15. Sometimes I feel spiritually bereft.

I have done so much reading since August died about the experience of losing a child, and one of the most interesting topics for me has been the spiritual side of this experience, if there is one.

I am not religious and never have been. Always, my spirituality was something very private and very much my own, wrought from a jumble of things that were both precious to me and difficult to put into words: bits of poetry and philosophy that spoke to me; heart-swelling, meditative moments experienced beneath starry skies; hours-long, late-night talks with my best friends that made me feel as if we were tapping into something enormous and profound…even, yes, things I “figured out” while taking mind-altering substances. I filed these feelings and perceptions away, mixed them together, and sensed in them some kind of beautiful truth. And always, these perceptions were positive. I felt spiritually connected to the universe. I believed that what many other people called God was actually, simply, love. I felt able to tune in to that current of love and be filled with and healed by it. I believed we were all connected — humans, animals, plants, water, the earth. All connected by love, and empowered by each other. I believed in possibility. I was truly agnostic: All I knew was that I didn’t know, and I was open to anything. I believed deeply and gladly in that quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

When August died, a harsh and sudden change happened within me: I no longer trusted my instincts. Always, I had operated largely on strong gut feelings that steered me truly. I relied on them. After August died, that sense of inner truth and knowing was just…gone. It got twisted and fucked up when this thing happened that was so against everything I had ever wanted or expected.

My spirituality was gone along with my instincts, all in a second. I felt betrayed by what I had previously understood to be a benevolent universe, and that shut off any sense of belief, or faith, or openness. In essence, I was suddenly unable to perceive anything except my own, direct experience — those things I could see, touch, hear, feel. And I resoundingly, gapingly, did not sense August.

I read about people who sensed their dead, beloved children just “beyond the veil.” About people who contacted their dead children in dreams or through psychic mediums. People who saw the same bird on their morning walks every day and believed that bird embodied the soul of their departed child. People who were comforted by these perceptions, since they meant their children were, in some way or form, still around.

Since August died, I’ve never sensed his presence in any way. I’ve never had a message from him in a dream or a psychic reading. Even my atheist friend once said she felt he was nearby somewhere, and that he was glad I had friends around to help me through this. I felt jealous that my friend could sense this. All I could sense was that he was Gone, with a capital G. No trace of him left behind; no aura, no spiritual residue, no message from beyond the veil. Everything that August ever was was simply gone.

Over two years later, I’m still wishing and searching for contact with him. (Will I ever stop wishing for that? Probably not.) I feel angry that he hasn’t visited me in a dream or a psychic vision. I feel jealous of other people who seem to have psychic or spiritual experiences that I just don’t have. I want those experiences, too! I want to know that August is still around, somehow.

I used to think our souls couldn’t disappear when our bodies broke down — they must transmute, like energy, into a different form, maybe into the collective unconscious, maybe into another body-as-vessel. But where did August’s soul go when his body died? It didn’t go anyplace where I’ve been able to find it. And that pisses me the fuck off. I wish he would send me a message. It could be really short and simple: “Hey, Mom. I know you loved me and wanted me. Sorry I couldn’t stay.” That would be plenty; that would be, oh, so much.

But instead I get nothing. No contact from the Other Side; no shivery, meaningful moments of sensing that my departed son is somehow still with us. I’m like the guy in my favorite Buzzcocks song:

What do I get? No love.
What do I get? No sleep at night.
What do I get? Nothing that’s nice.
What do I get? Nothing at all, at all, at all, at all…
Because I don’t get you.

14. Sometimes my brain didn’t work right.

Two days after August was born, we had to drive to the funeral home to make arrangements for his cremation. It was a chilly, rainy morning. E drove, slowly and carefully, while I lay back in the passenger seat with the back of the seat reclined. I wasn’t supposed to be up and walking around yet.

At the funeral home we sat on small upholstered chairs across a large, dark desk from a man who looked at us sympathetically as he asked us questions in a gentle voice. We answered as well as we could.

At one point, the man said something, I don’t remember what, but something that made me think August’s body was there, in the building somewhere. I sat up straighter.

“You mean, he’s here?” I asked. My heart had started to pound. I felt more alert than I’d felt in days. “Can I…” My words trailed off. I wanted it so badly I couldn’t ask.

The man paused and looked at me; his eyes widened slightly. He seemed to be searching for words. Looking back, I realize he must have understood that I was a crazy woman — the mother of a dead baby — and I craved seeing that baby again. Whatever he had said that made me think August was somewhere nearby had set off that craving.

Which meant the man had to backpedal, make up an excuse, put me off. You see, in the moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything beyond wanting to see my baby boy one more time. Hold him again. Touch his soft, chubby cheeks again, hold his little hand and feel his tiny fingers in mine again. Just once more.

I wasn’t thinking about what state his body would be in, two days after he had died. I wasn’t considering the fact that we had donated his body to the Blood and Tissue Center, and they had long since removed his heart valves and his corneas and I don’t know what else.

Later, realizing my mistake, I felt ashamed. What a huge oversight! Even if August were there, even if the man had brought him to me, of course I wouldn’t have wanted to see him like that. What had I been thinking?

But I was only thinking of how much I wanted him back. That’s all. For months and months and months, that was all I could think of.

The man at the funeral home stammered some excuse about, “Oh, I don’t mean he’s here — he’s actually at our other facility, awaiting cremation.”

I slumped a bit and sat back in my chair, dejected. “Oh. Okay.” I wouldn’t be seeing him once more after all.

Later that moment of wild hope — he’s here? Can I see him once more, just for a minute, I’ll make it quick, please please please?? — seemed so ridiculous. And yet, what mother wouldn’t have felt that way? To have a child who dies is to want something every minute of every day that you can never, ever have again. No matter who you ask, how hard you beg, how craftily you bargain, the answer is always, and will always be, No.

13. Sometimes I figure out a way to honor August that feels good.

So, I wrote an essay about August and Pearl; actually, it’s pieced together from posts on this blog. And I submitted it to this show called Listen to Your Mother that is performed annually in 10 cities across the country, including Austin. And I ended up being cast as one of fifteen writers who will read our pieces in this year’s show! Wow — I’m so proud!!

I’ve been feeling like a writer again, and it feels great. Articles, essays, site content for my former (and once again current) employer…it feels so good to focus once again in the way that writing requires, to consider words and their nuanced meanings, to try hard to get at the exact truth and to determine how to express that truth. I feel like I’m flexing muscles in my brain that I haven’t used in years.

And it feels so good to honor August in this way. To keep him alive in some sense. To keep talking about him; to keep telling the world that he was here, that he mattered, that he is missed.

After my audition for the Listen to Your Mother show, Wendi Aarons asked me how it felt to read my essay aloud. It’s a sad piece; I almost teared up a few times as I read the words. I felt uncomfortable reading it, though I knew Wendi and her associate, Liz McGuire, were already familiar with the piece. I guess it seemed too sad to read aloud. And yet — as I told Wendi — reading it aloud felt good, because I am always looking for ways to honor August that feel right. Cupcakes each year on his birthday, shared with my husband and my friends who were with us at August’s birth — that feels as close to right as I can get. Attending support group meetings to share this loss with other bereaved parents — that has felt right for more than two years now. Talking about August whenever he comes up, despite how uncomfortable I sometimes feel doing so, also feels right. And now it feels right, and so great!, that I get to take part in the LTYM show and read this piece aloud to an audience of potentially 300 people.

Oh, I expect my piece will make us all sad. But then the next writer will take the stage and read her piece, and maybe that one will be a funny one, or a heartwarming one, and it’ll take some of the ache away. After all, my experience of motherhood as August’s mom — it counts, too. And I’m not alone in this experience…which is very, very unfortunate, but also quite fortunate in a different way.

Eh. It’s late and I’m blathering. But I wanted to post about this good thing that happened, since it makes me feel so good, and feel closer to my sweet boy August.

12. Sometimes I write articles.

Ones that seem ineffective; that don’t quite capture what I want to say, probably because I have no idea what that is. As I wrote in my previous post, I don’t understand anything, and won’t, ever. That’s how it feels these days.

Here’s an article I wrote for Live Mom about our daughter Pearl, and perhaps even more, about August. As usual, I worked on it for weeks, refining it slowly, and felt good about it…until the day it was published, at which point I suddenly figured out a bunch of things I wish I’d added, deleted, or worded differently. Oh, well. I guess that’s the thing about writing; it’s never really done; there’s sort of no such thing. A written piece is a strangely living organism; as long as the writer is willing to keep reworking it, the piece stays dynamic, always ready to shift with each new day’s shifting perspective.

August, you were born exactly two years ago. (Since you were born at 1:24 AM on 1/12/10, I’m setting this post to publish at 1:24 AM on 1/12/12.) I miss you and love you so hard, every day. I look at your picture by my bed every night, and wish you were here. I wish Pearl could get to know her brother. I wish our missing family member could be with us once again. I still remember exactly how it felt to hold you, all nine pounds of you. You were warm and heavy and big, and so beloved. I hope you knew exactly how much.

11. Sometimes I reflect on how much parenthood hurts.

So far, for me, parenthood is much, much harder than I ever expected. It hurts a whole lot more — infinitely more. It’s hard and sharp and brilliantly beautiful, like looking straight at the sun through a diamond prism. The hardest thing in the world; the most compellingly gorgeous; so bright and dazzling you can’t look away, but the longer you look, the more painful it becomes, the more you cry, and the more permanent damage you sustain.

Sometimes I think about the saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I’ve thought about that idea so many times over the past two years. August’s death didn’t kill me, but it most certainly weakened me. Applying the above metaphor, I guess my soul is the part of me that has sustained permanent damage. Or maybe not my soul, exactly, but my emotional self: the part of me that feels broken due to this one event — his death. Or maybe my soul and my emotional being are one and the same, and both have been changed forever; both are less whole than they once were.

Since August died I have wrestled with questions about meaning and meaninglessness — “What the fuck is the point?” kinds of questions. Losing him is teaching me such a worthwhile lesson about myself: that I am not special. That I am just one among many in this world, this life. Believing I was lucky or untouchable was the most misleading of illusions, and one based in the simple fact that until August died, nothing ever happened to challenge that belief.

That is a great thing to learn. We are all the same. Losing August is also teaching me about pain, suffering and compassion: I have such a much greater capacity now for all three. This enables me to connect more readily and genuinely with others in pain.

But I don’t know if that helps them. They are still in pain, even if I’m feeling it exquisitely with them. How does that help? Besides, when you’re in pain, you aren’t really aware of others sharing it with you. You just hurt. And hurt, and hurt. At least for me, it created a huge self-absorption that lifted only when the pain stopped being quite so constant. I think this may be common: You only start to notice other people again, and feel grateful that they were there the whole time, helping you carry that impossibly heavy load, once your pain has begun to lift.

Also: Two years ago! August was born and died two whole, long years ago. Soon it will be three, and five, and ten. Pearl, August’s sister, will be a toddler and a child and a preteen, a young woman, an adult. As we move further and further from August’s existence in time, will his absence hurt less? Will the trauma of his birth recede? Will his life turn out to have more meaning, or less, or both? Will this mountain of shit seem less like it happened yesterday? Will it become more abstract? Will it start to seem like just an event — a particularly sad one, but just one amongst the jumble of all the events of our lives?

I think I am glad for the lessons… I’m not sure. All in all, since becoming a mom two years ago, I just feel sadder and more confused. Everything is even more of a contradiction than ever before. I feel more fucked, but also luckier, because August died. Eternally devastated, and yet richer: Had he never been here at all, I would be like a paper-cutout version of myself. Now the truth of life, the wisdom of the universe, the complexity of being human, seem somewhat closer, and yet entirely out of reach. I will never understand. Anything. Ever.

Speaking of things I will never understand: My friend Esme died on January 1 this year. I keep thinking of her mother — how she must be feeling the screaming shock, the bright, mad, ripping pain that I felt when August died. Right now, she is inside that insane fun house that I was inside once. I hold her in my heart with so much love and commiseration. Most likely, she will find her way out of that fun house, but right now I imagine that all she can see is her own, warped reflection, stretched and twisted in countless mirrors, and the Exit sign nowhere to be found.

One of the biggest fears you have when your child dies is that after a while, no one will remember anymore, and your child will no longer matter. One thing that comforts me about my friend Esme is that I do not think that’s possible with her. She was the brightest light, the kindest, most encouraging and enthusiastic person I think I’ve ever known. She had hundreds of friends; maybe thousands. She made each of us feel like her favorite person. There’s no way we could forget her. I hope her mother knows.

10. Sometimes I thought I didn’t count as a real mother.

I wrestled with this question a lot after August was born and died: Am I a real mother? Do I count in the “mommy club”?

I tried to reason through it logically: I had had a child. Physically, by definition, that made me a mother. But I didn’t have that child anymore. I never got to raise him. In my mind, a mother was someone who had a child in her care, someone in charge of a little person’s life and wellbeing. That wasn’t me. So I wasn’t a mother.

The phrase “childless mother” ran through my mind a lot. Often in the cold months after August’s death, I would go running, and as I ran, alone, the chill air rushing in, out, in, out of my lungs, my arms pumping, my feet rhythmically hitting the sidewalk, I would think about those words. Childless mother. I would turn them over and over in my mind and frown to hold back tears as the air chilled my eyes, making them water anyway.

When other women, friends and coworkers, talked about their pregnancies, I would weigh in, adding my own experiences and memories — but I would cringe inwardly as I spoke. I felt as if I was faking something, being too desperate — “Me too, I was pregnant too…!” It was such a profoundly uncomfortable space to occupy: having experienced and enjoyed a whole, entire pregnancy, but having no baby to show for it. Did I get to take part in the conversation? Was I in the club? Did I count as a mom?

Another question I wrestled with: Was August really born? I remember saying something to my sister about that once, and she looked at me as if I were nuts. But I couldn’t figure it out. Obviously, August had come out of me, into the world; but he wasn’t alive. I associated being born with starting life. To me, his life never started. Had it? After all, he hadn’t qualified for a birth certificate (something that bothered me deeply for a long, long time).

But he had qualified for a death certificate. Sometime later, a friend pointed out, “If something can die, then it was alive.” That comforted me, and I added it to my logical arsenal — my case for August having been alive, having been here, having mattered.

And by that definition, hadn’t his life, in fact, begun? It started inside me, and ended inside me, just before I pushed him out.

9. Sometimes it is still so huge and deep.

Times like now. A warm, sunny, lovely Friday morning in later October. I have been feeling so pleased all morning as I go around the house, doing laundry and saying silly things to the dogs, and I’m puffed up with that pleasure, the headiness of it, since it is so hard-won: Always, lurking in the back of my mind, there is the consciousness of the pain, such pain, and the loss that my husband and family and I have endured these past 21 months and nine days since August died.

I guess that’s a measure of how far I’ve come in this process of grief, or more accurately, how far I still have to go: A really, really good morning still makes me goofy and proud of myself, because really, really good moods, good moments, still aren’t the norm.

Even though we have a lot to feel really, really good about now. Such as this little girl who is sleeping in my lap, her loosely clenched fist pressed against her cheek in the contemplative, “Hmm…” pose she often adopts in sleep. She has a little faux-hawk, a tuft of hair right on top of her head that is surrounded by baldness. I call the tuft her eternal flame since it is reddish and wild and ridiculous and jaunty and wavy, and will not lie flat. (Not that I want it to, at all. I don’t.)

She is my daughter, my second child. She is seven weeks and three days old. She was born right here at home, on the floor between our bed and the bathroom door, in an explosion of energy and noise (from me, screaming and hyperventilating as I pushed her out) and light (from the row of bulbs above the bathroom mirror, shining down on us, illuminating the moment of this miraculous girl’s miraculous entry into this miraculous, terrible, beautiful world).

Born right here at home, just like I wish her brother August could have been.

Born alive and healthy, just as I still, often, fervently wish August could have been.

Her personality is emerging. She is hardworking, and spunky, and mostly easygoing, but she also knows what she wants. She expresses her thoughts and needs in definite terms: short, loud little yells that sound like an indignant “Hey!!” or soft, cooing sighs when she nurses that sound as if she’s saying, “Ohhh, this is sooo gooooood…”

And I keep wishing I could have gotten to know her brother the way I am getting to know her.

I wish I could have seen him alive. Seen those bright, sky-blue eyes of his open on their own, instead of having to open them myself and feel shocked by their bright clarity and color, and forever after wonder if I’m misremembering their exact shade of blue. After all, this little girl in my lap, who shares the same DNA as August — her eyes are a much darker, more blueberry shade. Surely his weren’t so bright-blue-sky as I remember them being. I think they were, but there’s no way to know. I saw them once only, and only for one moment. Never again.

Seven weeks and three days of caring for this new, second baby, this little girl in my lap, has consumed my energy, attention, time and emotions. I haven’t thought about August quite so much since his little sister was born. I still think of him every day — I expect that will never change — but now I think most often of this new baby girl.

But then mornings like this come along. I was just going along, feeling so glad and pleased, and so pleased to be pleased, and then something made me Google a woman whose first baby was also stillborn at 41-plus weeks of pregnancy. I read her blog from time to time. I have no idea why reading it again this morning seemed like a good idea. Suddenly tears were welling up and spilling over; snot was dripping; I was trying not to sob out loud, not wanting to disturb this sleeping baby girl in my lap with my noises or my shaking, quaking body.

The sadness, the loss, the grief. Missing that first baby boy, August. Wishing so hard and so futilely that he were here now. All of it. Still so huge, still so deep, even when I forget, for moments at a time, that it’s all still there, a wound I will always carry. A person we love who will always be gone.