Look in vain for the instruction book

You probably have heard of the amazing book on baby loss by Elizabeth McCracken.

My friend BookishGirl sent me the following link to McCracken's book excerpt/article in O magazine (yes, BookishGirl loves the Oprah Book Club unabashedly, even though our book group has mocked her for it in the past - I mock her no more).

Elizabeth McCracken starts with a description of a woman who has a book idea: a book of "funny stories" about loss -- those quirky things that you think or remember after you lose a child, omens or signs. It sounds crazy, McCracken thinks. And this woman is clearly not meant to be a sympathetic character.

Then comes a line that hit me hard: "She wanted an instruction book." '

I got a little defensive at this point. YES! Yes I DO! I DO want an instruction book! Is there something wrong with that?

A survival manual. Please. Anyone... and of course it's not that easy.

(By the way, the article later redeems this woman to some extent. I do have a few chuckly little anecdotes from losing Grace -and lots of 'signs' that I find comforting. Am I just like the crazy lady in the story?)

But OF COURSE we want a manual on how to do this. How to survive this. And we are notoriously bad at it - as a society, even as families. Losing a baby, remembering a baby, explaining the baby, explaining our role to the baby, explaining where the baby is. I do yearn for an instruction book.

The only heartening thing about this is that this desperate desire for a manual and answers is just parenting. I am finding a way to be a parent to Baby Grace. I am a mother to this baby. I have to make decisions. I can read all the books and get all the advice in the world, and then I have to do what feels right for me and the baby.

Yes, in this case, there's no baby right here, in front of me, to get to know. And that is a hard hard hard thing to come to terms with.

So like any good mother, you make it up as you go along, you read, you ask grandmothers, friends, wise women and men, you collect. And then do something that feels right, even though you really don't know what you're doing. See? Mothering, I tell myself. I half believe it.

Learn from those who've gone down this road...

"Grief is incredibly personal."

It was the first lesson the chaplain gave us as we learned that Grace's heart wasn't beating. And yet I was so grateful to hear from others who had been somewhere close to here before.

Especially so, because, in the weeks that followed, I was terrified of forgetting baby Grace. I was holding on to so little, I couldn't bear that my memory of her would fade.

Almost immediately, though, I was amazed to get these letters.

Onewas from the mother of a co-worker, a woman I had spoken with maybe once....

When I heard of your loss, I just had to write a little note... You see, 24 years ago, I gave birth to a stillborn baby boy...

...and another, from a distant relative I had never met in person...

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with your grandmother and she told me of the loss of your infant... and we were both so sad! I know pain of an infant dying as I had that loss too, now 44 years ago - and talking about it brings up that moment - seemingly still so near. And so I find myself thinking of you both and that empty ache within.

...and another from close relatives who had never spoken to me of their loss -- it must have been almost 40 years ago -- even though I knew of it...

We want you to know how sad we felt when we heard the news about Grace... It brings back memories of when we lost our baby at birth...

Before Grace's birth, my book group had picked Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal Dreams". After we lost Grace, my lovely and amazing bookgroup ladies tried to wave me off the book. Miscarriage, lost and endangered children. Perhaps I wasn't ready.

And this quote from the book's amazing narrator:

“A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven’t. Most don’t mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn’t happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.
But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she’ll know.”
-Barbara Kingsolver “Animal Dreams”

I waited, and then when I was ready, I devoured this book.

I needed this and all the stories. All of it. Desperately.

Release balloons

I saw this idea on the SHARE site as I was frantically trying to figure out what a service for a baby might possibly look like. I had no clue...


But this, I knew we needed to do - release balloons in memory of Grace.

So we've released balloons for Grace 3 times so far:
at her burial,
at 6 months,
... and at the year mark, this past November 2008.

It's one of those concrete things that we can see, touch, feel.

And we probably wouldn't have done it if we didn't have a 3 year old to placate.

Originally it was a way to make her feel a part of the experience. But, on the day of the funeral itself, it was a joyous moment for us in an otherwise devestating day.

For the funeral, we brought many balloons, and the children there (and there were a few) released balloons.

My friend N, who had lost her son to a cord accident 8 years earlier and was a huge support to us in the aftermath, also released a balloon for her son E.

We hugged and cried and let our balloons float off into the sky together.

This experience means that our daughter, N, thinks that cemeteries are beautiful, wonderous, celebratory places where people remember loved ones with trinkets, flowers, and treasures.

Stare it down

I'm starting - now 1 year out - to really face the bald-face truth: This happened to me. I lost this baby. She is gone.

The difference between now and a year ago is that I'm no longer fighting this truth. I used to say "I can't believe..." with a sense of injustice. I screamed this in the shower. I literally would find myself involuntarily shaking my head "no."

Now - with time, with counseling, with all sorts of coping mechanisms - there are days when I can leave it at just this: "This happened to me" with some level of belief about the whole thing.

I also realize that I can only imagine who she would be - I can't in good conscience think that I know who she really was or would have been. She is who she is -and a mystery to me in so many ways.

The comfort?

It comes right now in really being able to see how she is woven into our lives. I water the plant my family gave us in her honor. I see her picture. I have my necklace. Every time the wind picks up outside my house, every fall, will be about her. We'll keep baking our cakes. We'll keep lighting our candle. We have the pillow my grandmother made. We will soon have the angel ornaments on the Christmas tree.

This is not how I wanted it to be. This is the way it is. I hold both of these side by side.