I’ve been a bit off blogging about the endless, wearying aftermath of trying to come to terms with life through a new lens. Various things caused it but the effect of it has been bad; if I don’t write it down, it washes around my head and causes me pain. In the same way my biking stopped abruptly the other week – I suspect the two stops together amounted to some kind of subconscious self harming. I don’t know why I’d do that to myself. And if I don’t write here, I don’t write. I think there is a bit of journalist in my perhaps, a genetic requirement to write for viewing. And I hate having one blog for this and one for that – it feels divisive and I refuse to do it again.
All this started, as things are wont to do, with an unintended moment of unfortunate-ness that somehow robbed me of feeling I was still allowed to grieve. My process. My inability to see that the only thing that really matters is what I need to do to recover. Made me feel like I should be over it. Made me feel as if for being dead, Freddie was less than nothing, less even than the tiny bits I have to hold on to. It was unintentional, accidental – but it removed my ability to claim the space which is “my son died recently and I’m sad”. Grieving is a delicate balance of many things, especially when done as publicly as living in a house with 5 other people who are there ALL. THE. TIME. There is just no space to grieve. If I assign time to it, the pain that is caused cannot be acknowledged and exorcised in the time available. I can’t start crying, I can’t roll in a ball and sob, because there is no time to do so and the ripples cause other people, little people, pain and fear. I’ve got precious few places, people or times to do what needs to be done. If one of those gets ripped up, if the tiny, delicate portions of space that are places where Freddie is real, my real, once living, breathing son, get paved over, then I’m left in a terrible place.
There are many contrasts in child loss – I envy people who get to grieve for their firstborn, because I envy the space and the right to sink downwards, while knowing how much worse it would be not to have the girls to pull me along. I’m envied for having had a child who lived long enough for me to love him and I know that is indeed lucky, while knowing I had to let a little person go who I had learned to love, who had medical notes and chances and hopes and milk that I made for him. Nothing is simple.
It’s hard to explain how complicated it is to live inside a head that can’t be pleased and a body that reacts physically to the reality of someone not existing.
Then the counsellor I’m seeing chose that week to pull down all my defences and that, hard on the heels of the weekend away, caused me to come apart in handfuls of something dry, broken and formless. I might as well have been one of those cubes of compressed sawdust: tear off the plastic, kick me and lo! I’m not rectangle at all, just a pile of leftovers.
The next day there was a bit of a local disturbance that upset me hugely and made me feel very vulnerable, Max went away for a very long week, I went away for a long (lovely) weekend, I did two long drives, faced a baby, did a lot of running away and by the time I got back I was utterly incapable of doing anything other than sob for a very long time indeed. About a week in fact.
I thought that would be a good time to knit a blanket square in three tones of blue, that turned out to look just like a little boy jumper. I sobbed through nearly the whole square. I should have stopped knitting it. I didn’t, because it didn’t occur to me that it would make sense to do so.
I’m reached a new phase, one I’m going to have to do alone. We’ve all grieved; Max, the girls, me, all of us who met him, knew of him, hoped for him. I’m still grieving, but what has seeped in in the last week is that now I’m also mourning. The rest here, I think, are not.
Freddie was my rescue package. I needed him terribly, long before he was a twinkle or a baby. I needed him. I had a really dreadful few years and then finally he was coming and I began to heal from stuff that had ripped me into shreds. As I became more pregnant, I began to look forward to a life of being whole again, of having myself back, of not being sad any more. The happy ending was coming and Freddie was the process and to be the beautiful wanted end package too. A lovely child who started off as a means to an end and ended as something we all wanted so much.
On top of mourning for him, the little person, our son, that future and everything he should have been, I’m mourning for the hope that I’d be myself again. Some of what I needed I got, but the victory is hollow, just so hollow because there is a person gone. One who squeezed my finger, someone with a birth certificate and a death certificate, someone who had bottles of milk in a freezer that a nurse must have thrown away. I’m mourning for a future, a person, a self I wanted back, the innocence of thinking things could be okay. A baby. A little boy. A future that might never have had all this that I have to learn to slide away from, not look at.
I know in a couple of years, with or without any more children, that this will be easier. I just want to be at that point already. If grief is a cornfield, then I’ve tramped it down once and I resent that I have to do it again. I resent that I can’t do it faster. I hate that recovering from Freddie is something I have to do, that I have to learn to love him less, not celebrate him, not speak of him, not look back too long at his lovely little face and his gorgeous little body. That his birthday, one of the most amazing moments of my life, is something that it is only sensible to forget and consign to history. That it will be easier for everyone else if I just move on, let it go, let him go.
And that is why I’ve not been able to write. Because I can’t face the fact that the sensible thing, the convenient thing is to move on now. Let this part of my life go. Stop having babies, not be mother to a boy. It just hurts so much that I wish I could go to sleep and never wake up.
i think the share and enjoy instruction really couldn’t have been more jarring at the bottom there. i realise my loss and grief are entirely different, with different issues and processes, so won’t presume to extrapolate. but i don’t hope to let go, just change the emotions behind the remembering.v possibly much easier for me – tho not easy as such.
i am sorry that you are affected by other peoples processes in this, i agree that you have to help keep the ship afloat for the 4 lovely girls you have. But i don’t think they would expect you to forget Freddie, or not celebrate him, they just hope, because they love you, that your pain will ease.
hugs and love, but no answers x x
All through reading that I sat here hugging myself and I realised it is cos I want to hug you. It is such a lonely place being the only one mourning. Don’t move on until you are ready and don’ t force yourself too. You can’t and shouldn’t no matter how much pressure you feel to “get over it” xx
Ah this has made me cry. It does change over time, you are right there; the quality of grief and mourning will be different in two years. The depth doesn’t change, nor the weight of it. But you will be accustomed to it, in a way you simply can’t be, just now. Let the tears and all the words come. Let them come. Your girls will/are learning so much from loss and love, the love that bleeds through grief. Time, it passes. We so rarely walk where we expected to.
Be well and take care; gentle {{hugs}}
Merry, a friend of mine emigrated to Canada a few years ago with her husband and little daughter. Her parents have just been to visit them there for the first time. Reading her blog post about the visit made me think of you… your loss is so much greater in magnitude, and it must be so difficult to have known Freddie and been known by him for so short a time; but I think what she says is true nonetheless:
“I’ve been listening to the beautiful, lilting Irish voice of the late John O’Donohue as he talks about the physicality of the soul, and the way in which someone’s physical presence with you brings the fullness of their soul – all they are and have experienced – into your life, while their physical departure takes this fullness away. It can be hard to really grasp the truth of this, since people are still sometimes so real to us despite distance. But now that my parents have been absent from my life, then present, and then once again absent, this truth is very real to me. Being WITH them brought a myriad of new dimensions to how I could relate to them and experience them, and they me. Our bodies and souls were in the same space at the same time. They had not been able to see, hear, smell, touch and taste our life here, but now, though they are gone, they are able to truly picture us here, in our home; and I know they have been here – that they know and understand. Thus their absence has a different quality to the absence before their presence; they are absent and yet some of their presence lingers. And this is comforting. For as the great John O’Donohue put it, “absence is full of tender presence and […] nothing is ever lost or forgottenâ€.”
http://learningtosavour.blogspot.com/2010/09/absence-and-presence.html
I don’t think that there is a time limit on grief/mourning. I don’t think that anyone should have to hold it in/stop/be sensible because its a process, imho its not linear it can be quite abstract and it is’nt easy. I wish could say something comforting or helpful. Look after you.
My heart goes out to you Merry. I have been stuck in a deep dark hole, for other reasons than you but I am familiar in some ways with the place you talk about. Although the 5 other people in the house may be somehow preventing you from curling up into a ball and sinking further into the pit, by being there, having needs of their own, they are also helping you (although it probably doesn’t feel like it) because they keep reaching down into the pit and trying to haul you out. Oblivion may feel like an easier option because fighting back is so hard. Having staggered out of the pit into the sunshine some years ago, I now know that it was only because I had those intruding arms reaching in, pulling me upwards when all I wanted to do was push them away and retreat, but it was those arms that saved me from myself. One day Merry, one day at a time, you will make peace with yourself. take care and thinking of you xx
This post has me in tears, I can relate to so much you have written.There are plenty of days when I don’t want to wake up either. x
I’m so sorry I shoved a baby at you without warning. I know there’s nothing I can do to make it less painful but I promise that if I’d realised who you were, I’d have at least warned you first, so that you could do whatever you needed to take care of yourself.
Keep writing it out. I think perhaps it’s not that writing it out makes it better, but that not doing so makes it worse…
Ailbhe, it was completely okay. I was prepared for you coming and hoping I’d cope but knowing I would probably hide, not from you or your lovely baby, but from the company of people who I didn’t know. In fact it wasn’t actually the baby that undid me, it was the lovely thoughtfulness of A turning her away from me to try and stop the impact. It was one of those “oh my god I’m so broken and nothing anyone can do can make it right” moments – because of course I was also completely grateful for that care but undone by needing the care.
Does that make any sense?
No. It probably doesn’t, because if you’d shoved your baby intentionally, or stayed in the other room intentionally, I’d have been just as undone and if the baby had been left facing me, I’d have been just as undone.
It’s that very “impossible to please”ness which makes it all so exhausting. I’m relying on people to be simultaneously perfect, imperfect, caring and normal and of course no one can be.
You are all so thoughtful and kind to comment. Thank you.
It makes perfect sense. Every instance of thoughtfulness is another “reminder” (as though you could forget). It doesn’t make thoughtlessness preferable, but it doesn’t cure anything.
I very nearly asked A to pass on a message that I hoped to see you sometime under better circumstances, but since I can’t see you sometime when Freddie’s not dead, I didn’t. I hope one day we can meet when you have found some more ways of coping, and when I don’t have a newborn rubbing salt in your wounds, because I’d like to get to know you.
(((HUGS)))
‘Because I can’t face the fact that the sensible thing, the convenient thing is to move on now. Let this part of my life go.’
I do not share your experience of a child dying, but I do share this feeling. The utter dispair, compounded by the worse feeling that it will, eventually, get better, that you will stop feeling so raw and awful and sorrowful and that that, actually, is the worse thought of all 🙁
I don’t know if that helps, knowing that you’re not alone in that pit, and that you’re not the first – or last – to be down it.
just (((HUGS)))
Often, I catch myself thinking that I wish I weren’t this person – sad, pitiful, broken mother of a dead son.
I don’t really wish that, I don’t want to wish away my life or my son. It just hurts so much that the thought of not carrying this pain around with me everywhere I go is very appealing. I completely understand the desire to let go, to sleep and not wake up, to get away from this hurt however you can.
It’s so hard.