Goodbye To All That

Last June I read a heartbreaking piece in The New Yorker by the novelist Aleksandar Hemon, about the death of his toddler daughter from brain cancer. I cried copiously as I read it, though I'm not, in general, a cryer. Afterward I felt wrung-out yet fulfilled, as if after a hard workout. My empathy muscles were stretched and tired. That, I thought, was a great essay.

I hadn't read Hemon's fiction, and my curiosity was piqued. I Googled his bio and looked at the dates and realized that the writer's daughter had died eight months before the essay was published, which meant, factoring in the endless lead times of print journalism, that he had begun to write it almost immediately after her death. How could he do that? I wondered in awe. How was he able to transform his grief into art so quickly?

Now, of course, I know exactly how he did it. I don't know what I thought grieving people did with their time. Stare into space, or claw at their faces, or attend therapeutic seminars.

Elizabeth Siddal was a secondary character in The Wayward Muse, my 2007 novel about the Victorian designer William Morris and his wife Jane. After she gave birth to a stillborn daughter in 1861, it was said that Lizzie spent hours rocking herself in a rocking chair, shushing the people who visited her and saying that they would wake the baby with their loud voices. This, and the fact that she overdosed on laudanum a year later, was given by various historians (and, to be fair, by her husband, the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti) as evidence of insanity brought on by the baby's death. It sounded plausible to me. Wouldn't giving birth to a dead baby make anyone crazy?

Now that I've had a stillborn baby and managed (so far) not to kill myself or shoot heroin, I see it a bit differently. I would say now that Lizzie's life was a sad mess before the baby died, and the fact that it ended tragically has more to do with drug use, an unfortunate choice of romantic partner, misogyny, and social class than with the loss itself.

We are the people we were before, for better or for worse, and we do the things we've always done. Grieving laudanum addicts take laudanum. Grieving carpenters build things, I imagine. And grieving writers write.

*

By the time Balthazar was conceived I wasn't convinced anymore that I was a writer. In fact, his birth was going to make it OK for me to throw in the towel. The voice in my head had been urging me in that direction for awhile. You're never going to sell anything else, it told me. You’re never going to publish anything else. You had your shot and it got fucked up somehow and now it's over. But hey, it's all right, because you're going to have this baby.

I was ignoring the voice as best I could, working with a mentor and trying to finish a memoir to give to my agent, but, faulty thinking or not, something was hanging in the balance even when Balthazar was still kicking like Lionel Messi. I had never thought of giving up writing when Jasper was born, but back then I had a book coming out and an advance to write a second. I had my whole career ahead of me, which I believed was now behind me. So in my heart I quit writing and I chose Balthazar.

I felt guilty about it. I knew that it was too much to put on a baby, that he could take the place of writing, the thing I'd wanted to do since I was nine years old. But if there was a choice to be made, I decided, I chose Balthazar. And then he left.

In the first days after his death, I found myself lying awake at night replaying the events that composed his abbreviated journey: the birthday party, the vanilla cake with raspberry filling, the Doppler, the nurse, The Voice, the blue blanket, the blessing. I cherry-picked details and snippets of dialogue. The thing about Captain Zimbo would make a great essay, I thought. I wrote the essay in my mind, and then rewrote it. I was partly horrified with myself but I also suspected that it was a sign, the only one I had then, that I would survive.

Five days after Balthazar died, I opened up my journal and started to write everything down. I had to do it in five minute increments because it hurt too much to do more. I just knew that I had to get it all down while I still remembered exactly. I told myself that I would need the journal entries later, when it was time to make something of them.

Then, a few weeks before I started the blog, I decided that I was going to quit writing, whether Balthazar was here or not. I was going to go back to school to be an ESL teacher. I was going to get a job at a Christian adoption agency. I was going to volunteer to run my son's school's art program. But even as I said that I was done, I kept writing.

*

There's a part of me that thinks he knew that I wanted writing more, and he gave that to me instead of himself.

"Babies are selfish," Jonathan says. "He would never have given you writing."

It's a relief to hear him say that. Living, as he does, only in my mind, sometimes Balthazar threatens to become as stiff and gilt-encrusted as a Byzantine baby Jesus in an altar painting. Jonathan reminds me that Balthazar was not a saint or an icon, but just a regular baby. One who would now be eating Legos and pulling the cat's tail and demanding all of my time and attention, not giving two shits whether or not I'd rather be writing.

What Balthazar took, when he left, were the last vestiges of an illusion I'd been sustaining for years. What I had wanted to give up all along, though I didn't realize it, was my "career" as a writer. I never wanted to stop writing; I wanted to stop pretending. That the manuscript would sell this time. That I'd get that big advance that would save us. That the option or the foreign rights would fix our financial situation. It's not just the money, but the praise, the critical validation, the attention. The dream of a National Book Award or a bestseller list, which, if you want to get all self-helpy about it, is just a proxy for parental approval anyway. Fuck it all. I've been clinging to that sheer rock face by my fingernails for a long time and now it's time to let go.

What Balthazar gave back to me were the words.

When I reread the Aleksandar Hemon essay again recently, it was different; or rather, my relationship to it was different. I recognized the tone, a certain plainness of language. He didn't write the essay for the money. He didn't write it for The New Yorker, or to win a National Magazine Award, or to impress an editor who would buy his next book. He wrote it because if he didn't write it he wouldn't survive. It's not anything as pretty as solace. It's just all we have and all we know to do.

My career as a writer is over. I don't know what happens next. Except that I'll be writing about it.