see the shadows as they creep like vines
On the shoulder of this long green stretch I open the windows. It's quiet except for small birds and leaves. A dump truck passes with a clinking of chains and an airy whomp.
In the side mirror I try to conjure an 18-year old boy. Be walking. Boots and a pack over one shoulder and your daddy's gait. The boy transforms into a pained, blind three-year-old in a wheelchair.
I can't breathe.
+++
I'm sorry. I feel like a terrible fraud for all this, for the writing here. It's not that it was contrived. I felt all these words, but tonight they make me cringe. They're saccharine and slippery and unfamiliar. I am insufferable and embarrassed. I might have made you think I have some faith, or convictions, or certainty. Or at least an ability to drum up enough colour to self-generate.
I don't.
+++
The woman with the perfect power, the belly with the safe twins, my own Ben, Liam's double. I can't honour any of them properly. I don't know what to say or do. I stammer and turn away to nothing in particular, no purpose or intent or sacred space or ritual.
I see this scar every day and spit on anyone who would presume to pity me for it.
It's offensive to eat, to feed this body when he has none.
The neonatologist who stood with us over his body... he was kind and tall and British. He said don't use the word 'decision'. I search his face in my memory, again.
I wonder if that nurse thought I was a monster.
The sailmaker's chest keeps a clipping of his hair. It stares at me every time I enter the room. I look away.
See? There is nothing artful here, nothing resolved. This is an empty hole full of frantic.
+++
I heard my own shriek over and over again, the sound that came out when they took away the machines. It came out of nowhere, the ghost of that shriek, and I had to pull over. Evan's little preschool graduation play, next Tuesday.... next Tuesday? What's Tuesday? The 15-
On the shoulder of a long green stretch I opened the windows to breathe.
It didn't work.
I wasn't going to post this. Then I did, almost without comments. What can anybody say? I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable. And I don't want to make my mother cry.
Two days ago I mined this writing and my writing at Glow in the Woods for a friend of a friend, recently bereaved. And for a moment I felt like a consumer of it. I needed it. It sounded so assured. But then I remembered that I'd written it. Which is some kind of tail-eating snake, because what is true? The empty uncertainty, or the chocolate by starlight? I can't be both.
If it wasn't this it would be nothing and right now, nothing feels worse. So please forgive it and know that sometime, after Tuesday, I'll either figure it out or turn around. Or I'll try.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Reader Comments (56)
You are honest. Missy. Honest and from-the-hip about what you are feeling *right now.* Just because your feelings have evolved and become more complicated rather than less doesn't in any way negate what you really, truely felt yesterday or last year or as a still-pregnant-with-twins-and-as-yet-unscathed woman. It was as real as the truck that went whomp.
I'm so sorry that you are feeling lost.
I and many others will still be here, listening and being okay with where you are *right now.*
Comfort to you.
I've been thinking about you lately, knowing that the 3-year mark was looming. I can't know exactly how you feel but, pretty much everything you've written over the past few years hits the mark for me. There's no right or wrong about this business--it just is what it is.
I'll be thinking of you and and remembering Liam.
T
Oh, how I get this. I feel such strong identification with those words.
I don't know what else to say other than you are not alone.
xo
I'm thinking about you, Kate. You've got this.
xo
As for the rest, well. What can you or anyone else say? Some things are just the Worst Thing Ever, and there are no rules. You just, hopefully, keep going.
I love you today, yesterday, on the 16th, and forever.
The only choice you have today is how much of that you want to share with us and with the world. I am glad you made the choice to share some of it.....and I wish SO HARD....that I had words, any words, that would help take some of it away.
But I don't....so please know that I am here. We are here....and we will read (and cry and laugh) WITH you....when you want some company.
Love,
N
Thinking of you tomorrow, and Ben & Evan, and Justin. And of Liam.
as will your words, Kate. A friend of mine who lost her little boy at 2 says she is "struggling well" when someone ask her how she is doing. I would say the same of you, but since it is you I want to make it sound prettier, like, "struggling exquisitely" Thank you for just being you, it makes the rest of us feel more comfortable in our own skin.
Remember, when you cringe, that sometimes the empty uncertainty needs a voice just as much as the chocolate by starlight.
You honour him both with your tears and your smiles.
Peace, Kate.
You are amazing, and your family, here and not quite here, equally so.
(Also, you are never a fraud. No matter how you might feel.)
Wishing you the best. Now, then and always.
But as a mommy who recently lost her baby...I feel your empty hole of frantic.
I don't think anyone who comes to this space expects you to masquerade perfection or even calm I've-got-it-all-together-ness. How inhuman would that be? I'm just in awe of how much you let us see, and how beautiful it is, cracks and dirt and weedy curtains and all. And it helps me to see how beautiful my own grief and cracks and dirt and weedy curtains can be. A little. It's so hard to see ourselves.
Why can't it be both? Empty uncertainty and chocolate by starlight. Whoever said it was supposed to make sense?
(Of course when I tell myself that, when things get dark, it just makes me angrier. It SHOULD all make sense, damnit, of course it should!)
I hope you find the space to breathe. I hope you punch that brute right back.
This makes me think of the recent conversation on Glow about Tash's post and authenticity. You argued, quite passionately, that the voice changes with the time and that it is no less authentic for the changing quality of it.
Isn't that the same here? You are not a fraud because today you think differently than a year ago. Or because you lack certainty today where assurance dwelled last week.
You are what you have been all along - a mother of three, who is missing one. The shape of your Liam changes. It's inauthentic or fraudulent because you don't find him today or because he looks differently than before. Not to me, anyway.
If it feels fraudulent to you, that makes me sad. Questioning my own sanity in all of this, as Gabe comes and goes, sometimes near, sometimes far; as I am forever living two worlds - that day over and over and all the time that has passed since and now in this moment. . . that has been one of the harder parts. Sifting through all the pieces of broken shards and gluing them back together into some sort of container isn't easy. It all changes and shifts when you find a new piece and try to fit it in.
Thinking of you and your family.
I've been wondering the same thing lately...as I write, my beautiful, intelligent, seventeen year old son is in a psych-ward due to a drug-induced psychosis. And yet, each day, I rise and shower and go to work and the grocery store etc. I am putting one foot ahead of the other and breathing and smiling at co-workers and strangers alike, while living with this gash. I find myself looking into the eyes of strangers, wondering what they may be enduring. It's amazing how much strength we find when forced to do so. Peace to you Kate, and to all the other "walking wounded."
Love to you, Kate x
Expect some more hugs and hopefully some talking time in August.
Wishing you breath and space and hoping that rest finds you. And I'm thinking of you as you face this down, again.
Though we don't often speak here, you should know we are by their sides, we are so proud, we are with them every step of the way, we wrap our arms around them with the biggest and best Robson/Inglis family <<<HUG>>> along with Andrew, Christy and Molly we send all the love we have.
With our thanks to you all,
Sweetsalty Kate's Mom and Dad
you know you're not tied to that voice like a cross for the rest of your life.
what i read though is that you are, however, tied to the ineffable - an absence. his absence. and maybe i've just been thinking too much about brand identity, but representing absence is a whole lot more uncomfortable than representing the beauty of unseen presence.
i think that audience can evolve just like voice.
i think you should feed yourself, and accept that we read grace onto you even when you do not feel it. let yourself take some of it back from us, like balm for the raw spots. go gentle on yourself in spite of the absence, in spite of the frantic hole.
i will be thinking about you, tonight. xo.
None of us are just one thing, just one way. Steps forward and back, grief in cycles and circles. It's just our hearts and minds looking for the spot to rest.
I know that on one of my worst days, when the world fell apart and I had to move through it anyway, I was very conscious of the different parts of me doing different, different things. I was all business and process; I was jibbering with fear; I was holding together arms outstretched; I was looking into the eyes of a colleague and bringing her back to us from shock and pain. I remember deciding to fall apart at some point in the future, but not now.
I have always felt that grief was at its worst when it crept up on the normalcy of life. Like a preschool play falling on a specific day...
Hang on Kate. Hang on.
i think you have to be both. that's the twisted fucked up part of it. one handful of loss and one handful of life. and perhaps the only way through it, is to write it. kate, please know that there is nothing but love receiving you. always.
I don't know you at all, other than by your blog which I've read start to finish and come to often. But what I do want to say is this: Thank You. Thank you for being honest and real and confused and whole and empty all at once. Thank you for being authentic, and for sharing this with all of your readers so beautifully and so painfully.
Rapidly approaching the first anniversary of my own not-a-decision (not to deliver a 12 ounce baby at 27 weeks, but to let her die inside me) and I'm there in that hole with you. I always find something artful in your words, even these words of anguish and non-resolution. I go back and forth, too, between seeing my lost baby in birds, wind, the river, the stars, and feeling that she is just gone. As others have said, I don't think feeling that way makes you a fraud; it makes you human.
Love and light to you, Kate.
I remember Liam with you this day, lamenting his absence.16 is my daughter's number too.
Sending love.