Too much, too fast

My husband, who really is a very smart man, made a very smart observation yesterday.

As mentioned before, I am stuck in a deep rut of depression, overwhelmed by everything from  dirty dishes and laundry to birthday packages for my mother that I can’t seem to pull together.

There are reasons for this depression, or at least contributing factors. My dear aunt died in July, leaving a giant hole in my heart. My career, which once looked like a very promising path for a very promising writer, has stalled. I am too busy to properly dote on my children and too tired to work on my own projects that could potentially place me back in the realm of “promising writer.”

So instead of some things getting done, nothing gets done. I feel like a talentless failure and a self-loathing mother. I feel worthless and sad and ugly and scattered. I can’t pull it together.

Anyway, back to my husband’s observation.

“I think the reason for your feelings right now is because Clark is growing so fast and hitting so many milestones,” he said. “I think it’s because you are seeing him do these things and missing out on the things you aren’t able to see John and Drew do.”

He’s sort of right. We are planning Clark’s baptism, which is great for Clark, but it’s one of the millions of things planned for two little boys who aren’t here. In the middle of the baptism planning, we are also planning a funeral for Drew, who died nearly two years ago. Old wound, fresh hurt.

But Clark will have milestones every day for the rest of his life. He’ll walk and teethe and run and play baseball and go to school. He’ll go to prom and college and get his driver’s license. And John and Drew won’t. And nothing’s going to change that. So what do I do? How do I pull myself out of this? This pool of sadness is wide and deep and hard to navigate. And I don’t want my living son’s life to be such a source of the deep.

Baptism by Fire

Clark needs to be baptized. I know. I know.

Let me start off by saying that I’m not opposed to baptism. All my babies  - all of them – are blessed or baptized.  For Emily it was a ceremony of faith, a  mission of sorts that I fought my then-husband over. Infant baptism is important, I argued. It’s Lutheran. It’s faithful. I insisted. She was baptized.

John and Drew were both blessed by the hospital chaplain, their little bodies sprinkled with Holy water. It brought me some peace.

I think this is the part where I explain my faith as best I can. I’m not a person who looks at life and says, “Bad things have happened and I don’t believe in a God that would allow bad things to happen to me. “

My heart instead says: “Bad things have happened and I don’t believe God loves me.”

I am forsaken. I cannot forgive. I have lost my faith – not in the existence of God, but in the idea of his enduring love.

So brings about the problem: I believe in God. I believe in baptism. I believe that it’s important. I am forsaken.

So the decision was one of compromise. My husband’s very Catholic parents, in acknowledgement of my status as a non-Catholic and the reality that Clark can’t be baptized in their church, decided that any old baptism would do.

Get it done.

So we’re having a casual baptism on a riverbank, near the covered bridge where my husband and I were married. Fifteen minutes of religion and water and then three hours of wine and paired foods chosen by me and shared with just about anyone who wants to stop by and sip and talk and laugh.

My brother-in-law gets to be a godfather, my son gets to be baptized, and I don’t have to walk into a church and feel like a fraud.

Let’s do this.

Road Closed

Crumbling asphalt leads the way over a creek, up a hill, down a winding path just big enough for a car if you’re careful and to the back, back, back of the cemetery. In the back, all the way almost to the woods, is the tiny stone where John’s ashes are buried.

In recent months, I was not as devoted to my cemetery visits. We always go on death dates and due dates, we took a few sad looking garden items to “decorate,” but I would skip cemetery visits for weeks at a time.

Then the news came: the township had to close the bridge over the little creek for nearly a month. The entire bridge was threatening to fall into the water and replacement was the only answer.

Workers tore out the old bridge and set up supports and struts and beams for the new one. They dug and they poured asphalt and they packed it down. And through all this, they closed the road with a big ROAD CLOSED sign.

And suddenly I could not breathe. I could not see John’s stone. I could not make sure the weeds and grass were properly trimmed, could not sit next to the granite marker and watch the frogs hop around, could not watch the chubby groundhogs dart amongst the stones.

Every time I drove past the cemetery, the ROAD CLOSED sign gave me a panic attack, as if someone would steal John’s ashes or his stone or his tacky garden decorations. Silly, I know.

Two weeks ago I was driving by and the big sign was gone and the bridge was open! Relief. I drove into the cemetery and straight to the back. All was as it should have been – just as we had left it on John’s birthday in July.

For the last two weeks I have been at the cemetery at least six times. I drive through on my way to work or on my way home. Sometimes I take Clark, other times I go by myself. Sometimes I get out of the car, other times I just drive past the stone marker very slowly.

Oh, Baby Loss Mama logic. There’s no explaining it.

Grief by Calendar

The calendar on my wall has lulled me into a false sense of security, leaving me blindsided by an unexpected burst of grief.

In July, just after John’s expected due date, I looked at the calendar and thought “I don’t have another EDD/death date until October!”

In my mind, that meant that I had the rest of the summer and part of the fall before I had to pull myself through the anticipated Baby Loss Mama sludge again. If nothing else, I can at least take a personal day and wallow because I know when these feelings are inevitable.

Right?

Then somewhere in the end of July and through the beginning of August, it just hit me – that crushing feeling in my chest. That endless sorrow that I will never be able to shake – that I actually fear losing as if it means I’ll lose the little bit I have of my boys, too.

And it stayed. I wake up and drag myself out of bed and cry on the way to work. Sometimes I cry here in my already depressing oatmeal-colored cubicle that has to be about the worst creative environment for a writer ever. I cry at night. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be kissed. I don’t want to hear any noise. I want to sit and cry. And that’s it.

So the summer is now mostly gone. I’ve bought my daughter’s school supplies and I go to work every day.  Clark is crawling – faster and faster every day. He’s smiling and happy and healthy. He’s pure joy.

I am blessed. I live a blessed life. But there just isn’t enough space in my heart for the joy and the grief – and I can’t let go of the grief. So there it lives.

PTSD and a visit with grief

 I held off writing this until after March 8, after the second anniversary of John's death date. To be completely honest, I held off most of my life until after this day. I knew, deep, deep in my heart that I was going to be a mess, and I was right.
I'm keenly aware of the PTSD in all the alone times of my day. My brain turns on in the shower, my hour long commute to work each day, when I find myself in an odd moment alone with nothing else to think about.
The anxiety is crushing and it is heartbreaking every single time. I am overtaken by my grief, but I am well past the expected "expiration date" of mourning. People really do think that I should be "over this" by now. John died two years ago. I'm coming up on what would have been Drew's first birthday. I'm coming up on the anniversary of the exome results. I have a new baby boy and a wonderful family - so I should get over it.
Never. Gonna. Happen.
It isn't that I'm being stubborn - it isn't that I'm just not letting go. The grief is real and strong and soul bending, even now, even today, THIS DAY, this minute.
You might not see it, you might not know it, but I know it and I see it and I feel it. And it isn't OK.
PTSD is like an iron fist around my heart, directing my emotions without my consent. It comes up on me here at my desk or when I'm out in the yard, or when I'm doing the dishes. It hits me when I accidentally call Clark by one of his brother's names and I have to take the journey. I have to ride it out. There are no such thing as big triggers or small triggers. Tiny fragments of memory explode into full anxiety attacks while big long stories about people who lost their babies can roll right off my back with no effect. It makes no sense, most especially to me.
But John's death date was two weeks of trouble and sadness and it seeped through me and bled into every part of my life. I know that I need help with this, but there are shockingly few places to turn to. Even with insurance, hardly anything is covered from a talk therapy standpoint unless you are willing to be medicated.
So here I am, stuck again.


Again.

Because every story continues beyond "The End."

"How do we ever prove what we have lost? Who weighs it, quantifies it?"

Emily Rapp's words rattle around in my head, taking away my ability to focus on blogging, on Clark clicking and cooing from his car seat, from the words I can't form into real thoughts in my head but still feel this insane drive to share and communicate and cry out.

Rapp returns to my Baby Loss Mama world with her latest essay "Proof of Loss," a sort of post script of her book "The Still Point of the Turning World."

Read her essay at The Sunday Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2014/01/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-proof-of-loss/

Rapp's 6-month-old son, Ronan, was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a fatal autosomal recessive disorder with no treatment and no cure. He died just before his third birthday. Rapp's book chronicles Ronan's diagnosis and long journey to death. Her essay extends the reach of her story as she reveals that she is divorced and pregnant by her new partner. She is expecting a baby girl.

The essay answers a lot of questions without posing them as answers to inquiries, just statements of new fact. An unapologetic update of sorts. I am guilty of holding other Baby Loss Mamas to my own fire - I want to poke my nose in their lives and ask how they deal with a live baby up against the loss of a dead one. I want to know why their marriages failed and what I can do differently to protect my own partnership. I want to learn from the very smallest details of their journeys - the things I would never want anyone else to know about my own life after two terminations. I want to pick apart their behaviors and learn from their mistakes while patterning my mental health after their successes.

I want a roadmap, damn it, and I want it now.

No one gives me this "guide to the endless sorrow" that I so crave, including Rapp. It frustrates me as I read every word, tears rolling down my cheeks as I commiserate with the wrung-out emotions of loss relived over and over again in my mind, as I work my days around loosely controlled STUGS.

In "Proof of Loss," Rapp expresses that loss is ultimately measured by how we strive to live after the loss. It's ultimately what comes after we say goodbye.

In a way, that makes Clark my proof of loss. He is what I have gained, along with a larger sense of universe, a deeper understanding of myself and the ability to hold grudges and forgive at the same time but not to the same people.

I can tell you right now that Clark is the best of this proof, though I wonder if he got the worst of me - the me that is left over after the carnage. The pieced-together, patched-together, duct taped together mom that comes to terms with her genetically victimized self about every other day, but still wallows in the depths of grief on the diagonal every other days.

I am well aware that I have moved on, the world has moved on, from my tragedies - but the deaths of my sons hold me to an emotional place I can't ever leave. I feel like the finality of their deaths is like a stake through my flesh, pinning my body down in a spot I can't ever leave. The body moves forward even when the heart is stuck in a cemetery.

I suppose it all comes back to what I say over and over and over again and only sometimes believe: my personal mantra - Clark fixes nothing. He brings nothing back. He is not the embodiment of his dead brothers. He is not here to save his mother from herself.

I love him fiercely but independently of my grief. I am grateful for him, what he brings to our family and to our lives, but I also know there are things I can't expect of him or of me as I walk even deeper into my grief while ultimately living away from my past.

I am not so healed as I once imagined I was. I am not so far into understanding myself - the old me that I hated and the new me that I hate even more. That is its own kind of loss.

STUGS in the opposite direction

Today I had a breakdown over salad and soup at Bob Evan's restaurant.

There was nothing wrong with my soup. I was eating and watching Clark sleep in his car seat when tears overcame me. There are these moments when it just hits me; the overwhelming loss for John and Drew slammed up against the overwhelming blessing of Clark.

This isn't always a general feeling of love and loss. Actually, it usually starts when my mind travels back to micro memory - a tiny snippet of a larger crushing moment. Today's STUG was brought on as I was thinking of John's funeral. I had wrapped his tiny marble urn in a soft fleece blanket and I had to hand the bundle over to be placed in the vault. I actually hugged the bundle just before I handed it over and I was overwhelmed by how cuddly it was. I had been holding a hard urn for weeks...and that moment with the blanket was the closest I ever came to snuggling with a soft baby.

Watching Clark snuggled in a blanket, knowing that he is mine to hold, just did me in. This nbcn line between living children and dead children is going to be tough to toe.

out of nowhere

Goddamn STUGS. I'm fine one minute and a mess the next. Ugh.