What Grief Looks Like, Five Years Later

"Time is the longest distance between two places" - Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Our first house was on a large hill. There were two sets of steps and I remember coming home from the hospital and climbing them.  It was (almost) five years ago but today, the concrete still pulls at my knees.

I had just delivered a baby, my baby, after she'd died.  I'd received an epidural and I'd labored for thirteen hours and I'd delivered her.  Then they'd cleaned her and dressed her and passed her around the room, as if she were alive but she was dead.  For some reason, the stairs haunt me most. 

Maybe it's because I had just delivered a baby who was already gone, and my body was swollen and my head was a fog, and I had to hold the railing more than I wanted.  But I think it was the recognition.   Here we are at home, without her.  This is bad.  This is real.

He set down the bags, set water to all the flowers but I walked down the hall to her room.  It was pristine and quiet, as we'd left it.  I remember it was sunny, mockingly so.  And everything was neat and folded and tethered in place. 

Suddenly I was at the armoire, and then it was open.  And then, my hands were running through them, all the velvet and the tulle; untouched and unwrinkled and now, unnecessary, and then I was sitting on the floor. 

He appeared next to me.  Gently, willing the dress from my hands.

"Not yet," he said (wondered? pleaded?), and then he hugged me. "Okay?  Not yet."


Many people describe the initial days after a loved one's death as stalled.  Time stands still, at least in their minds, and they want the world to do the same.  I can understand this desire, very much, it's just not how I felt. 

When my daughter died I wanted to fast forward.  Past the epidural and the induction, past the moment I first held her.  Past the drive home, and the walk up the stairs and the sorting of the clothes, and the mornings where the floor felt too far.  I thought of the people I'd read about, those who'd endured traumatic things and returned to their slow pitch leagues, and I wanted to be like them.  Chasing deadlines and returning phone calls and cursing coffee stains, years removed from their concrete stairs.  I wanted to run, until I reached a day where the pain felt far away.

My plan was foiled, of course, from the beginning.  I understand that now.  That morning, her skin on mine, the hallway to the elevator.  The nurse's eyes and the sun on the hardwood and the velvet in my hands, these things feel far away now, the pain does not.   And so, five years later I continue with the biggest lesson of my life:  how to live with that.

When my daughter died, I was shaken.  And not in the way a branch sways with the wind, bending and absorbing and allowing;  I was snapped in half, dismantled, broken in ways I hadn't known one could break.  Too quickly, I assumed that if I allowed myself to look around, assess the damage, it would kill me.  

I wish I could go back, take myself by the shoulders; tell her to sit.  Stay in this for awhile.  Don't rush this hard, hard thing.  You can't bypass the necessary, and when your baby dies it's necessary to hurt.  To cry and rage and recoil and beg; to sleep in closets and run from grocery stores and feel nauseous opening your Dropbox.  Your heart will feel empty and your shoes will feel small.  Your mantle will overflow with flowers you won't water and your refrigerator, with food you won't taste.  You will hide from toddlers on rubber slides and protruding bellies in carpool lanes.  You will decline and insist and stifle and explode, and many times it will feel like you are dying, only you are the opposite.  

You, and all of your feeling and remembering, and running and reconciling, and clawing and climbing, and trying?  

Life, at its most tested.  Love, at its very best. 











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