It's funny reading over past blogs how quickly time can pass forwards and backwards and emotions either have changed...either become deeper like a wine, or they have evaporated but ting like an awkward scar in a mobile area. You want to pull them harder to stretch more but the skin is just a little too tight.
Knox did come, on the 25th. The first year it worked out well. Now we're going to have to be a very masterful in splitting weekends and hosting events. 2 sons and 2 celebrations. Very different times layered on top of each other.
This year would be Avery's 5th year. His kindergarten year. I had heard it would be a tough one, I had anticipated it would be a little more raw and hard, but I was not expecting the sheer steps back I am going through. The grit, the raw, namely the anger. It feels so foreign, so unwelcome yet natural, a conflict of personality and self awareness. It's being a stranger and a very old, but deeply unwelcome friend at the same time.
No one really enjoys being marked and running in sorrow. There's been so much of my own effort put forth to ease some of my angst, a turning away when people knowingly bring it up, and sincere efforts to avoid the sensory inputs that trip wire to the land mine. But in the same breath there's this desperate grasp to bring and keep fading memories- smells, moments, sights, sounds all of it are loosing their gasp in my mind. It's like grabbing the bar of soap and trying to clutch on to it while it slips out of your hands.
It is fair to say, it is a constant tug of war.
I feel comfortable around my friends who have experienced loss, it's so hard for me to feel like such a stranger to close friends trying to be kind and understanding. That righteous anger has returned "you do not understand you could never" "you will cry with me and then go back to your life without this loss" there's simply no way to get through this part of it. It's the truth. It's not part of the truth, it is the truth- the truth is, no one understands unless they have been through it and no one else lives with it but me. The "meeting half way" that I try to encourage, there's none of that but meeting on the bridge that says "I love you but I cannot help"....and what a bridge to no where is that.
There have been 4 and 5 year olds popping up all around me and my eyes search their faces and I listen in closer to their voices. I have to try hard to peel myself away, and I do. I can't stay long by them, there's nothing I can do about it. I am angry at them, for no reason other than they are there, and Avery is not. Who's fault its that? No ones. Again, you're left with a rope being pulled between two bitter emotions with no real winner. And someone will just be drug through the mud. The rope remains.
The physical hold is exhausting as well. Constantly feeling like I ran a marathon, attacks in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep but being exhausted, your heart beating a tighter like an angry fist. Sleep is an escape you can't take and want to.
Faces of repose have changed- looking in to my children's eyes leaves me in places I have not explored- knowing neither would be here if Avery had stayed, and not really knowing and feeling any peace from any of that...the old cliche grief quote "tell me which child you would pick".....I can't....I don't know how....and then sometimes when the sky is too gray or too sunny my answer comes from the pit of a heart that has been buried and grieving for 5 years and it's urgency frightens me.
Every day, more than ever, I wake up and I decide. Who am I going to be today? How will I handle today? The reminders come quick and painful when I am earnestly not seeking them and avoiding them. Bre will mention him, my classes will discuss PTSD, or complex grief, someone will mention him....something comes up. Where as bubbles pop and vapor is left, bubbles are popped and flood gates are released. So delicate and hoovering, but still solid and dammed up.
I would give, anything, anything and everything to know what kind of birthday party he would have wanted. I couldn't say he would have been like every other boy I know and wanted super heroes, he was so quiet, astute and alert. Baseball would have been probably involved, Thomas when he was maybe a bit younger, maybe legos? Something with adventure but quiet adventure. I see him carrying around a favorite book and being able to tell and wanting to tell any stranger about it's content. His siblings love dinosaurs, maybe we would have all been at the Durham museum walking the trails and looking at the dinosaurs. If I could see his face....his 5 year old face....his 5,4,3,2, 1 year old face....maybe I would know. Maybe I would know something more about my own child. The small body I carried from life to death....maybe something more to carry to life.
Strangers have enough to say that I should be over it. I love that. That we would find women who beat and murder their children so vile "here's the woman that is suppose to love them above all others" yet 5 years from a loss I am suppose to be "over" my child. Break downs aren't suppose to happen "What baby? What kid?" Really? How does that work? I do not understand how the two scenarios are required of the same person- love your children above everything, but be able to get over them easier.
I have done a lot of research- philosophical, biomedical and ethical research for papers and had to look into the science, medical and ethical issues of child/infant loss. The validation is overwhelming. Interviews from 70-80 year old women and men who lost children, the intensity of grief (and the more negative things) decades later. How compounded it was by being forced to deny and "get over" child/infant loss....drugs, alcoholism, depression, dementia....scientific and ethical papers from 3rd person perspective of the absolute devastation, and not from "these different times" but how it was decades and decades ago. The same bitter and terrible river of tears....we are all connected. Same scars, same depth to drown, same inability to see the world and relate to it as before. Articles? Yes these:
Arnold, J., Gemma, P. & Cushman, L. (2005). Exploring Parental
Grief: Combining Quantitative
and Qualitative Measures. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 19(6). p. 245-255.
Bellali, T., Papazoglou, I., & Papadatou, D. (2007). Empirically
based recommendations to
support parents facing the
dilemma of paediatric cadaver organ donation. Intensive and Critical Care Nursing, 23. p. 216-225.
Bellali, T. & Papadatou, D. (2006). Parental Grief Following The
Brain Death Of A Child: Does
Consent Or Refusal To Organ Donation Affect Their
Grief? Death Studies, 30. p. 883-917.
Haque, M. (2011). End-of-Life Issues in Pediatric Patients. JIMA; 43, 192-194.
**O’Leary, J. & Warland, J. (2013). Untold Stories of Infant Loss:
The Importance of Contact With
the Baby for Bereaved Parents. Journal of Family Nursing, 19(3). p. 324-347.**
Rini, A. & Loriz, L. (2007). Anticipatory Mourning in Parents With
a Child Who Dies While
Hospitalized. Journal
of Pediatric Nursing. 22(4) p. 272-282.
The O'Leary article unwrapped such validation I wanted the world to read it. I wish many would. I did a piece on pediatric organ donation, not to ascribe what should be done to make more parents consent, but why the current consent process is problematic. I had to address child/infant loss and delving into the readings from this perspective was validating in a whole new way. Made me realize I have a heart for neonatal/perinatal and pediatric palliative care...I am adding it to my infinite to-do list.
Here I am....looking into the 5th year. I did not know 5 years ago I would be so full of dread, I can only remember the hope and joy and anticipation. Everything you remember so fondly and repeat a million times in story of the birth of your children. But it is such a stark contrast to what happened...to what remained. You can't and don't want to tell the "you" then how naive and wrong you are, and you do not hate yourself for hoping and being so joyful, but that joyful is why you hurt *so much* now.
The race was over the moment it began. Not many stories, songs and events are planned with such a briefness....but with such an impact.
