Dear Diary: May 6, 2008

Please join me as I revisit my thoughts and feelings from the early days after Baker's death. From my journal nearly one year ago:

My midwife called yesterday with the final pathology report. It's upsetting to think of Baker's little body shutting down inside of me and blood going into his lungs. I hope he didn't hurt or feel anything. I hope he felt love from his mama. I hope that all he know was how much we love him.

Chris has a surprise for me this weekend for Mother's Day. I don't feel like I deserve something nice or special. I wish my body had worked and kept Baker alive. I've let him down.

We drove to Vermont that weekend, and the surprise that Chris had been planning was to design a ring with an artisan jeweler. He sat me down on a bench, next to the store where I bought my wedding veil, and confessed his plan before we entered. The jeweler gave me a hug and explained several ideas about how to design a meaningful ring. I remember being in a complete fog, still wracked to the core with grief. In the end, we chose a small birthstone diamond, bezel-set into a ring molded from a poplar twig. She patiently explained that the balm of Gilead comes from the poplar tree and is known for its healing properties. The ring arrived a few months later, inscribed with Baker's initials and birthday, and assumed its place of honor opposite my wedding rings.

Living for 2

Dalene is growing Baker’s little brother, and by all accounts, he is as robust and active as Baker was at this point. The pain and the fear ebb and flow, and mix with the excitement that we can’t repress. I’ve started reading to this baby like I read to Baker – reading the same books, and some new ones, leaning my head on the growing bump as we go to sleep, little guy kicking away at me as I read.

It’s bittersweet, as we come up on what should be Baker’s first birthday. We have plans for Baker’s day, honoring him with both sets of his grandparents at his grave, sharing lunch, donating some books to the library, and planting some flowers. Then we’ll want to get the hell out of town – find a destination and do anything other than come back home and sit, and think, about the frosting and cake that should be wonderfully matted in Baker’s hair, and eyebrows, and crammed in the cracks in the floorboards.

Baker’s brother will have the pent up attention of his parents – enough for two children – directed at him like a firehose. Our responsibility, I think, is to give him all that love while letting him be his own person. It scares me a little bit when I think of how much we want to meet him, touch his soft skin and smell his baby smell. We had only fleeting moments with Baker, and if we are so blessed to bring this guy home, we’ll need to positively LIVE every moment with him.

No one can live for two. We can’t ask him to shoulder the weight of his brother’s life. We’ll watch him as he grows and think about Baker every minute, but we have to give him the freedom to live for one and to someday know his brother, Baker, and miss him along with us.

Springing ahead

The light is returning. The sun is higher and stronger and sometimes blinding, even as it snows today. As we near Baker’s season, it is the light that strikes me.

I labored for three days at home beginning on April 1^st. On the first day, I baked chocolate chip cookies to bring to the hospital. I rechecked my list of things to pack. Chris painted the remaining pieces of trim from our kitchen remodel. On the second day, we walked to the library and I sat through a few contractions in the periodical section, vaguely considering what to do if my water broke on the upholstered chair. Chris painted a wooden bench for the front porch, I baked a chocolate birthday cake for our return home, and we figured out how to flip open and close the stroller. That evening, I called the birth center to tell them my contractions were coming 5 minutes apart. The midwife had me draw a bath and focus on feeling the baby’s movements. In the dim light, Chris helped me towel off and get to bed, where I dozed between contractions throughout the night. On the third day, I rested on the couch with the kitty and listened to yoga and birthing affirmation CDs as the frequency and intensity of contractions increased. I nibbled on grapes and toast and focused on my breathing. Eventually, no longer able to concentrate on anything other than getting through contractions, I handed my timer over to Chris and had him mark the start of each surge.

Time blurred during those three days. It is the light that I remember-the ebb and flow of light to dark and back to light. I called the birth center when the sun was at its highest point on April 3^rd. The midwife said to come in at 3:00. I called back at the appointed time because I couldn’t remember if she told me to come in or call again. During the quick drive to the birth center, I shut my eyes to the still-high sun, too focused to bother locating my sunglasses. The midwife deemed me 7 cm dilated and definitely in active labor. I could stay! She drew a warm bath, and I lolled about in the tub until darkness fell. Chris rocked in a chair next to me. Baker’s thumping heartbeat filled the room whenever one of the midwives checked on him. Chris opened the door to the outside to air out the steamy bedroom, and I was struck by the shadows of twilight. It was just the three of us, peaceful and calm and expectant.

It is nearly one year later and the light has returned. I both welcome and fear its return. With the light come the blooms of hyancinth and daffodil bulbs from Baker’s funeral arrangements that Chris dropped into the ground around our house. Snow crocuses, the first bloomer of spring, opened on the day we gathered with family to bury Baker’s ashes, a blindingly sunny day that didn’t match the occasion. I expect them to start poking through the ground any day now.

The entire month of April that followed his birth and death were bluebird-sky days that I think of as Baker wrapping his arms around his stricken parents. Once I was well enough to walk, we trudged around the neighborhood on daily one-foot-in-front-of-the-other walks, pulling each other along because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. The time and space we had carved out for our boy left a gaping hole. So I stuffed my pockets with Kleenex and we walked and cried and squinted into the sun.

The calendar ticks by and will soon mark the end of the first of many years without our boy.

But we hope to see him in the light.

Australian sand

Many thanks to Carly, mother of Christian, for honoring Baker on a seashore far, far away from here.

Footprints

Ever feel like you have so much to say that you could never get it all out? That's how I'm feeling about blogging and part of the reason I've been quiet lately. Something that I'm currently stewing about is that we have no marker at Baker's grave. I'm stuck in indecision and don't know where to start. Perhaps I fear the finality of seeing his name engraved in stone? In my mind, I pictured an unveiling of the stone on his first birthday in April, but Chris reminded me that the ground could still be muddy after this very snowy winter. So for the time being, we have the tree to mark the spot. A flat marker would have long been buried by now-instead his tree stands tall next to a similar tree for a young man killed in a car accident in August, just weeks before he was to start college and continue his accomplished athletic career. After the first big snow, Gabriel's parents brought a shovel to the cemetery and dug a path through the snow to their son's resting place. Most Sundays, we gratefully travel the same path to our own son's grave and now, after many snowstorms and many Sundays, the path is well worn by our collective footprints. Other than Christmas wreaths, there has been very little winter activity in our section, no other footprints to graves of people who died older and have been dead longer. Although I don't know Gabriel's parents and won't touch the "which is worst" question, I feel like we're in this together. I greet Baker, I greet Gabe. Chris trimmed Baker's grass, then Gabe's grass, in the fall. I watered their annuals. When we leave, we say goodbye to both Baker and Gabe. I like knowing that Gabe is buried next to Baker. From what I've read about him in the newspaper, he seems like the kind of kid who likes babies.

She gets it

Several times since the ultimate tragedy, Chris and I have come away from an encounter, conversation, or dinner out and said to each other, “he gets it” or “she gets it” or “they get it”. No one who hasn’t lost a child along the way can truly get it, but some special people come very close, so close that I want to throw my arms around them with gratitude. Is that what empathy is? The ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, even when the shoes are “the worst thing that could happen”? I had another of these moments when I opened an email this morning. It came from a friend who is full and pregnant and due in the spring, one year from the spring of my great loss. She wrote to warn me that an invitation to her shower will be arriving in the mail. She’s been this way from the beginning of my after, not afraid to call just days after Baker died and not afraid to meet me head on with her own coming babe, acknowledging the weirdness of this dance. It’s funny…just the fact that she recognizes that a baby shower could be difficult for me makes me want to maybe possibly attend. I may sit quietly in the back, but I think I’d like to be there for her.

Making it bearable

Some of the ways we made it through:

• We placed a small Christmas tree at Baker's grave.
• Several family members donated children's books to our local library in Baker's name. Others donated to the March of Dimes and World Vision in his memory.
  
• My mother donated baby boy clothing to a needy family that her coworkers "adopted" for Christmas.
  
• My parents donated a poinsettia for the Christmas Eve service, and Baker's name was in the program.
  
• Chris and I donated a truck for a one-year old to Toys for Tots.
• We designed glass-etched ornaments with his name, birth date, weight, and footprints and gave them to family members for their own trees.
  
• Baker's ornaments, which included a baby's first Christmas bootie, were the first to go on our tree.
  

O Christmas Tree

On the list of things I never imagined on the day we married: Chris and I owning a 4-person cemetery plot in our early 30s. Many parents of lost babies keep their children's ashes near them, on the fireplace mantle or bedroom dresser. We chose to rest Baker's urn at our local cemetery, and I like having a place to go. In the summer, we sometimes walked the round trip 4 miles with grass clippers in tow. We haven't decided on a permanent stone yet, largely because neither of us are ready to commission the giant LAST NAME marker that is common in this resting place. So instead we placed an antique urn and chose a dwarf Alberta spruce for Baker's first Christmas tree. So on this difficult Christmas Day when I am far away visiting family, I know it stands tall and prominent to mark the spot where we laid him nearly 9 months ago.

Kindness from Strangers

Baker's first ornament was knitted by a kind woman I met online. Amy's baby girl died last year at fullterm. I wasn't sure that I wanted to put up a Christmas tree this year, but it is there and it is lovely. Thank you, Amy, for helping us make Baker a part of the holiday.

Walk to Remember

We attended this event on Sunday, http://mysite.verizon.net/walktoremember/, held as part of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. There were probably 300 people, including many babies and small children born to bereaved parents, remembering over 150 lost little ones. We cried and walked the steps that Baker will never take.