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.