Gogovivi

Rewind: October 6, 2012

I didn't forget the anniversary of Miles' coming and going this year, but for the first time ever, I skipped blogging on that day. I still don't know why: obviously I haven't been blogging much lately, but honestly I did intend to keep up the tradition with my annual reflections on life and death and children and loss. I did have things to say; I did have a story to tell, I just didn't have the spark. It felt too big this year, bigger than me and bigger than my voice.

When really, it wasn't a big deal at all. It was looking like a nice weekend, so Bruce and I took Vivian car camping near Mt. Hood, her first camp-out ever. To celebrate Miles' birthday, we did the things we thought an 8-year old boy would like to do: we ate S'mores before dinner, and again for breakfast, we didn't eat a single vegetable, we walked across the raging river on downed trees, and, since we were the only people in the campground, we screamed "Happy Birthday Miles" over and over again at the top of our voices.

He seems more real to me this year than most, probably because after two years of waiting, I am finally an active volunteer photographer with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, the foundation that sends photographers to the hospital rooms of families whose new babies won't be coming home. In the past month I have photographedmet and photographed five newly bereaved families, and not one of their babies reminded me of our Miles.

These photographs aren't the kind of shots I can or would share; they are private and shared only with the family. But believe me when I say that every shot is a memory made tangible for a family who will have far too few memories of their child. I look over my few fuzzy photographs of Miles and wish that Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep had been operating in our area when Miles came and went.

Miles under my skin

The only thing that should surprise anyone about my tattoo (in my family, at least) is that I waited so long to get one.

Seven years ago, when I had just started to emerge from the fog of grief I had inhabited since my son Miles died, I wanted to commemorate his short life on my skin. I felt like a woman marked by loss; the symbolism of actually being marked felt deeply meaningful in some superficial, outward way.

I floated the idea to Bruce. His response? And I quote:

"Over my dead body."

I wasn't looking for his permission, exactly, only his support. His utter lack of support was so convincing, though, that I abandoned the plan and didn't bring it up again for another five years. I tabled the idea, but I didn't forget, and a year ago, I floated the idea a second time. This time, he said:

"That's a great idea. Go ahead!"

I spent the next six months looking for the right tattoo place. I looked all over Europe but didn't like any of the places that took customers on short notice. I didn't really want to be tattooed with a crowd of bikers and other tough guys looking on. I finally found the right tattoo parlor and tattoo artist in Portland (duh!) and I couldn't be happier. I loved Icon Tattoo for its cozy atmosphere, its warmth, and its lack of pretension.

My tattoo is beautiful and simple, it is beautifully simple. It features Miles' name in a lovely trailing script, accented by a dandelion puff that is losing seeds to the wind. It is in a perfect spot, where I can see it whenever I like, but it is unobtrusive and hard to see unless you know it is there.

So sorry Mom, sorry Dad, hope you're not too disappointed, but I finally got that tattoo you have been dreading. I think it turned out pretty well.

Six years and new questions

I awake on the morning of Vivian's 6th birthday thinking of both the present moment - 6 years, how wonderful! What an occasion for celebration! - and of moments past. Vivian's birthday has always been, but hopefully will not always be, clouded with memories and regrets and thoughts of other children both loved and missed.

Seven years ago when my first adventure in parenting ended in the death of my son, I acquired a distorted view of the world of birth and death. I had few close friends with babies and had known only a handful of families through the experience of pregnancy, birth, and childhood, so I had little experience with the "normal." Then my own child died, and I entered a new world, one in which I knew more parents of dead children than I did of parents with living children. Or at least it seemed that way.

Now I live in China, where 18 million babies are born a year, and only a handful of them die in the neonatal period. The relatively low neonatal death rate (11 per 1,000, compared to 23 per 1,000 globally) surprises me a little, as the quality of medical care here in Qingdao (and other places outside the major urban areas of Shanghai and Beijing) is, to a Westerner, dismal.

Just a few days ago a baby was born to an American family here in Qingdao. In 2011 alone, I know of a half dozen such babies born to foreign families here. Let me state clearly that the availability and quality of medical care in Qingdao is my single biggest concern. Surviving a serious medical issue here is a game of chance with poor odds - careless misdiagnoses are not unusual and careful patients sometimes bring their own cleaning supplies to the hospital. Still, 18 million babies were born in China in 2009, of which "only" 11 per 1,000 died in the neonatal period.

All this to say that it has taken me seven years, the birth and survival of my own daughter, and the celebration of the births of many, many babies in Chinese hospitals with unknown ability to handle a complicated delivery or care for a newborn with serious medical issues, to realize that childbirth just isn't that dangerous. Babies don't just die. Babies are tough as are mothers, babies are born every day in dodgy hospitals, and they live.

So what happened to us? Why did our baby die? Seven years since and the ever-present, stabbing grief has largely receded, only to be replaced by a new understanding of how unusual it is for babies to die, and new questions about what happened to us, and why.

This is my new haunting question. I will ponder it for years to come, but in the meantime, I will celebrate Vivian's 6th birthday and the next, and all the ones to come.

After Miles: Year 7

Last year I had a lot to say, and was feeling eloquent. The words, the tears, and the catharsis flowed. This year I have a lot of scattered thoughts but the words don't want to come. That's the way grief is: different from one day to the next, and different every anniversary, even seven years later.

You see, today Miles would have been 7 years old.

I have things to say. About how, despite my best intentions, this year Miles' birthday has neither a cake nor a candle. I made modest plans, in collaboration with Vivian and Bruce, to have cake and ice cream, and a game of Duck, Duck, Goose (at Vivian's request), with some of our nearest neighbors. But this morning came early, and Vivi was invited to an all-day outing to a Chinese wedding with our neighbors and friends the Zhangs. You know them through their son, Jia Heng, who I have written about before. 

I have started to think that maybe its time to lay Miles to rest in some permanent kind of way. Believe it or not, right now his ashes sit in our bedroom in a plastic bag, inside a ceramic box, hidden inside a wooden chest made for him by his grandfather. His ashes have traveled with us from Oregon to Korea to China, for no good reason other than that we just don't know what else to do with him. Him. Them. The remains. Perhaps part of me wants to keep what little we have of him close, and perhaps I am a little crazy in thinking that he belongs with me, though all "he" is now is a pile of dust and bone fragments, and not a boy at all. I am thinking about a grave, a marker, a place in the earth, and wondering where it should be and when the time will be right.

I am also thinking about the other boy in our lives, our friend Zhang Jia Heng. He has become so much a part of our family that I will certainly face another loss when we move home to Oregon and he stays with his family in Qingdao. Today I want to cling to him, and pretend that we won't lose him, too, eventually. When we finally do make the move back to Portland, or anywhere else, Vivian will lose a best friend, and I will lose another child that I love.

I feel a little bit crazy this year, because it seems like I should have reached the end of the grief road, and recovered from the loss. But make no mistake: even after seven years, I have not recovered from the grief of the death of my son. I have only started to realize what we have lost.

This October 15 is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. Please consider making a small donation to help raise awareness.

 

A world away from Gigi.

When did she become Gigi, anyway? When I was little, she was "Grandma Gladys." When we really wanted to irritate her, we called her "Granny." Then, somewhere along the way, when I was no longer a child but not yet an adult, either, Grandma Gladys was abbreviated to G.G., which in time, and with the coming of a new generation, became Gigi.

I never called her Gigi, and I never got used to the name. She is still Grandma Gladys to me.

Gladys Prickett Ariail, September 1960

Last week she died, my Grandma Gladys, when I was two continents and an ocean away. I was in flip-flops in snow boot season. I was visiting in one Communist country, and living in another, when Grandma Gladys closed her eyes. She was 95.

I spent a lifetime admiring her, sometimes emulating her, and often imagining myself to be like her. I longed for her, and for the idea of her. I wanted to be near and dear to a grandmother, but instead I spent my childhood at the opposite end of the country, the youngest grandchild of seven, and the one that knew her the least.

Grandma Gladys in Central Oregon, c. 1972.

I will miss Grandma Gladys, but then, that's nothing new. I have always missed her. I grew up far from my grandparents, all of them, and envied those friends of mine whose extended families lived nearby. I would never change my childhood in Oregon, because I am certain that I would be a far different creature had I been raised in my ancestral home in Alabama, the home my parents left shortly after marriage. But that childhood in Oregon cost me the opportunity to really know my grandparents and to know the deep connection of generations. 

Now I am in China, raising my child in the same way my parents raised me: in a world apart from her grandparents, and a world away from roots. The choice Bruce and I have made is similar to the choice my parents made in their time: raising my child in China is perhaps similar to what raising a child in Oregon was to a couple of parents from Alabama, back in their day. Perhaps my parents wondered, as I wonder, what their choice would do to their children, and for their children. In our case we are trading language for loving, travel for touches, life experience for connection. If we stay on the present course, this geographical distance will prevent Vivian from knowing her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins well, but perhaps she will know the world better than I did, do, or ever could.

And for us, hopefully, the distance is not permanent. So that eventually, and hopefully sooner rather than later, we will be close to family and friends again. So that Vivian will know her family, so that cousins will be friends, and grandparents will be more than a fantasy.

I am remembering Grandma Gladys tonight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gaining clarity about birthdays

It wasn't shaping up to be the best birthday on record. Bruce was in Vietnam, the gift that we ordered three weeks ago, the one that she has been dreaming of for a year, didn't arrive, no cards or gifts showed up from family back home, and to top it off, we had both been awake half the night while Vivian tried to cough up a lung. It wasn't a good morning, and I woke heavy with the self-reproach of not having tried harder, not having ordered her gift earlier, not doing better, not doing more to make her special day special.

Many of you know that I count the passing birthdays not just by recounting the joy of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow, but also with the marking of days of the child who is gone. It is impossible to reflect on Vivian's growth without also reflecting on the stalled life of her brother. This year, as her birthday approached, she was full of spoken thoughts and questions about Miles: the why, where, and how of his short little life. She shares my confusion, and I feel powerless to help her understand. She shares also my grief, a sadness for that missing sibling that I am unable to soothe.

But she wakes up, sunny on a cloudy day, and she makes everything better. How is it that she, the now 5-year old, makes everything better, when that's my job?

She gasps in wonder at the Hello Kitty Happy Birthday banner I hung over the breakfast table, the same one we used last year and the year before. She is delighted by her breakfast of waffles, yogurt, banana, and chocolate sauce and blows out her candles not once, but twice. Most of all, she is genuinely and generously satisfied with the box of Crayolas, the 64-colors-including-gold-and-silver-and-a-built-in-sharpener that she unwrapped after breakfast.

That was all it took. The day went from scrappy and gloomy to perfect in a matter of moments. Without even knowing it, she took that birthday and made it her own, as it should be. It shouldn't be about her and her brother both, the here and gone, the what is and what could have been. It should be Vivian's day, and the way she turned her birthday around has inspired me to make sure that from here on out, her birthday is all hers. Her birthday will celebrate that what is, will truly celebrate the joy of Vivian, and won't be wrapped in the grief of loss.

We went on to a full and abundant birthday. First was a little party in her classroom that included cakes and a (completely unexpected) gift from her class. After school we went to a St. Martin's Day event, a European tradition, in which children make paper lanterns then parade through the autumn evening. Finally, and perhaps most notably for Vivian, was the much-anticipated sleepover at India's house, her first purely social overnight.

Some other scenes from the day:

cupcakes at school

Vivian as the center of attention while opening a gift from her class

Vivian's handmade paper lantern

On evening parade with a handmade lantern for St. Martin's Day

 

 

The incident that could have been, but wasn't

I am sitting here thinking about what happened yesterday, when Vivian and Jia Heng disappeared.

It was 9 am on Halloween morning, and the kids, already dressed in their Halloween costumes, were playing in the bushes in the back garden. One moment they were there playing happily in "the clubhouse." The next moment, poof, they were gone.

No big deal, I think. Those two are constantly running between houses, they must have gone to Jia Heng's house. But they are not there, and I spend the next half an hour in growing distress, running through the list of places they "must have" gone to. I am on my bike, riding around the neighborhood looking for them. Bruce is on foot and is starting to mobilize the neighbors to help look for her. I am asking everyone I recognize in the neighborhood if they have seen my kid and her chum.

Nobody has seen her. She has never run off before.

I am wondering if this is the morning that my life changes forever, again. I am remembering with acid clarity that last terrible morning when I thought those same words, the last silent morning when the screaming in my head started and didn't rest for days. I am trying to calm myself. I speak soothing words.

This is China, not America.

Kids don't get snatched in China.

Especially not blonde, blue-eyed kids in witch costumes.

I am hoping I am right.

Most times, I am not a worrier. Despite my first disastrous experience in parenthood, or perhaps because of it, I don't let worry rule my life or my parenting. I could have chosen to raise Vivian as if she was breakable, checking her breathing while she sleeps, not letting her out of my sight, hovering, smothering. It would have been so easy, so falsely reassuring, to slip into an overprotective, controlling way of being, in a misguided attempt to keep my daughter safe from things I can neither predict nor prevent. But take my daughter away from me, and let me not find her, and I quickly slip into old ways and old habits, chewing that bit of panic in my head until it inflates into a barely containable force.

My panic was barely contained when an old Chinese lady yelled "Dao le!". They are here.

I ran to Vivian with tears in a torrent down my cheeks, grabbing her, hugging her. She was completely stricken by my emotional state because she didn't know anything was wrong. She was shocked into a frightened, incomprehending silence born of complete innocence. The poor girl didn't do anything wrong. She and Jia Heng had gone on a walk with Jia Heng's dad. Like she has done a dozen times before, only this time she forgot to tell me she was going.

Later that day, in a quieter moment, she came to me, unbidden, and said "Mama, I am sorry for running off. I will never do it again." She understands how frightened I was that she was lost. She does not yet know what it means to be lost, but maybe she understood, just for a moment, what it means for me to lose her.

 

 

 

 

6 years come and gone

Here I am again, a year after the last time I reminded you that today is my son's birthday. Six years ago today my son was born, and six years ago tomorrow he died. Six years and still I struggle to understand what happened, why it happened, and how to tidy up the feelings that still rage inside me. They rage less often, and their screams are usually quieter, but they are still there, coursing around, rebellious, unruly. What I particularly struggle with is just simply knowing what to do with this day. For a living child, you know how to celebrate a birthday. But what about for a dead child? I need an answer to this because my family needs the answer. And I'm tired of going through the same cycle, year after year, wondering what to do.

 
At one year we grieved and eased the still stabbing pain with ceremony and talking. I was heavily pregnant with Vivian then, but still, the pain of what lay behind, and the fear of what lay ahead, made it a very solemn day. At two years, Vivian was 11 months old and we were already living in Korea, blessedly far removed from the places and faces that reminded us of him. That year, we happened to be traveling in Kyoto, Japan, for his birthday. We commemorated by ringing bells at a shrine, what felt to me a simple, spontaneous, and beautiful way to remember our son and send messages of love and rembrance to his little spirit. Miles' birthday happens to fall on or around major Asian holidays, so we always have a vacation around the time of his birthday. That is why at three years and four years we were also traveling, which, for me, can be a soothing balm on an otherwise trying day of remembrance.

At five years we were moving into our new seaside apartment in Qingdao and enjoying a "staycation" for the Chinese national holidays. I don't remember what we did for that day. Did we talk about it, eat cake, celebrate, or mourn? I honestly don't know.

Now, at six years, we are on the road again, this time in Yangshuo, in southern China. I am writing this post ahead of time, on October 2, right before we leave for the plane to take us to the south. I am wondering, and stressing about, what we will do this year to commemorate Miles' birth and death. I suppose, as with years before, we will be spontaneous, but honestly, I think that this year we need to do something more purposeful to recognize the importance of the day, if only for Vivian. Aside from whatever need Bruce and I have to remember Miles' birthday, Vivian has a clear and present need to make a place for her brother in her life.

For six years I have wanted to be more public about my grief, to expose that, to this day, it endures without a foreseeable end. I don't feel the pain every day like I did, but there are days, more of them than I like to admit, where the pain and the tears flow. But the time and place for speaking of Miles seems to have passed. There were so very few moments with him, and so very few memories, that what memories we do have seem worn out and threadbare. Bruce and I rarely speak of him together anymore, though he is spoken of at home often, because Vivian is very curious. She asks questions and tells stories about him, trying to know this brother that she never knew. Outside the home, there is almost complete silence, as most of our friends here know nothing of the context of our lives before Vivian. 

To be honest, nobody except Vivian wants to talk about a dead baby. So I say nothing.

Aside from this day, once a year, when I feel free, even entitled, to speak my mind. I usually say very little, because I am in the habit of keeping these feelings private, and because sually what I have to say is simply a confusion of hurt and longing and missing what might have been. But I always say "Happy Birthday Miles, we miss you."

This year I posted Miles' story on Faces of Loss, along with hundreds of other women whose children have died. I also joined the I Am the Face movement. Please consider making a small donation to help raise awareness for the October 15 National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day.