer. I watched her suffer with an awareness I had lacked during my mother’s illness a decade before. At Thanksgiving, my father had to carry her up the stairs to our house. Her dinner was pureed in the blender so she could take it through a straw. When she went to the hospital for the last time, I had tonsillitis and was too sick to visit her.

I know my early experiences of death shape the way I parent my sons. I have trouble saying goodbye, and tend to weep embarrassingly over small transitions like the last day of school or the start of camp. I’m consumed with guilt about missing time with my children while I’m at work. When we’re together, I’m determined to make every minute memorable. There are so few things I can control, but I can spend a week decorating a birthday cake or stay up all night making thank-you gifts for my sons’ teachers. I’m constantly taking pictures and movies, aware of how few mementos I have of the years I shared with my mother. Of course this kind of helicopter parenting isn’t unique, but mine is motivated by awareness of just how short and unpredictable life can be.

The year I turned 42 I worried constantly about my breathing. I had two boys, exactly the same ages as my sister and I when our mother died. Although my doctor said I was perfectly healthy, I was terrified I would die and leave my children to grow up alone. At unpredictable moments, I became convinced that each intake of air might be my last uncomplicated breath. For all I knew malignant tumors were already colonizing my chest. There was no way to tell. My doctor discouraged a lung scan, saying it was likely to cause more harm than good.

Since I passed that milestone I’ve tried to be better about managing my fears. I know it isn’t healthy to be so obsessed with death and dying. In her journal, Ruth wrote resentfully of the hypochondria that drove her mother to bed for the last decade of her life. I want to make the most of whatever time I have, and hope that my sons will remember me for something other than my incessant countdown to my own death.

In the fall, I volunteered to be a guest reader in Noah’s class. I chose a story Ruth wrote for my sister and me. I found the manuscript while visiting my father the summer before. Written in my mother’s neat hand, it’s about our stuffed animals, our cat, and the excitable dog who lived across the street. I loved the thought of my mother sitting down to write for and about us so I had the pages scanned and bound into a book.

While I read to Noah’s class, I felt moved at the thought that I was the connecting link between my son and the grandmother he never knew. Afterwards, I asked him whether he had liked the visit.

“It was okay,” he said noncommittally.

“What do you mean, okay?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, “the kids in my class were kind of bored while you were reading.”

I bristled with irritation. This wasn’t the reaction I had hoped for. How could my son be indifferent to something so meaningful to me? Later, I changed my mind. I decided I was glad the book didn’t fill him with longing for his dead grandmother or awareness that life can be short and cruel. He has plenty of time to learn that lesson. For now, how lucky he is to live as if mothers who die can, like characters on Minecraft, respawn into a world untouched by their absence.

Rachel Adams is the author of Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, as well as essays on parenting and disability in The New York Times, Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Times of London, mariashriver.com, and Huffington Post. She lives with her family in New York City, where she teaches at Columbia University.

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For Life

Posted on April 7, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged cancer, death, grieving, losing a husband, loss, mothering, parenting, Sarah Kilch Gaffney, separation, wife • 22 Comments

By Sarah Kilch Gaffney

Sometimes it’s tentative and other times it’s brazen, but at some point people almost always ask if my husband and I got pregnant on purpose.

When I was twenty-five and my husband Steve was twenty-seven, he was diagnosed with a large brain tumor that we were told would ultimately be terminal. We could treat and hope for the best, but due to the tumor’s type and location, there would be no cure.

His doctors optimistically gave him five to ten years because he was so young and the tumor was slow-growing. As he recovered from his first brain surgery, we started talking about whether we wanted to be parents. We did, though we also recognized that it was an enormous responsibility to bring a child into this world knowing that Steve might die at any time, and knowing that he almost certainly would die while they were still young. It’s one thing to end up in that situation as a result of fate; it is entirely another to willingly choose that fate.

Steve and I had met five years earlier on a backcountry trail crew and had been married for just over three years. We had always talked about having kids someday (when we both had real jobs with benefits, were more financially stable, etc.) but before that time it had never been a pressing issue. We were young and felt like we had all the time in the world.

One night soon after his diagnosis, we huddled together in front of the wood stove and talked it through. We made our decision and never looked back. Less than two months later, I was pregnant with our daughter. We named her Zoe because it means “life” and we could think of no meaning more fitting for our child.

And so the questions started. Some people were certain she must have been an accident. Why on earth would we get pregnant, knowing Steve was going to die? Others felt similarly to us – it was the best and bravest thing we ever could have done given the situation.

Even after Zoe was born, I was a little quiet about our decision. I would tell people the truth, but I was not always terribly confident. I would watch people start to do the math in their heads and then realize she was born long after he was diagnosed. I could see the moment that the shock unintentionally spread across their faces, and the stunned looks became a predictable conversational theme.

Now, I simply tell people out-right, sometimes before they even get a chance to ask. We decided to have her after he got sick. She was not an accident. We wanted to be parents, wanted Steve to have the opportunity to be a father, wanted to live life with the same options as any other twenty-something couple. We also wanted to be hopeful, optimistic, and have something other than ourselves to live for.

It is an epic understatement to say that the last few years since Zoe’s arrival have been challenging. As I write this, she is about to turn three in all her purple-and-princess-loving, world-investigating, temper-tantrum-throwing glory, and Steve started hospice a couple of weeks ago. We had a blissful several months after her birth when there were no treatments, no bad scans, and where other than the faint trace of scar, we felt something like normal parents.

Shortly after Zoe’s four-month check-up, the first of many scans showed that Steve’s tumor was growing again. Since then, he has had another brain surgery, six weeks of brain radiation, three different chemotherapies, and a proton beam radiation therapy. Nothing has worked. The tumor progressed far faster than anyone could have predicted and the unanticipated severity of radiation side effects caused extensive long-term brain damage. At this point, it is unlikely that he will make it to five years post-diagnosis, the short end of his original prognosis.

All that said, we both agree that having Zoe is the best thing we have ever done with our lives. It’s a lot harder to fall apart and give up when you have a baby who needs you. It’s a lot easier to focus on the positive when you have someone in your life who needs to stomp in every visible puddle, who will sit for hours cutting paper into little tiny pieces, and who has no idea why you wouldn’t want her to draw on the television screen with a pen. There also seems to be nothing the folks in a cancer center love more than a babbling baby in the radiation wing or a tutu-and-glitter-bedecked toddler telling everyone how much she likes their pretty wheelchairs.

What I still don’t talk about much is our phantom second baby. Just before Steve’s second brain surgery and when Zoe was around 18 months old, we decided to try for another child. Though from the beginning Steve insisted I would meet someone else and marry again after he was gone, I didn’t want to think about having children with anyone else. I wanted to have another child with him, the love of my life. Steve and I each have a brother, and we both wanted Zoe to get to experience the love, challenge, and companionship of having a sibling.

What I never saw coming was how desperately I would want to have another child. After getting pregnant with Zoe so quickly, I also never anticipated that we would have any trouble conceiving – at the time it seemed like simply making the decision was the hardest part – a thought that is laughable now.

Almost as soon as we started trying for baby number two, we found out that Steve needed to start chemotherapy, a treatment route he was initially not a good candidate for. We went to bank his sperm before he started, only to be told that his counts were extremely low. We banked anyway and then made the difficult decision to try a “mini” IVF therapy. We utilized our tax return and some of our savings. Not our smartest financial decision, but one that felt absolutely necessary. We got to the last step and the eggs didn’t fertilize. We had to try, though, otherwise I would have regretted it for the rest of my life.

Down the road we were able to try a couple of times on the rare occasion that Steve got far enough out from a final chemo dose, but never more than a month or two at a time and never with success. All the while I was kicking myself for thinking we had so much time, for thinking we had the luxury to space our babies a couple years apart, for believing that, despite the odds, he was going to make it.

When I finally realized and accepted that we would never have another baby was when I truly admitted to myself that Steve was going to die. For a while, it hit me harder than his impending death itself. And the thought that I might, even for a moment, grieve the loss of a non-existent child more than the loss of my husband (and existent child’s father) riddled me with guilt. The double punch of knowing Steve was going to die on top of the possibility that I might never get the chance to be a mother again took the breath from my chest. My heart was broken, and if it weren’t for Zoe, I don’t know if I would have been able to set my grief aside enough to even function.

When Steve started hospice care, I finally started selling all of the baby stuff. I had held onto everything, even every last little onesie and bib, a physical manifestation of my hope tucked away in grey bins. I made a future grandma extremely happy by selling her almost all of our gear for a fraction of the price. It was devastating to let go, but relieving at the same time. I still can’t bring myself to start looking through the baby clothes, but I know someday I’ll make an expectant mother very happy with those.

As our days together as a family grow shorter, we’re trying to hold onto them as best we can. We take lots of pictures. We put pillows between the hospital bed and our bed so that we can still snuggle as a family. We let Zoe help as much as she can.

In the months before she was born, I started writing letters to Zoe and I continue to this day. Hopefully someday she will read them and learn more about her father and I, and about our love for her and each other. Hopefully someday they will help her understand this path we chose.

Losing her father will affect Zoe for the rest of her life, but I can also see how much his illness has already shaped her in a positive way. There are moments when her intuition into his struggles stops me in my tracks, and I cannot fathom what it would be like to face the future without her by my side.

Author’s Note: Steven Gaffney passed away on March 22, 2014 after a 4 1/2 year battle with brain cancer. He was 31 years old. The following day, this piece was accepted for publication.

Sarah Kilch Gaffney lives in rural Maine with her daughter.

Adventures in Fertility and Mortality

Posted on October 23, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, From The Archives • Tagged death, infertility, IVF, loss, miscarriage, motherhood, pregnancy, Zahie El Kouri • 4 Comments

By Zahie El Kouri

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” the doctor asks.

I’m lying on an examination table, wearing a sweater and socks, my feet in stirrups. A nurse has given me a folded, translucent square of paper, and I choose to leave it folded to cover my lap effectively rather than unfold it to cover more of my body while leaving nothing to the imagination. The doctor slides a special probe up what the truly educated are now calling the vajayjay. I am about to start my second round of in vitro fertilization, and the doctor is doing a baseline transvaginal ultrasound to see if we can go forward.

For some women, this kind of ultrasound is no big deal, but for me it is so uncomfortable it verges on the painful. I know I’ll be less uncomfortable if I relax, but I can’t do that because the doctor and I are talking about my father’s death.

My husband, John, is sitting by my side, and he squeezes my hand when he hears the doctor’s question. John is sad about my father’s death, sad that I have to go through all this medicalized stripping down, sad that sex has been taken out of our procreative equation. But he is also tired of being sad. That’s why minutes ago, before the doctor arrived, when I was crying while taking off my clothes, he tried to distract me by singing the tune of what he says is the music one finds in porn. Bam ba dah bam bah. Humor is the way he copes with stress and sadness, and the doctor has undone the moment of laughter John and I shared in his absence.

“So, how long has it been since your father died?” the doctor asks. He is looking from my vagina to the monitor and back again, and pushing buttons on a side panel. His glasses are smudged, and through a trick of the light, I can see my reflection in them, even though he isn’t looking at me.

“About six months,” I say, even though I know the answer down to the day.

“Was it a long illness?”

“No, just ten weeks. Pancreatic cancer.”

* * *

In many ways I’m a typical fertility patient, if there is such a thing. I am thirty-six years old. I have been trying to get pregnant for three years. Seven months earlier I lost my first pregnancy, achieved through IVF, to miscarriage. Two weeks before this appointment, I started injecting myself with Lupron, which has put me into temporary chemical menopause, a condition that, ironically, will help me get pregnant through IVF, even though the associated mood swings and headache may also alienate everyone who has ever loved me.

Fertility and mortality are not the only things on my mind. Just a few months after my father’s death, John and I moved to this new city for his new job. My mother is staying with us because she is too sad to be alone, and my in-laws are visiting, and all the parental attention only highlights my father’s absence.

In many ways, I am alone in my grief, and in my mind having a baby has become all tied up with my father’s death. A grandchild was perhaps the thing he wanted most in life, and I feel like a failure for not finding the right person to marry earlier, for not having a baby before his death. I can blame the weepiness and the irritability on the chemical menopause (and I do), but I know that I am sad and desperate because I am still trying to redeem myself.

I want a baby—I have always wanted a baby—but the truth is that, without my father’s death, I might have chosen not to do all of this. I might have chosen adoption. The truth is that, yes, I do believe in an afterlife, in a religious sense, but that belief does not save me from my grief. It does not keep me from missing my father. The truth is that I am loath to start injecting myself with drugs that will hyperstimulate my ovaries. I am loath to go from chemical menopause to chemical super-fertility in ten seconds flat. But the most important truth is that right now, I am willing to do anything to preserve my father’s genetic legacy—other than my memories, the only piece of him I have left.

“Well, do you believe in an afterlife?” the doctor asks.

There is a long pause, and eventually, John answers the question for me.

“Yes,” he says. He takes my hand and squeezes it. “She does. Her priest really helped us through it.” John leans toward agnostic, but he, too, is transformed through this experience of death. He prefers humor, but he knows when to step in and be serious.

I cannot look at John without crying, and I don’t want to answer the doctor’s question, so instead, I spend my time coming up with all the possible reasons for the doctor to ask me this question at this particular moment. I come up with three:

1. The doctor may think that making any conversation will distract me from what is going on with my body, and therefore relax me (like a Caribbean vacation with no hurricanes).

2. The doctor is particularly curious about my unique presentation of the human condition. The doctor has lost a loved one, and has found solace in his belief in an afterlife.

3. The doctor is bored because he has seen too many vaginas.

I begin by considering reason #1. Maybe the doctor has had success with making small talk while doing transvaginal ultrasounds. Maybe, after dealing with thousands of women desperate for a child, he believes that having a conversation about something other than fertility will relax me, reduce stress, and increase my chances of getting pregnant. Maybe he sees himself as part therapist, and knows that I am in desperate need of some therapy before I should be allowed to get pregnant.

This may all be true, but I still rule out rule out reason #1, as it is unlikely that anyone would think that asking about a patient’s father’s illness and death would distract her from a penis-sized plastic probe up her vajajay.

I next consider reason #2. I vaguely remember this doctor mentioning losing his own parents. Maybe he struggles, as a man of science, with issues of faith and mortality. Maybe creating fertility miracles every day has given him the intellectual space to consider the possibility of an afterlife. Or maybe it is the opposite. Maybe he doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but he envies those who do?

If I were being rational, I might conclude that I can explain the doctor’s behavior with reason #1 or reason #2. He is a warm and friendly man. Like my husband, he’s sad for me. But I don’t want to dwell on these possibilities because they are just too painful, so I go with reason #3—the doctor has simply seen too many vaginas.

Now, to be clear, my doctor is a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist with an excellent record of successful IVF pregnancies, so he sees more vaginas than say, your average neurosurgeon. He probably also sees more vaginas than your average obstetrician/gynecologist, as your typical patient comes in once a year, takes off her panties, and that’s it. She might get pregnant, in which case, she would be coming in every now and then for exams, and then there would be the labor, where the doctor would see a whole lot of her vagina, but still, most women don’t go through labor more than once a year. Unless they have multiple uteruses, but that might present other issues that might also require a specialist.

It’s not that I think my vagina is anything special, or that I don’t appreciate the square of paper or the fact that my doctor will spend the extra ten minutes talking to me about my IVF cycle or inquiring as to my state of mind and grieving process. I respect the Swedish position on nudity and the time-honored tradition of skinny-dipping. It’s just that I miss the days when the only naked conversations I had about the afterlife were with my husband. I am tired of being physically and emotionally exposed. I don’t know how to talk about my feelings about death while trying to create new life.

* * *

In the next year and a half, I manage to get pregnant and miscarry twice more. I travel to another state for even more specialized medical treatment, coming back to the afterlife doctor for early-pregnancy monitoring when I get pregnant for the fourth time. In the appointments, he is still friendly, though he discusses work with John instead of discussing death with me. When I’m eight weeks pregnant, he sends me on to an obstetrician, wishing me the best.

That pregnancy took, and I gave birth to a healthy baby boy in June of that year. Soon after, I see this doctor again, as John and I leave the office of a lactation consultant who shares his waiting room. The doctor’s receptionist sees us walking by and sends him out to see us while we’re trying to get our crying baby into his car seat. The doctor approaches and greets us with a smile. After asking permission, he takes the baby and dances around with him. The baby stops crying and looks at his reflection in the doctor’s smudged glasses.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“I’m great,” I say. “Tired, but happy.”

“That’s good to hear,” he says. “Isn’t that good to hear?” he asks the baby in a sing-song voice.

John and I smile at each other.

“Who do you think he looks like?” the doctor asks, looking from the baby to my husband, and back to me. “I see bits of both of you.”

“He looks like Zahie’s father,” John says. I have never heard him say this before. “It’s nice.”

I stare at the baby with new eyes. I have been so sleep-deprived since his birth, so focused on the work of keeping him fed and clean and making sure he is still breathing, I haven’t really studied his features.

John is right—there are my father’s big brown eyes, his full lips, his round face. I hope to see my father in the afterlife, but I am happy to have these pieces of him here with me now.

* * *

Author’s Note: “Once infertile, always infertile.” That’s what my friend used to tell me when she was pregnant and I was still in the midst of my infertility struggle. At the time, I thought she was a little crazy, a little whacked out on pregnancy hormones, but now I know what she means. My ongoing mental state of infertility, which persists despite the presence of my vocal, playful baby, leads me to check the infertility message boards every day, and to pay special attention to any personal essays about infertility or fertility treatments. I’ve noticed a trend lately of comments on these essays saying that women who go through IVF to get a child instead of adopting are selfish. Was my desire to see my parents in my child selfish? I think about this question all the time. I wish more peace in this question for others, and I hope that this essay will give a sense of some of the emotions connected with wanting a child with a genetic link to you—and the ways in which those emotions are so much more complicated than the word selfish might ever contain.

Brain, Child (Spring 2012)

Zahie El Kouri writes about family, fertility, and immigrant culture. As the child of a Syrian/Lebanese/Palestinian father and an Italian mother, she has a special interest in the experience of second-generation immigrants, within the family and without. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Memoir Journal, Brain, Child, Garbanzo Literary Journal, and Ars Medica. Her short fiction has appeared in Mizna, a Journal of Arab American Writing and the second edition of Dinarzad’s Children: an Anthology of Arab-American literature. She holds an MFA in creative writing from New School University and lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, the novelist and legal theorist John Greenman, and their son. You can read more about Zahie at www.zahieelkouri.com.

Little Man

Posted on August 12, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged baby, death, loss, mother, motherhood, mothering, premature birth, special needs • 23 Comments

By Fran Dorf

On October 22, 1990, I became the mother of two children. I will always be the mother of two children. Our daughter, Rachel, was already nine, but we’d been unable to conceive a second child after my husband’s shocking bout of cancer two years into our marriage, and so after several miscarriages and years on the artificial insemination rollercoaster, we’d arranged to adopt. It was a boy. He was a month early. We were thrilled.

Bob and I flew to the birth mother’s southern city, made our way to the hospital, and stood at the nursery window. The 4-pound incubated baby looked tiny, sickly. He had an odd, bulging forehead and his skin was dusky and mottled. I started to cry and Bob put his arm around me.

Later, we made awkward conversation with the birth mother in her hospital room. She was a fortress of a woman, not fat but about six feet tall and solid, wearing a blue bathrobe, and reeking of cigarette smoke. She’d mentioned some early pregnancy drinking in her first letter to us, calling it “partying.” My God, I thought, what were we getting ourselves into?

Bob and I spent the next few days in the hospital getting to know the baby, and nights in our hotel room making phone calls. Our daughter’s pediatrician said the baby would probably be okay, given his normal head size. Bob’s parents said they’d support us, no matter what. My mother, who died only a few years later, said, “Why take on someone else’s problems, Fran?”

We couldn’t reject the baby because he looked sickly. He was ours. We’d become attached over months of letter-writing and occasional phone calls with the birth mother, and although I was all over the place in that hotel room, I knew I had to take him on when I had a dream of him, left all alone in a dark, empty nursery.

By preemie standards he wasn’t that small, but the doctors said he needed to stay. Bob flew home and brought Rachel back. Our daughter was overjoyed that she now had the sibling she’d longed for, and we gathered him in and declared him ours. We named him Michael Max, in the Jewish way, after Bob’s favorite grandfather, though most often we called him Mikey, Magoo, or Little Man.

A few days later Bob took Rachel home, and I was alone. Didn’t matter. I was falling in love. Each morning a nurse took Michael Max out of his warmer and handed him over. I’d sit in a rocking chair most of the day, watching all the other human dramas unfold in front of me like parchment scrolls, feeding Mikey through a sliver of a nasal tube, unselfconsciously crying and whispering to him: It’s okay, it’s okay. You just have to be the baby, and I’ll be the mommy.

I’m not sure when I took Michael completely into my being as my son. Was it the first time he cried and I rocked him until he settled? When I changed his diaper and saw how undernourished he was, his skin hanging off his bones? When I found myself singing to him, though my singing voice isn’t fit to be heard by man or beast? When he looked up at me with deep blue eyes, and we both seemed to know we were meant for each other?

In the evenings for the next three weeks at the hospital, I’d find a restaurant along the local strip, eat dinner alone, and then return to the hospital for a last visit. The chicken in the Greek place gave me food poisoning—nausea and stomach cramps so bad I considered checking into the hospital myself—but by dawn I was ready to resume my vigil. That morning, a young, redheaded teenager sat in the rocker next to me, awkwardly holding her newborn, weeping and wavering in her decision for adoption. I decided I was lucky that Michael’s birth mother was older, steadier. We had agreed to her terms: we would send letters and pictures once a year, one way, through the lawyer. I was grateful it was only that. I could do that.

***

Michael became a beautiful child with blue, slightly crossed eyes, a pile of blond curls, and a solid build. Like many parents of children with neurological difficulties we became experts on issues we’d never even heard of before, like sensory integration, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified.

Indeed, Mikey was often frustrated and refused to touch certain objects, but everything he would do, he did with uninhibited enthusiasm, especially when it involved water. Bath time was always hilarious, though convincing him to get out of the tub not so much, and our little man just adored the pool. We all had to be there to watch, too, including Cookie, our cocker spaniel, and Mikey’s favorite stuffed toy, a puffy bright pink and green turtle. He’d stand at the pool’s edge, laughing, and jump into our arms, often before we could even get ready to catch him. He’d put his arms around us, give us one of his squeezes, giggle more, and then scramble up the pool steps to do it again. And again. And again.

Perhaps we minimized our son’s problems in our letters to the birth mother, though we often felt overwhelmed by them. Mostly, we told her how much we loved him, how hard we were trying for him. We described how he giggled and put his whole body and being into hugging us. We told her that he loved Big Bird, buses, and balls. And we wrote about his sister, who had become very grown up, teaching him, hovering over him like a little mother.

In our third birthday letter, we told her that Michael had finally learned to point, had a vocabulary of about eight words, or maybe word-sounds, and one time shocked everyone by clearly putting together “peanut” and ” butter,” neither of which was one of his words. We sent the gorgeous photograph Bob had taken that summer of Mikey and his sister in the pool. A photo we enlarged and hung in a frame on the living room wall.

***

And then came December 7, 1993, my personal Pearl Harbor Day. I put Mikey down for his nap and went to my office to work on a new novel to fulfill a two-book publishing contract. For reasons that remain mysterious and fascinating to me, I’d churned out over a hundred pages in the six weeks prior to that day, working faster than I ever had on a story about the kidnapping of a little boy named Elijah. Oddly, I’d spent most of those pages not advancing a kidnapping plot but rather imagining his young parent’s grief and terror. I still wonder if this was a kind of prescience, since I had no real idea at all what grief and terror for your child would be like. It could also have been an expression of my fears for my troubled son.

Around 4:00 I went to check on Mikey and found him in the midst of a violent seizure. He wasn’t breathing. My own screams told me that I had arrived in hell, and from that moment on it felt as if I were constantly screaming—screaming when we arrived at our local hospital, screaming when we got to the big medical center where they shipped him a few hours later, screaming at the next hospital, screaming at the next. Even in my dreams I was screaming.

Michael’s end came on a particular date, of course, though it had already technically ended months before when we stood in front of a light box, looking at rows and rows of illuminated brain slices, after the last of so many MRIs I had lost count. Each MRI was worse than the last, the blackness at the center of our son’s brain bigger.

The doctor gave us the news. “When tissue is damaged like this it shrinks and takes up less room, and fluid fills the void. I’m very sorry, but there’s nothing there. He will never get any better.” Sometimes I still can’t believe I’m a mother who survived hearing that.

After Michael died, I padlocked my office, retreated to the house, and declared I would never write another word. Writing was what I had done before. This was after. My world sucked into itself like a black hole. I spent the next two years walking around wearing my bathrobe and my shroud of grief, crying or staring vacantly at the walls, only vaguely aware of my daughter and husband coming and going, floaters in my field of vision.

We had to send the birth mother one last, impossible letter, which I struggled and labored over for months. We agreed to receive one letter from her. She thanked us graciously for the wonderful life we had given Michael, and said she was particularly sorry for our daughter, then thirteen. She mentioned that she’d had another child. She wanted to go to Michael’s grave. I was so fragile then, reeling in the early madness of grief; I veered from blaming her, to wishing she’d rescue me, to wanting to beg her forgiveness for failing him. Yet that child, and his death, was ours, not hers, and we didn’t—couldn’t—allow her into our lives. I do not have any of her letters now; sometime during those dark years I threw them away in a rage.

***

Our son would have turned twenty-three this October. I’m still a writer, but I also work as a grief counselor now; it’s one of the ways I have found to move forward, writing is another.

I’m constantly amazed when I sit with bereaved parents that even though all grief journeys are unique, they’re also similar: the rage and often irrational guilt, the feeling of having slipped into another universe; the decision about whether to have (in our case adopt) another child; the struggle to figure out what to do with the child’s room, his things; the difficulty of dealing with people’s insensitive remarks.

My world is rich and full of laughter, humor, and wonder again. Our beautiful, brilliant daughter is now thirty-two, a psychologist. I’m a grandma. Our granddaughter is named after Michael. We feel almost embarrassed at how much we adore that child. She is three now, near our son’s last age, though I try not to think about that. A few weeks after giving birth, my daughter’s emotional generosity astounded me. “Now I understand, Mom,” she said. I wish you didn’t, my daughter. As you raise your own child, I wish you didn’t know firsthand what could happen.

Yes, my life is sweet again, full of blessings. Still, I think I am like every bereaved parent. No matter how long ago it happened, how compartmentalized the grief becomes, or how reinvested in life, this loss remains, forever imprinted on your soul. I can no sooner give up being Mikey’s mother than I can give up breathing, even though Mikey is no longer here.

Sometimes, even now, I have random after-the-fact realizations, for example, that some of the accouterments that accompanied the opening of my son’s life were replicated at the end: the long daily hospital visits, the vigil, the nasal-tube feeding. And that all eight words Michael had mastered by the early summer of 1993 were gone by the time autumn came. And that in the large photograph in the pool that still hangs in the living room, our daughter is strangely bathed in sunlight and Michael is in shadow, as if doom were beginning to encroach.

Bob and I are growing old, but the boy who will always be our son has been frozen in time, in our memory and our home, forever a smiling, laughing toddler. We’ve moved several times since then, and we’ve always rehung our photos of him, and his red and blue finger painting that we’d framed like a work of art. We always put his last pair of shoes in their proper place atop the bureau in our bedroom. Navy Stride Rite sneakers with green laces, well worn, with dirt-caked soles.

Fran Dorf is a psychotherapist and author of three novels, A Reasonable Madness (Birch Lane, 1990/Signet, 1992), Flight (Dutton, 1992/Signet, 1993), and Saving Elijah (Putnam, 2000). Her writing has been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and online sites, such as McSweeney’s, Ars Medica, Forbes, Bottom Line, and Perigee. She’s currently working on a memoir, from which this essay is adapted. She writes an advice column and blogs as THE BRUISED MUSE at www.frandorf.com, on a variety of topics including psychology, writing, and bereavement, her therapeutic specialty.

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Secrets From The Grave

Posted on July 1, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged death, emotions, family, loss, Rebecca Braun, relationships • Leave a comment

By Rebecca Braun

My four-year-old son came home from childcare and said, “I have a secret. I get to tell you?”

I nodded vigorously.

He leaned close and stage-whispered, “Odin wore red pants today!”

I breathed in to combat the laugh sneaking out. My son’s complete lack of secrets struck me as the purest form of innocence, the embodiment of childhood beauty.

It happened that I had been thinking about secrets. In a moment of courage I had agreed to participate in an amateur storytelling event, after which I learned that the topic of the evening was secrets.

Since my husband’s sudden death 18 months earlier I’d felt exposed and naked. I didn’t intend to spill any secrets I might have left. I simmered with resentment. That is, until the Secret of the Red Pants incident.

Secrets mean something different to all of us. I’ve always considered myself a good secret keeper. I’m extroverted and talky and I try to give genuine answers to genuine questions, but I’m fundamentally private.

As I think about the story I’m supposed to tell, I make a melodramatic vow to myself: I’ll take my secrets to the grave.

And that’s when it hit me. My secrets have already gone to the grave, I think in a moment of inner black humor. Or to ashes, I correct myself.

******

I’m not really the support group type, but when you’re 39 and your husband dies in a freak accident, you kind of get a hankering to feel like one of the crowd. So I joined a Hospice group for young widows. The first evening, the facilitator, a platinum-blond with a luscious Boston accent, comforted one of my weepy peers: “I know, honey, you’ve lost your future.” [pronounced, yoh fewcha]

Lost my future? I rolled the words around on my tongue. It didn’t ring true. I don’t feel that, I thought. If anything, I gained a future. Where my future was once known, now it’s big and undelineated, needing to be re-imagined. It’s scary, it’s exciting, it’s open. I think about the future more than I used to.

I haven’t lost my future, I’ve lost my past. I’ve never been great at taking pictures. Most of the journals and diaries I’ve written are lost. I left one behind a rock where I was writing in Joshua Tree Desert, one in a hotel night table on the island of Fiji, one at an airport gate. I just can’t hold onto my memories.

One of the beauties of marriage is the creation of shared memories. There are certain stories you can only tell together, even when you tell contradictory versions. The story of my daughter’s birth is one. I don’t remember the moment when the nurse snapped at my husband, who had been trying to encourage me, “It’s like pushing a Mack truck out your butt, you have no idea what you’re talking about.” Or something like that. I don’t remember the moment I pushed Rosie out. That was John’s job.

And I don’t remember what happened on our honeymoon, when we took a spontaneous detour to China and then further into China and found ourselves in a bar in Lijiang where we befriended the owner. There was something magical and genius that occurred there, but it was filed in John’s memory.

And when we did that mini trek through the Tiger Leaping Gorge, did we rescue a goat from a well, or is that a fabrication of my imagination? What route did we take when we canoed the Boundary Waters during my first pregnancy? Did we catch a fish, or was that someone else’s story?

I outsourced my memory and didn’t realize there was no back-up. So much happened only between us, was known only by us–benign, mundane details of our lives. That intimacy is the fabric of love and marriage. But when one’s co-keeper of memory disappears unexpectedly, those details vanish too. So here I am, ace secret-keeper, and I’ve forgotten my own secrets.

It’s like I saved my money in a currency that no longer exists, or wrote my memoir in invisible ink. It happened, but I can’t access it.

A grief counselor once told the story of a four-year-old trying to figure out what to do for her dead father’s birthday. The girl hit on the idea of making a cake and putting M&M’s all over the top, because, she said, he loved M&M’s.

It turns out, according to the mother, her husband didn’t have any special attachment to M&M’s. But the girl loved the cake and now makes him this M&M birthday cake every year. So what if it’s a fabricated memory, argued the grief counselor; it brings the little girl joy.

I toyed with this idea, how we create our own legends, mythologize those we’ve lost. It’s happening already with my dead husband. Do I correct my children’s inaccurate memories? Does truth matter in personal memory?

******

When the police officer told me, “John died,” I knew with instant clarity that this was the defining moment of my kids’ lives. I think I keeled over, and from my prone position on the floor outside our hotel room, I was third-person omniscient. I saw my daughter Rosie as an adult, saying matter-of-factly, “My dad died when I was eight.” It was a new and stunning and permanent truth.

I tried out my son’s life story. “My dad died when I was two.”

I knew Rosie would have memories, and I knew I needed to help fix them. I knew Alder would need his memories planted and cultivated. I set to talking about John as often as I could, telling little stories whenever they would come into my head, pointing to the line on the wall marking John’s height, reminding Alder:

“Your dad used to juggle apples and eat them as he juggled.”

“Your daddy used to make egg sandwiches like this.”

“Remember when you and Daddy would put coffee beans on the floor and tell Rosie and me it was goat poop?”

About 18 months after John’s death, we walked by a bin of peanuts in the shell while grocery shopping. Alder said, “I want those.” I’ve never bought peanuts in the shell, but I suddenly remembered that very occasionally, John did.

So I said, “Okay,” and bought some, unsure whether Alder really knew what they were. When we got home he started cracking them and he said, “When John was alive I ate these with him.”

I never fed him that memory. We have no pictures of John shelling peanuts. Somewhere within Alder his own secret memory emerged from the darkness. It was such a small thing, Alder remembering John shelling peanuts, and it made me almost ecstatically happy.

Some months later, Alder started talking about Daddy. A journalist by profession and habit, I recorded his words:

I have like ten reasons why I didn’t want Daddy to die.

Daddy was the best thrower.

And he loved to play trains with me.

I just didn’t want him to become dead.

And he did lots of stuff with me, he just played and played and played.

I was at my Grandma’s house when I was a baby; he did the guitar.

And I like that red chair also, that was right there.

And I liked that little table near where the lamp was.

Daddy.

John, Daddy John.

And he loved to play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play.

That’s the end.

My son’s words may sound sad to others, but they brought me relief. His bursts of memory affirmed for me that beams of light will illuminate our past. Memory ebbs and flows. When the only other living witness to a moment is gone, that moment itself isn’t gone. It happened, and we the living are the sum total of all that happened to us, whether or not we remember it.

I never know what will leak from the vault of personal experience within each of my children, or when it will happen. I can only hope these storehouses will give them strength and wisdom when my own words and memories fail.

Rebecca Braun lives and writes in Alaska with her two children, Rosie and Alder.

Tiny Treasures

Posted on February 20, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged afterlife, Claire Ferry, death, grieving, loss • 1 Comment

By Claire Ferry

I am reading to my three-year-old, Finn, when he turns to me and asks, “Mom, what happens after someone dies?” I think for a second and decide to keep things simple. “When people die,” I explain, “they go to heaven where they can watch over us.” Finn looks at me, confused. “Like in a moving truck?” he asks. Now I am confused. Until it occurs to me that Finn is mistaking “heaven” for “Kevin,” as in my Uncle Kevin, who had stopped by in a moving truck earlier that day to drop off some furniture. In the seconds it took me to deliver my “simple” explanation, the poor little guy had whipped up a vision of a world where a moving truck whisks away the deceased to spend eternity with my Uncle Kevin. Explaining death and dying to a preschooler is tough business. Tough, but necessary if I want my kids to have a connection to one of the most important people in my life: my little sister, Ali.

Ali was 17 when she died from a brain tumor. I was 20 years old then and one of the most painful things about losing her was that someday I would have children of my own; and she would never get to know them. And, more painful still, they would never get to know her. It has been difficult for me to feel a connection to Ali since she died. To remember the little details that made her who she was. Recently, my husband asked me what Ali’s favorite television show was. I dissolved into tears when I realized I couldn’t remember.

I have never been terribly religious and still entertain some rather childlike musings about death and the afterlife (I wonder if heaven is actually in the sky…). I often worry that because of this, my kids won’t have the foundation they need to understand and accept death as a part of life. It has taken me all of my 33 years to come to the belief that death is not akin to disappearance, that we are all part of a bigger picture. It has been a struggle for me to overcome my inner skeptic and feel the presence of someone I knew and loved and lost. If I have had such a hard time forming that connection with Ali, how can I expect my young boys to feel the presence of a person they never even got to meet?

The answer comes to me one day as I wander the beach near our home. A smooth stone washes up into my hand and I stop right in my tracks. What if this stone is a treasure for Finn left by Ali? At bedtime, I press the stone into Finn’s hand, telling him that I think Ali can do special things now that she’s in heaven, like move the waves and sand a certain way to make a stone as smooth and special as this one. I tell him that she left it on the beach just for him. This sparks some more interesting questions, like “So even though Ali is in heaven, she still has hands that she can use to move the sand and waves?” But, he is mesmerized by the idea that Ali left this treasure just for him. He takes the stone to school the next day, placing it carefully in the small zipper pouch of his backpack. I tell him that he can get it out if he is feeling sad or lonely at school. This prompts the first tear-free preschool drop off of the year.

I wonder if somehow I am being dishonest, that Ali didn’t really leave that stone on the beach for Finn. But seeing that mysterious smile on his face when he finds his own “Aunt Ali Treasure” for the first time is more than enough to convince me otherwise. The idea even catches on with Finn’s two-year-old brother, Mitch. He’s just starting to talk, but when he finds a bit of ribbon or sees a receipt blowing across the parking lot, he looks at me with these excited little eyes and asks, “Aunt Ali Treasure?” Without any doubt, I answer yes every time.

These treasures are a regular part of our household now. The zipper pouch of Finn’s backpack is bursting with little tokens, with meanings only he and Ali could understand. Here’s what I find inside: a bent piece of a chain link fence, a shredded piece of fabric, a plastic spinning top he found on the floor at the store. These tangible reminders of Ali have helped the boys identify with abstract ideas like death and heaven more than any of my convoluted explanations ever could. I am proud of them for being able to find the beauty in the mundane and for being able to connect it with someone they never even knew. Above all, these treasures have shown me that feeling Ali’s presence and bringing her memory to life doesn’t have to be so complicated. If the boys can do it simply by finding a scrap of paper or a button on the ground, surely I can find a way too.

Claire Heffron is a mother of two boys (ages 2 and 4), a freelance writer, and a pediatric occupational therapist. Interactions with kids at work and at home provide plenty of inspiration for writing about healthy childhood development, the inner workings of the toddler mind, and the frustrating/ridiculous/hilarious challenges of parenting.

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Seasons

Posted on January 11, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged cancer, death, Lindsey Mead, loss, memories, mother and daughter, seasons • Leave a comment

A short story by Lindsey Mead

The sky is at its most intense, deep blue, before it fades to blackness; autumn’s leaves are stunning in their doomed shades of red and orange and yellow, before they crumple to uniform brown and fall to the frozen ground. So many things are at their most beautiful just before they die: the last gasp of beauty.

I thought about this a lot as I witnessed my mother’s fleeting, ethereal beauty leading up to her death in the last weeks of winter. She was so gentle, so strong, so prepared; she took me away from my terror, my loneliness, my despair. It was as if the entirety of her fierce spirit surfaced during her last days; her fragile skin was so transparent it seemed to reveal not only her deep blue veins but also the fullness of her heart.

Driving through Harvard Square, the muddy tired snow reminds me of those long days, two winters ago, in the room with the medicine-saturated air, lit by the clear winter light that poured into the room only during the coldest season, when the tall trees surrounding our Victorian house were barren and skeletal. I reach down to change gears but the stick shift is stuck; this car is so old, dammit. I have to take both hands off the wheel and use my full weight to shift to fourth gear.

****

“Lizzie, come on, you can do it! Relax and ease the pedals past each other. It’s really easy; it’s just the balance you have to get right.” In my memory, my mother smiles calmly at me, acknowledging the tears of frustration in my eyes. I take a deep breath, wipe a summer-browned arm across my forehead, turn the key in the ignition again. I can’t get the damn thing into first gear. I keep on stalling and jumping forward. It feels like my mother and I are riding a bucking rodeo horse. I know she doesn’t want to be here, teaching me to drive. This is her vacation, too, and she would rather be on the beach with her best friend than in a beat-up Jeep that smells like mold in a deserted high school parking lot. I feel so American and so teenaged, learning how to drive. It is such a clichéd rite of passage, yet I am angry and impatient, annoyed that I cannot figure this stupid thing out.

My mother is patient, but she cannot quite describe what I’m doing wrong. It reminds me of when she used to try to help me with basic French grammar. Her fluency removed her from the introductory stuff just as her instinctive comfort at the wheel is difficult to break down into steps I can actually practice and follow.

****

Mum died two years ago; everything reminds me of her. I cannot go through an hour without being drenched by a waterfall of memories. I am waiting for that moment, that day, when I can be happy with my memories and smile about them; I know that is what Mum wanted (wants?). She always told me she wanted to be remembered with laughter, during our many long late-night talks, over big mugs of herbal tea (she’d choose ginger tea – I hated it, it made my tongue numb), or, in the summer, over tall glasses of iced tea. Mum had a million friends; she was the most popular person I have ever known. But in the family, it was just the two of us. Dad left us when I was five years old, and I never really remembered him. He traveled a lot. His final departure wasn’t that much different from the others, except that he never came back, sweaty and cranky and demanding. Mum’s parents have been dead for a long time, I never knew them, and she didn’t have any siblings. Luckily for both of us there was enough money in the Chase family that Mum could work with the political activist groups she loved so much without worrying about putting me through college. We lived comfortably. We had a summer house by Buzzards Bay where I learned to sail, and an old Victorian house in Cambridge.

******

Mum was a national sailing champion in college. She also played bridge for money, earning her train fare for weekends visiting her brother at Amherst , where they would drink bourbon at his fraternity. Mum was a huge person contained in a regular-sized body. Of her many passions, sailing was the most essential. She instilled it in me. When I was very little she and I would go out into Buzzards Bay in the Laser or the Sunfish or, for longer sails, the J24. By the time I was eight I was sailing by myself. I understood the balance between boat and sail, wind and water. Mum taught me racing strategy, explaining what it was to steal someone else’s wind during a race. She told me that I should try to do it as infrequently as possible because it wasn’t “nice,” though she knew full well that I would eventually have to steal wind in order to win races.

And I did win, early and often. My trophies – silver bowls that Mum liked to use for fruit, engraved cups, and models of sailboats – began to crowd hers on the mahogany mantelpiece in our living room in Cambridge. I didn’t understand why Mum always had tears in her eyes when I raced up the dock to her after a race, ripping off my sailing gloves, untying the harness that helped me hike out over the edge of the boat, holding my blue first-place pennant and bubbling over with questions about the race, how I did, how I could have done better, gone faster.

Adolescence brought me to a more profound understanding of sailing and what it meant to my mother. When I sailed by myself (one of my favorite things to do during the long sunny days of summer) I would feel my mother’s hands in my grip on the mainsheet and look through her eyes as I gauged the wind direction. When my toes squeaked against the centerboard case I remembered how I’d giggle when hers made the same noise so many years ago, when I sat in the bottom of the cockpit of the boat and played with the bailer as she sailed. I would lean back and trail my long red hair, so much like my mother’s, in the dark green ocean just as she had taught me to do.

********

When I was fifteen, about five years ago, Mum mentioned to me that, in the distant future, when she died, she wanted to be cremated. She told me that she wanted me to sprinkle her ashes in the ocean and read “Sea Fever” by John Masefield (“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky…”) as I did it. I laughed, but her face was serious, and she told me solemnly that she really meant it. It was early in April two years ago that I drove to Buzzards Bay with the ornate urn buckled into the seat next to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much my mother would have hated the fussy, formal urn – I had picked the plainest, simplest one the funeral home offered, and it was still far too gaudy. I almost laughed through my tears when I thought about how she still had her seatbelt on while I drove: even in death she wasn’t confident of my driving. I realized these were our last moments of CQT, as we used to call our Car Quality Time, the intimate, meandering talks we’d have during long rides.

*******

“Mum? Um … may I have some more tea?” I am hedging, indicating the black and white cow-shaped teapot that my mother loves. She also has a pitcher that looks like it’s made out of stalks of asparagus that she adores. Random stuff clutters the kitchen. We never had a neatly matching set of plates or any policy for what was used when. The family silver came out for everyday breakfast and was most often used with the chipped earthenware plates that she had brought back from a trip to Paris years ago. Mum reaches out to the pot and pours more tea.

“Yes, yes, everything is fine. I don’t know, Mum, here’s something I want to tell you,” I chew on my thumbnail and then catch myself, pull my hand out of my mouth and start to toy with the handle of my mug instead.

“What, Liz?” Mum is distracted, looking out of the kitchen window into the night. She does that a lot; I always wonder what she looks at and I asked her once. She told me she just liked to see how black it got outside and to ponder how complete a blanket night could be.

“Well, it’s about Chris. Something that happened …” I look down and concentrate on my bitten fingernails, feeling my face flame with redness.

“Mm-hmm?” Mum isn’t really paying attention to me.

“Well, we slept together, Mum, and I, ahhhh—I guess I just wanted you to know, okay?” I stutter while talking, and finally, I force myself to look up into her eyes. She is looking at me at last. I am nervous about her reaction and also having a weird, vivid flashback to the day I told her I got my period. I’d been similarly nervous, and she had thrown her arms around me and started to cry, whispering, “Welcome!” Her reaction had touched and embarrassed me at the same time. I waited to see what she would say now. I have wanted to tell her since it happened last weekend, but we haven’t really had a chance. She’s been so busy at work.

“Liz, you know what? I know. I could just tell. I do know you pretty well. I know that you love him. And I think that he loves you. And I think that’s wonderful! What was it like?” Her final question kind of creeps me out, but I feel I have no choice but to answer it. “Well, it was okay… I mean, it hurt and all, but I’m glad. I mean I just feel really close to him and we talk about it all the time, which is good, I guess, and I am really happy about it because I do really love him…” I stop myself because I know I am babbling. I am so relieved to have finally told her.

“I’m not going to give you a lot of stuff about being careful because I know you’re a big girl, Lizzie.” Mum has always talked to me like a grownup. I think it’s a result of it being just the two of us for so long. “But if you do have questions, feel free to ask them, I’m here. And I’ve been there.” She smiles at me, and when she does, all her wisdom and love and understanding seem to flow across the table from her brown eyes, the same shade as mine, directly to me. I am moved, but I stare hard into the bottom of my cup and concentrate on the brownish murky swirls at the bottom of the tea, holding back tears.

********

About three weeks after that talk Mum went to the doctor because she found a lump in her breast in the shower. She was swept into a whirlwind of mammograms and biopsies, and it was quickly confirmed that she had Stage IV breast cancer. It had spread to her lungs.

My mother went haywire. She had never been sick a day in her life. She had walked around for 10 days with a fractured tibia before finally conceding to an x-ray. The day she was given the final diagnosis, she had gone to the appointment alone, refusing to let me skip school to join her. I think she was guided by some impulse to shield me from what she intuitively knew would be bad news. When she got home she marched through the front door of our house, threw her pocketbook into the corner of the entrance hall, and walked directly to the liquor cabinet. I was sitting in the big rickety rocking chair, studying SAT words, and I looked up when I heard the door slam. Mum poured herself a big glass of scotch and downed it fast. I was nervous: Mum never drank.

“Lizzie. I’m dying. I have cancer. Why didn’t I do that stupid self-exam more often? I have cancer. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me, I just read about it. I have cancer. I have cancer. Do you think I’m going to get used to saying that?” She sat down heavily and began to cry. I was stunned; I shut my thick book with a thump, feeling irrational irritation at its laminated, brightly colored cover. I stood up slowly and walked awkwardly over to my mother’s heaving shoulders.

“What did Dr. Goldman say? What happened?”

“Yeah, it’s cancer. So much for that ‘one in ten lumps is malignant’ crap. So much for ‘you’re still young.’ I guess 42 isn’t that young anymore. Oh, Lizzie, why? Why? What did I do?” She started to wail and got up and poured herself another scotch; her hand shook as she sloshed the brown liquid into her glass and some spilled onto the dark wood table.

From this point my memories blur; the following months are hazy and ragged at the edges, in distinct contrast to that afternoon whose details will always be crystalline in my memory. I could draw the cover of that SAT book in perfect detail. After that, I remember Mum started to drink more. She withdrew from her friends and her work and from me and simply sat around all day, staring out of the window at the fall. It was a spectacular fall, I do remember that, and Mum seemed to spend all day long looking out of the bay windows of our house at the trees as their leaves changed. I recall wondering if she ever actually saw them. She never said anything. The house was choked with silence.

I kept going to school, going through my days with mechanical motions. Chris and I broke up because I was so distracted, so preoccupied. I didn’t even notice that he was gone from my life. For a while Mum stopped talking to me at all; she was completely silent for three weeks. I spent a lot of time at the houses of a couple of close friends. I became really angry. In fact, my anger sort of excited me; I thought if I could synthesize enough anger, then I could cancel out and erase my grief and terror. I fed on my anger, making myself madder and madder until I was so angry that I didn’t think I cared about Mum at all. That she was dying became some kind of twisted relief. In my fury I told myself I was looking forward to the day she was gone. To the day the silence and anger would finally dissipate. October and November passed in a monochromatic, echoing quiet blur.

*****

This has become a familiar scene: I open the fridge door, pull out two chicken breasts, cream, and mushrooms, slam the door. Our fridge is old, and the door doesn’t shut without a lot of force, so there’s a lot of slamming in the kitchen. I find a wooden chopping board and start to slice the mushrooms with precision, concentrating. Slice, chop, wipe off the blade. Slice, chop, wipe off the blade. The sensation of steel slicing through the soft firmness of the mushrooms is oddly soothing. The gray-brown spade-shaped slivers form reassuringly regular rows on the edge of the chopping board. Mum wanders into the room, glass in hand, and sits down at the kitchen table, watching me. I put a pan on the stove and melt some butter into it; I watch the bubbles and hear them sizzling before tossing the chicken and mushrooms into the pan. I wait for them to brown in the heat. When I add the cream I stir it around and it turns from thick white to thinner brown-gold. I turn off the stove with the same soft click I’ve heard every day since birth and slop the chicken breasts onto two plates. Balancing the plates on my right arm like a waiter I pull open a drawer and grab two knives and two forks. I sit across from Mum and slide her plate and silverware across the wooden surface.

“Lizzie…” Mum whispers, keeping her head bowed, focusing down as she toys with the prongs of her fork. She is gripping the thing so tightly that her knuckles are going white around the edges. I notice her cuticles are ragged and bloody; she has always bitten her nails, preferring them short to “those tacky talons,” but they have never looked so destroyed. I refuse to answer her and look instead directly at her forehead, my gaze so full of resentment and anger I feel as though I could burn a hole through her dry papery skin.

She pulls her head up slowly, as though it’s heavy, and meets my gaze tentatively. Immediately her eyes drop again when she sees the expression on my face, my clenched jaw and pursed lips. “I’m sorry. I don’t know…” her voice is so quiet, like the rustle of dried leaves. My mind flies wildly to a memory of us raking leaves when I was a child, of jumping into a pile of them, of being surprised by the damp sogginess under the crispy brown top layer.

My feelings threaten to overflow my body. The last months have been so controlled as I deliberately constructed fences around my fear. These barricades come bursting open now, and my pain is alive, terrifying in its immediacy and power. I feel like a woman suddenly. I feel like my mother’s peer for the first time. Looking into her eyes I see how scared she is, how sad, how much she needs me. I am overwhelmed with these revelations, by the crushing, instant knowledge that my mother is a person, too, with needs and fears. I push my chair back roughly and run around the table to her side. I kneel on the floor beside her chair and throw my arms around her neck, sobbing into her chest, between her diseased breasts, the breasts that kept me alive in the first months of my life and that are killing my mother in the last months of hers.

Author’s Note: I wrote the first draft of this story before I had children at all. When I revisited it a few years later I was frankly astonished by the themes I had touched on, perhaps subconsciously. I am fortunate to live a mile away from my mother, and to regularly watch her interact with my 10-year old daughter. The way the generations ripple and echo fascinates me. My mother’s closest friend, who was a kind of second mother to me, passed away when she was 49, and her death is very present in this story also.

About the Author: Lindsey Mead is a mother, writer, and headhunter who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and son. A childhood spent moving around the world left her with a contradictory combination of restlessness and a deep craving for stability. She graduated from Princeton with a degree in English and has an MBA from Harvard, and is currently eschewing her peripatetic childhood by having lived in the same house for 11 years. Her writing has been anthologized and published in a variety of print and on-line sources including Torn: True Stories of Kids, Careers, and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, So Long: Short Narratives of Loss and Remembrance, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Literary Mama, and others. She writes daily at A Design So Vast.

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