Jennifer Massoni Pardini

A Good Year for Grief?

To suggest it’s been a good year for grief is to say that it’s also been a bad year for loss. And we’re only half way through. Loss marks the lives of those who remain every year. Lately, however, people in the public eye have lost.

We have watched Vice President Joe Biden bury his eldest child, Beau, 42 years after losing his wife and baby daughter. When we saw the image of President Obama hugging the Vice President at the service, we saw a father giving comfort to another in his time of bereavement.

We have watched Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg surface from her first month of grieving the sudden death of her husband, Dave Goldberg, with a note so open and eloquent and accessible, I’m starting to think those who aren’t actively grieving might “get it.” The week it was published, I was asked more than once “How are you today?” rather than “How are you?” In her piece, Sandberg sets apart the former as a much more manageable inquiry when we’re grieving.

“I realize the person knows that the best I can do right now is to get through each day,” she writes.

Being asked how I am doing today—three years out from the loss of my son—I take as a win.

These losses were sudden. They left behind spouses, young children, and parents. They were “good” men, as seems to be the case for too many who die young. We lose important people every year, whether they were important to us or to an entire country. The difference is that we are seeing something of the grief their loss inspires. We are running our fingers along it as best we can thanks to public expression like Sandberg’s and public mourning like Vice President Biden’s.

Then, a young man walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and suddenly took the lives of nine women and men, people who weren’t in the public eye until their tragic deaths. This was no cancer. This was no accident. This was hate and terror and racism and access to a deadly weapon. With the rest of the country, I watched as the families spoke out and grieved and even forgave the man who took their mothers and sons and aunts from them. And the country started arguing about what kind of crime this was and a vile confederate flag flew above it all, and I couldn’t see the good anymore.

The news cycle has moved on—to inarguably good news: marriage equality (#LoveWins), continued access to healthcare, and a uniting win for USA at the Women’s World Cup (also have to give a shout-out to my adopted home of Chile on their victory at the Copa América 2015). It feels good to feel good again.

Vice President Biden watched the USA Women’s Soccer Team take to the field in Vancouver, his grandchildren by his side. He cheered. I remember how wrong celebration felt for a long time after Lorenzo died, and I have to imagine how hard he had to work to put his heart into it, even though he knows better than anyone what it takes to move forward.

All I can hope for him and his family, for Sheryl Sandberg and her family, for the families of the victims in Charleston, and for anyone we know who is grieving, is that we continue to ask not how they are, but how are they today, for days and days and days to come.

Writing for Two

Evolution of a memoir: three years, nine drafts, one audience or two?

Welcome to my new site! I have been working behind the scenes with my talented friend Leslie Forman to relaunch this platform for my professional work as well as my message. Both have evolved over these five years of posting. I started writing here when I moved to Chile as a newlywed. I continue to write here as the mother of two, one living.

The inspiration for the overhaul was two-fold. One, I needed to bring my blog into the present and make it easier to navigate and connect across communities. Two, writing after loss is not simply the evolution of my life; it’s my creative enterprise. It may even be my life’s work. For now, I’ve stopped wondering for how long it will be and have embraced that it simply is.

My goal in sharing our story is the same today as it was when I first told it: to help other parents walking in shoes like ours. With that in mind, you’ll find that this site talks directly to those parents and those seeking to help them. My aim is to make it easier for those searching for stories like theirs—as I did and do—to find me and consider me a friend in solidarity. Part of grief is feeling alone in it, but I hope to minimize the time it takes to realize that you’re actually not. That directness is not at the exclusion of other readers. I hope anyone interested will find value here. That may be the toughest balance to strike as a writer: providing something of the universal through a singular experience.

In a recent episode of Longform‘s resourceful podcast about creative nonfiction, the memoir powerhouse who is Cheryl Strayed said something that has stayed with me:

“When we see a painting that we love, we’re not standing there thinking about the artist who made it—we’re thinking about how that painting makes us feel, what that reflects to us about our lives and the world… This is especially true in memoir, where you’re writing about yourself—it has this horrible, false reputation of being the narcissistic form, which I think is pure bullshit. No good memoir is really about the writer—and yet it’s deeply about the writer.”

Here we see that challenging divide: writing something that will inspire feeling in the reader, but is still our story. Great writers like Strayed succeed. Some of the most significant books in my life are singular stories writ large, and I’m sure you feel the same. Strayed’s memoir Wild helped me immensely in my early grief even though her journey stemmed from the loss of her mother. Sometimes, grief is grief and healing is healing.

As I edited my memoir this last pass, it became clear that there were still two audiences: grieving mothers, fathers, and couples—and everyone else. Which means the story held water, progressed through time, and the reader was left with the hope of H.—the upswing of an ending that reps of the book business have told me is needed, but may be the last thing a new loss mom needs. As for me, I wanted to explain things clearly enough for anyone to really understand both our decision and our subsequent grief. Three years out, I see what a difficult ask that is.

So I sat with it, this book that was begging to be two. The grief hit particularly hard one day and a bit of a breakdown proceeded to a pretty enormous breakthrough. And I rewrote it for the people I’m most concerned with helping: those other grieving parents. The revision of this website is in a similar vein.

I don’t yet know if that means everyone will respond to this version of the painting or a select few. I do hope those brave enough to listen in will better understand the tenor of the experience that is pregnancy and infant loss. I have a great reason to hold that hope—many in my life have listened these last years. They have tried to feel what they can, and I have been accepting of what they cannot.

One of those who has listened is Leslie. She built me a beautiful website. I invite you to have a look around.

Still Not That Mom

Most of the time, I’m trying it on. Music class. A conversation about sleep training. A spontaneous playdate in our new neighborhood. I am that mom because I have H. When I read “The Grief in Growing Up,” I’ve also “realized that all the photos in the world can never preserve this. I try to write things down and hoard mementos, but there’s no way to bottle the way she feels in my arms,” as Catherine Naja writes of her young daughter. But three years ago Lorenzo died, and I began parenthood as another kind of mother. And that is loss, that is grief, not watching a healthy child grow and achieve. I am still not that mom.

As Lorenzo’s mom I collect hearts and write personal essays and add pages to a memory scrapbook. H. has a scrapbook too, of all the cards she received after she was born and during her first year of holidays and celebrations. How similar my intention—to create a living document for each of them—yet how different the result.

As H.’s mom, we find a farm nearby and point at baby goats. She says “neigh, neigh” as she strides over to the carousel, and I swell with such a common, maternal pride. As her mom, I inhale the warm lavender left in her hair after a bath as we read in the corduroy chair from Santiago. As her mom, I listen for her deep, unlabored breathing in the dark before I go to bed. She is still the happiest person I know. Somehow, after so much was spectacularly broken, she appeared spectacularly whole.

I’ve been reading my friend Sky’s lovely blog. She is writing about her first year as a mom to an adorable baby boy. Her beautiful project will document that boy’s first year of life so he and her husband can always have it as testimony. Her moving intention made me worry I don’t write enough here about H., too much about Lorenzo. I’m not sure that’s necessarily true or that it even matters if it is. I try to protect her here, too.

As impossible as it is to truly preserve, I do want her to have heaps of evidence all her own. To know that I kiss her a hundred times a day, minimum. That she hands me a book, turns and backs up toward me, and plops down in my lap as if that action ignites the story. I am in total blown-away awe of her on an hourly basis. I record that awe in a line-a-day journal Laura Lee, another lovely blogging friend, gave me when I was pregnant with Lorenzo. I wrote about him until late May 2012, and then I didn’t write another line until the day H. was born. The story is in the gaps, too.

I have been writing a whole book for her brother, and she is in it now. For a long time I didn’t think she would be; I didn’t want to end the story with the “rainbow baby” because our culture thrives on the happy ending. Not every loss mom has gotten hers; others may never. And those of us who do are not magically all fixed. But H. is here. The grief goes on alongside her and the wonder she inspires. She is the one teaching me what it means to parent after loss. So they share this book, as siblings. I may not be that mom, but I am their mom, their connection.

On this most recent Lorenzo’s Day, H. looked through her brother’s memory book with me. I’d had it out on the dining room table all week, and her interest in this overflowing, leather-bound volume on high was evident. I helped her climb up, and we turned the pages together. When I asked her where the heart was, she knew every time. “Har,” she even said, pointing.

The Third June 2nd

Each year, we try to do something simple as a family. The first year, we took Ruby to a beautiful park in Santiago. The second year, we lit up the night.

This third year, it was Ryan’s idea. A trip to a nearby nursery to pick out a plant. I liked it instantly: retrieving something to care for, a little fresh air for our new home, and something we hadn’t done yet here. We chose Sunday so we could all go together to a place I’d found when H. and I had spent a cold morning amongst its many Christmas trees. Their lights had held her in such wonder.

This last day of May was warm, the sun on our shoulders and reflected in the pond.

Among hundreds of pots, we found a turquoise heart. This color always reminds me of Lorenzo.

Other hearts found us, too. Yellow also reminds me of him.

H. helped us pick out a plant.

It will bloom white and blue.

Here it is <3

How normal we must have looked, a young family perusing the grounds on a Sunday morning, stopping to consider this plant and then that. A dad strolling his daughter by a little waterfall she pointed to. A mom hoisting a ceramic pot onto her hip. We rarely see the real story. I suppose that’s why I keep telling ours to you.

Mama loves you, Lorenzo.

An Open Letter to the U.S. House After Passing Abortion Ban

May 14, 2015

Dear Politicians,

Please stop. Stop making personal, medical, and parental decisions. Stop spending your valuable time dialing back rights women have had for over 40 years. Please put your privileged, powerful energy elsewhere… toward poverty and inequality and hunger and racism and sexism and the ravages of war. Instead, you in the U.S. House have again passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Instead, the people you seem most concerned with criminalizing are heartbroken mothers and the doctors who care for them.

I feel like I’m back in Chile, without choice, speaking out about the very real consequences of these bans. That post was subsequently published in an anthology about abortion. Our story also appeared in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. I am not the only one speaking out about all that can go wrong during pregnancy. And two years later, we are right back where we started, further back in fact.

Then, our rights were being taken away. Now, they are also being subverted and overruled. As Laura Bassett writes in her Huffington Post article, “There is no exception for severe fetal anomalies, and the bill requires a neonatal doctor to try to save the fetus if there is any chance it could survive outside the womb.” As the Associated Press wrote, “Newly added to the bill is a requirement that the mother sign a consent form acknowledging that an attempt will be made to let her fetus be born alive unless the mother’s health would be threatened.”

Guess what, Congress, that isn’t consent.

As the Huffington Post article also states, “Abortions after 20 weeks are extremely rare, accounting for only about 1 percent of all abortions. Opponents of the legislation worry that it will hurt women [like Williams] who discover severe medical problems late into their pregnancies.”

Women like me. Babies like Lorenzo.

With this bill, you have made life infinitely harder for that 1 percent of us who choose to protect our children from needless suffering, who choose to protect our own souls, as much as is possible, from forcing that suffering, and who choose to take on that suffering instead. We already have precious little time to consider horrible options (but options all the same). We are already devastated over our children’s prognosis, already heartbroken. Now, you are forcing us to deliver severely compromised children.

Also absent from the bill is any truthful, medical examination of what that kind of survival might look like—the painful interventions required, the long-term effects, and at whose emotional, physical, and financial cost?

YOU are the ones forcing our severely compromised children to endure pain.

I have a friend whose baby was born at 24 weeks, 1 day. She was in pre-term labor with nothing more to be done to stop it. Ultimately, she came to the same conclusion for her son as Ryan and I did for Lorenzo—that “the medical interventions that might sustain their lives were too aggressive, too dangerous, and too painful for their little bodies,” as she so aptly put it. “But because you made the decision 17 hours before he left the womb, and I made the decision 17 hours after, I have the parental choice to withdraw treatment, and you are forced to watch your child suffer?”

Given this law, the answer would be yes. There, again, the consequence.

For my friend and me, our fates landed us in the same place… with dead first children. Neither one of us wanted that. But neither one of us wanted to force our children to endure medically what we as their parents—and as adults acting within the confines of the law—deemed to be too much.

The medical science she and I were presented with in our darkest hours has not changed. But laws are. That is a terrifying equation. And that is why this is a ruse. This is not actually about pain at all. This is about stripping away women’s constitutional rights. This is an incremental step toward the complete abolition of abortion. That is the end game here.

As Hillary Clinton said in response to the ban’s passing, “The bill puts women’s health and rights at risk, undermines the role doctors play in health care decisions, burdens survivors of sexual assault, and is not based on sound science. It also follows a dangerous trend we are witnessing across the country. In just the first three months of 2015, more than 300 bills have been introduced in state legislatures — on top of the nearly 30 measures introduced in Congress — that restricted access to abortion.”

We, the people you serve, must speak up and demand that your largely white, male, political elite STOP making decisions for mothers and their physical and emotional health and that of their unborn children. For now, your message has been received: In 2015, women’s constitutional rights and choices don’t matter. That is what decisions like yours yesterday affirm. And that is not okay.

Sincerely,

A heartbroken mother who is FIRED UP. And you don’t mess with those.