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.

My Brother, My Pediatric Geneticist

"Why does it matter so much to you to find out exactly what happened?" my brother asked.

We were sitting at a picnic table near Hogan's Fountain while Jonathan and Jasper played in the sprinkler. It was June, and the first time we'd talked in person since Balthazar died. I couldn't tell whether he thought it shouldn't matter to me as much as it obviously did, whether he was being slightly critical, or whether he was just curious. And if it was the latter, was it personal or professional curiosity?

My brother is a pediatric geneticist, which is not a bad thing to have in the family when you are a person who never took statistics, trying to run the numbers on various prenatal diagnostic tests. During the pregnancy I told everyone about my brother the pediatric geneticist. "I'll have to check that out with my personal pediatric geneticist in Columbus, Ohio!" I would say to the midwife and the perinatologist. I'm sure they rolled their eyes behind my back, but it made me feel safer, like I had a guy on the inside. Which in retrospect is ridiculous. Having your own personal pediatric geneticist doesn't do a fuck lot of good, it turns out, when you have to call him from labor and delivery to tell him the baby's dead.

"I feel a responsibility to the child," I said. It was not hard to talk to my brother about the medicine; we'd been back and forth on the phone for weeks. It was excruciatingly hard to talk to him about my feelings. "I mean, if he was murdered, I would try to find out who had killed him."

The number of tests performed after Balthazar died were staggering, and the results trickled in maddeningly slowly. Enough had come in by my six week post-delivery appointment, though, that I could tell the midwife was gently preparing me to never know the answer. She had tears in her eyes as she told me that the autopsy was normal. She also had to tell us that the chromosomal sample taken the day we left the hospital had refused to grow, which meant, because we had not done a cvs or an amnio, that we had no genetic information on Balthazar.

A few weeks later, at our appointment with the perinatologist, he could only run through the sheets of paper, explaining what each test was, and that each one was negative. Balthazar did not die because of Antiphospolipid syndrome, lupus, fetomaternal hemorrhage, parvovirus, cytomegalovirus, toxoplasmosis, preeclampsia, or gestational diabetes. The placenta was normal. The cord was normal. The baby was normal in every way that could be tested. Even I seemed to be normal.

"It shouldn't have happened," he said.

What I told my brother was true; I did feel a responsibility to Balthazar, but one of the ways that manifested is that I wanted some medical proof that I was at fault. Of course I know that fault is an incredibly unfair word to apply. This wasn't a fatal car accident with two opposing auto insurance companies duking it out in court. Even if it was my "fault", I hadn't been driving drunk or texting. I hadn't run a red light, or even been speeding. And Balthazar could in no way be blamed. If it turned out I had an infection, was that my fault? If he had a heart defect, was that his?

But I kept getting a whole lot of nothing. 

Later in the day the perinatologist called back to say that based on some fibrin deposition on the placenta, he thought I might want to be tested for some genetic clotting disorders. My personal pediatric geneticist was dubious, but I went ahead, following my newly-discovered personal philosophy: leave no stone unturned.

That day in the park, my brother told me that his hunch was that there was something genetically wrong with Balthazar, something not obvious at autopsy, something that medical science didn't currently have the means to detect, something that meant that he could not have survived outside the womb. I didn't want to believe him, but I also knew that despite his self-deprecating persona he usually knows what he's talking about. A quality I really hate in him.

Before we both left Louisville I gave him my envelope of fetal demise pictures to look through. I felt for him there, outside the Bristol after Sunday brunch, when I handed him the photographs of his dead nephew and made him select the "best" of them to take back to his colleague. His 18 month-old daughter squirmed on his shoulder. His almost-four year-old son shouted for his attention. And yet I needed him to do his work for me, right there, and then drive his family in their minivan the four hours back to Ohio.

As I waited for the results from the blood tests and for word from my brother I constructed a scenario that made more intuitive sense to me than the one in which something was wrong with Balthazar. My mother has Factor V Leiden, a genetic clotting disorder, and though I already knew I was negative for that one, I could easily have another clotting disorder. A clotting disorder was my body's disorder. I could blame myself for it. Balthazar would remain inviolate.

Of course science doesn't care what makes intuitive sense to you. A few weeks later the results came back and I had tested negative for all the clotting disorders. Though of course there are more clotting disorders than were tested for, the truth did not seem to lie that way.

My brother sent word that based on the photos his colleague thought Balthazar probably didn't have Trisomy 13, 18 or 21. But then, those genetic disorders usually make themselves pretty obvious.

With these pieces of information, I spent the summer trying to absorb the idea that Balthazar's physiognomy was incompatible with life. Obviously I hated the idea, but it eased some of the agony of the what if's: what if I'd gone to the hospital on April 1? Said to hell with the kick counts, this doesn't feel right? What if I'd had a prenatal appointment scheduled for April 2? Maybe he was still alive then. Maybe he could have been yanked out in the nick of time. If he was genetically compromised in some fatal way, none of that would have made any difference.

Then in August I sent my brother all of my medical records from the pregnancy, and after looking them over, he called to tell me what he thought.

"I don't know," he admitted.

He said that there was no red flag, no worrisome pattern that even an ob/gyn might not notice but an eye trained in this kind of thing might see developing. I think he had really thought he would see something, because he is good at seeing. I know he wanted to see something, for my sake.

A moment of compassion here for all of the medical professionals whose job involves telling desperate people that they don't know what's wrong with their dying loved ones. That they don't know why their child died. All these problem solvers, these know-it-alls, these Type A overachievers, having to face the desperate and grieving and admit that they have no answers to give.

I can now add my brother's reluctant "I don't know" to that other trenchant observation that medical science has offered me: "It shouldn't have happened." What, exactly, am I supposed to do with "It shouldn't have happened" and "I don't know"? Because we couldn't both be fine; it's impossible. Full-term fetuses don't die for no reason.

My ob-gyn friend thinks it was a cord accident that wasn't visible at delivery. Lacking evidence for anything else, a cord accident is the perfect gloss. Where do you place blame? It's not really his body, not really mine. It is literally the lifeline between the two. And if somehow it got wrapped around his neck and asphyxiated him, how is that anything but a piece of horrible luck?

I just read an article in the New York Times about a technique that has been developed to quickly sequence the DNA of critically ill babies, with an eye, not to curing them, but to rapidly finding out what kind of fatal genetic disorder they have. The only benefit is to minimize their suffering and to give their families answers. The doctors said they were surprised by how much it helped the families to know what rare genetic defect their dying infant had. It doesn't surprise me. Reasonable people don't expect doctors to save everyone, every time. But even reasonable people want answers, even when there is nothing good about the answers. It's true that Balthazar is gone whether we get an answer or not. Life is about mystery, and living with not knowing, and yadda yadda yadda.

I can live without knowing why some people think homosexuality is a threat to them, why someone dear to me has not been in touch since Balthazar died, why the marketing executive at Atria failed to do her job. I can live without knowing why Balthazar died, if I don't have a choice. But I sure would like to look his killer in the face.

Six Months

Last week I picked Jasper up from an afterschool playdate and on the way to the car I asked him how his day had been.

"Mrs. H wasn't there for part of the day," he said. "We had a sub. And do you know why? It almost made me cry when she said it. She was at the hospital. Her friend was having a baby."

I put on my therapist voice. "Did that make you sad?" I asked. He nodded. "You were thinking about Zimbo?" Jasper hates the name Balthazar and only calls him Zimbo.

More nodding. I got him in the car and started driving home.

"I'm different from other kids," he announced a minute later. "I mean, I look like a normal kid on the outside, but I'm really not."

"You think the fact that you had a baby brother who died makes you different from other kids?" I asked, hating my syrupy, condescending active listening even as I employed it. Because wasn't he saying, in the way that children have of cutting to the heart of things, exactly what I'd been thinking too?

Having a baby marks you on the outside, but not forever. I gained 46 pounds during my pregnancy. By the end my friends would smile sympathetically as they watched me lumber up the hill from school after dropping off Jasper. One day the guy at the coffee shop, who hadn't been paying attention to my growing girth, finally noticed it. "Yikes!" he exclaimed, passing me my ham and cheese croissant. Yep, I agreed. Yikes. Pregnancy is a huge physical commitment and sacrifice that is quickly forgotten and totally worth it, unless you did it for nothing.

Now I look like a normal kid. I look like my biggest problem is the chip in my windshield, the dearth of country ham in Portland, OR, or the flying ants trying to invade the living room. If you saw me at the grocery store or the coffee shop, you wouldn't have the faintest inkling. If you hadn't seen me in awhile you might think I had had a relapse in my ongoing struggle with brownie addiction, and that my son's nightmares or my obsession with internet shopping had kept me up a bit too late at night. If I didn't tell you, you would never know.

I try not to look at women who have just had babies. I try not to look at the babies who are always with them. The mothers have giant breasts and flabby midsections too, but the reason is obvious. It is nestled right there on their bodies where everyone can see.

Apparently it's a thing to get a tattoo in memory of your dead baby, for that very reason. You mark your skin to make visible that your baby was here. You display that loss on the outside. I'm just a little too old to be part of the tattoo generation, and I'm from Louisville, after all. As a child I read The Preppy Handbook, and not ironically. Yet I've thought about it. Just his name, I think. On my chest, over my heart? Or do I want it somewhere where people will see it and ask me about it? Do I want a reason to tell that story over and over?

My insides have never matched my outsides anyway. In high school it was often thought that I was snobby. When my husband met me he thought I was a "sweater girl from Connecticut." The weird, the goofy, the shy, the radical; it doesn't necessarily show. Maybe I'm getting tired of the incongruity. I've never been a normal kid, why should I look like one? Maybe now I want it all on the outside.

Honestly, though, a tattoo seems a pallid response to the situation. Really? That's it? A little ink under the skin is all I've got for my dead baby? A shaved head, I could see. Sackcloth and ashes. Some mortification, maybe.

We all understand that you never know what's going on with anyone, but it's easy to forget. The guy I accidentally cut off in traffic who then rolled down his window to flip me off more emphatically as he passed, was his daughter just diagnosed with leukemia? I never think about that, I just think he's an asshole. The checkout lady at Zupan's who didn't smile or make eye contact, did her mother just die? We assume everyone is OK because that assumption makes every transaction easier. Until we're not OK and then we're reminded, brutally, that there are uncounted millions walking around with their guts ripped out. 

*

"Well, stillbirth is very uncommon," Jasper said when I asked him if his brother's death made him feel different from other kids. He sounded about thirty-seven years old. "Do you know anyone else who had stillbirth?"

Oh fuck, I thought, I should have called the Dougy Center. Portland has this great resource for children in grief. But we thought he seemed OK, and we wondered if putting him in a room with kids who'd lost parents and older siblings might make him feel more alone than not.

I told him again about Tanja and the grief group I went to a few times and the blogs I read. Later I asked him if he might like to meet W and O, Tanja's stepsons, since they had been around his age when their brother died, and they would understand what it was like.

"Yeah, I bet they would understand," he considered, looking off into the distance, remembering. "It was horrible."

Everybody's got stuff, a writer said to me a month or two after Balthazar died. This is yours, she said, and I wanted to kill her. She wasn't wrong, her timing just sucked. This is my stuff. This is Jasper's stuff too, and I can't fully know all the ways in which it affects him, all the things he thinks about and doesn't tell me. I hope it doesn't warp his life. At Back to School Night he showed me a book he had written, entitled All About Me. All of the children had done them, and responded to the same prompts. One of his pages said "I feel happy when my mom hugs me. I feel sad when someone I know dies." I imagine he was the only child in the class who finished the sentence that way. But, then again, I don't know. Maybe we are different than the other kids, or maybe not. Maybe we are more like them than we think.

Book of Common Prayer

My mother and I have always joked that our family is good at death. My husband maintains that rather than being good at it, we are obsessed with it. To someone from Los Angeles who grew up without religion it probably does seem that way. I reply that his family is our obverse. They are a wedding family: extremely good at celebrating the joy in life and completely at a loss when it comes to death. I'd say that each could probably take a page from the other. But it doesn't really work that way.

We are undeniably good at funerals. As small a family as we are, for a long time we were top heavy with oldsters, and every year there was a great-uncle or a great-aunt or a grandparent to mourn. We still observe the rituals of an earlier time. There is no black crape over the door and we don't wear mourning clothes for a year, but we mostly follow the script that our ancestors did. We do things the way they have always been done. We have visitations at Pearson's. We have church funerals at St. Andrews, we sing "For All the Saints". We bury our dead at Cave Hill, and then afterward we have wakes at home and serve melon balls and country ham sandwiches and cheesecake brownies.

I know how to behave at a funeral in Louisville, Kentucky. I know what to wear (although my mother did complain that my black Banana Republic sweater was too low-cut for my aunt Ellen's funeral). I know how to sit on a brocade sofa with someone who is no longer able to stand for long and listen to an incomprehensible tale about something that happened in 1936. I know how to subsume my emotions, whatever they are, into the task at hand. I know how to dole out tears like hand soap; just a little bit and at the appropriate time. 

Balthazar died in a foreign country; that is, he died in Portland, Oregon. I had never been the primary mourner before, only a supporting character. My job had always been to look nice and be polite and represent the family. I had never organized a funeral, and I didn't know what to do when it was a baby and not an eighty-seven year-old with organ failure. There was no reporter from the Courier-Journal on the phone. The only family I was representing was the family that had almost been four.

I called Holman's Funeral Home on Hawthorne because they handled the arrangements when my friend Gwen's father died and she said they were good. I arranged for a memorial service at Westminster Presbyterian because I couldn't bear the thought of doing nothing. But we didn't invite family to fly in, though there was time. We didn't invite anyone, feeling strange about asking people to come when they didn't know him. We were the only ones who knew him.

I told Laurie, the minister, that I didn't want "For All the Saints". That hymn is for my grandfather, someone resting from his long years of earthly labor, not for Balthazar, who never got to do anything. I asked for Our God Our Help in Ages Past, but I warned Laurie I wouldn't be able to sing, which was a good thing since the words would ring pretty false. I asked for O Waly Waly, which I once heard Judy Collins sing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I asked for Ashoken Farewell and the minister found a soloist to play it on the violin. My father and I had had our first dance at my wedding to that song. At the time I wondered why the band had picked it. Was he really supposed to be that sad that I was married and leaving him? That was not the kind of dad I had at all. But for the funeral of a baby, evoking as it did all of the mothers who had lost sons in the Civil War, it was perfect.

I chose a Wendell Berry poem from a book the minister had sent. You'd think I'd be better at picking poems than I am. My mental storehouse is somehow better at collecting and remembering music. I knew Auden's "Funeral Blues" was wrong. A poem for an adult, not a child. I thought Wendell Berry was right, the way Ashoken Farewell was right. I had wrapped the child in a Churchill Weavers blanket and I would make his funeral as redolent of Kentucky as I could. Jonathan wanted the Walt Whitman, so that went into the program too.

I wore a black dress I'd bought in the fall to wear to give a talk at a book group luncheon, black tights, black suede ballet flats, and an old green cardigan sweater with a missing button. Most of my clothes still didn't fit. The minister asked if we wanted to have a coffee afterward, but since we didn't invite anyone that seemed unnecessary.

We sat there, the three of us, Jasper in the middle, Balthazar's ashes on a dais, still in the little cardboard box. I'd been on the internet at 3 in the morning for several days, looking, without success, for an attractive extra small urn.

I feel manipulative writing about extra small urns, like Ernest Hemingway with his six word short story: "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn." I can't think of anything sadder than trying to choose an extra small urn. But it's the truth. It's what I did. All the time thinking, this is ridiculous. I couldn't make this stuff up.

I hated all the urns. The ones for kids were so cheesy, with teddy bears and Mary Engelbreit-looking angels on them. Then I started feeling guilty for having such thoughts. Was I really considering a matter of taste with regard to my dead baby? But yes. My dead baby would not be a cheesy one. He would be dead in the style I preferred. I ordered a Ukrainian wooden box from Etsy, but it didn't arrive in time.

Gwen's husband had cut some lilacs from their garden and arranged them in a simple glass vase, which stood on the dais next to the ashes. I was glad I'd thought to bring them. All the funerals I'd gone to, the church had been filled with flowers, but the day before the service it occurred to me that it was because people had sent them, and then other people had transported them to the church. The flowers people had sent us three weeks before were already droopy. But a single vase of fresh lilacs was more appropriate anyway.

There were a few other people there, members of the church. Someone I'd been on a committee with. An older couple I recognized but didn't really know. The education director. The music was played and the poems read, and the minister spoke of Balthazar's journey being done. Jonathan and I both cried unceasingly. Jasper patted one of us, then the other. My grandmother would have called them 'love taps'. For three weeks Jonathan and I had been taking turns losing it and I worried what Jasper would feel, seeing both of his parents utterly incapacitated at the same time, but there was nothing to be done. Then Jasper cried, too, and we patted him. I kept my arm tightly around him. For him or for me? I don't know.

Balthazar was cremated, not buried. My first thought had been to bury him at Lone Fir Cemetery on Stark Street, but Jonathan wanted him cremated. My mother asked if I wanted to bury his ashes at Cave Hill.

"She's saying that he is a part of her family," my therapist said.  It was a powerful symbolic gesture, offering him a coveted place in the family section, but I said no. I said that his home was here, and that I couldn't bear it for him to be so far away from me. I thought that eventually we would take his ashes up Top Spur, maybe scatter them at McNeil Point on Mt. Hood, but neither of us had the heart to do it this summer. We may never have the heart to do it.

The way people live is always changing, but death hasn't changed. The emotions of grief and loss have not changed. In the midst of life we are in death, and it must be acknowledged. Balthazar had a nice memorial service, as right and appropriate as any funeral in my family. Even if when my mom and I said we were good at death we didn't know what the hell we were talking about.

Failure

A couple of people responded to last week's post, in effect saying, I don't know how to be or what to do and I'm sorry that I've failed. It made me feel kind of bad, really, because I've been on the other side of it, too. Every time I've reached out to a person in grief, I have fucked it up.

I knew a girl in graduate school whose father was an English professor at Williams, where I went to college. I didn't know either of them very well, but the girl's writing was all about a father dying of cancer and when I checked with a friend who worked at the college, she confirmed that the man was, in fact, dying. I was twenty-four and pretty emotionally clueless but I had been told, or had read, or had somehow picked up that when a loved one dies, you have to say something to the person right away. You can't just pretend that nothing has happened; it's the worst thing you can do. So when I saw her in Dodge Hall a few days after her father's death, I walked up to her and said, "I'm really sorry about your dad."

I don't know how I expected her to respond, but she immediately burst into tears, said, "I can't handle this," and fled the building.

That's not the part I feel regret about. I am sorry that in our society it's not OK to burst into tears in public. I wish we had a socially sanctioned way to publicly mourn. The thing I feel badly about is that after that I avoided her. I felt awkward and uncomfortable and I had the suspicion that despite the best of intentions I had made things worse for her. As if I was important enough to make things worse! I wish I had approached her at a later date and made it clear that her response was completely understandable, that my feelings weren't hurt, that I was available if she needed me for anything. But I didn't.

When my best friend from Louisville's husband died suddenly of a stroke, leaving her a thirty-seven year-old widow with an eleven month-old, I dropped everything and flew across the country. I told my parents I was coming and I grabbed two and a half year-old Jasper and I left the next day. I went to the visitation and the funeral. But then I went back to Portland. Then what? Did I call her? Did I send her cards or leave her messages? Did I think, having made the gesture, that it was over? I don't remember, but I suspect that I didn't do nearly enough. Just recently she told me a story about a co-worker, someone she liked but wasn't even particularly close to, who had called her every few days for a year after Pete died. She left simple messages, "I'm thinking about you, you don't have to call me back, just wanted you to know." Lisa never called her back, but she ran into the woman not long ago and told her how much those messages had meant to her. Why wasn't it me who did that?

When Tanja's baby died, I went to her house a couple of times. Once I went with a mutual friend and brought food. Once my husband and I stopped by unannounced. Jonathan went to the shed, where Jed was building his son a coffin. Tanja was in the dining room with a friend from work. They were going for a drive, did I want to come? They were very polite but obviously wanted to be alone, and I was horrified at the idea that I might be intruding. No, I said, I'll just find something useful to do here. So I cleaned out the refrigerator. I wasn't sure if it was helpful. Was I using the wrong cleanser, was I discarding things they still wanted? It was all I could think of to do. It was the thing I would least want to do, under any circumstances. After that though, we didn't go back. We weren't sure how many times it was OK to show up at someone's house, someone we really really liked but didn't know intimately, without an invitation. We didn't want to be pushy. Was it good that we went to their house, or was it intrusive? Was it wrong that we stayed away after that, or was it respectful? They are too kind to ever tell me of my mistakes. 

My current theory is that  everyone fucks up in the face of grief. Everyone. Everyone says the wrong thing, and does the wrong thing. There is no way to do it right because there is nothing right about it. I think all you can do is try, with an open heart. The well-meaning gaffes are easy to overlook. Ignoring what happened, out of fear of making a mistake, really does hurt more.

Now I just found out that someone I know a little and like very much has cancer. Will I handle it well? I doubt it. I'll try, and I'll fuck it up, and just hope that's OK.

Before the Cock Crows

Today at the coffee shop a woman recognized me from when I used to go to church. I asked after her kids but I couldn't remember how many she had.

"No, I only have two," she replied cheerfully, when I asked if she had three, "unless you count my dog." She asked if I still went to church and I squirmed a little bit and said I was still a member but I hadn't been in awhile. Whenever I see anyone from church I always feel guilty, like I've been caught playing hooky. Then she asked The Question:

"You just have the one, right?" I said yes, and that it was nice to see her, and went back to what I was doing. Then on the way home I cried, feeling distinctly like Saint Peter.

"I'm sorry," I said to Balthazar. "I didn't mean to deny you. I just don't know what to say."

My friend Tanja has said that she never knows what to tell people when they ask how many kids she has. Does she have one, referring to w, her only living biological child? Does she have two, w and L, her stillborn son? Does she have three, w, W and O, her living biological son and her two stepsons, or does she include them all and say she has four?

My problem is not quite so complicated, but I still don't know how to respond when the question comes up. I hope someday to get to a place where I can say matter-of-factly, "I have a seven year-old and a baby that died a few months ago." So far it isn't working out that way. A lot depends on the other person's reaction. When I went to polliwog to return a couple of baby shower gifts, I told the owner that I was returning the things because my baby had died. He looked up, startled, and said he was sorry, but otherwise didn't react. And I was shaky, but OK.

But then a week or so later in pilates class, an instructor I hadn't seen since I came back to pilates said, "So, Elizabeth, have there been any changes in your body I should know about?"

"Kelli didn't tell you?" I said in dread. I prefer to have an advance man for these things. He said no, Kelli hadn't told him anything. "Well, there's nothing I can tell you about in front of everyone," I said, kind of hoping he'd drop it.  Instead he took me aside, which was really about two feet away from the rest of the class and afforded no privacy at all, and then I had to tell him. He hugged me and I instantly lost it, despite the fact that I barely know the guy. He got teary and that made me sob even more. And then after all that I had to sit back down and take the class, and he had to lead it. The lesson, I guess, is that the nicer someone is the worse it is, for both of us.

I live in terror of moments like that. Partly because I'm embarrassed. It's just not done in our society, to cry all over people. Also because I think I should be able to control myself in public a little better by now. And because it hurts, a lot, to have to do it over and over. But it also hurts to pretend it didn't happen just to make the wheels of social interaction turn more smoothly.

 Next to the cash register at the coffee shop the owners keep a Christmas card picture of their three year-old daughter. It got me thinking about the Christmas card and what I'm supposed to do about that. How do you compose a Christmas card with a hole blown in it? Dress Captain Zimbo in a onesie? Put a bow on the cat you got because your baby didn't come home? It feels wrong to leave him out. But it feels morbid to include him. Merry Christmas from Jonathan, Elizabeth, Jasper and...

Do I say I have one child or that I had two? The lady from church who was just being friendly probably did not need or want to know. On the other hand, by withholding that crucial information I'm guaranteeing that I will not become friends with her or ever make a connection. Because the only way you can know me, now, is to know about Balthazar.

Consciousness

It was inevitable that my mom, despite a truly heroic effort, would say something wrong in the aftermath of Balthazar's death.

Mom: (struggling to articulate the enormity of my loss)
"It's a tragedy, Elizabeth. After all, he was almost a real baby."

Me: (too shattered for the meaning of her words to fully register)
"He seemed like a real baby to me."

Other than that, no one has suggested that my loss is less than if Balthazar had been born alive and died minutes later, but of course it is different. He did not receive a birth certificate or a death certificate. We got a "Certificate of Remembrance" which I guess is better than nothing, but what are we remembering if he was not born and he didn't die? I listen to the stories of the parents in the grief group whose babies were critically ill for days or weeks and try to decide if what happened to them is worse. I think it must be, but how would I know?

From the experience of my three pregnancies I've come to believe that life doesn't begin at conception, but neither does it wait for that first breath. So when does it happen? It's a politically loaded question and since I am staunchly pro-choice it's something I've tried, I'm ashamed to admit, to avoid thinking too hard about. Now I'm online Googling "ensoulment".  The places your children take you.

So here's what Wikipedia has to say about ensoulment: beliefs about when it occurs vary widely. In the time of Aristotle the male fetus was considered "ensouled" at 40 days, the female at 90 days. Some cultures believed that life begins at the quickening, between fourteen and twenty weeks. A lot of people cite fetal viability as the moment when a fetus becomes a person, but fetal viability keeps moving backward, saving younger and younger babies, as well as varying from pregnancy to pregnancy.  It's possible now, but not guaranteed, that a fetus at twenty-three weeks can be saved.

Then there are the Stoics, who apparently didn't think you became a full-fledged person with a consciousness until you were fourteen years old.

Where does it all leave Balthazar? Was he "almost" a real baby? Was he a "real" baby? We don't seem to have the language for his in-between place.

Sometimes I search the internet for hours trying without success to find something interesting to read. And then there are days like yesterday, when I found this article about consciousness that seems to speak directly to me. Daniel Bor, author of The Ravenous Brain, believes that the neural pathways between the thalamus and the prefrontal cortex, which are necessary to create what we would consider consciousness, are not in place until around 33 weeks gestation. Before that, he says, a fetus is not conscious in the way that we understand it and does not feel pain. He also mentions in the essay that a fetus in the womb is sedated by chemicals produced by the placenta.

So when Balthazar died, according to Daniel Bor, anyway, he had a consciousness, but he was sedated. That's less painful to imagine than a lot of scenarios. Plenty of people go out that way these days. 

I'm not a neuroscientist so I can't evaluate the science behind the 33 week claim, but it makes intuitive sense to me. It certainly feels right that at 37 weeks and 5 days Balthazar was a person with a consciousness. Right, but horrible, because then he was not a "almost a real baby" but a person who died. But I think that's true.

Or maybe I'm just trying to find evidence of Balthazar's, for lack of a better word, personhood. Maybe it's confirmation bias, me looking for something to prove what I believe in my heart. Maybe I'm just jostling for position on the hierarchy of grief, leaving the parents who lost a child at 32 weeks on the other side of the divide. Will their grief be less because some scientist tells them their fetus was pre-consciousness?

Daniel Bor's research into consciousness has also made him a vegetarian. I'm not ready to follow him there just yet.