One of Princess GiGi’s friends wrote me after she read my blog, ”This is my first big grief.” Another friend put me in contact with a father who had recently had a stillborn son, as we had. This is my gift to them. I spent too long in the dark with grief, so I hope this will lessen some of the surprises. Everyone is unique, so this may be familiar or may be totally wide of the mark for others. I’m writing at a distance of fifteen years, but many of the memories are still fresh and raw. Grief is a room in my house.
There is a lot written about grief. Joan Didion wrote about it far better than I ever could. Jackson Browne sang it in Late for the Sky. These are the things that I want others to know. These are things that I learned after the death of our son, Bryan.
All of the emotions with grief are very powerful. If they are suppressed, they will emerge elsewhere. In my case, my shoulder would not permit me to play guitar, and I couldn’t begin to fix it until I discovered the connections. It will emerge through your health, and stress-related symptoms, and depression. I was eventually clinically depressed, and that needed to be treated as well as the other problems.
The emotions are so powerful, your body can’t sustain the expression for long. Great ripping bouts of grief would pass through like storm fronts, followed by some calm. Brief moments of sunshine would be the eye of the hurricane. With me there seemed to be some period of recovery, so that when I was recovered enough to feel it all again, my body would present me with another episode of grief. Timing and place might not necessarily be convenient.
Music was a terrible trigger. I realized that all the love songs, all the “you’re gone, I’m destroyed, I’m sad, what did I do?” songs work unfortunately well as grief songs. I went to give a talk at a gem and mineral show 2.5 hours from home, listening to Kim Richey sing Didn’t I? and crying the whole way there and back. A friend made me a mix CD that contained Dee Carstensen’s Farewell, with love, written to her own child who did not survive. I first listened at work and had to go home for the rest of the day. I was on the recumbent bike exercising, when Kate Wolf’s version of Who knows where the time goes? caught me off guard and left me absolutely breathless with pain. I eventually listened to Eric Taylor a lot, spare guitar in a quiet room, dark songs crafting the darkness into light.
Friends may or may not help. Many times words and actions are all directed at the mother who has lost a child, not the father. Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote several times that what one can suffer another can share. But it is a rare friend who can really share this with you. Sad but true, many people are glad what has happened to you did not happen to them. It’s a secret happiness that most are very ashamed of. The shame keeps them silent. What they need to know is that words aren’t necessary.
Some friends and acquaintances will take refuge in clichés. Some would ask, “What stage of grieving are you in now?” You can’t be serious. I wasn’t issued an agenda when my son died, so I would think or say, “Oh, yes, I’m on step 3b(iii).” A subset of friends want to make a speech – so they will feel better. I still believe that the saying there’s a reason for everything is the most succinct expression of superstition available. Like thermodynamics has a 0th Law, that saying is the 0th Law of Superstition. What doesn’t kill us makes us strong demonstrates a remarkable lack of empathy and compassion. The only appropriate response is to inflict as much pain on the speaker as possible, all for their own good, of course. I believe that if we all work together and kick someone’s balls each time that someone says what doesn’t kill us…then that expression will die out quickly.
Religion may or may not help. Neither my wife nor I believe in God, so we never had to deal with the issues of God killing our child and taking a giant shit on the heads of the faithful. We attended a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at the time. The interim minister was very good to us, but when he left, that was that. The Director of Religious Education that we were close to left, mostly because of the new minister, I think. We indicated we would like to add Bryan’s name to the memorial in the garden. The committee ignored their own policies, went ahead and did it without the paperwork, without being paid, and without even checking the spelling of his name. The stone carver was already there, so why not? Our request to donate a bell in Bryan’s name spurred bureaucratic infighting over who would control such requests in the future. We left to found another UU Fellowship, and when we requested that the old Fellowship move Bryan’s Memorial Fund, they slowly complied, but they skimmed off all the interest from the account. Maybe other churches are better. I learned that UU’s were so self-absorbed that it wasn’t a really good place to be if you needed any sort of support, excepting perhaps the loan of an underwire bra or a jockstrap.
Science may or may not help. If you ask for an autopsy report, get someone else to read it for you. We asked for one for Bryan. It contained no answers for us, but it did contain all the details on the way the coroner cut up our dead son. I spent a day in a medical library researching stillbirth, and got no answers. (More research has been done since then, but it was pretty bare at the time.) The search for answers is a dead end. Even if all the answers are available, you still have to deal with the hole in your life, the loss that doesn’t end.
Then there’s the things that nobody talks about. Like libido. I suppose it is a normal response to death to want to use your own naturally-occurring abilities to replace the loss. I was ready to knock up any female who wanted it. Single women in my town that want children? Line them up. You big ones take numbers, you little ones choose teams. It was disturbing enough that it sent me to the grief counselor at my wife’s work. She had suffered a severe miscarriage many years earlier, but remembered the aftermath: The doctor told them to wait six weeks before having sex again. They lasted a week. Another friend of my wife’s had a stillbirth the same time we did, and told her husband, “Why don’t we go ahead and try again?” She said, “Honey, he had me on my back and was in me before I could hardly finish the sentence.” I never acted on it, but my wife got pregnant the first time we tried.
Information helps, good books, like Living When a Loved One has Died, Empty Cradle, Broken Heart, and Trying Again. Support groups help, and keep that feeling of isolation at bay. We reached out to other to let them know that they were not alone.
Work helps, and I don’t mean hiding in the nine-to-five and busy-ness. I worked on it with therapists, both mental and physical, and learned to express myself better with words and music. We attended the ParentCare support group, run by a chaplain from the local major hospital. I met some very exceptional people that I still keep in touch with.
The thing that really works is time. My therapist told me that grief and loss become a room in your house. At first, you spend a lot of time there. As time passes, you spend less and less, but when you go back in that room, it’s exactly as you left it. Every feeling and memory is there undisturbed. Grief is a room in my house.
What I wish for the grieving is peace of mind and heart, and the time in which to find it. That is what I wish for you all.
drsledge 