Fallout

Good days are followed by bad days.  Yesterday was a good day, full of distractions, focused on teaching, on grading, on an engrossing new novel and a disappointing college basketball game (David did not find it disappointing.  We are a House Divided.).

Today the weight of it all is impossibly heavy again.  The very things that offered me hope yesterday--the idea of another baby sometime in the future, a card from my mom, David's solid reassurance, plans made with friends--all of them seem so fleeting and far away.  The risk of hoping for future good things is not worth what I can only imagine will be the inevitable disappointment to follow.

A website where grieving mothers voice their pain and offer each other support doesn't feel like a refuge today.  Instead, I feel burdened and overwhelmed by everyone else's pain.  Weighed down by the vast injustice of all of it and desperate in my wish to somehow fix this--not just for me, but for everyone.  For Otis's mom, and Kai's, and George's and Olivia's and Lily's and Julius's and Amos's and everyone because it is so fucking unfair and it hurts so much I don't know how any of us are dragging ourselves through the day.  Or why we bother.

And I know yesterday was better than this.  I know it was because I lived it and I felt ok and although there was some crying (in my "new normal" there is always some crying), it was the kind of crying that feels like relief instead of just coming out like the only sound I can make while being gutted alive.

Gosh, that sounds dramatic doesn't it?  It's horribly true, though.  And writing it made me feel a little better.  Naming the experience is somehow satisfying, like if I could just put into words exactly what it feels like then I could control it a little bit more.

A friend of mine has an anonymous blog.  So she can write just how she's feeling at any given moment, she explained, without having to worry that her mom will come over on a suicide watch.

I get that.  Because sometimes writing is like a purging of the pain and once it's out there, it's easier to breathe.  But I don't want to make other people even more upset with my words.  I don't want to make people worry.  Because sometimes I have this strange sensation that the fact of the experience is actually worse than the experience itself.  Once I put the facts out there, and name the experience somewhere outside myself, it's a little easier to go back to just existing.  The writing of it is somehow sadder than the living of it.  I'm not sure that makes sense.  I'm not sure it's always true.  But sometimes it is.

And even though it always helps to get comments and e-mails from people who read the words and say "I'm sorry" or "Me too," the truth is that just getting the themselves words out there, even without hearing back from anyone, is a kind of relief, like sucking out the poison from a festering wound.

Yay for the vivid similes today, huh?

I heard a story recently of a woman who was depressed after the loss of a child.  She has other children, but the death of her oldest child was just more than she could bear and after years of appearing to take it all in stride while surreptitiously self-medicating, it recently became all too obvious that she was suffering from intense depression.  I heard this story and my heart ached for that woman.  I thought about how easily that could be me.  If I didn't have my parents and my brother.  If my relationship with David were different.  If I didn't have my closest friends.  If I weren't in therapy.  If I hadn't become connected with other women who know what I'm going through.  Those ifs feel so fragile--such a thin remove between her experience and mine.  I felt so terribly, terribly sorry for her because I understand her suffering and I know exactly how it feels to think that it's all too much and that nothing in the future could be worth the pain of getting through this moment.


I said something of the sort to the friend who was telling me this story.  How sad I was for this woman, how I hope she can find some help, how I understand the intensity of her sadness.  My friend didn't speak to any of that.  "Her poor children," she said, shaking her head.  "And her husband.  I hope she can get the help she needs."


Oh, yeah.  The fallout.


This woman's family hadn't even registered on my radar of people to feel sorry for.  Probably because I'm too busy feeling sorry for her...  and myself.

Despite the fact that my grief makes me selfish and small, I do realize that the fallout from Eliza's death is not limited to me alone, or even to just David and me.  My parents are grieving for a granddaughter they'll never know and probably for me too, the irreparably damaged daughter.  I don't want to make them worry, I don't want to amplify the pain of my friends and family who loved Eliza and miss her too, and who also miss me--the person I used to be before all of this happened. 


I know there are other people who are hurting over this not just because they would have loved Eliza and they miss what she would have been to them--granddaughter, niece, BFF-once-removed--but who are hurting mostly on my account.  Because they see how this is tearing me apart.  Because they are sad for me and they can't make it better and they want to offer me something to fix it--distraction in the form of shopping or dinner or weekend at the lake, a promise of future children, a promise of a glitzy eternal life where I'll see my baby again. Some days these things truly help.  Some days nothing could possibly help.


On a good day I feel like a survivor who knows that life is still worth living even if I don't have what I wanted most of all.  I feel like I can live out cliches about weathering storms.  Maybe I could be like old Anne of Green Gables, eventually smiling again even though she had to bury her first child, even though the smile is different than it was before.

But on a bad day--like this day--I do feel like I am irreparably damaged.  That this "new normal," whatever it looks like, is flawed and broken and however I define "happy," it will never be what it meant before.  And--worst of all--that if it can't be what it was before, it's not worth having.

And I'm overwhelmed with the hurt and the injustice of it all--not just for me but for so many other mothers who wanted and loved their babies and for no good reason are forced to figure out what happens now.

When this painfully intense sympathy meets the bottomless well of self-pity, well, you know it's not going to be a good day.

On days like this, I want to ignore the fallout.  I want to curl up selfishly in my cocoon of grief and not try to choke back tears.  I think I'm entitled.

But I do hate that my pain makes other people hurt, too.  So I drag myself out of bed so that David's forehead wrinkle won't get deeper when he looks at me.  I talk about my sadness in therapy.  I read books.  I eat dinner.  I take deep breaths and make myself sit up straight.  I wrestle my sadness into words in an effort to manage the power it has over me.

The truth is that I have good days.  And then there are bad days.  "That's the ebb and flow of grief," my therapist says, nodding wisely.

I happen to hate the ebb and flow of grief.  Particularly when it threatens to drown me.