A Wednesday in Mid-October

I nearly missed it this year. Not that I didn’t know what day it was or tweet about it or appreciate those who were remembering Lorenzo. Not that October 15 has anything to do with him other than it being Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day. Not that I don’t remember two losses when I see those five words.

Last year, I posted about it and offered some suggestions for how to help someone who had to let a dream and so much more go. This year, I also remember those who have come after me. Just since January, two late-term stillbirths, two fetal anomalies incompatible with life, several miscarriages, IVF that didn’t take. Meanwhile, twelve healthy babies were born, including my daughter. And I have ten friends who are currently pregnant and thriving. The happy stories still outnumber the losses. But the losses still matter. I am honored that I have been trusted with many of them because I have trusted many with Lorenzo.

This year, I was busy, too. H. had music and gym. She did her first hand stand! Ryan worked late. It was oddly humid. At 7 PM, when it was time to light a remembrance candle, H. and I were swaying to the pop music playing in a Korean BBQ restaurant, waiting for a to-go order. It wasn’t until most of the day was closed that I uploaded a batch of new hearts for Lorenzo (we are nearing 3,000!) and read essays like “Wish You Were Here.” Amazingly, I received an email from a mom who made the same choice we did for her son who had the same diagnosis during the same summer. A piece about the day had led hers to one of mine and she reached out across the loss to connect. While I had been trying to get to Lorenzo, he had gone ahead and found me.

But I couldn’t write this all into a post, the memoir didn’t get revised. Ryan and I didn’t take Ruby to a dog park as was our ritual down in Santiago. A candle never got lit. They are all somewhere in a box in the basement though I keep reminding myself that we might soon need them. We live somewhere now where a storm could come in and the power could go out, where I keep hearing it’s supposed to be another rough winter after this stunning year of chasing summer.

October 15 was in many ways just another Wednesday. And that’s OK. It consisted of experiencing joy with my daughter while remembering my son. He isn’t just missing on October 15, after all. So here we are on October 25, here H. is asleep in the carrier as I type this, her deep, easy breathing hot on my neck. Outside, fading leaves float to the ground. Sometimes one—just one out of all that rustle—will stick to my car door window or to the hood of the stroller or to the doormat inside the house and I’ll think, There’s Lorenzo. I sit and read essays sent my way recently, namely “Grief Is Not Broken” and “Denied,” and the recognition makes my eyes go tight. Words actually do help although that is one of the things you’ll hear the most… “There are no words.”

Of course there are.

For this year, that is what I’ll offer and do myself. To share something about what someone else is suffering, confronting, surviving, or accepting. In order to run our fingers along the edge of it. To ask a question. To try to find those words. It doesn’t have to be a certain day to remember. It can be any day at all.

Forward Motion

First, some humor on building a life someplace new. Oh, how I appreciate this. We especially need community when we’re starting over in some way, and that can be when it feels most out of reach. Thus far, Ruby is out in front with her boyfriend, Boomer, right across the street.

It should be all too easy to connect—if only because everything is in English again! I can even call people without calculating time zones or scheduling Skype dates! (And I don’t—mid-conversation—run out of minutes on my un-smart phone, requiring a quick run to the pharmacy to load more… how normal that so recently seemed.)

Here I go again, comparing two countries, only in reverse. I recently read a post about parenting in Chile and recognized so much in the images and observations. Because it’s there that my parenthood began and struggled and began again. It’s there that everyone I knew also knew about Lorenzo. Here, the truth doesn’t always fit in with the chit-chat after music class. Here, the neighbors still think we’re the new young family on the cul-de-sac. Of course, I could tell them. But we have only talked about the weather, about how fast Ruby can run, about how happy H. is. And she is. So inherently happy, which fills and strengthens my heart. I’m re-reading my Pema so I know it’s about taking it all onto the path: “The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving,” (When Things Fall Apart).

Protection is going on here too. We live in a conservative town. There are a dozen churches within a mile of my house, or so it seems. I end up behind cars with license plates that imply there shouldn’t be a choice. I do not believe that our decision is incompatible with this environment (and I’ve moved from a staunchly Catholic country), but I still exercise caution. I honor Lorenzo with every heart (as have so many of you), every essay about him, every word in the memoir I am revising. I also have H. I am an active mother. I am not so hungry for acknowledgement that I tell any and everyone about my son. But that does not mean I won’t be relieved when I find the person here I can trust with our whole story. That I don’t pause every time I might nod in order to keep the conversation with a stranger moving and imply that yes, H. is our first.

H. I’m on my knees with gratitude that she is on the path with us. She is all about forward motion these days—crawling, turning, rolling, reaching. She insists on it when being held too. How spiritually sound babies are by this definition. Calm, for her, is forward motion.

In all honesty, how happy I am that I spend most of my time with her. So much is temporary. I’ll look back on this time with fondness and yearning—as I do my latter days in Chile—because this, a third home, is where most of H.’s first year is blooming and where time moves quickly again.

A Santiago friend recently emailed. She had her daughter eleven days after I had H.—at the same hospital with the same doctor. She and her family will soon be on their way to Mexico City. That’s the thing about these international lifestyles… the revolving door keeps revolving. We keep moving. Forward motion. How nervous I once was to meet her, an “Innocent,” or so she seemed, pregnant with her second child. But how kind and receptive she was, how not as innocent as I initially thought. I’ve been remembering that as we continue down the path. And today I did tell someone new about my son, not the whole story but the heart of it, and she was lovely, as she pushed her own baby boy down the street. She asked me to tell her his name. Lorenzo. How much that meant and will always mean. How lovely, also, to then spread a blanket on a patch of grass and watch our children play.

Pacing

Often, you notice subtle, surprising things about a place only after you leave it. Sidewalks, for example, were wide and ample in Santiago (and rich in hearts). I’d often get stuck behind four men walking side by side at a leisurely pace, so Ruby and I would duck around on the tree-lined grass expanse that divided the sidewalk from the street. The sidewalks were wider still—a few meters across—over on the boulevards. Here, in the ‘burbs, the sidewalks are narrow—meant for a solitary traveler. Sometimes, the sidewalks just stop while the road curves on ahead.

 

 

It’s natural, though not necessarily helpful, to compare. I did it all the time upon landing in Chile. Where could I find the food that would remind me of home? Why did I have to go all the way to the post office simply to mail a letter? How often could I get to the grand Pacific? Here, we still haven’t reached the Atlantic. (We attempted a trip to New York City, as Ryan has never been and we both have family and friends there, only to cancel. By “attempted,” I should clarify that we thought it through, including the logistics of keeping a teething baby happy for several hours in a car without traffic. We stayed home.)

There, most of my friends lived within walking distance. Yes, it was a bit of an expat bubble. But was it ever easy to meet people that way, to grab those walks while talking side by side. Here, we aren’t a community of strangers in a strange land as we were there, eager to reach out and respond. Sure, it takes time to find your tribe, as just about anything does.

There, Ryan and I had nothing but time. We were waiting for a baby who would breathe. I was writing through the days. We could take ten-hour drives out of town if we wanted to. Here, the baby breathes. And laughs. And time runs fast through her tiny hands. My heart nearly explodes when she takes those hands and places them around my neck and squeezes. I write in bursts while she sleeps. She loves it when Ryan plays music for her. It’s the life we wanted superimposed over the one we survived.

It’s also patience in reverse. There, I wrote madly to busy my hands and to lay the story—still—on the page, which calmed the vibration in my mind. Here, I’m editing those pages. I have a road map and know what needs to be done to help others relate to and visualize the story. But the discipline is not in maintaining the steady clip of logged hours, but rather in being satisfied with small bites, chalk-outlined squares that will eventually transport the story across. It’s still about pacing.

This new pace, it turns out, is compatible with editing this kind of journey. Because I can take seeing all that we survived on the page, but I have to take it in small doses. Where I devoured others’ stories like ours, where I transcribed my own as a form of forward motion, it’s sometimes overwhelming to go back and relive it in detail, line by line. It’s surreal to pick up the bread crumbs after laying them down.

Year Two

“I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never been, and longed to be where I couldn’t be.” 
—John Cheever

 

Living here is a bit like inhabiting a Cheever story. The electricity of summer storms. The audible glee rising up over the community pool down the road. The cloak of suburbia (minus the alcoholism and bewildered regret). But there’s something to the quality of this Eastern air and the way it settles, thick, on your skin. It’s not “home,” but it induces nostalgia. In this case, for stories read and underlined a long time ago, for another lifetime of my own. I went to college in Boston, I lived in New York City for two years and change afterward. I am not a novice on this coast. But now a decade has past. I’ve gone off and written about other places, I’ve met my husband, we got a dog long before I thought we would because we lost our baby boy. Now, we have our daughter.

 

June 2 marks two years since holding Lorenzo. It does not get easier or better (better for whom? I always want to ask). Something about it grows milder, I’ll say, like a burn’s metamorphosis into blister, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t crying my heart out two weeks ago with my grief group. Four of us, who have only known each other in the common struggle we’ve communicated over the phone and online over the past year, finally met face to face. We spent a weekend talking about our babies as fluidly as I ever have, their names and stories weaving in and out of the conversation with the facts of our lives. Only now, face to face, did we inquire about our jobs and how we met our husbands and where we went to school. None of that has mattered as we’ve grieved together and as all of us, it has turned out, have lost more than once. Our babies, strictly, have mattered. Together, we could experience the refreshing absence of speed bumps when our grief did resurface in the conversation. There was no sense that we should wrap it up. No shock over hearing how we all wished we had held our babies longer. Seeing only beauty in the photos we shared. Our babies, ourselves, truly seen.

 

Last year, I was hesitant to wonder about what would transpire between the first June 2 without Lorenzo and this, the second one. I was hesitant to hope. But here H. is. Strong and full of smiles. Rolling over and shaking rattles and finding her toes. Resembling her father, but also his father, another person who is gone. Spending time with her has filled the part of me that cracked open and ran dry. I watch as her personality emerges, her happiness and preferences already so distinct. She loves it when I sing. Shocking, as my voice is terrible, but she doesn’t know that yet. She can’t judge. She is simply soothed by the voice she heard first and the music her father plays. And so I sing, making up songs like I did for Ruby when we first brought her home and she cast an unfadeable light on those dark days.

 

Two years into this marathon, I know that rituals also cast a light. Taking Ruby to the park. Writing on the page and in the sand. Posting hearts. Opening a memory box and then tying its dark green ribbon closed again. Until now, I’ve always walked where at some point in some way, Lorenzo walked with me, too. I miss that terrain. But here are new paths to chart with Ryan and H. and Ruby in this different yet familiar weather. Thankfully, there are always new hearts to find.

 

“It would storm. The stand of cumulus cloud—that city—had risen and darkened, and while he sat there he heard the percussiveness of thunder again. The de Haviland trainer was still circling overhead and it seemed to Ned that he could almost hear the pilot laugh with pleasure in the afternoon; but when there was another peal of thunder he took off for home. A train whistle blew and he wondered what time it had gotten to be. Four? Five? He thought of the provincial station at that hour, where a waiter, his tuxedo concealed by a raincoat, a dwarf with some flowers wrapped in newspaper, and a woman who had been crying would be waiting for the local. It was suddenly growing dark; it was that moment when the pin-headed birds seem to organize their song into some acute and knowledgeable recognition of the storm’s approach. Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up stairs, why had the simple task, of shutting the windows of an old house seemed fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm wind have for him the unmistakeable sound of good news, cheer, glad things? Then there was an explosion, a smell of cordite, and rain lashed the Japanese lanterns that Mrs. Levy had bought in Kyoto the year before last or was it the year before that?” — “The Swimmer” by John Cheever

 

Settling In

We say this to ourselves, don’t we? How much we are looking forward to settling in—to a new home, city, environment. How we hope it for others when they transition. It seems many of us are inclined to gravitate toward a settled state.

From this…

When I moved to Santiago three years ago, I sold most everything and got on a plane with my duffle bags. In contrast, the re-entry has taken on epic proportions. We found out we were officially relocating in January, the week after H. was born. Movers picked up our boxes at the end of March. We arrived here in early April and lived in temporary housing for one month before moving into a one-year rental. Furniture arrives piecemeal as we acquire it, and the rest of our things from Chile won’t be here until next month (they are being shipped, literally, across the sea). We will very likely have to move again before our time here draws to a close, whenever that may be. (Just as we never really knew how long we would be in Chile.)

This is what we signed up for; Ryan’s job is tied to our flexibility. This kind of lifestyle isn’t “traditional,” and there can be excitement in that. Our exposure to culture and language and changes in the weather shift as we do. We can only plan so far ahead. As Ryan puts it, we are always living in the present.

There are trade-offs, of course. We rent and lease, buy what we can carry, and keep boxes on hand because we’ll be packing up again before too long. I’m trying not to count the days until we do, but to simply inhabit them. I don’t always succeed in that.

… to this.

Right now we are setting up shop, and while it’s a tad stressful to do so from scratch, this is technically the fun part. This is when Ryan and I get to select the objects we’ll live upon, that we’ll continue to cart around from country to country, that H. will remember from her childhood (as I remember the rectangular, lacquered coffee table I drew under as a child). We’ll remember these days, of feeding our baby on the floor, of Ruby’s inquisitive looks, of reminders that so much is temporary. Even the moments we want to rush past will appear, perhaps, all too fleeting in retrospect.

Ryan and I look at one another and marvel at how normal it can all feel—as we pick out a sofa, as we decide where the dog food should be kept. Until, surprisingly (though I should know better than not to expect surprises on this journey), I’ll realize that it’s not about the dog food. It’s about how much I suddenly need to talk about Lorenzo. It’s Mother’s Day again. Or, in this case, Mother’s Night. H. is asleep after a day of snuggles. Thank God for those snuggles. But Lorenzo isn’t here. And Ryan and I have been so busy “settling in,” both to active parenthood and a new part of the U.S., that I need to make sure he is still right there with us—in a place where physically he never was. I want to make sure we haven’t regressed into the old, run-of-the-mill stress I thought the grief made us immune to. There was a time, not so long ago, we wouldn’t have cared at all about objects to acquire, let alone where the dog food went.

It’s strength, Ryan reminds, not regression. We are stronger now for bearing the weight and resurfacing, and that is why things can sometimes feel so normal, here, settling in on the top of things.