and it sprouted a whole new amalgamation of thoughts…. what a guy!
“What the moulting season is for birds – the
time they lose their feathers – setbacks,
misfortunes and hard times are for us human
beings. You can cling to the moulting season
and you can also emerge from it, reborn.”
Vincent van Gogh
I had a huge a-ha recently and then, almost
immediately thereafter, set it aside. The pain
felt almost too much to bear.
Or perhaps the pain appeared too much to bear.
I almost lost what I wrote. I shoved it away,
took the key and tossed it in a rarely used
drawer labeled “do not open until you’re
good and ready.”
Not just “ready” notice but “good and ready.”
The next very important step, it seems, in
this shove-the-pain-stuff-aside is to determine
to never be “good and ready” – almost ready,
kinda ready, close to being ready, but never
the predetermined form of “good and ready.”
Never be precisely good and ready or exactly
good and ready – always less than that or
different than that.
It is strange how it works.
Natalie Goldberg showed up again, you see,
with one of her writing prompts that land
on my psyche more like writing commands.
She said something like “tell me about what
your heart knew in July 1990.”
I tried to find the exact words this morning
but they were hiding from me, my ego waving
its finger taunting “I told you and you wouldn’t
listen – this is an obvious sign you are not
‘good and ready’ yet, you are still stumbling
around in ‘almost ready’! Don’t do it!”
I heard Natalie’s command that day. I followed
Natalie’s command that day.
And then I hid my words. I buried them. I denied
their existence.
That is until right now, in this moment.
One day in July, 1990, my heart knew pain. And
running. No, make that crawling, away from the
pain. I had failed, miserably, in my most important
assignment yet. Failed, flat out failed.
The most important task of my life and it was
over before it began.
“An accident, a fluke….” People of wisdom
said. Yeah, they could talk it away all they
wanted. that Summer, that day in July
of 1990, was long and hot and
sticky and lonely.
I had three jobs – three! – to avoid
feeling anything.
I moved, again. Stumbling away from any
intimate-friendships-in-the-making. If you
have intimacy, you might talk about what
you are really feeling and I didn’t want
to risk doing that.
I might have embarrassed myself. I might
have cried in front of someone and made
them uncomfortable. In July of 1990, I
would have none of that.
My heart knew better. It waited.
Even now, this many years later, there
is a part of me that doesn’t want to be intimate
with that failure, doesn’t want to be
intimate with any failure. It wants to
pretend failure doesn’t happen.
Maybe this is one of the reasons I hold
on, so tight, to things that aren’t right:
relationships, weight, places, thoughts, the
“failure” identity. Is the “edge” I am stepping
into finally about shedding the holding on so
tightly, about unwrapping my fingers from it,
loosening the grip, allowing myself
to have freedom from this ‘failure’ stuff?
Natalie commanded me to write of 1990.
Yesterday, still following this command,
I wrote an open letter to my doctor from
those days. An open letter is one written but
not expected to be sent.
I didn’t write much, I see now. My pencil
was stopped, abruptly, mid-thought.
I laugh, today, at the irony.
Dear Dr.
Do you remember me? I was a
twenty-eight-year-old kid. A scared
broken hearted little-more-than-a-child
who had delivered her baby, the baby who
was dead at birth. (The more subtle way
to say that would be “stillborn” but no,
she was dead. I delivered a dead baby, into
my own arms. In the passenger seat, in the
dark, on a friday night in February, 1990.)
You called the next day, my dear dr.
and spoke into my answering machine.
“So sorry,” your voice said, “So sorry…”
I rocked on my bed, my pillow over my
head, not wanting to hear the sorrow in
your voice, not wanting to hear the sorrow
in all the other voices there, cued up in
the brown plastic box with the blinking red
light. The voices all tinged with matching
heartfelt incredulity, trying to
make sense of the impossible.
That stillbirth was 18 years ago.
I don’t speak of it much anymore.”
My pencil went silent, much like my heart went silent.
That particular chamber, closed. I would knock on
that door, I would poke my face into it, but I never
went very deep again. I listened to the cultural
knowledge that grief was better left unnurtured,
that limitations on time were better than “stewing”
over it, that thinking about it only made things worse.
I beared it mostly alone.
I remember sitting across a table from my husband,
sometime in 1992 or 1993 and he said, “When will
you ever get over it?”
I reminded myself to get over it. Checked
that box on my to-do list and vowed
to not bring “it” up again.
I looked like I had emerged from that particular
“moulting” season. I went on to live a lot of life,
some better than others, some deeply painful and
some incredibly ecstatic.
People looking at my life would say “now
there is a life well lived.”
I agree. It is and it has been a life well lived.
And even so, there is that bit of me that knows
that much of my life, like my baby daughter, has
been stillborn. Has been “almost made it out
alive, but not quite.”
She, my daughter, would be an adult, legally, now.
If Marlena had lived, we would be readying for
her high school graduation.
I sit, in the here and now, with my pencil,
waiting for movement. I think
of the photos at the cemetery, the ones
I recently took during my “On the Edge”
photo series. I remember the message
which I believed came from John Alsheimer,
when he commanded me, “Live.”
Today I heard something new from his command.
I remembered I found out I was pregnant with
Katherine, Marlena’s little sister, on the
Friday before Mother’s Day, 1991. I remember
sitting at Marlena’s grave on Mother’s Day,
1990, saying “I can’t bear another Mother’s
Day without a baby.”
Christmas, 1990, was among my worst ever,
or so I thought at the time. We pretty much
denied the season. I worked (one of my jobs)
that day. I tried not to think about all the
“Baby’s First Christmas” hub bub, the Santa
stuff, all those hopes and dreams denied.
Hopes, dreams, desires, stillborn and buried.
Over. Kaput. Or so I thought.
Katherine, Marlena’s little sister, was born
on Christmas Day, 1991. She was three weeks early.
I was in denial that I was going to have her that
day right up until she burst forth from my womb.
Breathing. Alive. Stunningly beautiful.
Alive. Not stillborn.
I always pictured God and Marlena high-fiving
each other, their conspiracy – their joint
Christmas gift to me, complete.
Marlena’s giggles burst through, her
voice saying, “See, Mommy? See? Not
stillborn. Your baby,
alive. Your life, alive.”
Eighteen years later, she watched me,
I am sure, taking pictures. I imagine she
gathered her friends, chanting together,
“Live, Mommy. Live!”
That was what my heart knew in
1990. It is what my heart knows
now. Live.
Live.
Live.
Was Katherine’s conception date an
accident? No – it was a fulfillment of a promise.
If Marlena had lived, Katherine would
probably not be here. That is unimaginable
to me. No Katherine?
I can hold onto the feathers of the moulting
season, with longing. I can stay devoted to
the fact of stillbirth as “failure” or I can
devote myself to the command of my beloved
daughter and all her friends, gleefully
chanting, “Live.”
I can be good and ready, I can be precisely
ready, I can be not even ready.
I just have to let go, unfurl my fingers, say
yes, and live.
Live.
Live.
It occurs to me this chant isn’t for me alone.
I feel my now unfurled hand, reaching towards
you as I let go.
Live.
Live.
Live.
Ready?
Live.
