I thought I’d share my thoughts on “help,” both in the sense of what words and gestures of love have helped me and Ryan through the last seven weeks of our lives, as well as where I’m floundering… where “Help!” of some form is going to be needed. At the moment, I’m still bracing myself against the dark fence, looking for the contrast of light.

First, the positive, the half-full, the gratitude, the fresh flowers on my desk in Lorenzo’s vase:

• “Grief chooses us,” said by a mother who lost an adult child. I knew the daughter well and now, after the ten years since her tragic loss, I know the mother well. We’ve worked together closely toward the same end: cancer funding and research. But perhaps I have never truly talked to her until we talked about loosing our children. The segments of our grief are very different. She lost an only daughter on the cusp of the kind of life that true kindness, intelligence, good humor, focus, and beauty prepare you for; I lost a 1 lb, 5 oz, 11 3/4 inch son who had his father’s mouth, my nose, never opened his eyes, and should have had every potential ahead of him… first steps, laughter, a healthy body in motion chasing down each dream he dared to muster. Both of these futures were cut short, leaving parents to wring their hands, ask why without any expectation of an answer, and find whatever ways possible to keep carrying on WITHOUT, which is now a state of being. Her comment liberated me from the idea that I should be grieving a certain way, that my own progress could possibly be measured against anyone else’s, even hers. Of course it can’t. She is the only mother who lost Sara. I am the only mother who lost Lorenzo.

• “Your babies are waiting for you,” said by possibly the most inherently good and generous person I know. Whatever she or I or you believe, I believe in this idea. In this HOPE that the future is out there, waiting to form and become our destiny. Maybe Lorenzo will guide them now, his younger siblings, if we are so blessed. One day, I will tell them about their older brother and protector.

• “Don’t have expectations of yourself because the process is not linear,” said by a grief counselor. This is why yesterday was harder than the day before. This is why I don’t know what to say when people hope that with each day it gets a little bit better. This lets some of the pent-up air out of my lungs. This has made it “OK” to lie on the couch at 7AM and pull a comforter back over my body and pet my dog at my side and pivot from there until the afternoon. There is a novel looped through a binder in a box under my desk. One of these mornings I will lift the lid, reach down, and start again, but that morning has not arrived yet. It is a novel about love and loss and grief. Before this, I thought it was nearly finished, after spending two-and-a-half years writing it because I thought I was close enough to grief to do so. I know picking it up again means readying myself for a different kind of book.

• “They’re ahead of us in this existential wackiness,” said by another mom who lost the way I lost, meaning our sons’ journeys have continued, meaning we can admit we don’t understand it, meaning my pain is partly derived from trying to align Lorenzo’s journey with my own… with footsteps on our earth, in our time, inscribed by the meaning I know through love and accomplishment and touch and compassion. Who am I to believe there is only this meaning, only this way to travel? 

• I’ve also been given images to hold onto. I may one day put all this into a box, a good friend said, but it will always be a box without a lid, perhaps more contained as time passes, as this becomes lighter, but never truly better. It will all be there for me to look at and carry and remember by, moment by moment. Or, as my husband said, this is like wearing a heavy jacket… while walking up stairs… and carrying an over-flowing box. We don’t ever take these jackets off now, Ryan and I, and even our jackets are different. Still, they are on for good, but sometimes we may feel lighter as we walk with them and sometimes, heaven help us, we may, for a portion of time, forget they’re there.

• There are many, many more helpful words that have been found by dearest friends and family and even the new friend I now have a bond with because our lives share a symmetry you would never want. She’s right, there is no boredom in this. For me, the waiting is the thing. 

Here’s where I still need some help:

• I have no sense of time anymore. It passes very slowly and without urgency until suddenly it is all urgent and I’m in a world where I never ovulate again or, if I do, I never get pregnant again or, if I do, there are more fatal complications. Ryan is better at believing in a future where our healthy children are running around and we can’t imagine a time when they weren’t. I believe in it, too—I have to—I just believe it more when he says it. 

• Metaphors aside, you can’t know how you will wear the grief, and sometimes I stick my neck out of it for a moment and look down on myself—un-showered, pajama-ed, though I’ve already walked the dog three times in one of those flannel pants-running-shoes-big-ski-jacket kind of looks I might have been horrified by as a carefree teenager. I think everyone can see this, but of course they can’t. They can’t know the real jacket I’m wearing, just as I can’t see theirs. To them, I’m just that girl with the sexy three-inch gap between the top of her shoes and the bottom of her pants, walking her incredibly cute puppy around the block again.

• I might need a glass (or two) of wine and I might need it (them) nightly. I am not beyond control with this, I know it will pass, and I talk about it with Ryan. I don’t hide it from him and I don’t hide it from you because I came back here to be honest. There is no point in turning to the side so others only see what you want them to see. That takes too much energy for you and doesn’t really do anyone any favors. I say this at 8:48 in the morning, far away from the influence of or desire for a glass of wine.

• I just made another appointment with the grief counselor and ordered four books on our kind of loss and our kind of decision. Now, Amazon can surmise just as much as you can. I’ll get auto-generated emails with recommended reading based on this order, or maybe I won’t because I believe these are the only four books that exist on the matter. Ours is an especially isolating, stigmatized, politically violent segment of grief. Still, I believe we did the right thing for our child, and that should be isolating, I suppose, even if many doctors also told us we did what they would do, that we were still good parents. But no one else had our child. No one else held him for an hour in a private room in the maternity ward of the very same hospital I was delivered in 32 years and four months apart from my son. 1980, 2012. February, June. Girl, Boy. That reality both connects me to and disconnects me from my own mother in the chain. Maybe it connects me to and disconnects me from you.

It made it so upon reading the noun, sere, I can now see myself in an entirely different part of the process. Sere (pronounced seer) means: “An intermediate stage or a series of stages in the ecological succession of a community. Example: forest, forest destroyed by fire, grass, brush, young trees, mature trees” (Wordsmith, 6.19.12).

Right now, we are living in a forest destroyed by fire, but we are believing in grass, believing in the community that helps us.