The Grieving

The grief is the big fish and I'm the little fish.
(photo by Jim Lavrakas)

Now that the anxiety about The Procedure was out of the way, all I had left was the sadness and grief. I spent so much time crying, at least hourly the first week or so. Not just crying - sobbing. Body-wracking, full-voiced, I'm-3-and-I've-skinned-my-knee sobs. I quickly became tired of all the crying, but there was no way to avoid it. It was inevitable. But, it was so exhausting and it didn't really make me feel any better. It seemed like such an inadequate response, in the face of the intensity of the grief. It seemed like my head should explode, or I should burst into flames. That would have been more like it. Anything besides this constant, impotent crying. I couldn't even tell you why, exactly, I was crying. It wasn't triggered by specific thoughts or images. I mean, yeah, there was the loss of the actual, as well as the loss of the potential. There was the physical and emotional trauma I'd been experiencing. There was also the hormone flux that intensified everything and threw it all into further disarray. But all that, all those words I just typed, weren't really it. That's what I've come up with in retrospect. At the time it was just this primal thing, raw and visceral. Like a great, gray monster that demanded hourly sacrifices. I guess the crying kept it from swallowing me.

Then there were all of the last painful details. My milk came in. I bound my breasts with an ace bandage, but they still became completely engorged. I had to lie on the couch with bags of frozen peas on my chest, but that didn't provide much relief. It just seemed like some sort of cruel joke, one last poke from the Fates. I also had to tell people. Some of this I started once we knew it had all gone to hell, but remember, I had gone on a little telling spree just before our first sonogram, so there were lots of people who had to be told. I tried to delegate as much as possible. Orion and my mom took care of family. I asked my friend Nancy to spread the word at work as much as possible. All that was a big help, but still, weeks or months later I would run into somebody whom I hadn't talked to in awhile and I'd have to go over it all again. Not in great detail or anything, but enough so that they got the drift. And of course, it was awkward and painful. People really didn't know what to say to us other than, "I'm sorry." That was enough, actually. What else was there to say? Many people offered support, though I think many others avoided us because they didn't know what else to do. I may have done the same thing in their position. My friend Christy, however, did the exact right thing. She called me every day. We wouldn't talk long, there wasn't much to say. Often I'd cry a bit, and sometimes she'd cry with me, but just as often we'd talk about office gossip, or the weather. She was just checking in, but that was exactly what I needed. Orion was also there, of course, but he had his own grief to deal with. Fortunately for us, this whole experience pulled us together, rather than pushing us apart. I'm grateful for that.

It was amazing to me how many people came to us in support with similar stories of their own. We got a card in the mail from our pharmacist expressing sympathy and telling us about his wife's difficulty conceiving. Apparently Orion had told him a little when he went to fill my prescription for the sleeping pill when he was concerned that I not take it while pregnant. I found his note touching. I had no idea how many people I knew had gone through single or multiple miscarriages, or IVF, or had children born with some kind of serious condition. People keep that kind of information pretty close, I guess, though once they heard what we'd gone through they would share openly. Not that I'd wish anything like this on anyone, but it was good to know that we weren't the only ones.

Eventually, I was only crying every couple of hours, and then only a couple of times a day. It was months, however, before I went an entire day without crying at least once. The sadness would come over me without warning and I'd have to stop what I was doing for a few minutes and succumb. Fortunately, my desk at work was in a secluded corner, so I could weep quietly for awhile, and no one was the wiser, I think. I'd still occasionally run into people I hadn't seen in awhile, but I could let them know what happened without actually breaking down. I got an email from a colleague I hadn't seen in a couple of months and he said, "You must be tired of people putting their hands on your big belly by now!" I had to write back and let him know the score and he was so mortified, it made me laugh. Poor guy!

Well, that's the story. It took a lot longer to tell than I thought. It was also a lot more difficult. I guess the monster still lurks. I'll get back to the originally intended story next - Linus' birth. That's one that you know has a happy ending. Should be balm for the soul after this, at least for me.

Thanks for sticking around.