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.
