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.

Dear Diary: April 30, 2008

From my journal nearly one year ago:

Chris and I sent Baker's pictures to some people. It makes me so sad to realize that those are the only pictures we'll ever get to send our family and friends. No Christmas cards, no school pictures. He'll always be a baby.

Thank goodness for the pictures that the hospital staff urged us to take. I wish we had a thousand more. A friend who is a professional photographer contacted me shortly after Baker died and shared that she is a volunteer for Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. She offered to retouch the pictures and did an amazing job sharpening up the close-up of his foot that was originally so very blurry. Chris thinks that Baker would have been a barefoot water skier given the size of his tootsies.

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Some random thoughts to finish out the month of April:

I spotted this obituary for a baby named Lizzie Marie Horner and loved the words: She was also loved by many aunts, uncles and cousins. Lizzie enjoyed talking to her family and friends through mama’s belly, and loved to kick daddy in the mornings. She will be forever loved and missed.

We didn't put a printed obituary in the newspaper. At the time, it was too much to bear along with the other details of Baker's burial and memorial service. If we had, I would have liked to say something similar.

The most emailed Boston Globe article on Wednesday (until swine flu took the top spot) was
Bereaved fathers find healing in friendship.

The forsythia wreath we placed on the door of Lazy Cat Farm on Baker's first birthday, April 3rd:















Hyacinths from Baker's funeral arrangements blooming in our garden:

Dear Diary: April 26, 2008

From my journal one year ago today:

This morning, I discovered the birthday cake I made to celebrate Baker. Mom had put the two halves in the freezer. I baked it on April 2nd while in labor. He was alive and kicking then. I threw it in the trash and cried.

I miss my baby. I hope that he is happy in heaven. Our minister says that there is no suffering where he is. I hope that Baker knows that he is loved and that we miss him. I hope that his baby spirit will stay with me and help me through this.

He was so active and alive inside me. I wondered for so long what he would look like. When I finally saw him with my eyes, he was dead. So still and lifeless. It was so wrong. My heart is broken. As C. told me yesterday, this is the worst thing that could happen.

I briefly thought about attempting the same chocolate birthday cake for what should have been Baker's first birthday on April 3 of this year. Then I decided to do cupcakes from a box, and even that felt like too much to expect of myself. Maybe some future year, but not this year. So on his birthday, when we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things before making the trip up to Lazy Cat Farm and I spotted the single blue or pink birthday cupcakes, I knew I had found the perfect solution. Later that night in the dark, Chris and I lit the single candle that came with Baker's blue and white-iced cupcake and whispered a tearful rendition of "Happy Birthday" to our sweet boy. Chris read Baker's favorite book, The Pokey Little Puppy, to our two boys, and we were both mercifully asleep by 11:31 pm, the time that Baker was born without breath.

Dear Diary: April 25, 2008

From my journal one year ago today, 3 weeks after Baker died:

April 25, 2008

I miss having Baker in my belly. He would stick out his baby bum on my right side, and we would spank it. I rubbed it when I sat at my desk at work and loved him. I loved him wholly and completely. I fell in love with my son. I miss his baby hiccups toward the end of my pregnancy. He squirmed a lot when he hiccuped. I could tell he didn't like them. Chris wanted to take him out and burp him when they happened. Sometimes they were faint and sometimes they were jarring.

In related news, Baker's little brother is 28 weeks today, solidly in the third trimester. He pokes and hiccups and squirms around often, which I hope are little reminders that he is alive and well and is going to come home with us in July. My fundal height measured 30 cm at my midwife appointment this week. At the end of May, I start twice weekly non-stress tests until delivery. I'll have two growth ultrasounds in June to check fluid levels. It's all for peace of mind, really, since Baker's death was likely a freak cord accident during labor. That's the good news and the bad news for us. It is maddening to know that Baker should be toddling around today, if not for an accident. That knowledge coexists with the knowledge that his little brother should make it out alive and well.

Dear Diary: April 22, 2008

Since I didn't start writing on our blog until Baker had been gone for 6 months, I feel the need to share some of my thoughts from the early days of my grief, when the pain was so raw that I gasped and choked for breath. For the next few posts, possibly for the next several months, I'm going to share excerpts of what I wrote one year ago in my journal. I carried the notebook, stuffed with a few select cards that I read and re-read, like a security blanket in my purse to work, along with a small photo album of Baker's pictures. In the days leading up to what should have been his first birthday, I cracked the book for the first time in months and remembered through my tears. It doesn't take long to get back to that place. These were the first words I could manage to get down on paper, exactly one year ago today.

April 22, 2008

I did not ask for this. It is so unfair and totally sucks. I don't want to be a grieving mother. I just want my baby. My beautiful baby boy. I want him more than anything. I'd give anything to change this. This isn't how it was supposed to turn out. I feel lost. I feel empty without my baby. I feel hopeless and aimless. I am afraid of the dark. I am afraid that we'll get hit by a car or that Chris will get hurt and killed. I feel paralyzed and in a daze. I have trouble remembering things. Baker died almost 3 weeks ago. I should have a 3-week old newborn. We should be taking Baker out for walks in the sunshine in his stroller. We should be figuring out nursing and be waken in the nighttime by his baby cries. We should be changing his diapers and rocking him to sleep and watching him breathe. I want to see his eyes look at me. I want to hold him and smell him and comfort him. Instead, we are left with an empty house, a quiet bassinet, a room full of hopes and sadness, and our baby in the ground. It isn't right and it isn't fair.

Today is for remembering

by W.W. Roberts

Today is for remembering
The day begins like any other day,
The busy-ness of people all around me
Going about the tasks of their day,
Will never know the pain
This day marks for me.
I have survived a difficult year.
I have endured more pain and heartache
Than I ever thought possible,
And I have survived.
And I miss you...
It may just be another day
To everyone else,
But today I remember you.

Enjoy it While You Can

Perhaps we're just a little jacked up this week because we are staring Baker's first birthday right in the face, but I don't think so. It's more than that. We've encountered a run of people compelled to tell us, in conjunction with our "new" baby, that we should enjoy this freedom while we can, before the baby comes.

It is a harmless suggestion, most of the time, and we understand the sentiment. Life before you have a baby is carefree and easy! Everything from finances, to marriage, to sleep, and "going out with the guys." All easy!

And then the newborn comes, and you're up all night with feedings and changing diapers and oh boy, you don't know what you are in for, you babes in the woods!

The comments began when Dalene started showing. We knew at the gut level that this wasn't sitting well with us, though we couldn't quite put our fingers on why. It finally hit us yesterday, after a particularly egregious violator ran this line of commentary by Dalene. I was conspicuous by my absence, as we are normally together - I was in Boston having a drink with co-workers to celebrate the end of our fiscal year - a toast to surviving another challenging budget. So when Dalene said that I was out at a bar -she was bombarded with the inevitable, "Hey, enjoy it while you can, right?"

Everything that we have "enjoyed" in the past year has been almost entirely because our son died. Every drink that I have had after work, every dinner with a friend, every morning we have been able to sleep in on a weekend - yep, that's our prize for our dead baby. Yes, I know what you are thinking - we are damn lucky to have all that freedom.

It is hard to come up with a snappy response, but you kind of feel like saying, "enjoy it while you can" right back to them. Enjoy your living children. Enjoy their laughter and their tears. Enjoy being woken up at 2 AM with projectile vomiting. Enjoy a bowl of cheerios dumped on the cat. You know what - fucking enjoy it all, because the alternative is so horrible, so unspeakably empty and cold and hollow, that you wouldn't know the first damn thing to do with yourself.

And then some people, mostly parents, want to start giving advice about traveling with young children, and daycare, and lord knows what else, as though this is our first child, and we have never thought about any of this before. And then, you want to say, "Remember our baby who died? Remember how we finished the nursery, stocked up with diapers and butt paste and onesies and took CPR class and bought life insurance? Remember how we planned out precisely when and where to get Baker's passport, and what we were going to pack on our family trip last year to Antigua? Remember how we have already visited a daycare, already know the staff, know the schedule, have it all worked out? So yes, our sweet baby is dead, but we are parents, and we have seen that movie, and read that book, and damn it, most of the time I feel like more of a parent than you ever will."

But I don't usually say those things. At least I haven't yet.

I guess we just roll with these things - as with everything else, the people with the emotional intelligence to understand our pain are the people that we grow closer to and those that reveal that they lack the human empathy gene, well, they should enjoy that while they can.

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.

Restoration

Dalene and I met in graduate school in Vermont, both studying natural resources. One of the big topics of discussion and debate among colleagues related to the concept of ecological restoration and land management. When resource managers "restore" a site, what are they restoring it to? Do you design the restoration simply to improve ecosystem function, or do you pick a moment in time - a snapshot of the past - to restore to. In Vermont, restoration might mean reclaiming pasture from overgrown forest - cutting back to the stonewalls that once marked boundaries and loosely kept sheep and livestock penned in. Restoration might mean creating age and species diversity in a forest to begin to approximate the healthy, uneven-aged forest of the area. If one really wanted to push it, restoration might bring us back 14,000 years to a glacially-scoured landscape being repopulated by species following warming temperatures and chasing the ice back to the poles. Restoration is both scientific and arbitrary at the same time.

Like resource managers, historic preservationists must define restoration. Every layer of wallpaper, every addition, every moved window, kitchen improvement, and floor finish is part of the historic fabric of the structure. The 1790 12 over 12 windows and the 1960's wallpaper are all a part of the house's history. What do we keep? What do we trash? If we were truly restoring the farm to 1790, I'd have to build an outhouse. The chimney mass would have to be rebuilt and the little hearth upstairs, long gone, that the children used to stay warm by, would have to be recreated.

The truth is, our restored landscape is going to be part wilderness, part 1850's sheep pasture, and part 2009 retreat. The restored house will have indoor plumbing, a modern refrigerator, 200 year old hardware and flooring, hand blown windows, and with luck, high speed internet. The landscape - human and natural - cannot be restored to a specific time - it cannot help but reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly of its history.

Like the land and the house, our healing, our grieving, has to be designed to embrace and incorporate our history. We cannot roll back the clock, pick a moment in time, and restore ourselves to when we were naive enough to take our son's safe arrival for granted. We wouldn't want to go back for too long to the painful, shocking, unreality of the days immediately after Baker died. But we need some of that to make it real - like keeping a hideous scrap of wallpaper in the back of your cabinets where you can see it. Our personal restoration then becomes a melange of our individual pasts, our early carefree days as a couple, the excitement and hope that we had as we waited for our sweet Baker to arrive, the unspeakable suffering that we have endured having lost him, the bond between us that has been cemented, and Baker's little brother that is on his way. That is our landscape history. That is the fabric of our collective building. It is our story, and it is the way that we incorporate our dear baby into our lives.

Platitudes not welcome here

Another lostbaby mama on a discussion board I frequent posed a question that has me thinking. She wanted to know the most heartfelt and helpful words we were told after our loss. I'm going to answer the question in this space, too. Right after Baker died, it was the people who expressed rip-snorting anger who were most helpful for me. They were angry for us, with us, and with this impossible situation. In my state of complete shock, it helped to know that I had good reason to be STINKING, RAVING MAD. Also, a friend who I didn't expect to be especially eloquent, said that he didn't understand why something so awful would happen to the best people, with tears in his eyes. And several dear friends who stared and stared at Baker's pictures for a really long time. And anyone who expressed that THEY were hurting, too...that THEY missed out on meeting and knowing our son. Basically, anyone who let me be in the throes of grief and didn't try to talk me out of it. So, if you are reading this and are one of the aforementioned, thank you.

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.

Sweet little one

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.

Spring flowers

Lilacs, white roses, and potted hydrangeas filled the front of the church in April. So many flowers for such a little boy.

Structural Work

The “How are you doing?” question is so hard.

I’m breathing.

I got out of bed this morning.

I’m employed.

I think of my lost boy every waking hour.

I’m grieving.

Yes, I’m STILL grieving, get it?

Our external appearances have started to return to some semblance of normalcy, but under the surface, there lies complexity, damage, challenge, and hurt.

We invest energy and time on our structural repairs. We locate the damaged timbers of our hearts and minds and reinforce the weak areas with our memories of the time that we had with Baker, with the kindness of friends and family, and with the knowledge that our boy is with us in spirit.

Like us, the house is riddled with problem areas, rot, weaknesses, and challenges, hidden beneath a reassuring façade. We seek these areas out; we cut back to good wood; we find solutions and patch together the old and the new, to create a new old house that is pieced together like the new old us.

Custom Grief

200 or so years ago, the craftsman who built our house selected strong timbers from this rugged land, felled the trees, and worked them with an adze – an axe-like tool perfectly suited to this task. This craftsman worked at a time when so-called scribe rule framing was the norm. The frame was completely hand built – and each joint is a custom work of art.

The term scribe rule refers to the precisely fit joints – although every corner post and rafter perform basically the same function, they were shaped by hand and “scribed” to fit in a certain place. “Marriage marks” helped the carpenters reassemble frame – they are essentially numbered to be precisely refit. Our house has those marks – most visible in the rafters in the attic.

This type of framing dates the house pretty well – scribe rule was gone in VT by about 1810, replaced by “square rule” – the frame parts had greater uniformity and interchangeable parts which made construction easier and faster, and compared with our modern milled lumber and balloon frames, was still highly custom.

I think about our grieving process like our scribe ruled house – it’s not mass-produced, but rather it is “Custom Grief.”

Our little one of a kind person has been lost. In the same way that he is a one-off, artisan made, unique boy, we cannot get by with production line off the shelf grieving. Like the frame of our house, we have to carefully fit our grief, and the memory of our boy, into our lives. We try to fit the pieces together precisely, hewing the joints out of the large, heavy, irregular timbers of our pain and creating something strong, square and true to withstand the winter of our loss.