Iconography

I mentioned several months ago that I couldn't see how I would be able to send a Christmas card. How would I acknowledge Balthazar without being morbid and creepy? How could I send a card if it made no reference to him at all?

Fortunately I've never been a Christmas letter writer, so the dilemma was just about the card and the family picture, if there was to be one. Over the weeks I made some half-hearted efforts at brainstorming, but I didn't get far.

Idea one: a picture of the family with me holding the brass-studded Ukrainian box where Balthazar's ashes reside. See: creepy. It's a nice box and everything, but it's just a box. It's not a baby. Also, how could I smile in that picture? It reminds me of the photographs taken the Christmas my grandfather was debilitated by a stroke. I don't know whose idea it was to take those pictures, but there are way too many of them in the family's box. My grandfather is wild-eyed and slack-jawed; my father and my aunt are absolutely grim. My grandfather died in January. No one should have to sit for a photograph like that. 

Idea two: a picture of the family with me holding Captain Zimbo. I suspect that would make people cringe. More importantly, it would make me cringe. I think I have a problem with me holding anything. It's too much like a stand-in. It's too much like Lizzie Sidall telling her friends to hush, or they'll wake the baby. I can't put anything else in the Balthazar-shaped space.

My friends in the perinatal loss book group have been throwing out suggestions. Some of them have walked this road longer than I, and they've managed to devise ways of honoring their babies that work for them. One woman in my group said she put butterfly stickers on her cards, to represent her baby. I liked that idea. Iconography suits me. It's the art history major in me.

Once my therapist asked me if I wanted to work in the sand tray. I was deeply skeptical of the idea as more therapeutic hoo-hah, but if you feel bad enough you'll try anything, I guess.

It occurs to me that I'm suspicious of things that don't involve language. It's my preferred medium, and where I feel safest.  But I love art, and images are important to me. Almost as important as words.

In the sand tray I built a mountain, and on top of the mountain I placed a crashed Lego helicopter. Inside the helicopter I put a blue glass pebble. Down on the flats I made a lake, beside which three other blue glass pebbles stood together. I felt badly about how unreachable the pebble in the helicopter atop the mountain was, so I built a path around the lake and up the hill out of rocks. Of course that's wishful thinking. In life there is no path. In death, maybe. If you believe in heaven, which I don't.

I found I liked the exercise. It got me out of my analytical brain to another part. The dreaming brain. The image-making brain.

The truth is, Balthazar already has his own iconography in my mind, and has since the early days of Captain Zimbo. It was just a matter of making it explicit to myself. The things that make me think of Balthazar are airplanes, flight, bees, tulips, the color white, owls.

Balthazar's symbol is a snowy owl.

I once read an interior design article in Vogue in which Aerin Lauder, granddaughter of Estee Lauder and an executive with her eponymous beauty company, told the writer that she repainted her sitting room seven times to get the right green. I suppose the Occupy part of me should have been disgusted and shouted "Down with the plutocracy!"  but what I actually said to myself was, I can so easily see, if you had the money, how that could happen. I once told my husband that there was no point in having a house at all, if we couldn't paint all of the rooms.

Do not ask me what I was doing reading Vogue in the first place.

As a result I thought it might be a challenge to find a card that was not just any snowy owl, but the right snowy owl. I figured, though, that the internet has everything. So I Googled. The first image I found that was even close to what I was looking for was this: 

I didn't like it. The owl looks cold and helpless, huddled in the snow like that.

And somehow the cute, graphic owls are too cute. Like this: 

It makes me focus on the fact that the adorable little owl is all alone.

My favorite one was this: 

This owl is alone, but you don't get a sense of loneliness from him. Instead, you get a sense of majesty and power. Those gorgeous white wings could be the wings of a muscular angel. He's in flight, not stuck on the ground. He's about to land, but because he wants to. He's unfurled himself in all his beauty. It's not quite a photograph, which would be a little bit too National Geographic for my purposes, but it's detailed. It's not cheesy, like this one: 

It was even available in card form.

The problem: it's available in card form in the U.K. The British Red Cross does not ship to the U.S. I went so far as to email them and tell them the card reminded me of my dead son, but I stopped short of calling and begging or of flying to England to procure them. I do not have Aerin Lauder's bank account.

I didn't want to settle for one of the wrong owls, though. So I kept looking and eventually found an owl that is not the owl I wanted but is a pretty good owl:

The owl's alone, but he doesn't look lonely. He's cute, but not impossibly so. He could be snowier, but presumably I have many years of Christmas cards ahead. There are lots of snowy owls out there. Now I just have to take a picture of Jasper and Fluffy to put inside. Easier said than done. That cat is not shy with his claws.

Jasper says his symbol is an ocelot.

The only downside to all of this iconography stuff is that I can see how in a few years I could be living in a house crammed with a collection of stuffed animals and ceramic owls and all kinds of junk. And then every little item becomes suffused with meaning and you can never clean your house. 

One of the trees some friends thoughtfully gave us, died. We tried not to dwell on it too much. The plants we received we now have a responsibility to keep alive, because they are Balthazar's. I can't throw out that weird 6 pound 8 oz heart-shaped pillow covered in camouflage flannel even though it's got a hole in it and is shedding its fill, because it's his. I don't want to create a responsibility for any more objects.

Though I think one glass snowy owl Christmas ornament could be nice. With the understanding that if it breaks, we'll just order a new one and not act like he's died all over again. He's not in an ornament any more than he is in a box.