Spoiler alert:
It's loss.
The most tragic gift is always loss.
No initially, not at first.
You can never find the gift in loss in the beginning.
It always comes later.
After you have come full circle.
After you can finally look back at where you've come from and connect all of the dots...after you make meaning.
After the healing really starts to happen.
My tragic gift arrived 10 years ago in a tiny beating heart of a baby whose soul was destined to only live 4 hours.
At the time, it was the best and worst moment of my life, the metaphor of the brightest, most beautiful sun shining through the clouds on a stormy day comes to mind.
Except with an intense lightning storm, and my heart felt like it was struck over and over again.
To say I was devastated would not even begin to fully describe that pain, the loss of my daughter.
I realize that to talk of things such as loss in our culture is somewhat taboo. Especially the loss of a baby or child. It is generally not spoken of and people tend to feel uncomfortable with being around people in pain.
It is hard to sit with another in the midst of their loss and completely accept your inability to fix it, or worse yet, to do the wrong thing.
So we do nothing.
But I challenge you to read on and allow yourself the opportunity to understand loss a bit better. See yourself in the example of the pain in order to examine your own losses and how they have impacted you so that you can find the gifts you have received.
You may wonder how a gift can come from something so tragic.
It is in the times of intense pain and tragedy that we are able to move beyond our man-made self, we move beyond our ego.
The situation and our intense presence in that moment (because of the pain) allows us to strip away all the thought, preconceived notions and judgments as it destroys our sense of self and our understanding of reality.
It becomes a spiritual experience.
In that moment, our true spiritual essence emerges.
In tragedy, there is no room for ego.
Ego becomes powerless.
This is a common occurrence in birth and death but can also happen in other times when we experience intense presence; any moment of sheer joy or intense loss.
I am choosing to talk about the gift in loss because it is easy to find the gift in joy and quite difficult to find it in loss.
Either way though -it is a choice to find the gift.
Let me quantify loss as not only death, but any situation that causes substantial change in one or more of your life domains; The Physical, Social, Personal and/or Spiritual Realms.
This could be chronic illness or a sudden disability, a layoff or being fired, divorce or a situation that leaves you questioning your beliefs and/or the choices you have made.
No matter where it comes from, loss will leave you vulnerable, confused, shaken and questioning many things that you previously thought to be your reality.
To find the gift you must allow it.
You must allow yourself to completely fall apart in order to be able to come back together in a different way.
You will feel beaten, bloodied and bruised, but you will have a knowledge and understanding that would not have been possible without the loss.
You will have to reconcile all of the "whys" and figure out your new understanding, and once you do, you will see that loss has no power over you because you will see that it is a gift.
You never wanted it.
You didn't ask for it.
You will have changed for better and sometimes worse (i.e. increased fear of loss again).
You will have evolved.
"What is it all for? What do I do with this new expanded consciousness?" you may wonder.
My question to you is:
What will you do?
The following is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published book "The Spirit of Grief." The chapters I chose are ones that I thought were able to most capture the loss and the shift toward finding the gift in it. I kept the chapters in their entirety instead of pulling out bits and pieces, so while it makes it a bit more lengthy, I think you get a better overall picture of the complexity of loss.
Chapter
1
Marah
Gene
“Your
baby is not ok.” I know that is true as
my first born daughter is pulled from my womb, not looking like a healthy baby,
but instead, purple, little and with a misshapen head that does not look quite
right. I nod and say nothing, I am in
awe that this little being was inside of me and I love her instantly. She is swiftly taken to a table full of
bright lights and bustling nurses and doctors who surround her - poking,
prodding and blowing into her mouth to help her with her first attempt to breathe. But there is no breath, just an increasing
level of anxiety as the minutes without her tiny cry tick by. They speak in specialized
dialect and short, determined whispers that I cannot quite hear. And still, there
is no expectant baby cry and happy “Congratulations!” There is just silence, a professional
seriousness and many, busy working hands.
My husband looks at me feebly and keeps saying over and over again “She
is ok, she is ok, she will be ok.”
Somehow saying those words provides him with a sense of calm. But I know.
I know she will not be ok – a feeling I have felt since I was pregnant
early on, but still, I cannot allow myself to accept it.
This
is not what I envisioned for her birth.
We had a birth plan. I took care of
myself; I ate right, I exercised, I went to prenatal yoga once a week. I didn’t drink alcohol or caffeine or even
take Tylenol for headaches. So what did
I do wrong? How did my body fail me
so? How did I fail my helpless beautiful
girl? As her mother, I should be able to protect her; to nurture her, keep her
from harm. But here I lay after my c-section, unable to move, to hold or touch
my newborn daughter, at the mercy of whoever is working to repair the void
where all my hope for the future was once nestled inside of me.
Later,
as I lay in recovery, I felt numb; numb from exhaustion of labor preceding an
emergency cesarean, numb from the pain medication, and numb from the denial
that something is terribly wrong with my first-born child. I prepared myself that she was going to be
handicapped in some way. I told myself
“It will be ok; she has a purpose and if that is what is supposed to happen, so
be it.” I did not, however, prepare
myself for reality.
It
seemed like hours. People were so nice –
too nice- like they were trying to protect me from some awful truth that was
too horrible to speak. How true that
was. “Adrianne, blah, blah, blah,
blah….” The neonatalogist is speaking
but somehow I do not understand the words that come out of her mouth, until –
“…she doesn’t have very long.” Somehow
that statement breaks through what I have told myself is a bad dream and I look
at my mother who covers her mouth with her hand in an attempt to stifle a cry,
as tears slide down her cheeks. Where is my husband? My only response – “Are you saying that she
is going to die?” I had prepared myself
for so many things, but this cannot be happening, not to me, not to my baby. I did everything right. Where is my baby? This cannot be true. I have to see her, touch her, smell her, and
love her. Little did I know that this
was the beginning of the end.
Chapter
3
“Blue Hoses of Silence”
After
what seems to be an eternity of waiting for my required recovery time, I am
allowed to be wheeled into the NICU where my baby is surrounded by a bundle of
tubes and is tiny, so tiny, amidst
the technological advances of man. She
looks like a normal baby with her hat on – so pure and innocent. I touch her
porcelain skin, trying to memorize the wisps of dark brown hair peeking out from
under her crochet hat. She moves like a
normal baby despite a ventilator with bright blue tubing that is helping her
breathe, her little lungs too underdeveloped to take in the air she needs to
survive. They tell me they do not know
why her lungs are so immature. She is
going to die. She smiles…do babies that
are going to die smile? I think she
knows. She is saying goodbye. All Derek can do is stroke my hair and
appear to be strong for me. His eyes are
bloodshot from crying and he sniffles periodically and wipes his nose with the
back of his hand. His strength is an
illusion that is so very transparent. He
looks at her and looks back at me with helplessness. But I can’t think about his pain, all I can
think about is Marah. I want to take her
all in; her eyelashes, tiny nose, ears, fingers with little finger nails. She wraps her little hand around my finger
and I never want to let her go. I can’t,
can’t, can’t let her go.
My
husband and I do not want her to die attached to a machine, so we decide to
take her off. She is four hours
old. In the back of my mind I hope she will
prove the doctors wrong and continue living, but the finality of what I have
just done becomes apparent as I watch her struggle for breath and tiny pieces
of me go with her at every attempt she makes to stay alive. Her little body is cuddled to mine as her
body lurches for one last time and gives out.
I don’t know when it happened exactly during the trip from the NICU to
my room but I remember hearing a wail that did not even seem human, and then I
realized it was coming from my own mouth.
Chapter
6
Change
The
days turned into weeks then into months of endless nothingness. I cannot
remember the first time I smiled and laughed again, although I remember feeling
incredibly guilty when I did. It felt alien and like I was dishonoring Marah in
allowing myself to feel happiness despite of her absence. On the other hand,
there was the sense of relief that I was still able to access small pieces of
joy even though I was still not fully present in those moments. It was a
confusing time; like walking through thick fog, trying to find your way, and
every once in awhile brief rays of light would shine through.
Panic attacks were my constant companion. The rising dread went with me wherever I would
go; causing my heart to hammer out of my chest, almost like it wanted
recognition that it was still there. And
there never seemed to be enough oxygen as I gasped for more air like a fish out
of water.
I went back to work in the mental health field in a
different capacity to avoid previous clients and their need for an explanation.
I was not the same person. I was broken, raw, vulnerable, and jaded – my life’s
course permanently altered. I had no
idea where I was headed. I told myself
“one day at a time” and various other cliche statements that people say to you
in an attempt to make you feel better (but which really are ways for them to
deal with their own uncomfortable position). My favorite of these was “Well, at
least you are young and healthy and can have another baby.” Right. That will
make it all better. Like when you are little and your fish dies and you can just
go get a replacement. I’ll just replace my one -of –a-kind baby, a unique soul,
with a substitute. Hello anger! My
uncensored thought: Go fuck yourself. And take all those cigarette smoking pregnant
women or people that don’t even take care of their kids with you. Along with all those people that had started
to say “She needs to get over this and move on.” Grief 101-you never “get over it.” You are permanently
altered forever.
I started to go to a grief group with other mothers that
had lost their babies. For the first time in a long time, I felt connected and
supported. I felt that I was a part of something- like these other women really
understood me. It came at a time when my husband and I had drifted apart; neither
one of us emotionally able to support each other in our respective grief
journeys. I wanted to talk about her all the time. He didn’t. We both had completely different experiences
during her birth and death and couldn’t agree on a shared reality. To me, our
baby lived for four hours. To him, she was dead from birth because in his mind
resuscitation and her being on a ventilator without brain activity did not count
as being alive. Grief group helped me breathe again. And stories- the sad,
heart wrenching stories coming from amazing women that didn’t deserve this
experience either. It hurt to listen to their pain but there I also found my
own and those women brought me so much comfort. They listened to me and offered
support, they were my confidants, and they were my friends. They still are my
friends. Thank God for them. My hope is that one day they will read these words
and know their impact, know that their baby’s lives had purpose too. I thank God for each and every one of them.
A realization started to develop during this period. I
had to live again. I had to engage and continue on my journey. And not just my
grief journey, but my spiritual journey - because another thing started to
shape and mold and develop during this period. It was my weakened ego deflating
and making room for my soul to expand. My spiritual journey had begun.
Chapter
7
Spirit
My spiritual journey had first begun while I was in the
Peace Corps and experienced both the lowest lows I had yet to go through in my
life, as well as the most unbelievable highs as I went through a personal
transformation. It all started with a racist joke. Now my friends will read
that and unequivocally not believe it, but it’s true. And in my ignorance of my
own socialized worldview, I hurt people. It was a loss in its own right – the
realization that my thinking may be flawed, but I have learned to appreciate
that poignant moment as the beginning of the breaking open of my human ego. I
began to emerge and question all that I was, all that I had learned and how I
saw the world and its inhabitants. I started to inquire and challenge my
concept of God and how my perceptions were formed. My reality was under my own personal
magnifying glass and I wasn’t letting myself off easy. To me, this was crucial for the work I wanted
to do with others.
So
my spiritual transformation continued, and on a more intense level, after my
baby died. So many people are amazingly resilient, it turns out, that I
couldn’t allow myself to crawl back into my hole of stagnant grief. I questioned so many things and wanted to
make sense out of the most senseless of tragedies. I decided to go to graduate school to become
a school counselor; which was a way to distract myself from my grief, but also
a way to work through in somewhat of a forced capacity. It was hard, albeit
healing, work and in the process I discovered that my true fit was not working
with children in a school, but working with grieving children at Hospice. Not
only had I come full circle, but I found a way to make Marah’s life meaningful.
Through my work, she would leave a legacy, and I would honor her in this way. I
couldn’t save her, but I could try to
support and help others in her memory...You can do this too. You can make meaning out of your loss.
Another important part of the process is to depersonalize other people's pain. They show us their pain in the hurtful things they say and do but it is never really about us. They do what they do to survive, just like we all do when this human journey gets difficult. Allow others to be ignorant and forgive them with love and compassion; let go of your ego’s
judgments or need to be right. You are making space for their learning and when you make that choice you will learn as well; about healing and
strength, about the grieving process, about yourself, and about the powers of
the human spirit.
I've learned the only
way through grief is to walk through it. It is unavoidable, painful and
incredibly heartbreaking. But it is also transformative.
There came a time when I realized that I didn't want to
be a victim anymore. I didn't want people to look at me with sympathy and feel
uncomfortable because they didn't know what to say. I didn't want to be “the
woman whose baby died.”
I wanted to be a survivor.
Just like you.
