Happy third birthday...

Happy birthday to you...
Happy birthday to you...
Happy birthday dear Josie,
Happy birthday to you...

I wish you were still alive.

Click for original sizes of the following panoramas... This is where she is buried and this was the sunrise this morning...

I wish...

I'm having a bad day. Tomorrow will be worse and for some stupid reason I made a doctor's appointment right smack in the middle of it. I'll probably walk in there and they'll want to know my medical history (first appointment with a new primary caregiver) which of course will include Josie, and I'll lose it.

So here I vent in an attempt to get some of this stuff out of my head...

Back in the glorious days of childhood; back in the days of magical thinking; back in the days of believing that people could come back to life; that bad things wouldn't happen if you just behaved well; that there were far-away fantasy lands in which giants roamed through the autumn leaves and everyone grew up...

I remember confidently telling my dad that if I grew up to be beautiful like Marilyn Monroe, then no bad guys would shoot me because I'd be too pretty to kill. I was about nine - he told me that no, bad guys would kill me regardless. He was right, of course. One of many push-pins that attached my psyche firmly to the walls of reality.

In so many ways, losing Josie threw me back to childhood myself. Back to the time of wonderment at everything, simply because I survived too. I'd been reborn and had to re-learn everything I'd ever known. In many ways, that is magical, that survival and the ensuing "different" that it makes you. In other ways it's alienating though.

This year will be the first year I've ever spent alone since Josie died. I will drive, alone, out to her grave before dawn and get out of the car and sit on the ground and cry. And watch the sun come up.

In one aspect, Josie's third birthday makes me want to crumple into a heap. In another, it makes me so angry that I want to smash everything up into thousands of pieces. This time of year is always bad. I want to shout "it's so f*cking unfair - I've had it!" It makes me want to say the following things, selfish or pedantic as they might be:

"All I ever wanted was a family, but then she dies and absolutely everything fall apart irreconcilably. Nothing happens for any friggin' reason. It's all bullsh*t."

"I was hard to understand before, already had enough to tell people that would put them off me completely. Now this too? Don't want to re-tell my story any more, want to live in a damn cave for the rest of my life. It's all crap and I'm so tired. So tired. So exhausted. So weak. So done."

"I don't want this burden any more; don't want to hold it up by myself and can't ask anyone else to help me. So lonely. Everything is useless. Alone, inside the high walls of my mind which have doors I won't come near enough to open because I'm too scared of the stuff people will see inside...so what's the point?"

"Everything just goes away. Emotions are poured out, hearts are opened and still, everything just goes away. Sometimes, I hate loving."

"I want to smash all the cups and the plates in my house and throw everything I own out of the window but instead, here I sit because I can't scare my beautiful living daughter. I have to pretend to be a normal person so that she will be okay."

"I'm so angry. I'm so hurt. I'm so hurt. I'm so hurt. I'm so hurt."

"When will I wake up? Please can I wake up now. This is a really long bad dream now. I've had enough now. I want to wake up and be four again, when everything was okay."

I'm broken, glad nobody else is here because I'm sure they wouldn't be able to handle me like this. No makeup, no airs and graces, just a woman in a puddle of tears. I wouldn't go near me if I were anyone else.

Now the tiredness has set in. I'll be really really glad when tomorrow is done. I feel really sick. Sorry if this entry sounds self-centered - I suppose it is really, since it's all about how I'm feeling. Bella is sweetly sleeping, looking like a little angel so it's just me here. I'm so glad she's alive - I'm so blessed with her.

It was only one hour ago, it was all so different...

"It was only one hour ago, it was all so different..."

The first line from Peter Gabriel's "I Grieve" to which a link is below. I remember thinking that after Josie died. Racing into the sunrise, knowing in my heart she was gone and unable to do anything about it. Leaving the shreds of youthful innocence behind us as we sped down the freeway. All gone; never to be recaptured.

I think we hang on to the hours, the days, the minutes...since...because they make that event, that life, everything real. A few tiny bones in the ground that we can't see any more doesn't help. A big piece of stone over them, and soil - these things don't help, but remembering in minutes, hours, days, months, years - like a thread... That's all we have now. It's almost obsessive compulsive but it's a part of me that won't go away - and probably shouldn't. I map the passage of time after each of my children was born; one living here with me, the other stardust, as Joni Mitchell so beautifully puts it.

"We are stardust...we are golden...and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden..."

The day of the bath, today. That day I decided to have a relaxing bath in the fall sunshine because I knew it would be the last time I'd get the opportunity to do that. The day sticks out in my memory because it was also the first time I felt what I thought was a contraction but really wasn't - that pain that comes when something is going wrong with the placenta. I had no idea. I think I told people I'd had a strong contraction. There I was in the bath with Clannad playing on the laptop, candles burning and so on...

(Incidentally, I spent a lot of time in labor with Bella in the bath both at home and in the hospital. Funny how I threw myself into conquering my fears by repeating what had happened, in a similar fashion.)

You know that feeling you always got when you were little and you broke something valuable? That sinking feeling - you knew you were in trouble? Times that by about a thousand and it's one facet of how it feels to be the parent left behind.

I am going to curl up on the sofa now with a blanket and some hot chocolate...Bella is sleeping and my man is in Wyoming until next Friday. Down into the underworld I go for the third year - but not alone, because there are parents out there who know or can empathize with this. Thank you for remaining with me in my tired, aching, exhausted state that I get into this time of year.

It's that time of year again...

Warning: there may be a little profanity here. I'm just going to write it as I think it, so hopefully you'll understand and won't be offended.

It's that time of year again - the run up to what would have been Josie's third birthday. When people said this wouldn't get any easier year after year, they weren't wrong. My mum - or Mutti, as we call her - still cries every time she visits my brother Finn's grave. He would have been 25 on September 22nd.

This time three years ago, I would have been washing and folding baby clothes. I still have visions of them laying out on the floor in piles of tops; onesies; little pants; little tiny socks. I took pictures, which will of course now haunt me forever.

May I just take this opportunity to say how utterly crap it is to have a dead child? It just doesn't go away - not even slightly. Nothing can make it better really - you just have to tend to the wounds when they surface, which they frequently do. You have to adopt coping mechanisms for the sadness like someone with a heart condition who has to carry pills around. God, it's so frikken crippling, it really is.

The real kicker is the fact that so many people who lose children then get to watch their families fall apart at the seams afterward. They get to watch people previously doing well go back to the booze and lose everything in the process - their children too. Some days it's hard to get going even slightly. Some days I wish I could just win a little on the lottery, even though I don't play it - just so that I could sit completely still on bad days and do nothing at all. Nothing at all.

The messed up thing is that after you lose a child, about 97% of the world's population doesn't understand you any more. I'm so aware of my own mortality nowadays that it's stupid - maybe long ago when infant death rates were higher, the support would be there - the understanding. With the advent of wonderful new medical procedures and interventions that understanding and the willingness to talk about babies and children dying has gone away. So you end up as this person just floating free of all the rest of the people, utterly knowing that everything could be taken away at any given moment. If people found you hard to "get" before, trust me, you'll really be a mystery after you lose a child. It's really fucking lonely in here.

Like I've said before, dying isn't hard - it's easy. It's not as painful as you might think either because the body takes over and pumps all this pain relieving stuff through your veins. Even when you're bleeding to death, you can comfortably remain in denial until the blood all comes out on the floor and then you just look, surprised, thinking "gosh, that was all inside me a minute ago - I'm probably fucked now." So don't be afraid, people - don't be afraid to die. To quote Kevin Kline from the wonderful French Kiss, "I promise you, if we crash, you won't feel a thing."

It's that time of year I find myself transported back in time to the weeks before Josie died. In stunning clarity, I sit behind the wheel of a Dodge Magnum thinking "I really shouldn't be driving this pregnant - it's so uncomfortable!" Frank Sinatra is playing on the stereo and I have McDonalds on the passenger seat because it's the most frequently found restaurant up and down I-35 and I was too hungry to wait. They have a special going on with the Chicken Tenders. I'm wearing a maternity top with a tie at the waist - it's very pretty and made out of some slippery artificial material which slides around on my belly. My feet are hot and a bit swollen in my flat shoes. Endless phone calls stress me out; I'm fighting a losing battle at work.

Sure, I could go and be diagnosed with PTSD - after all, the flashbacks are extremely upsetting, random and interfere with my life. But what good would that do? I'd be labeled incurable. I'll just stick with what I have: an intense desire to go back in time and pull the car over, stop, somehow change everything.

I miss you, Josie. I wanted you. I love you still. I wish you weren't dead. I will never forget holding you in my arms, all 6lb 6oz of you - you were so beautiful. If I could have died instead of you, I would have - in a heartbeat. You would have done a better job at life than me - of that I have no doubt.

Fragmented...

Bits of my heart, little pieces
Are traveling a path up my body
And leaking from the corners of my eyes

Wandering are they, hit by a meteorite
Fragmented into the space
That exists within me like a starry blackness

Not made of stone, am I
Nor shielded in armor
But my stronghold shudders in the aftermath

And time keeps moving on
Toward a light in the far distance
Toward the explosion and the flowering
Toward the dawn
And things I cannot yet see

Emotions and intent...

It's been two and a half years now since Josie left. She died, and the "me" I am today was born out of a completely annihilated wasteland of psyche into what I can only describe as a shell of a body, bereft of its former soul and its child. If that sounds harsh, so be it - I felt like a useless bag of flesh and bones after Josie died. My mind was in pieces on the floor and there I was, scrabbling like a mortally wounded animal, trying to scoop up pieces of myself from muddy, bloody substrate. It was useless of course. I sat there psychologically against a wall, gathering up the ingredients of wits out of the air. People rolled helpful things toward me as I waited in the quarantine of despair and madness.

What that experience did to me was cut me to the quick. Even after I'd stuck myself back together again, there were huge pieces I never found. I stuffed the holes with plastic bags and paper, taping the gaps shut in an effort to keep the wind out of my bones until new parts of me formed to fill the spaces. The layers of pretense that covered me before were gone. They never came back either. 

Nowadays I am a raw human being. Take me to the deep forest and dump me there: I'd find a way to survive. I've slowed down. My eyes are open to everything; my ears hear it all. I'm fifty percent prey, fifty percent predator and one hundred percent alive. Through the monotony of a boring day, I find things I've never seen before like a little child. 

All my life, I've felt things deeply - strongly: that's been me, all along. But now I admit the emotions I feel to myself and let myself really feel them rather than trying to escape or distract myself with other things. Pain is like a huge crevasse in the earth to me: sometimes it's like being carved in half length ways. My fibers strain for one another across the gap, trying to protect the heart inside. Joy is like a bubble in which I float, full up with laughter and magnificence. Exuberance takes flight and I'm flung across vast distances like an eagle.

The love I have for my child is fierce and without limit - I would die for her in a second without a thought and I've felt this way since well before she was born. It's a wonderful feeling.

Falling in love with another person is different: it is like a dance between the two people, alternating between coyness and pursuing, one to the other. One steps up - the other steps away with a choreographed grace older than the sands of time. They play, snatching little pieces of armor off each other as they go - distracting with glances and smiles. But one day, under the right circumstances, one person turns in the dance to find the other standing directly in front of them. The defenses are down: it's go time. And as they look into each other's eyes, which really are the doorways to the soul, neither one looks away and a mutual realization strikes. Hearts stop beating for a moment...then they both fall off that high place into a completely new world.

They're big, these emotions. But how exciting this is: to be alive. I'm glad I am alive. We may all be made of stardust, but we're certainly lucky incarnations of it to be able to exist like this, in a sensory state. We are like the fingers of the universe, reaching out. What is the meaning of life? Maybe it's what you make it, when you let go and stop worrying about what the meaning of life is...

Fresh from the kiln...

Attempting to work effectively today has been hampered by a number of things within me that I feel I need to write first. I think the writers among you know what I mean when I say that there are times where you can't push out the "official" stuff because there are a bunch of proverbial sheep scattered about the proverbial road.

You're trying to get the car of work down the road.

There are sheep in the way.

They say "bbaaaaaaah!"

You say "Oh come on, move - MOVE!"

But, they're there, demanding to be recognized: demanding to be carried off the road one by one - daring you to ignore them (running over them would simply damage the proverbial car and cause work to suffer so that wouldn't be an option). Translating of course, can be difficult. Some days, all I want to do is sit there and say "bbaaaaah" like some semi-vegetative, over-sized, half dead sea slug. Some days, all the watery optimism in me is pressed out, as though I am a sponge. Then it's all hands on deck, trying to soak it back up before too much is permanently lost and has to be gleaned once more from other sources...

Lately though, I've felt alternately hopeful for new beginnings and then completely incompatible with everything, including myself. It's an extremely confusing state to be in, I can tell you. I crave stability. I can do all sorts of crazy, interesting things from a stable "base" but without one, I feel a little bit like one of those thin creepers that wind around trees and fences and other little plants. I need to change forms - evolve.

Bella is evolving too - thickly caught in the stranger anxiety that'll keep her safe; cutting teeth all over the place; beginning to walk more and more; discovering independence but worried that mama will run away and leave... It's got to be confusing for her as well. I muddle through each day trying to do my best to be a good mom, not really knowing if what I'm doing is "by the book" - just mostly instinctive. Instinctive and progressively more introverted, too, as I am aware that the responsibility will probably always just rest with me. I try not to think about that too much, because it makes me sad.

Sometimes, I sit here with my elbow on the table and stare through the screen, letting everything just slide for perhaps five, maybe ten minutes. I hear the cars go by on the road outside and the noise of the house settling; icicles falling off the roof; floorboards cracking as they move over long-placed nails in joints and timbers. I let my consciousness drift over to the other side of my desk and it sits there, regrading me with curiosity as if to say "are you a sad person, Jay? Are you that sad person sitting there?"

I'm not a sad person though. It's much more complex than that. Underneath, I am the long scar left after a potentially fatal wound has healed - the one people look at and whisper about because they're taken aback by it. When you peel the layers off, that's what I am. My optimism is only part of me - it's real, but it's like veneer. I choose to wear it on the outside because it's just better that way. I think I'm okay with it for the most part.

The thing is, I suppose, what bothers me is the possibility that what has happened in the course of my life has left me too...complicated (?) to really love. The outside is just fine, but it's not the whole of me, nor would I be happy with anyone ever assuming it was. I do wonder though, whether it's just too much trouble - too much to ask of anyone to actually deal with all of me. I wouldn't even know where to start anyway. Without trying to sound insecure (this is a different kettle of fish) perhaps what has changed is that before, as anyone with self esteem, I felt that doing my best would be enough and that I could give someone else a gift, of me. Now I almost feel as though that gift has changed into a burden.

As though I've been fired and am sitting here alone little a piece of hot pottery on a board, fresh from the kiln.

If that makes it sound as though I am completely depressed, don't be fooled - that I am not! I'm just doing a little soul searching. A little thinking out loud. I'm not the only one with these kinds of thoughts, I know. It's nice to write them down sometimes: get those sheep out of the road.