While I was out on maternity leave and home with my then-almost-a-month-old daughter, I decided to start listening to the stereo during the day. This is something my mother always did while I was growing up. Leaving the stereo on and one light whenever leaving the house, she always returned to a lighted, sound-filled home. I don't know what her reasons were for this, but I assumed it had something to do with not wanting to come home to a dark, quiet house. As I sat at home, nursing, changing diapers, sometimes cleaning the house, and sometimes eating lunch, the combination of our grandmother clock's steady tick-tock, and intermittent newborn cries could have induced a turn for the worse in my mental health. Fighting this decline was critical, and so I started listening to the oldies station.
I love music in general, and the oldies are no exception. Much to my surprise, I've noticed the music of my childhood years edging its way onto the local stations, indicating that the tunes of the decadent eighties are now going the way of the dinosaurs. It was noticing this, combined with decent pattern recognition skills and auditory recall, that led me to realize the local station was rotating a few playlists. Tiring of being able to predict the next song to play, I decided to really shake things up and listen to NPR instead.
Although there is predictability to NPR, it didn't bother me because I knew I'd be listening to different topics each day. I started to learn about politics as I changed diapers, and listened to people I've never heard of talk about their new books while I nursed.
Then Sandy Hook happened.
It was one of those moments when I knew I'd remember where I was when I heard the news. That day, I was eating lunch at my dining room table and my daughter was on the floor in her jungle animal play gym nearby when the news broke. It was the first major tragedy to make news since my daughter had been born, and I had no preparation for the impact it had upon me.
I looked at my daughter. I thought of my workplace friends. The teachers filling in for me on leave. My students. In particular, I thought of an elementary school in which I work. The principal, the office staff, the students with whom I work in the halls on travel skills. The dedicated teachers who support them in their educational programming every day. I thought of the people at Sandy Hook, desperately waiting for children, spouses, and friends to leave the school building. I looked at my daughter again and finally understood why some people live in desperate, controlling fear, and cloak their children in it.
Oh, how I cried.
The photos started to go up online. You know the ones I'm talking about. Young children and the educators who lost their lives. The person who carried the gun, and the person who brought him into the world. I have never cried so much over the deaths of people I did not know.
I began this post intending to write something about safety versus independence, and how being able to live fully means being willing to accept a certain amount of risk, to deliberately exchange our attempts at keeping ourselves safe for the richness and joy that can be ours when we stretch beyond our habitual ways of behaving. All of that is true. Sandy Hook is a painful reminder that we cannot be certain that this moment won't be the last one, and of how limited our control is over what happens to us.
We do have control, though, over the spirit in which we approach life. After all, we only have our lives, our loved ones, our memories and values and dreams, for so long.
Let us be grateful for what we have while we are fortunate enough to still have it, and let us express that gratitude by living as fully as we can.
Showing posts with label child loss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label child loss. Show all posts
Monday, March 25, 2013
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Babies, Loss, and Keeping Secrets
A little over a year and a half ago, my younger sister found her infant son in his crib, cool and unbreathing, on an early February morning.
It's the kind of thing that you think will never, ever happen to you, nor to anyone you love. Not my family. Not my children. Not my niece, nephew, grandchild, brother, sister, cousin. It's also the kind of thing that you just don't get over. Life goes on, yes. New things happen. People come and go. Yet the death of a child is one of those things that lingers in your heart. Like all deaths, it is a forever kind of game-changer.
Early this morning, I awoke to thoughts of the afternoon tea party and shower that my mother and sister-in-law are hosting today in celebration of our first child, who's due to come join the rest of us at some time in November. It hasn't escaped me that my child's due date is close enough to my deceased nephew's birthday to matter. It hasn't escaped me that, as we approach the birth of my first child, my sister is approaching what would have been her deceased son's second birthday. So, I find myself thinking of my sister today, too, as well as my oldest nephews, who are now 13 and 12 and remember all too well the events surrounding their little brother's death.
My child is the first child to be born to someone in my family of origin since J. passed away. As I get closer to the end of my pregnancy, I find myself thinking less about the pain of labor, or whether or not I have enough (or too much) stuff packed in my hospital bag, and more about loss. I find myself staring down thoughts and stories of loss, and remember the words that someone very wise once told me: loss is a part of life, and loving fully means accepting that loss can and will occur. Even if the loss is something as common as the child being born, growing up, and leaving home, there will be many little losses and changes to meet along the way. There is the loss of oneself, too, as a person who is not a parent and becomes one. I think that keeping a loving spirit in the face of loss comes from accepting and acknowledging (but not resigning oneself to) the fact of loss. Shortly after J's death, a friend also shared what she had learned about loss, saying that it was not something you really get over or move past, and that no one else can take the place of someone who has passed away, but that you discover that you are big enough to hold the space where that person used to be.
I have seen my sister act in ways over the past year and eight months that show something of her own understanding of both of these ideas that others in my life have expressed. I've been able to witness some of the changes that have come to her over time as she follows her life where it takes her. I see her growing, both because of her devastating loss and in spite of it, holding the loss and expanding around it as she moves further along the path of her life. I have the most profound respect for the challenges of her journey and how she has met them.
At my midwife's appointment the other day, I was asked about my sister's kids. I told the midwife that she had six children. "How old are they?" she asked. I found myself saying, "The oldest is 13, and the youngest is almost 2." That was the first time that ever happened. Usually, when I talk about my sister's kids, I tell them how old child number 5 is, and that the youngest passed away from SIDS. I don't ever say, "my sister has five kids," because that is not true and dishonors the short time that J. came to hang with us here on planet Earth. I suppose that the reason I told the midwife something different was because I just didn't want to get into the big, awkward conversation that tends to happen when someone finds out a child you know has died, even as I wanted to keep the memory of my nephew alive. I also feared being seen either as attention-seeking for sharing this information in the first place, or uncaring in the way I sometimes matter-of-factly convey this information.
The thing is, I'm not a big fan of secrets, although I've been known to harbor a few. Privacy, yes, but secrecy, no. You can decide just once not to tell the whole truth about a situation, for a reason that may feel perfectly right at the time, but then it gets easier and easier not to tell the whole truth. You start to box parts of yourself and your life experience away. Whether it's because of shame, or being concerned how others will view you, or whether or not someone's opinion of you will change, or just because it seems easier for the moment, you keep a secret that needs to be expressed or you hide something of yourself that is starving for light and air. Loss winds up begetting loss. You may have started by losing a person to death, or an important perceived part of your identity, or all of your money, then you start to hide these facts of your life. That is where you wind up losing yourself.
It's the kind of thing that you think will never, ever happen to you, nor to anyone you love. Not my family. Not my children. Not my niece, nephew, grandchild, brother, sister, cousin. It's also the kind of thing that you just don't get over. Life goes on, yes. New things happen. People come and go. Yet the death of a child is one of those things that lingers in your heart. Like all deaths, it is a forever kind of game-changer.
Early this morning, I awoke to thoughts of the afternoon tea party and shower that my mother and sister-in-law are hosting today in celebration of our first child, who's due to come join the rest of us at some time in November. It hasn't escaped me that my child's due date is close enough to my deceased nephew's birthday to matter. It hasn't escaped me that, as we approach the birth of my first child, my sister is approaching what would have been her deceased son's second birthday. So, I find myself thinking of my sister today, too, as well as my oldest nephews, who are now 13 and 12 and remember all too well the events surrounding their little brother's death.
My child is the first child to be born to someone in my family of origin since J. passed away. As I get closer to the end of my pregnancy, I find myself thinking less about the pain of labor, or whether or not I have enough (or too much) stuff packed in my hospital bag, and more about loss. I find myself staring down thoughts and stories of loss, and remember the words that someone very wise once told me: loss is a part of life, and loving fully means accepting that loss can and will occur. Even if the loss is something as common as the child being born, growing up, and leaving home, there will be many little losses and changes to meet along the way. There is the loss of oneself, too, as a person who is not a parent and becomes one. I think that keeping a loving spirit in the face of loss comes from accepting and acknowledging (but not resigning oneself to) the fact of loss. Shortly after J's death, a friend also shared what she had learned about loss, saying that it was not something you really get over or move past, and that no one else can take the place of someone who has passed away, but that you discover that you are big enough to hold the space where that person used to be.
I have seen my sister act in ways over the past year and eight months that show something of her own understanding of both of these ideas that others in my life have expressed. I've been able to witness some of the changes that have come to her over time as she follows her life where it takes her. I see her growing, both because of her devastating loss and in spite of it, holding the loss and expanding around it as she moves further along the path of her life. I have the most profound respect for the challenges of her journey and how she has met them.
At my midwife's appointment the other day, I was asked about my sister's kids. I told the midwife that she had six children. "How old are they?" she asked. I found myself saying, "The oldest is 13, and the youngest is almost 2." That was the first time that ever happened. Usually, when I talk about my sister's kids, I tell them how old child number 5 is, and that the youngest passed away from SIDS. I don't ever say, "my sister has five kids," because that is not true and dishonors the short time that J. came to hang with us here on planet Earth. I suppose that the reason I told the midwife something different was because I just didn't want to get into the big, awkward conversation that tends to happen when someone finds out a child you know has died, even as I wanted to keep the memory of my nephew alive. I also feared being seen either as attention-seeking for sharing this information in the first place, or uncaring in the way I sometimes matter-of-factly convey this information.
The thing is, I'm not a big fan of secrets, although I've been known to harbor a few. Privacy, yes, but secrecy, no. You can decide just once not to tell the whole truth about a situation, for a reason that may feel perfectly right at the time, but then it gets easier and easier not to tell the whole truth. You start to box parts of yourself and your life experience away. Whether it's because of shame, or being concerned how others will view you, or whether or not someone's opinion of you will change, or just because it seems easier for the moment, you keep a secret that needs to be expressed or you hide something of yourself that is starving for light and air. Loss winds up begetting loss. You may have started by losing a person to death, or an important perceived part of your identity, or all of your money, then you start to hide these facts of your life. That is where you wind up losing yourself.
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