Follow-Up

Tomorrow I have my first PET scan in over a year, the first one since the scan I had about a month after completing my treatment. Normally, I’d have had another one six months ago, but when I unexpectedly (and wonderfully) turned up pregnant with Ada, we had to skip the intervening one.

Am I nervous? I’d be lying if I said I were. That’s right. I’d be lying if I said I were.

“Really? Not even a little bit?” you may ask.

No, not even a little bit.

Quite frankly, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I should be nervous until Ed surprised me by telling me that he wanted to go to my appointment with me. I hadn’t told him about it, and then when I mentioned it, he asked me to send him the date. I thought he meant so that he could take care of the kids while I was gone, but I told him that my dad had that covered already. Then he said that he wanted to come.

“You want to come? It hadn’t even occurred to me that you’d want to come.”

Hadn’t even occurred to me.

In my head, I’m thinking, “Why does he want to come? He didn’t come to the last one. He didn’t come to any of the clinic appointments over the course of the year when they checked my bloodwork and felt my lymph nodes. Why would he want to—”

Oh.

Oh. I get it.

He’s worried. Maybe not a lot. But at least a little. Worried enough that he wants to be there just in case the news is not good.

Never even occurred to me. I figured I’d go, get the scan, the doc would say I’m still clean, and then I’d go home and pump and dump the radioactive mess they injected into me.

And in all likelihood that is what will happen, Ed said to me tonight.

And I said, “Yeah. But that’s what I thought when my mom had her CT scan.”

And it’s true. I remember the day, the moment, like it was yesterday. My mom had been having digestive problems for many months before someone finally suggested she get a CT scan. They’d been planning to remove her gall bladder because they couldn’t figure out what else could be wrong. But the surgeon said they should take a look before just taking her gall bladder out. So she went for a CT scan. Sometime in the late afternoon of that day—it was April 16, 2002—I remembered that she was supposed to have the scan earlier that morning. So I just called her up from my office (which I shared with three other people), chipper as can be, to confirm what I already knew—that her gall bladder was bad and needed to come out. What else could it be? They’d ruled out everything else.

I asked her how the scan went. She asked me if I was still at the office. My heart began to race. I said yes, and she suggested that we talk when I got home. My mom never postponed a conversation with me. Ever. I was already on the verge of tears when I blurted, “Just tell me!”

“I have cancer, honey.”

Just like that. I can still hear those four words over the phone, over the many miles. “I have cancer, honey.” I lost my shit completely. The only girl in the office with me quietly got up and left.

I don’t remember the details of the rest of the conversation except that she told me she had pancreatic cancer. I didn’t know much about cancer (who the fuck pays any attention to this before it hits your family?), but I knew that was bad. What I learned over the course of the next 24 hours was even worse—the median survival time from diagnosis was 8 months. My mother died on December 19, almost eight months to the day from her diagnosis date.

I have never written much about the days in between April 16 and December 19 of 2002. Much of it was so horrible that I can still barely believe any of us endured it. These words I am writing now comprise the first effort I’ve made to write about the beginning of that journey. I will probably write more some day. But I’ve mostly wanted to forget about it. The end result was my mom dying, so why remember?

So should I be worried about tomorrow’s PET scan? Experience tells me I should (go in with low expectations and be pleasantly surprised… don’t get blindsided… don’t be a fucking idiot AGAIN). Statistics tell me I shouldn’t (fuck statistics—where were they when Hudson died?). My gut tells me I shouldn’t. I’m going with my gut. (And God, I hope my gut is right).

I never wrote much here about my cancer journey, either. When it began, I had this idea that I’d document it all, the wretched moments and the enlightening ones. And while I did write bits and pieces, I never got into the nitty-gritty of what it was like to be a cancer patient. I will probably write more some day. But I’ve mostly wanted to forget about it. The end result was that I got cured, so why remember?

Really. This is where I have been with cancer for the last year. The first ten days after the needle biopsy on March 29, 2012, were terrifying, because all I knew was that I had cancer, but I had no idea how bad it was. I had a terrible tightness in my chest that I was convinced meant that the cancer had already moved there, but as it turned out, it was just the stress of the diagnosis. We’d caught the cancer early, and I was headed for four months of very straightforward chemotherapy, after which I’d be, in all likelihood, cured.

And so it was. Four months of chemo (yes, they sucked, but in the grand scheme of chemo and cancer treatment, were really not that bad) and I was, as far as we know, cured. I started a new job. My hair began to grow back (and is now this crazy mess of ringlet curls that never existed before). I got pregnant with our third child. We moved into our lovely new house after seven long months of renovations. I gave birth to our third child. My illness seems like something that almost didn’t even really happen, like it was something I dreamed about one time. Sometimes I do a double-take when I remember it really did happen (like when strands of my hair fall into my hand and I am amazed at how long they are).

And here we are. On the eve of my first scan in a year. And am I worried? Who has time to be worried? I am chasing a very active two-year-old boy around, nursing a two-month-old every few hours, remembering my oldest child every time I look into the faces of her younger siblings, and trying to keep my sanity through it all.

I am not my mother. Despite my experience to the contrary, statistics really are on my side. I hit the cancer jackpot.

I am not worried. Really.

Famous last words, right?

I Love...

Jackson:

I love to watch your imagination at work. Like the other day, when you discovered some new magnets that came with our dry erase board, you put them together and pretended first that they were a shark's mouth, and you fed the other magnets to it. Then you pretended they were different kinds of soda-brown, blue, and white. Then you pretended they were nail clippers and you clicked them together as you "cut" my nails.

I love you how like to play with vowels. Just like the song "I Like To Eat Apples And Bananas," you like to try out how words and songs sound with all the different vowels in them.

I love how you phrase all your statements as questions. Instead of saying, "I want some milk" or "I wanna go outside" or any other assertion, you ask, "Want some milk?" or "Wanna go outside?"

I love, love, love to listen to you laugh. It's my favorite sound in the world right now. And I love happening upon the silly things that make you produce that beautiful sound.

Ada:

I love the precious squawk you make before you start to crank up for real. It's kind of like, "Hello? I'm still here!"

I love watching you beginning to notice things and stare at them, fascinated.

Everybody All Together

Tonight, after a long tough afternoon with both kids (maybe it’s my imagination or a product of having two at once for the first time, but this Ada kid is giving me a run for my money) and a total meltdown by Jackson, who missed his nap this afternoon but was trying to avoid going to bed like it was his job, I finally got Jackson up on the changing table to put on his diaper and jammies and get ready for bed. He had gone from screaming, crying, and tears running down his face to laughing and chatting in about ten seconds.

He started gleefully shouting the names of everyone in the family. “Daddy!” “Mommy!” “Jackson!” “Baby Ada!” “Bess!”

How could I not notice? How could I not?

No “Hudson!”

We talk about her. Often. Her pictures are everywhere, and Jackson can point to them and say, “Hudson!” If I ask him who Hudson is, sometimes he’ll say, “Sister!” or “Big sister!” Whenever the Iz version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” comes up on Pandora, he’ll say, “Hudson’s song!”

But no “Hudson!” when rattling off the names of everyone in the family. Not that I blame him. “Sister” is still a pretty abstract concept, even with a baby sister now in the house, nursing half the time and crying the other half. “Family” is an abstract concept, too, even for my extremely verbal son, who surprises me every day with the words and concepts he understands.

The book he chose tonight was “A Baby Sister for Frances.” If you don’t remember the Frances books, they are about a little badger named Frances and her family. This one in particular is about Frances trying to get used to her own baby sister. I ordered it for Jackson back before Ada was born. Life gets pretty crappy after Gloria is born (no blue dress ironed for school, bananas instead of raisins in her oatmeal), so Frances runs away to the dining room one night. Her mom and dad talk about her while she’s run away to the other room, about how even though it’s really nice to have the baby, they are just not a family without the big sister. “A family is everybody all together.”

“A family is everybody all together.”

The first time I read those lines to him a few months ago, it was like I’d been hit by a bag of bricks. Everybody all together. Everybody. All together.

We are not. All together. The big sister is gone. Not run away to the dining room table to snack on sandwich cookies. Gone. Altogether.

And yet she is here, isn’t she?

Today I caught myself staring at her Easter egg photo, which serves as the wallpaper on my phone (Jackson looks at it and says, “Hudson!”). She’s always there, behind all the icons. Sometimes I stop and pay attention to her. Many times I don’t. She is just there.

I use some combination of letters in her name and numbers as my password for a variety of things now. Sometimes I stop and think about her when I type them in. Sometimes I don’t. But she is there.

Ada is working her way through Hudson’s hand-me-downs. Sometimes (often) I stop and conjure an image of Hudson in the same pair of jammies or the same outfit. Sometimes I don’t. But she is there, too.

As I wrote in Ada’s birth story, I felt remorse later when I realized that I hadn’t thought much about Hudson in the moments right after Ada’s birth, nothing like the bittersweet moments I spent just after Jackson was born. But as I wrote there, what I have realized is that, much like these other two kids who are here with us living, breathing, screaming, yelling, running, eating, pooping, smiling, giggling, and snuggling, she is so much a part of us that we don’t need to “think about her” for her to be here with us. Maybe that is just a rationalization on my part for what I know and understand to be, finally, acceptance of her death and integration of it into our lives. But it makes sense. We live and breathe her just as much as we do our other kids, maybe even more so.

“A family is everybody all together.” Jackson doesn’t understand this now. He doesn’t understand “family” or “sister” or “Hudson died.” But he will. And when he does, he will know, probably better than we do, that even though we are not together in the way we wish—the way we wish in every single living, breathing second—that we could be, we are still all together. We are still a family.

Ada’s Birth Story

We welcomed Ada Rose Hitchcock Chaney into our lives on Wednesday, August 14, at 8:30PM. She weighed 7 pounds, 7 ounces, and was 19.75 inches long. She gets her first name from Ed’s great-grandmother, and her first middle name partly from some other relatives of Ed’s, but largely in memory of her big sister, who also had a flower for a middle name. This is the story of her birth.

The weeks and days leading up to Ada’s birth were long. They are long ones for any pregnant mom nearing her due date, feeling big and swollen and sleepless, but they felt especially long for me. Although I’d been able to stave off most of the anxiety that had plagued me all during my pregnancy with Jackson, the last weeks of my pregnancy with Ada brought many of those fears roaring back. I dreaded the possibility that she might not arrive by her due date, because I feared that my anxiety would just skyrocket at that point. I talked with the doctor about when they’d want to induce, and she said they would probably not let me go past 41 weeks, given my age. But I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it to 41 weeks. We went ahead and scheduled an induction for the day after my due date, but I knew that I could change my mind if I decided I didn’t want to go through with it, and I was just hoping that this baby would follow in her big sister’s steps and come several days early rather than following her big brother, who arrived right on his due date.

I was nesting like a madwoman during those last three weeks. I baked, I cooked meals for the freezer, I organized the basement, I organized the baby’s room (some more), I knitted—you name it, and I was probably doing it. I think I was hoping that all the activity would bring on labor. I know I was hoping that all the activity was a sign of impending labor. At my 38-week appointment, I was about 1 cm dilated, and the doctor went ahead and stripped my membranes in hopes of helping get things going. This, of course, did nothing. At 39 weeks, I was about 2-3 cm. I saw a different provider that week, a nurse practitioner, and because I didn’t know her and she didn’t offer, I didn’t ask her to strip my membranes again. As that week went on, I felt the induction looming large in my mind—I really didn’t want to go through with it, because I was committed to another drug-free delivery and I was concerned that Pitocin would make that difficult. I had acupuncture for the first time the day before the due date. The due date, August 13, arrived, with no sign of the onset of labor, except that I was dilated even more, to 3-4 cm at this point. I told the doctor to go ahead and cancel the induction, that I was feeling OK anxiety-wise and really didn’t want to induce unless the anxiety got unbearable. We scheduled a non-stress test for the baby for a few days later. And although the doctor stripped my membranes again that morning, the due date came and went with no excitement.

Early the next morning, around 2AM, I woke up for no reason, as I had a tendency to do during that last month or so. I lay awake in the bed for a while, trying to decide if the contractions I was feeling were real contractions or just Braxton-Hicks, which I’d been having off and on for a few weeks. I was also counting the baby’s movements, and by 4AM, I felt like I hadn’t felt her moving enough and decided to go into the hospital to get her checked out. This kind of anxiety and overreaction was just exactly what I’d been hoping to avoid, but there it was just the same, just as soon as the due date passed. I went to labor and delivery and they hooked me up to the monitors. The first 20-30 minutes really didn’t look that great—Ada was moving occasionally but not showing any real accelerations of her heart rate during the movements. The nurse said to me, “How do you feel about staying here and having a baby, because in about five minutes, that’s what they’re going to come in here and suggest that you do.” I called Ed (he had stayed home with Jackson because I didn’t want to wake up my sister-in-law and have her come over for no reason—I imagined I would get the baby checked out and be back home in a couple of hours) and asked him to come to the hospital so that we could talk to the doctors and make a decision. Of course, after I called him, the nurse gave me some juice, and I went to the bathroom, and within a few minutes, Ada was bouncing all over the place. During all of this time, I had been having what I was pretty sure were real contractions at this point, although they were still only mildly painful and were very irregular, and I’d also had a fair amount of bloody show. The resident checked me and said I was still about 3-4 cm. She talked to the chief resident and they decided to send me home since it still did not appear that I was in active labor. I asked if it were possible for me to just stay and see if the labor started to progress more, and she said the only way they would let me stay is if I agreed to go ahead and let them do some kind of artificial augmentation of labor. We started planning to go home, and then there was a shift change. A new attending came in to see me and he said that not only was it fine for me to stay if I wanted to, he’d actually prefer it—he said that OBs are anal and conservative and that they’d have preferred for me to have delivered before the due date. Ed and I thought I’d probably be more comfortable laboring at home until things seemed to actually be progressing. The new doctor, who was really very nice, said that if we went home, he would be on shift until 5:30 that day, so if we changed our minds and wanted to come back in, we could do so, and at point, we could talk about some other options besides Pitocin to get labor started, including breaking my water. This seemed like a good compromise to me, so home we went.

I remembered the advice my very first doula gave me, which was to rest as much as possible, so that’s what I tried to do. I laid down in bed and tried to sleep, but the contractions I was having were getting more painful, even though they weren’t getting any more regular. They were anywhere from seven to fifteen minutes apart, and I was still not convinced that I was really in labor.

Finally, close to 4:00 in the afternoon, I was getting frustrated and anxious. Several Facebook friends suggested that perhaps the labor wouldn’t really start to progress unless and until I felt safe and confident that that baby would be OK. I was also worried that once things really did get going, they might go very fast, and I did not want to be faced with the prospect of having a baby in the car. While most women feel more comfortable at home, it seemed like perhaps I would feel more comfortable at the hospital, where I knew we could monitor Ada and get help immediately if we needed it. I also wanted to get back there before the attending I’d seen that morning left his shift, so that we could talk about some things and anyone who took over for him would know about any plan we came up with. So we decided to go back in, even though the contractions were still not regular.

I called our doula to let her know that we’d decided to head in to the hospital. UNC has a volunteer doula program that provides labor doulas for free to anyone who wants one. I decided to go with the volunteer program because I wasn’t totally sure that we needed a doula on the third time around, but I still thought it would be nice to have one there just in case. I’d met her twice already, and Ed had met her once. She was . . . odd, to say the least, and I wasn’t sure I was totally down with her approach to being a doula, but I tried not to let this get in the way. I knew that I had not really connected with her, but she was a volunteer, and I didn’t really feel like I could call up the volunteer coordinator and say, “I’m sorry. I don’t like this volunteer that you are providing to me for free. Could you please provide me with someone else for free?” You know, it just felt like a looking-the-gift-horse-in-the-mouth kind of thing. She seemed like she knew her stuff, and I just tried to ignore her quirks and the fact that I didn’t really like her approach. That was a mistake. When I called her to let her know that we were heading in to the hospital even though the contractions weren’t 4 minutes apart yet, she immediately started trying to talk me out of it. I explained to her that my instinct was just telling me that I should go on in, that I would feel safer and more comfortable at the hospital, but she proposed several doom-and-gloom scenarios and basically suggested that if I went to the hospital now, my chances of being able to stick to my birth plan would go out the window. I mouthed silently to Ed, “SHE’S DRIVING ME CRAZY!” as I simultaneously made arrangements with her to meet us at the hospital later. What I was thinking, I have no idea.

The human body is an amazing thing, though. It seemed that almost as soon as I made the decision to head to the hospital, the contractions started getting more intense and started coming much closer together, well under four minutes. We got to labor and delivery, and thankfully, because I’d already been in that morning and they’d wanted to keep me there in the first place, they skipped triaging me and put me right into a labor room. The resident checked me, and I was already to 6 cm. I was really hoping that the rest of the way would go really quickly, but alas, it was not quite as fast as I’d hoped. Fortunately, UNC had wireless heartrate monitors, which made it much easier for us to keep an eye on Ada while I was laboring.

It was about 5:00 PM at this point. I talked to our nurse while Ed put Hudson’s pictures around the room. Our nurse was fantastic—she was totally on board with drug-free delivery, and she actually sat and read our birth plan through, asking us questions as she went. I was amazed. One of our requests on the birth plan was to have a nurse who was enthusiastic about unmedicated birth, and she assured us that she was a and that when the shift changed again, she’d make sure the next nurse would be as well. She brought me a birthing ball, which I sat on for much of the rest of the evening. The same doctor I’d seen earlier in the morning checked in with us, and since he could see that I was in active labor, he left us in the nurse’s hands.

This is when we fired the doula. The volunteer doula. Yes, we fired our volunteer doula. After we’d gotten settled in, I texted her to let her know they’d admitted me and how far along I was. She texted back that she’d already left and was going to stop and get something to eat along the way. I started explaining the situation to the nurse about how I didn’t really like the doula much, and she immediately said, “You need to tell her not to come.” Ed agreed right away. I hemmed and hawed, saying that I couldn’t fire a volunteer, and I certainly couldn’t fire her on the way to the hospital, but the nurse persisted, reminding me that labor is very psychological and that I didn’t need any stressors or distractions in the room. If the doula was going to be more of a burden than an aid, then she needed to stay home. I relented, and Ed so kindly agreed to call her for me. I was both too embarrassed and also having to concentrate pretty hard through contractions at that point, making a phone call difficult.  I was so relieved once it was done, and I was glad to have two people thinking smarter than I could at the time.

The contractions were getting worse and closer together. A few different times, I went into the bathroom and straddled the toilet backwards for a while, hoping to get my water to break (this position had done the trick with Jackson), but to no avail. We talked about the possibility of having the doctor break my water, and the nurse was really great about explaining the pros and cons of this procedure. I was still frightened enough of scary things like prolapsed cords that I decided to wait it out. Ed was a champ this entire time, massaging my shoulders and back and cheerleading me through the contractions.

At the shift change, two wonderful things happened. First, the attending who came on to the service was one of the two doctors I saw through most of the pregnancy, and I loved her. We were both really excited that she happened to be on call that night and would be delivering my baby. And second, the new nurse was an unexpected gift from the universe. She had recently received her midwifery certification, of all things. We fire our volunteer doula, and suddenly, we get a midwife. And she was fantastic. She sat down on the couch in the room while I labored on the ball and just talked with us for a good half-hour. She was visibly moved when we told her about Hudson, and by the time it was all over, she felt like our friend. Where she really proved her worth was about an hour later, at the very end, when I hit transition. During the last hour or so, I had been in the bathroom again, hoping desperately that my water would break. I was starting to fall apart emotionally, feeling like I couldn’t hang on much longer (a sure sign of transition, but I wasn’t convinced of that), and my legs were beginning to get tired from supporting my body as I straddled the toilet. They were starting to shake, and the nurse suggested that I try lying down on the bed. This idea terrified me a little bit (the pain you know is better than the pain you don’t know), but she made a good case that I needed to give my muscles a break. I lay down on my left side and by this time, my whole body was trembling. I could not stop shaking. I didn’t realize that this is a sign of transition—I’d never had the shakes before—but the nurse did and she paged the doctor to come check me. Meanwhile, she placed one hand firmly on my hip and slid the other hand firmly down the outside of my thigh, a gentle massage that slowly helped my body calm down and stop shaking. It was absolutely amazing, and I told her so.

The doctor that I loved so much came in to check me, and lo and behold, I was fully dilated. I couldn’t believe it. For the last half-hour or so, I hadn’t wanted the doctor to check me because I was sure that I was only 7 or 8 cm along, and I just couldn’t take knowing how much longer I might have to go. So when she said I was complete, I was so relieved. She asked me if I wanted her to break my water, and at that point, I didn’t care anymore, so I said, “YES!” (Hudson’s delivery was similar to this—the doctor didn’t break my water until I was already pushing, and hardly anything came out because Hudson was already in the birth canal). The doctor broke the bag, and I felt the warm whoosh of water and said, “You broke it!” She laughed and said, “I did!”

And then, out of nowhere, I had this incredible urge to push. It was like the doctor broke my water and all of a sudden, the baby was ready to just ride the wave out. I screamed that I needed to push, and both the nurse and the doctor said to go ahead. I pushed once, but I was scared and thought I heard one of them saying something about holding up for a second. I remember thinking that I was going to tear like crazy. I looked up at the doctor and screamed her first name (I was embarrassed about this later), feeling like I needed someone to give me some instructions. But like with Jackson, there was no waiting on this baby. My body was in total control, and I pushed once more and she was out. It took about 20 seconds altogether.

And then, there she was, little Ada, tiny and screaming on my chest. The relief I felt was immense—even having done this twice before, the dread of the unknown can weigh so heavily, and I was just so glad that the delivery was over and that Ada was safe and sound. (Funny—I just went back and read Jackson’s birth story and saw that I wrote almost this exact same sentence at the end of his.) I held her close and spoke softly to soothe her, and I started crying almost immediately, thanking everyone in the room and letting the euphoria wash over me. UNC is wonderful about not taking babies from moms for at least an hour after birth, so Ada stayed right on me for a long time and was nursing within twenty minutes. She looked pretty small to me—her limbs didn’t have much chub on them at all—but her official birth weight was one ounce heavier than her big sister’s. But to no one’s surprise, she looked just exactly like her big sister and brother, as if they were all popped out of the same mold.

So much was different about this labor and delivery. It was so much less loaded and emotionally fraught. This time, I already knew that I could love another child as much as I loved Hudson. I already knew that I could love another child and still love Hudson. Hudson was still present in the room with us, but in a way that felt much more integrated than when Jackson was born, when there was still the very strong sense of a giant hole just waiting to swallow me up. Later, I felt badly that I hadn’t spent much time thinking just about Hudson in those moments after the delivery, but as the time has gone on, I realize that that is what it really means for her to still be a part of our family. She is right there with us, whether we are thinking directly about her or not. And that is a blessing.

In a lovely twist of fate, Ada was born on the one-year anniversary of my last chemo treatment. It’s almost hard to believe that is a coincidence.

And so we keep moving forward, now a family of five, a baby sister, a big/little brother, a big sister, a cancer-surviving mommy, and a daddy who somehow helps us keep it all together every day.

Three (Two)

So this is actually happening.

Five and a half years after we first learned we were pregnant with Hudson.  Three-plus years after Hudson died just as we were planning a sibling for her.  A year and a half after our plans for a sibling for Jackson (and Hudson) were put on hold by a cancer diagnosis and ensuing treatment. 

Finally.  Finally.  Our home is about to have two living siblings in it. 

Even as I say that today, at 38 weeks pregnant, when our daughter could arrive at any time, I am still not entirely sure I have properly arranged all the necessary facts and emotions in my head to help me grasp that after all this time, after all these interrupted plans, our family will have more than one living child.  I have begun writing this post again and again in my head for two months now, and even now, mere days away from the event, I still find myself befuddled both by the actual fact of it and by the ever-flowing confusing emotions that accompany it. 

Two.  Two living children in our house.  All the planning I’ve been doing over the last few weeks, getting ready for the reality of two.  A reality I should have encountered more than two years ago.   Only just now am I exploring how best to help an older sibling adjust to the birth of a new baby.  Only just now am I figuring out sleeping arrangements and child safety seats for two children instead of one.  Only just now am I grappling with how to engage a two-year-old while also meeting the intense needs of a newborn. 

All of this time later, all of this planning for two. 

And yet there are three. 

It’s nearly impossible to believe that Hudson has been gone for more than three years.  Even harder still to believe that we are about to welcome yet another child without her here.   The most potent confirmation yet that no matter how many children we have, our family will never feel complete.  It will never be complete. 

I find myself, in these waning days before yet another life (and lifetime—we have experienced so many in these few short years) begins, feeling much like I did before Jackson was born.  I am waiting, waiting, anxious yet again just to know what this will feel like.  Two years and some change ago, I just wanted Jackson to get here so that I could stop imagining what it would be like to parent a living child and a dead child at the same time.  Now, I just want Ada to get here so I can stop imagining what it will be like to parent two living children and a dead child at the same time.  And what it will be like to parent a daughter again after having lost my first so suddenly and so horribly. 

One thing I know with absolute and unshakable certainty, certainty for which I am so very grateful:  the heart’s capacity for love is, indeed, infinitely expansive.  Before Jackson was born, I was not sure how I would be able to love him like I loved his sister who died before he was born.  And although I recognized at the time that many second-time parents experience this, for me, the feeling was so loaded with other emotions, the most powerful one being guilt.  How could I love him, living, breathing, alive, without slighting her?  How could I love her, gone but still nearly larger than life, without slighting him?  I would never have the opportunity for “special time” with each of them, at least not in the ways that many parents of two try to make room for.  How would I ever make Jackson understand what Hudson meant and means to me?  How would I ever go on living and loving more children without feeling like I was leaving Hudson behind? 

Quite honestly, I’m not sure I have yet answered the last two questions.  Although Jackson knows Hudson’s face (and often mistakes it for his own in photos) and calls her his sister, he’s not yet old enough to know or understand anything else about her, who she is, where she is, why she isn’t here with us, how very much she is still part of our family.  So I don’t yet know how we will do at that.  And no matter how much I tell myself differently, it is very hard not to feel like Hudson is being left behind.  Not necessarily that we are doing the leaving, but that she is being left behind just the same.  I read a blog post recently from another bereaved mother whose daughter died when she was nineteen days old.  The post was mainly about helping others understand how hurtful unthinking comments and careless behavior can be to a parent who has lost a child.  But one thing that stuck with me was this: she said that four years on, she gets up with the exact same sadness that she felt the day her daughter died—she has just gotten better at hiding it (her point being that people always asked how she was in the beginning, but then stopped asking after some time).  The exact same sadness.  I don’t feel that way.  Or at least not what I understand her to mean, which I could be wrong about.  If I woke every day with the exact same sadness that I felt the day that Hudson died, or that next day, or the many horrifically dark days after that…  Well.  I. Would. Not. Be. Alive.  The only hope I had during those days was that it would not always feel exactly like that, and if that had turned out to be an unfounded hope, I would not be here.  Truly.  Of course, this doesn’t mean that I don’t still feel Hudson’s loss acutely each and every day—as a friend recently said, it must be like having an amputated limb, and while I have never had an amputated limb, I think the metaphor is spot on—of course I feel it.  And I feel it in new and surprising ways all the time.  Just when you think you have encountered all the possible ways that the grief could sneak up on you, you encounter another, and have to grapple with the ensuing bleeding.  But just as I predicted very early on, the giant hole that Hudson’s death ripped into our lives, while still the same size absolutely, is smaller relatively, relative to the joy that we are still so grateful to be able to appreciate in each moment of our lives.  As that joy grows, as our lives grow, everything else gets smaller—not absolutely, but by comparison.  This is as it should be in any life, but in my case, it still can’t help but feel like Hudson is somehow being left behind in the midst of it all.

But.  But.  Back to that certainty.  I have absolute certainty that my capacity to love all of my children, here, gone, living, dead, in front of me, in my memory, is infinitely expansive.  Infinitely.  Loving Jackson makes me love Hudson even more.  Loving Hudson makes me love Jackson even more.  Loving them both makes me love Ada even more, long before she even makes it into my arms.  Loving her makes me love her two siblings even more.  To me, this is the essence of family, why people create families in the first place, in the amazing numbers of ways they create families.  We have so much love to share that all we want to do is share it more.  I know that’s how Ed and I have felt from the very beginning. 

Two.  Three.  Three.  Two. 

More.  Ever and ever more.  

Land Mines

I truly have only barely begun thinking about what it means that I am going to have a chance to raise another little girl. Every time my brain starts to wander into that territory, it veers off unexpectedly, not ready to entertain any deeper thoughts on the matter.

Today, I was forced to dip a toe a little deeper into that water, and yet I was still only scratching the very surface, I think. I finally got down to tackling all of the boxes and junk we’d thrown into the baby’s room in the new house. Not only do I want to get it cleaned up and ready for an actual baby to live in, but I also want to use it as a writing space for the summer, so I needed to make some room.

The room contained several large boxes that have basically not been opened since they were packed from our house in DC over a year ago. I also brought up some other boxes from the basement containing baby clothes, with plans to sort everything out by size and gender (or gender-neutrality as the case may be) so I could figure out what we have for this baby to wear. (You can probably see where I am going with this. This is another one of those posts that just keeps rewriting itself over and over again in new circumstances, I think).

I had already seen some of Hudson’s baby clothes through the sides of the clear plastic boxes I brought up from the basement. Somehow, this was all I was preparing myself for, and it seemed manageable.

But instead of starting with those boxes, the knowns, I opened one of the big cardboard boxes labeled only “Baby Clothes.” And right there on the top, the first thing I saw, were all the 18-24 month size clothing that Hudson was wearing around the time she died. In DC, I’d never been able to bring myself to put them away somewhere, so I simply moved them into the bottom drawer of the dresser in Jackson’s room in order to make way for his clothes. I looked at them from time to time, but for the most part that drawer stayed closed. When the movers came to pack us in DC, it felt almost like a cop out to me that I was letting them pack the clothes in the dresser, another way to sidestep having to ultimately do anything with those clothes I was unprepared to do anything with.

The thing about land mines is that no matter how much you prepare for encountering them, and no matter how many precautions you try to take to avoid them, they can still blow up right in your face.

On top was the grey fleece jacket with the bear ears that she wore so very often during her second and final winter that it was almost like an extension of her:

(I’d originally put this jacket in the box of clothes to be worn again by another sibling, rather than in the special box of Hudson’s clothes that will be only her own forever. Today I changed my mind about that. It’s just far too much hers to ever be anyone else’s.)

Then there were several items I’d only recently bought her at a huge kids’ consignment sale, including the lightweight sunsuit she was wearing in this precious picture with her friend Ellary on the playground at St. Ann’s:

. . . as well as this sweet top that I was inanely worried about getting stained by black beans when I took this, the final photo we have of Hudson:

Some of the clothes from that drawer in DC she hadn’t even gotten to wear yet, because the seasons were still changing and it was not yet reliably warm (we’d planned to take Hudson camping for the first time on the night she fell ill—we canceled the trip well before she ever ran a fever, because the overnight temps were supposed to be in the low forties).

I dug down lower into the box and found a jacket she’d worn regularly as a baby—I’d written her name on the tag so that it wouldn’t get lost at day care:

I shared that last photo on Facebook, with the caption: “Unpacking so much more than mere clothes,” and I am. I’m unpacking an all-too-short lifetime of memories. One of my bereaved-mom friends offered the kind hope for “a time when there is almost as much sweet as bitter in these clothes.”

And the thing is, this is that time. At least I think it is. Yes, finding these clothes when I (stupidly) wasn’t anticipating to (seriously, how does this keep happening?) blew me into a rib-shaking grief wave. Yes, most if not all of these clothes have some Hudson memory attached to them. But isn’t it sweet to have them in our lives again, to share them with Hudson’s little sister, to make new memories in them even as we tell Hudson’s siblings the stories of what their big sister was doing when she wore them? Isn’t that much sweeter than tucking them away in a drawer or a box as if I am afraid of them?

I think so. At least for the time being. I will probably still try to prepare, in vain, for the possible land mine that awaits when I first put one of those items of clothing on my second daughter. And it will probably still blow up in my face. And it will be OK. I’m willing to bet that something sweet will be waiting after the dust settles.

What Memorial Day Is “About”

Today, I posted on Facebook a column contemplating whether Memorial Day should include a commemoration of people like Henry David Thoreau and the many other anti-war activists and conscientious objectors and others who endeavored to prevent or shorten unjust wars. The column prompted some debate about what Memorial Day is “about,” with my two cents being that the purpose of Memorial Day is to honor the dead who gave their lives in service to this country, many of them needlessly in wars of aggression and greed, and that to me, we dishonor their memories if we do not continue to meditate on the need for peace; that to me, it does not take away from honoring the sacrifice of all those who have lost their lives and their families to meditate on the idea that while we are so incredibly grateful for their sacrifice, we are terribly sorry that they had to make it.

As the day went on, though, and I thought more and more about this discussion, it occurred to me that perhaps none of us should presume to say what Memorial Day is “about.” Because I imagine that, like Mother’s Day, Memorial Day is about many different things for many different people—those who have served and continue to serve, those whose family members or friends served and died, those leaders who sent young men and women into war, those of us who have not lost any loved ones in service to the nation but who understand that many of our freedoms, including our freedom to protest unjust wars, are a result of those sacrifices. It may mean to a mother who lost her son in a war she does not believe in something different from what it means to a father who lost his son in a war in which he believed wholeheartedly. So I think when any of us presumes to say that Memorial Day is “about this” or “not about that,” we may risk ignoring the diversity and depth of experiences and emotions that are brought to bear upon the meaning of this day.

So as the day continued, I thought more and more about what this day means to me. Having only a few friends in the military and having never lost anyone I loved to a war, it obviously does not mean to me the same thing that it might mean to my friend, Helen, one of the mothers I have become friends with in this journey of losing a child, my friend Helen who lost her 29-year-old son Joe to an IED in Afghanistan in 2006. It does not mean the same thing to me that it does to Joe’s wife, or to his young daughter and stepson, who lost their father on that fateful day. So what does it mean to me?

As I was meditating on this, I heard an interview on NPR with a chaplain who accompanies the notification officers tasked with the terrible duty of notifying the loved ones of those who have died in military service. The chaplain said that in every case when he has made the walk to the front door of one of those families, as soon as the door opens, before the notification officer can even get a word out of his mouth, the grief has already begun—the sight of the government vehicle in the driveway and the two officers in uniform on the front steps tells them everything they need to know. He said sometimes, family members would see them coming up the walk and simply refuse to open the door, as if doing so would mean keeping their beloved soldier alive.

And when I heard that, when I imagined that moment in my head, that’s when I had at least a better sense of what Memorial Day is about for me. Because what I thought of when I heard that chaplain describe that moment when the grief begins before the officer can even say a word, what I thought of was that same moment when we knew, without anyone saying a word, that Hudson was going to die. We had been waiting for what seemed like hours and hours for the doctor to return and tell us the results of Hudson’s latest CT scan, taken after her pupils stopped responding to light altogether. Finally, the hospital social worker guided us into a private room and sat us down. Then the social worker, two nurses, and two doctors all walked in and sat down in five chairs across from us. It was then that we knew. The words were superfluous. We knew in that moment that our lives would never be the same.

And as I remembered that horrible moment, I had a sense that for me, Memorial Day is about honoring all of those mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and children who have had to open that door, who have known, before any words were even said, that their lives would never be the same. And for me, it is about doing whatever I can do to make sure that no family, no mother, ever has to endure that horrible moment without an unassailable reason. I don’t intend that as a political statement but rather as an intensely personal and emotional one. If another mother’s child is going to die for my sake, if another mother must endure that moment when she knows without being told that she will never see her child alive again, then the very least that I can do on Memorial Day is pledge to do my best to make sure that her child “shall not have died in vain.”