Watch Out Now

Back in September when Ryan and I traveled to Perú, my yoga instructor told me something the day after our room was robbed of just about anything of value. “Watch out now,” he said. But he didn’t mean for thieves or crime or further violation, but “for the angels that emerge when the shit hits the fan.”

 

 

It’s true.

Throughout all of this, many have emerged to help honor and reflect the meaning of our losses. Today, I’d like to acknowledge those folks.

 

A remembrance angel (and a heart) from Danielle.

 

First, my husband. He is the only other person who lost our son. He is the only other person who decided. He strengthens my ability to withstand the grief while also sharing his. It’s not an easy balancing act.

Second, Ruby. She is unconditional love and present tense and pure joy.

 

Happiness is…

 

Third, all of you who follow our journey. All of you who reach out and accept me right where I am.

Fourth, all of the heart contributions to the Chain-Link Heart Project. We’re up to 152 hearts, people! From Santa Fe to Sri Lanka to SPACE (I kid you not)! I know most of you, but not all of you, which is also amazing. People like Kate, down in Australia, have found Lorenzo’s story and shared it. Do you have any idea how much that means? How much all of your shining hearts make me feel like my son is somehow out in the world? The chain-link connects such an intense gathering of angels, I can’t help but see and believe.

 

Vivian’s hearts.

 

Fifth, the children at the orphanage. They are vital little creatures who astound me with their will and innocence. But they don’t have homes or consistent parental love. They have round-the-clock Tías who adore them and a daily shuffle of volunteers and, for those whose families are working towards getting them back, family visitation days. But many need lifelong angels to come along. I’ve known it to happen three times since I started volunteering and once in front my eyes: a child meeting her new parents and the sense of salvation you can truly see, on both sides, when it happens as it should. In the meantime, these children need to start using language. They need room to run and undivided attention and two arms that can focus on holding and feeding and snuggling only him or only her. So something must have emerged to float my hands from my empty lap to the room where they eat and sleep and play.

Even in the face of crippling loss, when we can’t imagine needing anything but what or who we have lost, still, watch out.

Like It Just Happened

It doesn’t go away.

It doesn’t get “better.”

Part of it passes, falling away behind you. Then, one day, you stop moving and it catches up. It’s right by your side again and all around you and as far up ahead as you can see. And it’s fresh. It feels like it just happened.

That’s where I am right now.

 

 

It doesn’t matter that it’s been over eight months. It doesn’t matter that I’m trying to pull myself up and am largely functional in this world.

It’s still there. And I know it always will be.

It starts to unravel when, on a walk with Ruby, I see a bird who fell from the nest and is lost, disoriented, injured. I wonder if the mother is nearby or if anything can be done. I remember that you don’t want to put your scent on a bird in this situation as it could lead its mother to reject it. Then I can’t remember if that’s really truth or legend. But Ruby is there, vibrant, ready to move on, and I am her mother, so that is what we do. Then, a week later, it’s all undone when we pass the same spot and the bird is still there, but long since gone. And it takes all I have to make it home in one piece because I want to go back and pick him up, but I can’t.

 

 

It shortens my breath whenever I walk out of the orphanage I visit twice a week and know that all those children are still there, behind me, waiting for their parents to rehabilitate or for a new family to adopt them.

It knocks me down when I see a soldier standing on the metro platform and I think about his willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect the rest of us. Then I think about his mother, his father, the potential for loss, and I lose it.

 

 

All of this rises as I go about the day, seeming normal, acting “better,” even. Until one unpredictable day it all crests and takes me down with it. I don’t always have the tools when I break through to the surface. I’ve lost a few (heartbeats) or they no longer seem to work (rationality). They–I–am water-logged and kinda sorta drowning here. I guess that’s what can happen when you head back out into the water.

Do you realize that this is most of what I know of motherhood? This? This effort not to drown?

 

 

It’s my birthday tomorrow. Ryan’s is on Thursday, Valentine’s, a day made of hearts. In honor of it, I asked all of you to help me reach 100 hearts by Valentine’s Day. And you did! You surpassed 100 hearts, actually, and I love you for that.

This time last year I was pregnant with Lorenzo though only Ryan and I knew. We were at the beach here in Chile for our last birthdays as just the two of us, we thought. I pictured what it would be like having the little one there with us. By this next birthday, I wouldn’t have to picture it, I thought. The vision would be five months old and right there in the sand at our feet. So, I shouldn’t be surprised that these have been difficult days leading up to it in the alternate reality.

Like I said, it doesn’t go away.

Collecting Hearts for Two

People say that we see what we want to see. I agree to a certain extent. I’m on the lookout for hearts that are often already there, carved into the concrete or painted on the wall. But other hearts are fleeting; they exist for the time the sun shines them into shadow. Others beg questions of timing and happenstance, like those that form in a cloud moving along a blue sky or tumble out of the same bag of M&Ms. Still, I find them.

 

 

There have been a few hearts I haven’t captured because the car moved by too quickly or I didn’t have the means to take a photo, but most of the time I am at the ready if a heart happens upon my path. Because the path, too, is the thing.

 

 

So, I don’t think it’s random that the final chapter of Pema Chodron’s When Things Falls Apart is called “The Path Is the Goal.” In it, she writes about “bringing everything that we encounter to the path… This path has one very distinct characteristic: it is not prefabricated. It doesn’t already exist. The path that we’re talking about is the moment-by-moment evolution of our experience, the moment-by-moment evolution of the world of phenomena, the moment-by-moment evolution of our thoughts and our emotions… The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant” (Chodron, 184-185).

 

 

Right now, I bring the loss—all of it—to the path, just as I bring the moments when I’m out in the water, where it’s easier to float. I have to believe that the path is still leading to parenthood, even though none of us can see up ahead. I choose to believe that the heart moments I collect along the way (and my capacity to find them) have something to do with Lorenzo. And now, maybe with someone else, too.

 

 

When we lost again, we lost earlier, before there were things like gender or names or shared knowledge, even. But my belly was in the process of being pushed out by this little one of ours who had a heartbeat. That means something. When I looked down, that meaning started presenting as a second heart. This loss is easier to survive because the process of losing doesn’t come close to that hour I held my son. In another way, it’s harder than it might have been in isolation. Now, it spreads like water in and amongst the other, ghastly large pool of grief. It all blends and widens. I spent some time trying to think of the two tragedies separately, in the hopes that a mental division would result in one down in my heart. But I think that was a fool’s mission for a childless mother. Of course they should live together now, these two babies.

 

 

In kind, I found more and more of the coupled hearts and they emerged as a pattern of their own. That’s the “moment-by-moment evolution” right now, right here on the path, where two hearts walked with me, for a time. So many of your hearts are on the path, too, now, and there’s strength in numbers, as people also like to say. That’s the premise the Chain-Link Heart Project was founded upon, after all. I think the resulting chain is often what I hold onto when I try to pull myself up. Thank you for all the links—the strength—you’ve added.

 

A Letter for My Husband

This post is for Ryan.

 

 

We recently celebrated two years of marriage and we’re coming up on four years together. Since we met in a bar on a Friday night in San Francisco, we have fallen in love in a way that does not insult or damage or disrespect, but strengthens and perceives and accepts. We have made it through a year of international long-distance, gotten married, set up our first home in Santiago, explored Chile and more of South America together, adopted a dog, been robbed, visited dozens of beaches, found meaning in music, made up words and a lot of stupidly hilarious jokes, played a respectable amount of Scrabble, reached over in the night through earthquakes, eaten A LOT of burritos, and learned, painfully at times, what each other believes in.

 

 

Because what often feels spread like a blanket over all of this is that we lost our first child. That experience trumped everything and everyone around us and set us on that island together. And just when we thought things were going to be okay, we lost again.

 

 

But I think we’re starting to get back in the water and swim around a bit. And if I’m not inclined to, I think I’m going to force myself back in. It’s going to be terrifying much of the time, doesn’t at all diminish what stranded us together or the subsequent grief, but still somehow has to happen.

 

 

Recently, I caught up with a friend who has always felt more like a sister even though we may only get to see each other every few years. Time can go by, as can respective tragedies and blessings, and we still communicate in a way that heals. She has been to an island similar to ours and so I trusted her when she told me something on the exact day I could hear it: I need to try to pull myself up, for myself and for Ryan.

 

 

I wouldn’t have heard it eight months ago, when everything profoundly shifted inside and out, or two months ago, when it caved in again, but I could hear it then because of something Ryan had said the night before that showed he’s been just as worried and scared as I have.

 

 

Of course, I’ve known this. But he’s also the reassuring and hopeful one, the one who rights me when the grief has knocked me over, the one who says–definitively–that yes, we will have a healthy child and yes, things are going to be okay. He believes so strongly in us that little obscures his view of the future. I believe in us, too. But it’s harder for me to believe–definitively–that a healthy child born of my body is our inevitability. So, I need his hope, his unshakable belief in this child and in our future.

 

 

My friend reminded me how much he needs that from me, too. I knew she was right because the second Ryan’s hope faltered, mine surged towards him, like a wave he could ride. Mostly, he needs me. Certainly not the me I was before–that’s impossible once everything changes–but more of her. I need more of her, too. As another mom, who has in fact been to the same exact island we have, put it: “I think that inclination to ‘pull yourself up’ is the natural process of grieving. You get to the point where you say, ‘Okay, that was horrible and I will never be the same but I still have to be.’ ”

 

So, I swim out a little farther than my usual circumference. I duck dive under a wave. I’m scared, but I surface. Then I do it again.

 

 

Somedays, maybe even most days, I still may not. It’s warm on the sand and the other creatures are usually in plain sight. But it’s also where the weight is. It’s only in the water that you can float. So, I’ll try to do that more, for myself and for Ryan. After all, I have to remember that there were days when it was hard to believe I’d ever find him.

 

Why I Went to Mexico

It’s time to tell you that the day before Thanksgiving, I had a D&C because of a miscarriage I’d had, unknowingly, the week before. I didn’t know until my doctor looked for a heartbeat we’d already heard twice before, but could no longer hear at 10 weeks. Once you know, once there is no more hopeful anticipation or praying or safe calculating of when it might be you might meet this new child or tentative peace with the connection of things, there is only the silence where the heartbeat once was mixed in with all the grief you realize has been there all along, riding its steady course under the new hope and the new heartbeat.

 

 

I’ve alluded to this before, but I haven’t spelled it out until now. I haven’t been ready. It was a pregnancy we didn’t tell anyone about, not even our mothers, until it was gone. Then, for the two months that this day marks, I needed to grieve and process emotions that are already so complicated from the trauma of losing Lorenzo. I needed to start collecting hearts for two.

 

 

But I’m speaking out now because I’ve found and given support and solidarity in speaking out about Lorenzo and this loss deserves that, too. I’m speaking out because I met someone recently who, when I told her I was writing about losing a pregnancy at six months, said: “More people need to write about that.” I suppose I am now writing about losing at 10 weeks, too. I suppose I am writing about losing. And hoping. And praying. And grieving. And hoping again. And again.

 

 

While I was pregnant again, I didn’t plan on attending a close friend’s wedding in Playa del Carmen, Mexico and then taking a side trip to Tulum with two girlfriends. I was too scared. Too worried about all that needed forming and how I would never forgive myself if something went wrong that I could have prevented. So, I thought staying home would keep this new life safe. As it turned out, what went wrong this time had already gone wrong as early as it possibly could have, far earlier than when the heart forms.

 

 

It’s called a partial molar pregnancy. It is not at all related to what happened before, but is another rare and complicated occurrence that, again, shouldn’t recur. Where there was a 2 in 10,000 chance of HLHS, there was a 1 in 1,000 chance of this, even though I was doing everything right again. It’s “twice bad luck,” as the genetic counselor put it. It comes with added risks to my health and because of that we can’t try again for several months. That realization felt like taking broken pieces of a scarred heart and then mincing them into pulp, into dust.

 

 

So, what do you do when you’re holding the dust?

 

 

You and your husband skip Christmas. Instead, you take your dog on a road trip. You feel gratitude for a shooting star across the sky in a part of the country blanketed by the stars you can’t see in the city where you live and never can see in the hemisphere you grew up in. You cry when you get the biweekly blood testing this new loss requires and you cry when you’re just walking down the street or when you read kind words from a friend or when a pregnant woman sits down next to you in yoga class. Then, you dedicate your shavasana to her baby because he or she is the hope in the room with you. You start volunteering at an orphanage. And when Laura says, “You know you should come to Mexico,” you say, “Yes, I do,” and you buy a ticket that same day.

 

 

You remember what it’s like to be 16 because you are with the people who knew you best at that age.

 

 

You watch two people commit their hearts to one another.

 

 

You dance.

 

 

You wake early to see a sunrise in Tulum, Mexico, the first place where the dawn touches that country.

 

 

You find many, many hearts.

 

 

You eat good food and have the conversations that make you laugh and cry and look out at the ocean for a long while.

 

 

You float in that ocean for an hour because it’s calm enough to do so and read all day in a hammock and when you fall asleep in a Bali hut your body remembers the feeling of the subtle waves and the soft swing of the hammock.

 

 

You miss your husband and your dog. You come home to them bearing gifts from the other country and then you realize the dust is still there, right where you left it. But so is your family.