Something happens and you’re left staring at the news on the computer screen, absolutely dumbfounded even though the events are all fathomable.  We are not talking about aliens coming down and wiping out whole cities.  We are talking about news that shakes our world but allows the rest of the earth to keep revolving as if nothing has ever happened.  You should be able to wrap your mind around life and death.  Around love and loss.  These things happen everyday.

And that’s what you tell yourself when you are still sitting in the chair, staring at the screen minutes later.

There is nothing you can do.  If you were physically close to the person, you could make them dinner, do a load of laundry, offer to watch their child.  If you were family, you could make phone calls, schedule a visit, help with the planning.  But if you are far away, on the other end of a computer screen, you can send an email.  You can rally the troops.  You can stare at the computer screen.

You can go in the kitchen and bake a dozen cookies.  You can wrap them carefully and label the box.  You can walk them to the post office, tell the postmaster the story of why you are sending cookies.  You can hope that when they arrive, they are a small good thing; a figurative hug for when arms can’t reach.

What do you do to show love?

Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts on the birth/death post last week — especially the people who shared personal stories about death.  I don’t know many people who wake up in the morning wanting to think about death beyond goth teenagers, but I do think it’s important to bring up the topic from time to time.  To remember that every single day, there are people grieving even if we’re lucky enough to not be in that group at the moment.  By which I mean, even if you’re not actively grieving, all people are holding that thread that link us to one another.  Even if we’re not actively grieving, all of us are passively grieving in the sense that we can be mindful of another person’s grief and not leave them alone in it.

The twins have returned recently to the topic of death after a fairly long hiatus from it.  With all difficult topics, the twins move close to the edge and then jump backwards and edge closer and jump back until they finally reach the information.

Prior to recently, they believed that people died for three reasons: stopped eating, ran into the street without looking and were hit by a car, or turned 100. (It’s an on-going joke with our friends who say, “and then President Lincoln instantly turned 100 at Fords Theater…”)

I let them hold onto this idea and didn’t point out the various other ways people die because they seemed to be at a point where they were moving back from the edge again.  They had all the information they wanted for the moment.

And then Harry Potter sparked that idea of parental death.  That it will happen one day — either I’ll be in my thirties or I’ll be in my nineties or somewhere in between, but it will happen.  That it won’t be by Lord Voldemort (we established that), but one day, every person will lose their parents.

And then, of course, they overheard news about the earthquake in Japan and there were suddenly more ways to die — if there were 5 ways (eating, car, 100, evil magic dictator, and earthquakes), could there be even more ways?  And then the trigger that brought all of this together was that we were watching a concert video and the singer started crying while he sang a song.  The twins asked why he was crying, sort of giggling about it, and I said, “he’s crying because his father died when he was little and this song is about that.”

I said it without really thinking.  It was late.  My mind was in two places at that moment, half working and half with them.  I realized after a moment that they weren’t really watching the screen anymore; they were watching me.

So we turned off the video and had a long talk about how unusual this was that his father had a problem that a doctor couldn’t fix.  We spoke about the fact that while he was crying during this song, they had seen that he had performed a host of other songs with a big smile on his face, and that life does indeed go on.  That the hurt wells up, but also recedes.

I think what struck them the most was the time gap between the death and the song.  They asked if it had just happened, and I said no, it had probably been almost 30 years since his father died.  And the ChickieNob said, “and he still cries about it?”  It opened this door in her mind that there exists these enormous hurts that still have the ability to affect us long down the road.  That this person has never “gotten over” it in the way that the twins are asked constantly to get over the little hurts that mark their day.  And I think this terrified them; this mixture of the crying singer and Harry Potter staring at his parents in the mirror and the earthquake in Japan.

Sometimes, when we talk about death, I picture the idea of loss as this house.   It’s that curious house that every neighbourhood has — the one that somehow draws everyone’s attention, the one you avoid on Halloween when you’re already scared, and yet you can’t help but wonder what it looks like inside.  Except, instead of being owned by one creepy old cat lady (apologies to all cat-ladies; if I weren’t allergic to cats, I would most definitely be one), we all walk past that house with the understanding that one day, we’re going to have to live there for a bit.  In this unfamiliar house.  With none of our familiar possessions.  And it’s going to suck while we’re there.  And it’s going to change who we are even after we leave it.

The only way I can shake having that figurative house have a hold on me and change the way I walk to school so I don’t have to pass it, is to simply confront it, much in the way the children in Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles go and ring the doorbell of their neighbourhood’s creepy house in order to release their fear.

What gets me to that door, what gets me over the threshold, what makes me look at the inhabitants is the fact that all of us will live in that house at some point.  That we are all forced into that space, and so it behooves us to take a deep breath and peek inside to speak to the current inhabitant while we still have the choice to be standing outside rather than living inside that house of grief.

I couldn’t see anyone choosing to live there; what they would get out of it.  But I think even places we hate — such as the fertility clinic — can become familiar enough that when we peel away the fear, the hatred of the space, the dread, what we get is this strange sensation that defies language — we simply don’t have a word that sums up the familiarity that can be found in a dreaded space.  I certainly felt it at the fertility clinic — this place I never wanted to be, yet felt so familiar that I could walk between the blood lab and the sonogram room with my eyes closed and muscle memory would tell me when to pause, when to turn.

I felt that way with the NICU too.  I asked every single day when we could leave.  I didn’t want to be there; I certainly didn’t want the twins in there.  But one day, as I was washing my hands and arms up to the elbow with the disinfecting soap prior to entering their NICU room, I was thinking about how much this had become routine.  How it no longer felt heart-pounding scary, but now was merely a sigh of fear.  A well of sadness.  One that I could navigate with pauses in the day to eat lunch or send an email or even joke with Josh.  We couldn’t do that the first few days.  I was a fucking wreck the first days; I cried like an animal.  But humans can get used to anything.

And, unfortunately, all of us will have to get used to living in that house.  We will probably have to enter there several times.  We may never have a soft entrance.  I have a feeling I will spend the first days, weeks, months, perhaps lifetime, kicking the walls and screaming while I’m in there.  But while that is happening, I don’t want the people on the outside to be racing past the house, trying not to notice it or think about their own time in there.  I want someone to be ringing the doorbell.

So that’s why I do it, and in turn, hope that by gently talking to the kids about it, I get them to a place where they can ring the doorbell too.  Not all the time; no one is perfect and we don’t always know just how much the other person needs us to visit.  And not every person can be expected to visit every inhabitant of that house.  But if everyone was willing to knock on the door, each person would have a few visitors.  And that’s important.

That is the only thing I can think to do to make that loss any easier on them; to give them the tools they’ll need in order to live in that house.  And they’re flimsy, paltry tools at best, that will have little impact on their time in that house.  But what else can I give them considering that I can’t circumvent what will happen one day?  And that thought and the flimsiness of those tools, fills me with enormous grief even if, at the very same time, I am also filled with enormous love.

I am quite a fan of posts with bullets.  I know, it sort of bucks the trend — most people would think I would like lengthy, contemplative posts.  And I do, but I am also a fan of posts that simply dump a lot of ideas on your plate and you can pick and choose which ones you feel like snacking on.

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This week was St. Patrick’s Day and the ChickieNob was extremely anxious about what she would do about wearing green.  She has some green summer clothes, but nothing suitable for winter.

I remember in elementary school that there was a contest for who could wear the most green and in third grade, I tried to win.  The problem was that if you wanted the green on your underwear to be counted, you had to go to the bathroom with a fellow student and prove its greenness.  Which upon reflection today, totally wouldn’t fly.  I mean, how would you react to your child being told by a teacher to show someone their underwear?

So, I remember sitting there in third grade during class meeting, where people were counting their green items and we’re trying to discern who has the most green, and even though I knew I had underpants on that had green on them (they were dotted with flowers, but the stems and leaves were green), I didn’t go to the bathroom to show a fellow student.

And the reason was that one of my best friends as a child was a boy (he later became my first date!) and at camp, I had shown him my underpants.  Not only had I gotten in trouble, but some girls had teased me for having a boy as a friend.  And I remember sitting there on the carpet, desperate to win the St. Patrick’s Day green count but unwilling to show another girl my underpants because all I could think of were these bratty twins from camp who would run by me on the playground and tell me that no one wanted to play with a girl who would show a boy her underpants.  But I had been so curious about boy’s underpants and he had been curious about mine.

Every time the ChickieNob would fret about being pinched, I would think back to how I lost the green count even though I would have won if I had shown someone my underpants as proof.  I’m still bitter about it to this day.

Please do not worry — the ChickieNob was saved by Julie who gave the ChickieNob a green shirt a few weeks ago when I saw her that said, “Eat More Kale.”  So no pinching.

*******

I got the first batch of Purim packages off with only one hitch.  I don’t know why — my heart wasn’t into Purim this year.  I had the theme set for months, but I dragged my heels in picking what I wanted in the box.  And I didn’t make new costumes for the kids.  Usually, it’s this huge sigh of happiness when I get the first packages out.  But this year, it was sort of a sigh of relief and a feeling of crossing something off my list.  I’m not sure why the blue Purim.

The hitch came on Sunday while Josh and the twins were running errands and I was at home, making lollipops.  I was completely in my own world, which is the only explanation for how I poured super-heated sugar over my hand.  I was trying to slosh the remains out of the pot into the sink, and my hand got in the way.  Luckily, since I was right at the sink, I immediately turned on the cold water and thrust my hand under.  And I had a topical ointment for burns with lidocaine that I put on afterward.

My hand looks fine now, but I was in mind-numbing pain through most of Sunday afternoon.  The sort that blots everything around you out.

*******

Earlier that day, since the kids were out of the house and I was baking (pre-lollipop; nothing was made post-lollipop), I tweeted that I turned on the Violent Femmes.  Kate asked why I don’t play the Femmes in front of the kids, and it comes down to our philosophy on curse words.

Namely, we want them to own them and we believe that in order for a person to really be able to own a curse word and use it properly in the future, they need to find it themselves, preferably written on a bathroom wall rather than being overheard in your parent’s music.

I remember exactly where I was the first time I saw the word “fuck.”  I was in the bathroom at elementary school and someone had written it on a piece of toilet paper.  I tore off the toilet paper and brought it out of the stall to an older girl who was doing her hair by the mirror and asked her what it meant.  And she told me.  And now I own that word and use it comfortably, albeit sparingly (much to my mother’s chagrin).

I don’t want my kids to be using the word in the future and have this niggling thought of their parents in the back of their head as they say it.  It’s all about roots and wings.  Or something like that.

So, we are those parents who censor the music we play, and I’m sure many musicians would be horrified to know that we play their music and mute the curse words in songs (I have a mute button on my steering wheel).  The kids know exactly what we’re doing and we’ve told them why we do it.  But the Femmes are just too much work.  My thumb would cramp from hitting the mute button.

I’m not of the mindset that all censorship is bad.  I think censorship when used for a clear reason (in this case, so that curse words aren’t ruined for them) can actually be a good thing.  I know many disagree with me and they can even present a good argument, but I frankly don’t care.  Nor would I be offended if someone told me that they ripped the sex scenes out of my book before they let their daughter read it.

It’s how we walk that fine line between letting them listen to the music they gravitate towards and keeping it still age-appropriate.  And not ruining a good curse word for them since you can’t unring that bell.

I’m finding it difficult this week to get any traction on work.  Part of me feels like it would be better to just let it go, stop stressing, release myself from any feeling of pressure and try again next week.  Part of me knows that it’s really a waste of time to not be getting work done AND to spend the time beating myself up about it.  That part of me knows that if I’m not going to get anything accomplished the least I can do is count it as a mental vacation and take the time to read a book or watch a movie.  De-stress.

But instead of doing that, I spend all my time arguing with myself about the fact that I don’t deserve a break.  That I’m an idiot for wasting time when I could be working.  I am really hating my internal voice right now.

I wish I could slap her sometimes.

Please tell me it was something in the air and not my own fault.  Did you have trouble focusing this week?

*******

I haven’t gotten a chance to see the book yet, but Michael Barr, a blogger, put out a book about infertility from the male perspective called Swimming in Circles.  From the book information on Amazon:

Swimming in Circles provides an all-access pass into the private life of a couple faced with situations ranging from the embarrassing to the absurd, and decisions that are impossible one moment and incomprehensible the next. This truly unique memoir is told from the usually neglected male perspective and is filled with gallows humor peppered in between the depths of disappointment and the peaks of possibility.

It just feels like there’s a real dearth of the male perspective out there, so I thought I’d put this out there.

*******

The Weekly What If: What if you could read, internalize, and have a complete understanding of any work of literature without having to actually sit down and read it simply by touching the cover?  You could only do this with one book.  Which one would you choose?

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And now, the blogs…

Baby, Interrupted had a post about an accident that was avoided though the residue of what could have been still remains.  I read the post with my hand over my mouth.  She writes, “If I had been looking down, changing the radio station.  If I had been reaching into the back seat to retrieve her teething ring.  If I had taken the moment to glance at my phone.  If, if, if…”  The post will make your heart stop.

Sugar Donor had a post last Thursday that I didn’t read until Friday about a horrible, irreversible mistake with the doctor’s office.  I sat on commenting because it was so raw that I couldn’t pull my thoughts together; and I still can’t now.  She calls it a small part of the whole, but it’s not just the mistake, it’s what it represents.  She writes so heartbreakingly at the end of the post: “I literally have nothing from this pregnancy, nothing. No pictures, no connections, nothing.”  It’s the repetition of all the times the letters N and O come together in those two sentences that makes me want to scream for her.  Losing that information is both part of the whole and its own loss.  And my heart just went out to her.

Flotsam often asks good questions, and this post is about drawing your personal lines.  She promises this question ties into a specific post, one that hints that her line has been pushed (perhaps I’m reading too much into that?), and says, “How much do you let others dictate what remains private and what becomes public?”  The discussion is interesting as well.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post that made me smile about the pregnancy of fictive kin.  Maybe it’s because she captured in words the love and fear and longing and hope and excitement that she feels about this impending birth.  About how it will change things.

The roundup to the Roundup: Absolutely no ability to concentrate this week.  Book about the male perspective with infertility.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.

After I wrote the question for last week’s Weekly What If, it keep tugging at me mentally, would I want to be there for the beginning or the end?  The birth or the death?

What if you could either be transported to the first show or the last show of your favourite band.  Would you rather go see them before they became the polished musicians you know them to be; to catch that first spark?  Or would you rather go enjoy their last hurrah?

I was couching it in terms of a band, but I think (at least for me) what it really comes down to where is your comfort level with death.  With a few exceptions that come to mind, I think most people are excited to be there at a birth.  But how many of us would opt to be there for a death?

While there are many who would answer affirmatively, point out that they wouldn’t want to miss out on any time they could possibly have with the person, there are a great number of people, I would guess, who might want to be close by, but not actually in the room.  Or not even close by — there are plenty of people who are more comfortable remembering the person as they were when they were vibrant and don’t want their final memory to be that moment of death.

And I think all options are valid — a person needs to do what a person needs to do to feel comfortable.  There is no right or wrong way to say goodbye.  Or to not say goodbye, as it were.

*******

I would hazard a guess to say that we have fewer opportunities to be there at a birth than to be there at a death (with perhaps the exception of certain professions).  I’ve met exactly two people on the first day of their life and those would be the twins.  I’ve met some people a few days into life, but most people I’ve met months or years or decades into their life.  Isn’t that a strange thing to think about?  How few people you’ve known since the moment they were born when you consider all those important people around you?

This concept is thought about deeply in adoption circles, and people have written much more eloquently that I could about what that moment of birth means.  Missing out on a person’s birth is a loss — a deep loss that we can barely wrap our minds around, so we instead joke about it through movies such as Due Date — and yet the rational side of our brain knows that the best is yet to come.  It’s exciting to be there for the beginning, but is simply seeing a person exist more exciting than seeing them walk for the first time or ride a bike or graduate high school or get their first job?

Birth sort of feels like the beginning of a band, where you can sense that you like the music, but you have no idea what the band’s full potential is during those first few chords.  I’m not sure it would be that exciting to see my favourite bands when they were pimply teenagers barely able to strum a few chords.  The music certainly wouldn’t sound like the music I know and love today.  Whereas there are milestone concerts along the way that I’d love to have been at.

And while I don’t like the idea of saying goodbye to something or someone I love, I think I would opt to be there at the end, to have known as much as I could about the journey.  It takes time for love to full entwine itself around your heart as much as it can wrap itself fairly tightly at first sight; at first knowledge.  I would rather be loving that person (or in the case of our what if, band) with my whole heart, having that love in every single one of my pores as I say goodbye, having all of the knowledge that comes with being part of something or someone.  I never want to say goodbye; I am terrible at goodbyes.  But I think I would rather miss out on a birth than ever miss out on a death.

Which is to say that, of course, I’d rather be at both.  I’d rather be at neither.

*******

Which leads us to our next logical thought — what about when the beginning is the end?  When the birth is the death?  When they come in quick succession or when death precedes the birth?  When the two are wrapped so tightly into a single package that they become inseparable.  The birth is the death.  The death is a birth.

Just writing that paragraph made me cry.

*******

We recently got to the part of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone where Harry encounters the Mirror of Desire and sees his parents.  The ChickieNob had turned her body so her face was pressing into the back of the sofa because she was scared of Professor Snape (who almost bumped into Harry in that scene).  The Wolvog had his head bent over the arm that held the book, half looking at the page, and half resting his forehead and just listening.

And then I noticed that my arm was wet.  The Wolvog had been crying, thinking about how Harry’s one desire was to see his parents and how he had grown up in life obviously missing their birth, but also not consciously there for their death.  He talked about it in terms of Harry, how it would be so sad to say hello and goodbye at the same time, seeing them for the first time in the mirror, but also knowing that it’s not real, it’s just a reminder of a goodbye.

But, of course, what he was really talking about was this knowledge in the back of his mind, the one too terrible to actually think about too deeply yet, is that one day his own parents wouldn’t be here anymore.  That everyone dies.

And seeing him process that book was seeing this premonition of how my own children would possibly grieve my death in the future.  That I am going to bring this pain on to them one day; it’s unavoidable.  I am going to devastate my children by dying.

And that absolutely gutted me.

We take such care not to yell at them.  Not to tear down their self-esteem.  We beat ourselves up when we snarl at our kids because we’re having a bad day.  And yet, we are going to do something unspeakable horrific to them in the future and there is nothing we can do about it.  They’ll do this to their own children.

And that thought, that there will one day be a goodbye, one day be an end of the band, one day be a choice of whether they want to be there for the end of my life — that is what gutted me.