Look.

This week, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend lost their son.  His name is Jack.  

It has taken me some time to sort.  And not because it's impossible anymore, to process the inevitable grief that ascends when anyone loses their baby- to smile and make dinner and help with math homework- while the scars on my heart soften and spread.  It has been seven years since my baby died.  I'm good at that now. 

What has me reeling is the response.  The collective, societal demand of these brave, bereaved, broken people, to keep their pain private.  

I knew better than to read the comments.  (don't we always?)  And yet I found myself scrolling-in the corner of my room, in the car at batting practice, in my classroom on my lunch hour- hoping for believing in, willing some improvement since I found myself in their (much less expensive but no less vulnerable) shoes years ago.  Spoiler alert:  there isn't one.  

"I feel these pictures are super personal and should have been kept private."

"Maybe some of us don't want to see this."

"You called a photographer to take pictures of the dead fetus, of yourself crying, of the operation you had.. How sordid this is!"

"Feelings like grief need to be elaborated privately."

"I find the whole thing totally inappropriate and grotesque."

"Nobody in their right mind would post about this type of pain."

I thought about her reading, too.  Chrissy, in her postpartum underwear, holed up in her mansion.  The unknown, un-famous woman from Idaho who just returned from the crematorium.  Her milk comes in with no baby to feed, and she panics.  She Googles how to make it stop, and seven years later cabbage leaves will make her cry.

I grew frantic, like some sort of feral dog protecting its rations.  I started reporting them, one by one.  After fifty my hands grew tired, and I'd become so angry I couldn't make the words out anymore, but it didn't matter.  I knew what they were saying, all of them.  

Look away.  

When my daughter died I didn't know it could happen, at least not to me.  It was such a shock that I didn't cry for a full month.  The nurses were crying, the doctors were crying.  My husband and mother and sisters, passing her around the room in beautiful hysterics. I remember counting the tiles on the floor.  The brackets in the curtains.  I remember cleaving the reality from my own each time they laid her on my chest: "If this were real, look how bad it would be." 

Unfortunately, when I finally realized just how real and just how bad it is when your baby dies inside of you and then you have to deliver her, the mailbox was empty.  The flowers had died and the texts had stopped.  Life had resumed, in all of its magnificient, filtered glory, and I couldn't.  Because although I had been THERE and done THAT and bought the tattoo, I had also been trying- so desparately- to look away.  

And so I found myself feeling faint at barbeques.  And hiding from strollers in parking lots.  And yelling at husbands and three-year-old sons, and at deadlines and mirrors and stoplights until I opened my eyes-in the figurative sense but also the literal kind.  One day, I lifted her pictures from the hospital folder and I looked at her, really, for the first time.  I cried for a year maybe, at weddings and preschool soccer games and parent/teacher conferences.  To the mailman and the crossing guard and the barista.  I told them what they hadn't asked about, showed them things no one likes to see, and it felt...necessary, and glandular, and terrifying.  And good.  

Here's the thing:  ignoring grief doesn't make it go away.  Ignoring death, the timely kind or the baby  kind, doesn't make it pretend, doesn't put it back in the closet.  It doesn't make you stronger, or happier, or smarter, or a good friend, to deny life's one and only guarantee.  And berating someone (publicly or otherwise) for looking when you can't?  That makes you limited.  It makes you a coward.  It makes you gross.  

So Chrissy, when life resumes, as it must. When people stop asking and start forgetting, (as they always do eventually but when your baby dies, immediately.)   When you are reminded that you can always "try again", as though he were a missed layup.  When they invite you to the mall, and scoff when you don't respond in kind, and when they say things like "I don't know if I can ever see those pictures, Nora."

Share.  To your broken heart's content.  

Tell them.  Show them.  Force their eyes, as life has yours. 

Bare your love.  Bare your weathered, polished soul.  

Make them better.  

Make them look.