Eight Years Without You

Every year since 2003, at 11:34 am on the 30th of December, I have looked at the clock and thought, "And now I knew." Ben was gone but the long process of labor and delivery loomed, phoning my husband to tell him the terrible news, alerting families and friends.

In the space of a moment, a life changed, a life ended. A lifetime of things not done, words not said, plans and hopes and memories never made.

Eight years. Unimaginable that anyone can live that long without something--someone--so important. But live you do, because there is no other choice.

May Your Love Bring Us Love

There is nothing I can say about the events of 10 years ago that someone else hasn't said better, with more wisdom, more insight. When I remember that day, I think of the silence, after the towers fell, stepping outside on a beautiful, glorious September day, and there were no cars moving past, no airplanes flying overhead, no schoolchildren calling.

Only silence.

And today I give you Bruce Springsteen singing a song from his 9/11 album, The Rising, Into the Fire.

Well the sky was falling and streaked with blood
I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into dust
Up the stairs, into the fire
Up the stairs, into the fire
I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs, into the fire

May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love bring us love

Fast Away

For Ben - Happy Birthday, wherever you may be.

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

-D.H. Lawrence

After Great Pain

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

- Emily Dickinson

Could Someone Please Explain to Me...

...why there are so freaking many of us?

When Ben died, my OB told me that, in 20 years of delivering babies, what happened to us had happened about 3 times when he was the doctor. Initially I thought he meant stillbirth in general, but I later realized he meant stillbirth as a result of a cord accident. I've since learned that about 15 percent of all stillbirths are due to cord accidents - so not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but a high number when it happens to you.

I've been stumbling around the blogosphere the last two days, reading various baby loss blogs. (And may I say, if you're not reading Niobe, you should - she writes so beautifully it makes me drool with envy.) And I am continually staggered by how many of us there are, who have had stillbirths or some other kind of baby loss. These are two of the blogs I've read in the past two days, and they made me feel so sad: Still Passing Open Windows and Baby Theo.

But what I feel more than sadness is just completely pissed off. December is not a good month for me, but I was doing ok until yesterday. I'm feeling pissed off mostly because it's a damn site easier than feeling sad. What I need right now is a good cry for all of these beautiful babies, but I don't want to. We're approaching Christmas, the season of joy and light, and you know what? It's not such a season of joy and light for so many of us. And that pisses me off too. I want my life to be the way it was before. I used to just love Christmas, especially all the carols - I've been a singer all my life and I couldn't imagine my life without music. But have you ever noticed how sad many of the Christmas carols are? All those beautiful old melodies set in a minor key - In the Bleak Midwinter, O Come O Come Emmanuel - singing of a celebration but full of sadness, foreshadowing the future of the one being sung about. I wonder why they were always my favorites, those mournful melodies. It makes sense now, after Ben, but I suppose I was always filled with a touch of melancholy anyway.

Right now, I just don't get it. I don't get why babies die. And I wonder sometimes how we all can live in a world where they do, and keep going, and pretend that everything will be all right.

Imaginary Friends

Sitting with my daughter this morning, watching the Macy's Parade, on comes a float called something like "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends."

Charlotte turns to me and says, quite softly, "I have an imaginary friend."

"You do?" I said. "I didn't know that."

"Ben is my imaginary friend. Our baby that died."

"Is he your imaginary friend, too, Mommy?"

"Well, yes, honey, I suppose he is."

That Time of Year...Again

So, yeah, it's that time of year again. No, not the holidays, though there is that; winter is approaching, and we're approaching the time of year when we lost Ben. Specifically, it was New Year's Eve when I delivered him, so four years ago right now I was 7.5 months pregnant and uncomfortable and starting to feel really ready to be done. Looking back, I can't believe I felt so anxious to be finished with pregnancy, but honestly, I didn't enjoy it. It was just hard and uncomfortable, and though I loved feeling my baby move inside me, I wanted to be able to walk up the stairs without huffing and puffing and sleep without heartburn or aching hips. I regret that I didn't appreciate that time more, but it wouldn't have made a difference to the outcome. That's the thing about parenting: there's always something to feel guilty about.

We've never really established a ritual around Ben's death; we have a lovely candle that friends gave us to commemorate him at his memorial service, and we light that on New Year's Eve for him, but we never do anything else. The first year we dropped our daughter off with friends for a sleepover and went to a hotel where we looked at his pictures, lit his candle and talked about him. Since then, it's all been hit or miss. Twice we've been with family, and his name hasn't been mentioned - though I don't really blame anyone for that, as we didn't mention him either. (Ok, maybe I blame them a little.) It's on his anniversary that I especially wish we had interred his ashes somewhere so that there was a place to go, to say a prayer, to say a few words, rather than attend to the cleaning, the cooking, the ordinariness of our daily lives.

This year my in-laws will be with us on New Year's Eve, as they were last year. I need to figure out something to do that will fill that hole in my heart that day, that will make me feel I commemorated him on his birthday. I realize that Ben doesn't care, but I do. I've just never figured out what would feel right. One thing we do like to do is make an annual donation to a charity: Save the Children is the one we've usually picked, and we also give money to the hospital where he was born. I like knowing that something good came out of his life, that somewhere in the world another set of parents doesn't go through the grief of losing a child because of our donation. Somewhere in the world a child lives because Ben died - and that means the world to me.

Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Day

It's October, which means that it's Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and today, the 15th, is loss awareness day. And wow, I sure wish I didn't know that.

My boy would be nearly four today, attending preschool, running around like a wild child, loving Bob the Builder, trucks, cars, macaroni and cheese. I don't expect he would be napping any longer, he would have declared his favorite flavor of ice cream, and would probably be in love with the Cars movie. I expect he would be at that really wonderful stage of adoring and needing his parents, still a bit cuddly, but on the cusp of pushing us away as he started to grow up and become a "big boy." And I know he would be driving his sister crazy.

I also know, that, had he lived, I wouldn't have a James. I have thought, over and over, that I could have had them both: Ben would have been 19 months old when James was born, so it's all physically possible. It would have been hard, but I could have done it. But that's not how the cards were played, and now, I can't imagine my life without James, and I can only dream about my life with Ben.

I'm not doing anything today to remember Ben - except what I wrote above. I do more on his anniversary, and I don't really know what else to do today. I think of him, like I do every other day, and I think of all the other babies who never came home, like mine. And I know how unbelievably lucky I am, that I had him at all, and that I have what I do, with my two children now. I recently met a woman who had a baby in 1963, her second, a boy. He was born severely deformed - and of course, this was before all of the testing they have now, so they didn't know anything was wrong with him until birth - and they took him away from her, and he died three days later. She never saw him, never had a footprint, a lock of hair, a shirt he wore. Nothing. The hospital had him cremated and buried, and she was encouraged to forget, to move on. Those were the dark ages of infant loss, and I am so grateful that I lost Ben in 2003, and that I got to hold him, and kiss him, and see the whole of him before I had to let him go.

And I am thinking today, of all the mothers and fathers who are aching for their babies; the ones who will lose their child today, the ones who lost their child decades ago. The ones who are waiting, hoping, for another chance, another child. If I had a magic wand I would be waving it like mad right now, to make it all better for all of us who've lost the most precious thing in the world.