thanksgiving and my 200th post

This morning I'm sitting in my office, waiting for things to pick up, while still trying to recover from last night's ninety minute commute home from hell and simultaneously gearing up for an even worse one tonight. This is Thanksgiving traffic in Los Angeles. It is soul-crushing. Last night I cried in my car but this morning I was laughing about how people lose their damn minds while staring at the snaking line of brake lights through their windsheilds.


I've been thinking about how different things are this year as opposed to this time last year. Last year the holidays left me a quivering mass of jello made from a Brianna mold. Lemon-flavored jello. Bitter and transparent. Which, of course, was a completely reasonable state to be in. This time last year I wrote the following post. I read it now and feel so acutely what a difficult time I was having when I first wrote it.


But things are different this time. Better. Happier. The intensity of my grief over George's death is not debilitating as it was a year ago. Anyway, the purpose of this post was to give encouragement to those of you are facing down your first holidays without your babies. It gets better. The pain never goes away but it does get easier, I promise you.


Wishing you all a peaceful day tomorrow.




Stretched and Stark (originally posted November 9, 2010)



On days like this it comes so near as to snatch the breath from my lungs.  I reach out and feel the bitterness and anger and sorrow on the tips of my fingers.  Smooth, solid.  An obelisk of obsidian throwing long shadows on my life's landscape.



A seed of wide love coated a thousand times over in mourning.  My very own black pearl. 


My mind wanders to naked branches, limbs stretched and stark against a blue sky.  They herald the coming season but instead of choirs of angels I hear them speak to me in cautionary baritones.  The Winter creeps ever closer still and one morning I awake to find that it is almost upon us.  The nearly imperceptible change of the angle of light throughout the day; soft and simultaneously inexorable.  I feel the weight of it pressing on to my shoulders.


There is no shine or sparkle to these days ahead.


I once read a book* and it pulled loose a small thread in one of my seams.    


“Nothing is predetermined, it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given – so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was is; everything that ever will be is – and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.”


I've since unraveled as time has pulled me away farther from him.


Underneath something different.  Nearly imperceptibly so.  Softer and simultaneously inexorable.  


How I ache to believe that we will be brought together.  That he is more than just a single brush stroke on this canvas.  That he is, no matter how small, intimately and sensibly tied to all others.


My son, where are you?

I miss you.

I am incomplete.  

reclaimed; this box, my life, and George's death

Recently Leif and I were given an amazing hand-crafted box made from reclaimed wood made by our dear friend Josh.  It was made specifically for George and his initials are burned into the side- G.E.H.  It is a place for the few things in this world that are exclusively his; baby blankets knitted with love from grandmothers, ink prints of tiny feet, three photographs of his little face.  We had no special place for these things. They were stashed in a cabinet that has since become his sister's wardrobe and in a plastic bin stuffed in our closet.  When we mentioned this to Josh he offered to make something special to house George's things.  Special is what it certainly turned out to be.

In the days since it has been in our home I have traced the outline of his initials a dozen times.  G.E.H.  A gift for my son.

I am so incredibly grateful for the box.  For Josh and for Kari.  For their living daughter Stella, and for the one I never met, Margot.  Rarely in life do you find friends such as these.  Rarely in life do meet people who are just so fucking cool.

For a long time after George died all I wanted to do was clothe myself in grief and live in the shadow of his death.  It was the only way I knew how to feel close to him.  I couldn't imagine ever finding, let alone admitting to finding, positive things in my life that came as a result from his death.  How could anything good come from something so terrible and tragic as bearing witness to the death of my son?  But there were positive things, even then.  In the saddest days there were seeds of beauty being sewn into my life solely because he had died.  Now I find myself collecting and cultivating those beautiful things in the hopes that they make his existence add up to more than the 292,320 minutes he lived inside of my womb and the mere 24 he lived outside.

Nineteen months later those seeds are blooming everywhere in my life.  The strength of my marriage.  The little girl Clio who just yesterday learned how to roll over.  The deep sense of empathy I have for others in the midst of tragedy.  The strength of character I now have.  The bonds of friendship I have developed with people like Josh and Kari.  This human, the one who now occupies this more wrinkled and faded skin, is a direct descendent of his life and death.  I am who I am because he was who he was.

I miss George every day.  His absence still hurts and I don't think that will ever completely go away.  His death was ugly but my life from his death is beautiful and for that I am grateful.

welcome to the club

Some days I feel like an ordinary mother.  I go about my day as any other parent of an infant does; kiss her, change her, kiss her, feed her, kiss her, burp her, kiss her, dress her, kiss her, play with her, kiss her, put her down for a nap...you get my point.

Other days I'm reminded that I am not totally just an ordinary mother.  I'm also the parent of a dead baby.  I'm someone who knows too much about the subject of death and grief and infant loss.  I'm someone who knows what it is like to be completely incomplete.  I'm someone who misses her child with a wild intensity that few other people can ever truly understand.

Yesterday was one of those days...

The newborn sister of one of the toddlers at Clio's daycare died over the weekend.  It wasn't unexpected as she was born with a genetic issue that is considered "not compatible with life."  In fact, the parents had fully expected her to be stillborn but they made the choice to carry her to term anyway, a decision I can relate to since Leif and I basically made the same one after we had exhausted most of the medical interventions available to us.  But the baby surprised them all by being born alive and then staying alive for three weeks or so.  From what I understand -I have never met these parents so all of this is secondhand information- they were able to take her home from the hospital and spend those weeks together as a family.

Leif let me know as soon as I got home from work yesterday and I was immediately back in those early days after George died.  The despair, the chaos, the helplessness...I could easily imagine everything that these people are probably feeling.  And I thought to myself when I heard the news, now they are some of our people- the parents of a dead baby.  New members of one of the saddest clubs in existence.

I am trying to decide if, when and how I should reach out to this couple. I don't want to overstep my bounds as I have never met them.  Hell, I don't even know their names.  Do I give them a list of resources; online forums, grief support groups, my phone number?  Do I send them a card via the sitter?


"So very sorry for the loss of your baby.  Welcome to the club."