Mi Isla Sola

So, my friend, who is around 20 weeks pregnant with her sub baby is daring to hope.. she is going to buy a few things for the baby, and think good thoughts for it. Her rationale is that if something does indeed go wrong, she’ll have something for the memory box. I think this is pretty sound reasoning, no? So, in an attempt to follow suit, I have been looking at travel systems. I desperately wish I could enjoy this activity unbridled, but I can’t. I just want to look at them, and dream of actually pushing one of my children in it. But as soon as I do, I get overcome with the what if’s, and feel angry for allowing myself to hope. How dare I endanger my soul like this again? I *know* it doesn’t matter, that thinking or not thinking of strollers won’t make it any easier if this baby dies too, but I can’t help feel panicky and scared a few minutes after doing it.

I really hope this goes away, and I adjust to the idea of having a live baby. I wonder if I’ll be 39 weeks again… petrified, unable to think of anything but urns, funeral speeches, flights for family members, etc..  I do think I’ll hold off on being too ready though. It is really hard to pack stuff up after a baby dies. The glaring reality of all that is lost is so apparent. It is so, so hard to put away diapers not worn, socks with tags attached… nursing pads, unused. So I think, should we make it that far again, I will have the barest of necessities ready, and just simply hope. How much do babies really need, anyway?

Wow. Last night was really a trip. I think the longer the lapse between my dives into the pit, the harder they are, because I am less accustomed to them. I guess this is a good, and a bad thing. I appreciate the reprieve, yet realize this means I am moving on in my grief… I don’t want to feel guilty for it. Yet I do. How can I find joy in things, and think of things other than my daughter, when she has had no chance to do so? I have lived a lifetime longer than she was allowed. It’s incredibly unfair, I feel this every day. All I can do to remedy this survivor guilt is try to do my best, I suppose. Be my best me… I do this in a lot of ways. I tend to take my time with things more than I used to. I don’t turn away from strangers, I don’t ignore people who seem like they’re in need. I don’t fear as much. My mother is a very fearful woman. She is afraid of *everything*.  Teenagers, homeless people, coloured people… all of it. I think I could have easily slipped into the same kind of existence, yet I have turned the opposite direction. Instead of shutting people out, I am letting them in. Allowing myself to feel for them, be vulnerable to them. My neighbour’s wife is dying of cancer. I have had an inexplicable urge to ask him if she might like a visitor, perhaps someone to read to her once or twice a week.. I see the little colour tv from our kitchen window, and I know she’s bed ridden. I just don’t know how to do this. We speak to the husband quite frequently, and he’s been really helpful with our renovations, and gives Evan a new dvd every week it seems. Somehow, the lemon loaf I baked him in the summer seems so flimsy now. Really, it is. It’s just food. There is no price to put on a heartfelt visit. Yet why is it so hard? Why am I so nervous about doing this? Is it so strange in our society to reach out with yourself, rather than a material object, or physical offering?  I really think this is a lof of what’s wrong with us. We just don’t engage with eachother anymore. I read several strangers’ blogs from all over the world, yet I don’t step outside and offer a chat or favour to an ailing neighbour? It just seems so weird to me. I think, after Phoenix, I will go talk to my neighbour. I hope his wife is in good enough health to still be here when I get back. I wonder how it will go… I doubt I’d have ever done this if my daughter hadn’t died. I would never have appreciated the value in a compassionate, honest visit from someone, offering just themselves, their comfort. There is tremendous value in it.

Tomorrow is packing for Phoenix.. I’m excited, nervous, yet not really afraid. I would have been 3 months ago. Afraid of the crying, opening up to the pain and heartache of my daughter’s death. But, I think I can handle it. I know I can. I know I will cry profusely throughout the day, but in the evening, I will put on nice clothes, and go out for dinner with my husband, hold hands across the table, and genuinely enjoy myself. This is a trip to honour Isla. It is all about her. We get a chance to enrich our lives in some ways, bring  this richness back home with us, and hopefully apply it to our lives here. We will benefit greatly from this trip, in so many ways. It will be hard. We will have to relive things, and it will hurt. But it will also heal. And I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it with some very important people, who’ve been through exactly the same thing we have. There are no masks, no pretending, no “I’m fine”s.. just suffering, healing, learning to live again people, all together. It will be good.

Today has been threatening to turn sour. Sigh. It was bound to happen, and soon. I feel like I’m on an emotional roller coaster, and it’s going too fast.  I just want to get off for a while. I’ve felt this creeping fog since this morning… noticing that others around me are frustrated with me for being aloof, or detached, and not really caring or trying to amend it. My mind has pulled back and really taken a look at everything all together that’s happened to me in the past year. I was a mum, to one wonderful boy, and we were happily expecting our second healthy child. She came, and she went. And my life collapsed. What am I, really? I’m a shattered shell of a for-the-most-part happy person. It’s funny, I think I have come so far, and patched up my life, dealt with my grief, and healed my heart. What I really am though, is a facade. I do look pretty put together from the outside. I try to maintain my hygiene, mostly so people don’t start asking me if I’m “okay”.  I bake, and show moderate interest in current events etc. But I am a jigsaw puzzle. A cool picture when you stand back and look at it, all things fitting well; a complete picture. Yet, look closer, and I’m actually a fragmented, broken person; pieces everywhere, barely held together. Vulnerable and fragile. Not a true strong being at all. Only as strong as my weakest piece, actually. When one piece is pulled upon, the rest collapses upon itself. This is how I feel. I fall apart at the slightest threat to my fragile structure. I yearn to be the complete picture, a strong and confident unit, but it is not to be. I am weak, I am fragile, I am broken.

I still cannot believe I must live the rest of my life without my daughter. There will be no firsts for her. For us. As I am acutely aware of all the things she should be doing, like first steps, first words, first  day of kindergarten, first boyfriend, first heartbreak, and so on, the rest of the world moves on, and forgets about her. She was ‘just’ a baby who died, to them. Her existence ceases to exist beyond that.  Yet I am here, trapped in my own broken heart, aching for her, needing her here, to touch, hold and love. My arms flop uselessly at my sides, feeling resltess and unsure of what to do, searching for something to hold, some matter to fill the empty space where my baby should be.   So I smother my son. I cradle him, my enormous nearly five year old boy, and ask him if he will be my baby forever… of course, he says he can’t, and even if I had a thousand people, it wouldn’t matter, he would just keep on growing, he can’t help it.  So I weep, for having to watch him grow up and cultivate his own path in the world, independently, while I desperately just want to clutch him to me, and never let go. This is all because of Isla. Would I feel so desperate had she not died? No, I’m sure not. I was never this clingy before. Yet I can barely keep my breath when I imagine him not being with me every day; being off at school, off with friends, as he truly should be.

I ache so painfully for her. I want her back, it is so unfair that it has beeen decided that this is my life. How can it be that I have to endure my life without her? How can any mother be expected to do this? I don’t understand. I did everything right. I ate well, didn’t drink or anything, yet my baby is taken away, while thousands, THOUSANDS of women are granted baby after baby that they really don’t want. Drug addicted, neglected babies, continuously given to these ungrateful women. How is this fair? How can I ever accept this? I cannot. Oh, my  heart. I am so sad. I feel so so incomplete. I don’t know this foreign, unnatural feeling. It is not part of of the natural human experience. It is not supposed to be this way. How can this be real? Oh god I want her back, if only for a minute; only long enough to hold her, to remember her form, her smell, her sounds, her hair, her nose, her eyes, her eyebrows, her chin.

I find I’m desperately trying to convince myself of the possibility of an afterlife, or some kind of existence beyond this world. I need to believe in something, to allow me to believe I might see her again. I need to have that.

God I miss you baby girl. I don’t know how to do this without you. I’m going through the motions. I find such little pleasure in anything. I look back on my pregnancy with you with such sadness, because it was such a wonderful time, and it is so definitely over, forever. I remember going to Nelson, Dad and Evan playing on the rocks at a lakeside while I sat at the picnic table making lunch for us. Homemade chicken salad sandwiches, fresh blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and carrot sticks. Juice boxes.  How pure, and complete it all was. I watched Dad and Evan playing, thought of you playing in my womb, and how very perfect our lives would be in just 10 weeks, how we couldn’t wait to meet you. I don’t think I’d ever in my life been so happy and content. This is what makes it so very hard to look back to that time. I realize what a lifetime away I am from that feeling now. The feeling of everything being right. What a taken-for-granted feeling that is. For all the people who complain about their cars, or their jobs, but have yet to experience true loss, true grief, there are just as many of us who have been to and remain in the depths of a hell all our own. For us, job and car complaints don’t even register. I bet many of us wouldn’t even notice them. Oh what I wouldn’t give to have my biggest complaint be an unsavoury co-worker, or an oil leak I can’t afford.  I can’t even imagine that kind of bliss.  I just want to scream.

I am exhausted. Missing my daughter wrings me out and leaves me completely unable to feel for a while. I can’t empathize, sympathize, enjoy, bemoan anything. at. all. for some time. I am numb. Just floating around, waiting… please let there be something beyond this. I need it. I need to see my daughter again, I need to hold her and embrace her, absorb her, feel her with me, physically.  This can’t be it, forever. It just can’t.

So, after all my devastation over low sperm count, it may have been for naught. I am pregnant. Weird to even write that. 5 weeks today. I was pregnant when I blew up at Tim over not wanting to pursue fertility treatments, and didn’t even know it. No wonder I was such a mess.  My CBFM gave me a peak 2 days before FF gave me a coverline, so I overrode the coverline, and in hindsight, I think FF was right. This means our last attempt that month fell nearly 3 days before I ovulated. This bodes well for a girl. I am due around the 25th of May.  How do I feel? Am I ‘fixed’? Did the positive stick change my grief? I feel … a little relieved, that the counts were at least high enough to fertilize an egg. I feel a little more confident in my body, that it’s able to produce an egg, be fertilized and then implant (hopefully) successfully. I feel scared. I’ve willingly opened my heart up to love and pain again. I feel vulnerable and if I think about it too long, I feel panicky. Eventually, this baby will have to come out.. somehow.. I know that will be a trip. Somehow the staff that day are going to have to know my story, because I will be a wreck, and they have to a)accept this without saying something stupid and b)know how to deal with me.

So, yeah. That’s the news of the day. I have hope, I have an ability to look toward the future, without forgetting my past. I feel tremendous gratitude in being priveliged to carry another baby. Every second is a gift, with the full realization that it could end at any moment. I intend to appreciate every one of those moments, and hope for the very best outcome. But I dare not allow myself to dream that far ahead yet. First, let’s make it till tomorrow.  Sleep well, little bean. Please hang in there.

we’re bringing the telescope Evan got for Christmas last year, and the ‘map’ of the star dedicated to Isla when she died, on our camping trip. We’re going to light her candle and seek the stars for her.  The other day, Evan and I were talking about angels, and how we’re not sure what happens to people when they die, and what some people believe. Heaven, going to be with the angels and so on.  Then, he is quiet for a second, and says: “you know what mom? Stars aren’t actually stars.” I say “They’re not?” and he says “No, they’re actually angels”.
I. love. this. kid.

Yesterday, we had a talk about dying, and he told me that he knew I wasn’t going to die because I was ‘all grown up’.  So, methinks he has the life cycle backwards, poor thing. I think he believes babies die, but if you can survive infancy, you’re golden. Sigh. So, we had ‘the talk’, and I told him all about how most babies actually don’t die, that Isla had an accident in my body that made her body unable to live. And most people get very old, and then they die. So, of course, the question came.. “Are you going to die?” And I told him I was, but probably not for a long, long time. Then he asked if he was going to die, and I said yes, probably when he was a very old man. He said he didn’t want to die, and I nearly burst into tears for him, having to learn these important lessons at such a tender innocent age. I told him he would probably be very old, his body very tired, and it would be okay. He wouldn’t mind. And then, possibly against my better judgement and belief system (which is always in flux), I explained that we don’t know what happens to us when we die, explained a little about the notion of Heaven, spirits and angels, and that we might see Isla again one day, and the other people in our family who have died. He REALLY wanted to know where we go when we die. AFTER the angels.. then what? All I could tell him was that no one really knows.. only when you die, you find out. You don’t get to come back to life and tell everyone about it, so no one really knows for sure.

Ugh! How can a non-religious, trying-to-be-spiritual person try to instill hope of an afterlife, or some kind of ‘grace after death’ in her son, when I don’t even know if I believe it myself? I feel fraudulent, and like a used car salesman (no offense to used car salesmen). I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, because I don’t know what I believe. But I *want* Evan to believe in the possibility that there might be something else. I was never given any kind of religious or spiritual influence, and I do often feel frustrated from my lack of ability to “just believe” in something I can’t prove. It’s lonely, and isolating at times. I want Evan to have different belief systems, and possibilities presented to him from a young age, if it will make any difference at all in his developing spirituality. I know he’s getting an early introduction to death, loss and grieving. That’s sad for me; no child should have to really deal with this at such a young age. However, many do, and I suppose this won’t hurt him in the long run. Maybe he’ll be more compassionate to the dying, and the bereaved. If this does become the case, then I can burst with pride knowing that he has a step up in a world that likes to brush death and grief under rugs, and pretend it doesn’t exist.   Hopefully he would use this ‘knowledge’ to his, and the world’s advantage.  I have to say, despite the horrible circumstances from which my child has had to learn about death, I am loving the human being he is becoming. It brings me to tears, actually.

And I’m not freaking out anymore. I’m kind of anticipating it. I think it’s because we’re going camping, and I’m able to keep busy getting packed etc… planning hikes, and our healing walk. Isla’s rosebush is about to bloom, and if it’s ready, we’ll cut blooms from it for the healing walk to leave the petals on the path as we walk and remember her. I think we’ll do this every year, it gives us something to DO with our hands, our minds as we wait and wait for this wretched day to come and go. I hope that (wishful, probably) after this first anniversary, I don’t find it as hard to pass the anniversaries. All the firsts will be over. Then maybe that’s a whole new reason to grieve. She’s getting farther away from me, there won’t be any more firsts for her.

Today, Evan and I were talking about if it would be nice to have another baby in our family one day. He said yes. Then I asked “but would we ever forget Isla?” Kid breaks my heart and says, emphatically, “NO! We will Never forget Isla. She’s always going to be part of our family, it’s just that she died”.  Oh, my heart. I had to assault him with hugs and kisses and tears, because THIS is exactly what I’ve been trying to impart to him the whole time. He gets it! She STILL matters! She’ll always matter, and he KNOWS it. In his OWN heart. God, I almost feel sappy about this, but it’s really the best thing we could have hoped for. I love my son so much, it hurts.

to go.  I am a mess. I can’t believe this past week has been more difficult than the past 5 months. I am edgy, restless, irritable as hell, crying at the drop of a hat sad, and just emotionally exhausted. I don’t have anything left for my son, or my husband. We celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary yesterday (11 years together), and got into a small fight at dinner, just dampening everything. I can’t take any noise; Evan playing the wii, the sound of his chair legs bumping along the hardwood floors make me want to scratch my eyes out. I can’t handle any stimuli at all. Yet I can’t be alone, because “they” will find me. The grief gods. I hate them. I read someone’s blog (sorry, can’t remember who to give credit) who described it as a fog rolling in. You can see it from afar, and try to outrun it, but it slowly, patiently just gets thicker and thicker, closing in around you, and suddenly, you’re immersed in it; suffocated by it. I know it well by now, after nearly a year of it being my closest companion and enemy. It’s always there, like that clingy friend you wish would go away… but never does. You want to go hang with the cool cats, but nope, grief needs you more. So you stay home, mope, cry, feel lonely and pity yourself, like I’m doing tonight.

Fuck, I’m so tired of hurting. I know I’ve complained about this part ad nauseum, but I can’t help it; it’s the most awful thing of it all. I wish I could just turn it the fuck off, for a day, an hour, a minute. Just to be whole again, without the weight of this tragedy driving my heels into the ground. I’m tired of seeing a different reality than everyone else, seeing the world through different eyes. I hate feeling so unable to connect with the world, even during the rare time that I desperately want to.  Somehow, conversations lead to children, childbirth, and I am outed.  Some flippant or ignorant comment is made, and I’m thrust to the bottom of the pit, alone. While everyone else carries on, completely unaware that I’ve dropped off the party bus, and am drowning, while desperately trying to keep it together on the surface. That’s the isolation part. That’s the incredible loneliness.

Alan Wolfelt said in “Understanding Your Grief”,  that when people try to “educate” you on the proper grieving technique and timeline, and hint that you’re at the point where you should be ‘wrapping up your grief’, that this can be when you feel at your loneliest, our most alienated and isolated.  I can’t agree more. It is a wicked slap in the face when someone completely untouched by loss tells me that I should be “getting over this” or “be grateful for all that I have” and to “focus on the positive”. These are the most horrible times. It acutely defines how stark the line between bereaved and non-bereaved is, and how irreversibly different my life is by comparison. All I want to do at times like this is curl up and cry, or flee to my loss board, and cry with my fellow mom (I love you guys, you know who you are).

So, yeah, this week has been a whirlwind, and it’s going to get worse I figure, until after my birthday, in October. I’m at the point now, where I’m saying to myself frequently “a year ago… I was doing x”…  I’m going to keep doing this for a while. God I hope it’s true that the anticipation is worse than the day itself. I’m scared, scared of my pain, my grief, the power of it to wipe me out and leave me sobbing yet again, deeply hurting from my painfully empty arms. As I see little one year old girls toddling around, learning to walk, cutting adorable new teeth, discovering hair accessories and little walking outfits and dresses, my pain intensifies, and I feel crippled with pain. I feel immobilized and unable to see any kind of optimistic future for myself, in spite of my wonderful son, and husband.

Throw into the mix, a possible low sperm count for dh, and I’m having a whopper of a week. I have always thought our inability to conceive this year was due to me. Yet after charting for 9 months, and realizing that I do ovulate predictably each month, and now this new sperm thing, I suddenly feel completely powerless in my desire for another child. I am trying not to feel defeated and devastated again, but I never would have thought it would be a problem with him.

The cherry? PMS. Full swing. Another month down the drain.

Sigh. Stop the bus, I want to get off.