Mother's Day

A Message To My Fellow Bereaved Moms

also

How I Really Feel


And now this stupid weekend is upon us and there is nothing to do but ride this shit until it's over. You're going to keep breathing, whether you want to or not. You're going to hate everyone, whether you want to or not. You're going to grit your teeth at the asinine things people say to you and the cacophony of #blesseds that will find you no matter how well you insulate and isolate yourself from the world. They're like an airborne illness born of humblebrags. Your entire consolation will come from you. It is the love that bleeds out of you, yes, still, for your precious child. They were real. They were here. Their life mattered. Of course you feel slighted on this weekend of mothers. You were slighted. So when your pain feels like rage and pettiness and you want to punch someone in the face, know that I stand with you. Together we will keep our keep our hands to ourselves. Happy Effing Mother's Day.

Haiti- a composite

Haiti- a composite 

It’s December and the temperature was in the mid-90s everyday in Haiti. There is no air conditioning, there are few glass windows, and there are no screens. Most concrete construction homes and buildings have decorative-looking concrete blocks where we would expect windows that allow a breeze to blow through. 

There is so little infrastructure in Haiti it is alarming. There is trash everywhere you look. Piles and piles of trash line certain parts of the streets, but trash debris is ever present in Haiti. We stayed at the orphanage, where rainwater is collected in cisterns and then filtered for drinking and cooking, where there is a well that provides water for bathing and cleaning, where there is a generator powering lightbulbs and a refrigerator. But the power goes out a lot. They turn it off at night. Bugs fly in and out of the jalousie windows that are permanently open. Americans sleep under mosquito nets like princesses. Well, if they can sleep. Between the roosters and the dogs who loudly complain all night, and the announcements being made in kreyol by a man with a megaphone driving through the packed dirt roads of the community in the dead of night, sleep can be fleeting for our dainty overloaded senses. 

Despite all of this, Haiti is beautiful, not the least of which being stark contrasts of azul-blue coasts and red-brown hillsides, giant rubber trees growing from the dust, and children walking to school in perfectly pressed uniforms over the rocky terrain. One of the buzzwords around disaster relief currently is resilience. Haitians don’t need any patronizing lessons in resiliency; they are the most resourceful and resilient people living on a land with precious few resources. Where there is no way, they make do and keep surviving. Which is not to say they are thriving and don’t know any different. No, they know they are painfully poor, they feel it in their empty bellies regularly. They know there is better out there and they want it for their children and themselves. You see this through the pride in school uniforms. How mothers and children living in stick and mud huts with no running water can daily produce perfectly pressed school uniforms is beyond my comprehension, but it is the rule not the exception in Haiti. 

The vast majority of people in Haiti have no voice, no way of telling their story, no way of changing their lot in life. NGOs and missionaries come to Haiti to help and often waste money and resources, and force assistance that only hurts the communities and fledgling economy. So if you talk to adults in the community, if you ask them questions, if you ask if you can take their picture and share what they say, most jump at the chance. They want the world to know their story and the real Haiti. They want help. Because they are human and humans have an intrinsic need to be seen and heard and known. They are resilient, but only because they have to be all the time.

When Griefs Collide

It’s been three years since Bryant left this earth. Since I said the world was less bright without him in it. It still is. I feel for his mama and brothers today more than usual because I know their pain and I also had a front row seat for part of his last weeks here. It was terrible, and it wasn’t Bryant. Bryant was everything light and fun and imaginative and exciting. I’m so glad I knew him.

Today I crocheted a taco Christmas ornament for a 6-year-old boy in Georgia who is dying of DIPG. DIPG is a terminal childhood brain cancer. Not one person with DIPG has ever survived it. This little boy just loves Christmas and wants more ornaments to hang on a tree. He is in hospice care. He’s survived 20 months, twice the average, since his diagnosis. In pictures he is so swollen from treatment and steroids you would never ever recognize him. It reminded me so much of Eli. Like a knife in the heart. I hate the shit these kids go through. It kills me.

An ornament I ordered months ago came today. It’s a primitive looking mom with a baby strapped onto her in a carrier. I had the option to personalize it with limited hair colors and carrier colors, so it’s representative of the baby carrier I used for Eli. I got that maroon carrier when he was 3 months old and used it every single day until he was walking and would no longer be restrained. That thing soothed him and sometimes was the only way to get him to stop screaming or fall asleep. To receive the ornament in the mail today was emotional. 

My heart is aching for three little boys today. 

Day of the Dead

November 1st is known in Christian circles as All Saints Day. It comes from the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Popular culture has latched on to the colorful sugar skulls of Dia de los Muertas. The history around All Saints Day/Dia de los Muertos is interesting, but like much of history in the last several hundred years involves colonization and also taking a "pagan" celebration and making it into a Christian celebration. (Womp womp.) The Day of the Dead is a public holiday in Mexico and people of Mexican decent around the world celebrate it, often by decorating the graves of their loved ones, praying for them, and cooking and eating the favorite foods of their departed loved ones.
I never paid any attention to the Day of the Dead before Eli died. In fact, I didn't even know the colorful skeletons and sugar skulls had any meaning or what culture they were from. I once asked my grief counselor how people in other cultures survive child loss. Mostly I was talking about places where people live in abject poverty, where child loss is more common and where mothers likely don't have a picture of their child or mementos to physically hold on to. Or, you know, grief counseling and entire books and blogs on the topic. She said something along the lines of, "Every culture has rituals and things they do individually and communally to remember their loved ones."
I have learned a bit more about the Day of the Dead in the last couple years. I love the idea of it now that I understand it. Now that I have my own departed loved one. It feels fitting. I don't have any plans to participate in any celebrations because I want to be so careful appropriating someone else's culture. But it is comforting to have this day in my heart with Eli, where I am not carrying my memories and loss alone, but knowing that millions of people are remembering and celebrating their own special person today along with me.

Depression and digging

I'm not sure what I've shared here, but in my daily life I've been pretty open about my somewhat recent depression diagnosis and experiences with antidepressants. If you know anyone in your real life who struggles with depression give them a hug. What a maddening and misunderstood condition. 

I've tried a couple of medications, some more helpful than others, some with more side effects than others. It took darn near an entire month for my current medication to have any effect, but I am immensely proud of myself for sticking it out. I'm grateful for how helpful it's been since.

As far as I can tell I spent at least six weeks in a complete darkness, without a single positive emotion. It may have been closer to eight weeks. I did not feel any sort of goodness about anything for any length of time. It was not for lack of effort, it is just what depression can be. Even when I received some wonderful news one day and could intellectually say I was happy, I felt no happiness, joy, delight, or even a slight lessening of the pain, darkness, and frustration. That experience was a touchstone for me. Both grief and depression can make you feel awful crazy, but that day I knew it wasn't my doing. It was my brain being a real pain in the heart. 

I've been much more functional for a few weeks now. I make it to meetings. I get out of bed. I respond to work emails. I keep up with most things. Ty and I finished the school year. 

But...

You can't outrun your problems. You can't outwork your problems. It turns out you can't outmedicate your problems either. It's not as obvious as it sounds (especially considering the opiod epidemic in our country). 

I never expected an antidepressant to solve my problems. I hoped it could help me function. I hoped it could help me feel something besides the desperation of depression. It has done that and I'm massively grateful. I FELT hope when I had coffee with a friend this week. I don't take that for granted. 

But I realized the one thing the antidepressant doesn't do is provide any kind of relief to my discontent in life. I don't know why I'm here. Life seems to have very little purpose. I'm bobbing in an ocean, waiting for something to give. 

This is all wrapped up in my extended existential crisis. I joke about my EEC because what else am I going to do? Oh, besides devour articles, books, and podcasts... However, the tug holds fast. What is the point of all this? Why am I here? Why are any of us here? What is true? How am I supposed to keep living? 

There are no answers. Not in a pill or a bottle or a person or a job or a book or a song or an article or an author or a leader or in academia. Even though some of those are good places to look, meaning can be hard to come by. And yet I can't stop digging for answers. 

On doing "better"

I wrote this in February. It's now June. I found it tonight and it still is absolutely true.

"I don't want time to heal me. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away." ― China Miéville

"So you're doing better, that's great, huh?"
::cringing:: "Um, yeah, I don't know. I guess. It's complicated."

This conversation has happened probably a dozen hundred times. I know it comes from a place of love, support, and encouragement. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be glad with me that I am functioning reasonably well.
Except I don't want to be doing better. I just don't. And I am in good company. (My fellow bereaved moms and I are doing our secret handshake now. Just kidding, we don't have a secret handshake, we just pass the tissues.)
Doing better means I'm farther from Eli emotionally. When I last held him I was shattered. In the days and weeks following I was such a wreck I could hardly leave my house. Any task was overwhelming. To be functioning at life now feels sort of good, but it also reveals how far away I am from the person I was the last time I saw Eli. That is a thorn in my side.
Doing better means I'm farther away from Eli in time. The fact that my pain has not lessened, but become familiar and easier to tuck away means I have had practice in dealing with it. Practice over time. So much time has passed since I was last with Eli. But then I'm really still in the beginning of this journey of survival. It just feels like it's been so long.
Everything is different. I am different. I hate it.
It's good that I'm doing better. But it hurts, too, to be doing better. My brokenness keeps me close to Eli. My brokenness proves to the world he was here; he lived. I'm not just letting that go.
I'm so proud he was mine.

Why can't I just accept it?

I don't know why belief and faith are so hard for me. I'm not talking about a specific faith or belief. Just any faith, any belief, any anything.

I've been experiencing an extended existential crisis for about 20 months. (What a coincidence...) It's not for fun and it's not a release and it's not cathartic. It's not comforting or exciting or soothing. I just don't know if I really know anything. And while my brain can say, "Yes, I'm fully aware that there is no bottom to the well of faith, that there is nothing concrete to find" the rest of me is fully compelled to keep digging, keep looking, keep finding out more. It's much more of a compulsion than a hobby in religious history and beliefs.

It started after Eli died. I told a friend, "I don't want to be angry or sad. I've been both of those things for so long and I'm sick of it." My friend gently replied, "Don't worry, you will be." It didn't really matter how sick I was of being sad and angry. I had no idea what was coming.

Briefly, I was able to hold my faith close. I prayed. I showed up to worship. I tried to engage. And on a Sunday morning three weeks after Eli died, when everyone around me was singing about God moving mountains, I sat down. I didn't decide to sit down, my body sat down for me. My heart asked plainly, "But why didn't you move my mountain?"

That was August 2015. It's March 2017. My question remains. I thought I would be further along by now. I for sure thought I would be done treading water in an existential ocean by now. I'm not. Sometimes I wonder if I've still only just begun. I'm not in a panic over this lack of faith, though. I'm as comfortable as one can be with a bucket of doubt. I'm taking all the time I need to process, and it looks like it will be a while, still. I'm okay with it.

Except I'm so freaking frustrated. All of the exploring and listening and considering has gotten me exactly nowhere but farther down the well and I'm tired. I want to accept something, anything, so I don't have to continue all this striving.

Looking at the contributing factors to my current state I can say I got here through the combination of an extended traumatic life event and subsequent life-altering loss which my faith was not created to withstand. What I mean is the faith I learned got it wrong. My faith was great as long as I still had hope, as long as I was the one who could do the helping and fixing for others. It was meaningful. I was all in. I'm not saying I was taught wrong. I'm saying the very faith I shared with my nearest and dearest was wrong.

Look, before you get worked up, please know this is not an attack or a dis on any faith. This is my faith falling apart. Despite the terrible things done in the name of religion throughout human history, faith itself is good for humans. It is good for people to have faith, and with it a community, a sense of meaning, hope. Those are wonderful things and I want them for others and for my own family, I just can't get there myself right now.

Yesterday and everyday before that for several months, I would have told you that I don't believe in an afterlife of any kind. So yes, that means I have been of the opinion that I will never see my son again. Yes that is as shitty as it sounds, maybe more. Today I'm not so sure, though.

I've been pretty doubtful that God even exists. He's certainly not a "good, good Father" if he does. Who can know? I've been wondering if maybe God is more energy than anything.

I wish I could believe something. When Eli died and I asked to see his name in the clouds, and then most of my family saw the exact thing I had asked for (his name in the clouds ON CHRISTMAS) and all I got was a photo of it, I could only ask Why? Months later I talked to a fellow bereaved parent about it and he asked me if I would have been able to accept it if I saw it myself. I know you think the answer is Of Course, but it's not. The answer is probably not. And then this January my mom saw it again and called me, and I *happened* to be driving almost exactly parallel to her a few miles away at the exact same time and so I saw it too. You would think since this bizarre and specific thing I asked for has quite obviously happened I could accept at the very least that it is a sign of sorts. But you would again be wrong. Because all I can think is that Eli is a really short and linear name, it's not like I named the kid Mergatroid, which would be much more impressive in the clouds quite frankly.

I don't want to debate theology. I just want to be able to accept some kind of faith.

I thought I was going to hang my hat on science, but it turns out that takes too much faith, too.

German theoretical physicist, Werner Heisenberg, famously said, "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."

First of all, that is beautiful. If God is real, then God is in everything that makes our world what it is. We don't have to be afraid of learning something that will disprove God.

I guess I'm just not to the bottom of the glass, yet. Or the well of faith and belief, which has no bottom anyway.

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore founded the MISS Foundation and the Center for Loss and Trauma in the years following her daughter's death. She has published peer reviewed research around the topic of child death and bereavement. Of the bereaved authors, bloggers, foundation-starters, artists, and parents I know, I don't identify closest with Dr. Cacciatore. But she does have thoughtful and well-developed ideas that make me think.

I read her most recent article, A Subatomic Connection to Our Dead, yesterday. It's short. Go read it. I'll wait. You have know it to understand the rest of what I have to say.

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I read about the invisible connection between entangled particles last night. I already knew about fetal microchimerism cells, the cells that babies leave behind in their mothers when they are born. I know I have some of Eli's cells inside of me. Which is the most brutiful thing.

But when I read, "We are one in the same, connected subatomically, in the visible and invisible realm" my body shook. Because I knew it was true. Not only did I know it was true, science was saying it was true, and I could feel it was true.

Today I don't think it's true.

I know, it's science in the process of being peer-reviewed, which is basically the rubber stamp of factual reality.

I just want to believe it. I just want to believe that Eli and I are still connected, somehow. Somehow besides memories and stories and pictures and ideas.

I don't know why I can't accept that it's possible there is a realm of consciousness after we die (oh you know, maybe like an afterlife), or that God or Eli could be communicating with me in some fashion, or that science shows quantum entanglement is real (um, which is did).

Maybe hope is still too painful.











If anyone happened by and is going through a deconstruction of their faith, hi there. Here are some of the books, blogs, and podcasts that have helped me examine faith in a healthy way and not just throw it all away.

The Liturgists podcast- I think starting at the beginning is a good idea because in the beginning it was more straightforward and topic based and frankly a bit easier to follow. Not that I don't love it now. It has just built on itself a lot.

Science Mike (podcast, blogs, and definitely read his book, Finding God in the Waves)

Rachel Held Evans' books A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Faith Unraveled

Pretty much all the things Richard Rohr has to say, especially his guest appearances on Episode 35 of The Liturgists podcast and Episode 86 of The Robcast with Rob Bell.

Why Everything Does Not Happen For a Reason, John Pavlovitz (blog)

Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Any Poetry by Nayyirah Waheed

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell

The entire Harry Potter series. I was a late comer to the Wizarding World, but it's so beautiful and comforting. JK Rowling wrote it as an allegory for the forces of good and evil in the world also the Gospel, so, basically just read it and cry and feel your feelings.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller