Shipwrecks and Snowstorms

In December 2000, during a raging snowstorm, I gave birth to a baby at 25 weeks. She weighed about as much as a bag of sugar. Not much more than half a kilo. She was living at the edge of viability; we were living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, far away from friends, family and everything we knew. We called her Maia. I’m looking at a Polaroid of her now: it’s all we have. Two large brown eyes peer out from the confines of an incubator. There is no mouth. It’s covered with a gag of white sticky tape, yellowed with spittle, holding two large blue breathing tubes in place. She died when she was nine weeks old. Next to the picture, what remains of her ashes are nestled in an iridescent art-glass vase, etched with a single pink lily, a copy of which is seared into my arm, the memory of her pain made flesh. Dan, my husband, and I travelled to the most beautiful places to scatter her ashes, but we spent the next several years floating in the ether ourselves. In the midst of the worst of the grief, I turned to the letters, poetry and prose of writers who had lost children, people who understood what it was like to drown in self-pity, hopeless longing and utter despair. 

As I write, my two-year old daughter is crying out in her sleep and will not relent. She brings me inexorably into the present. “Mummy! Mummy!” she calls from her transitional mattress on the floor, “I want a cuddle mummy!” So I go into her room, kiss her and tell her: “Lola, mummy’s here, everything is going to be alright.” I check on Daisy, Lola’s older sister, snoring quietly in her flowery bed, and I lie down at right angles to Lola’s belly button, reaching up to stroke her head and reassure her. The carpet’s a bit itchy, but I don’t think to change my position: I’m somewhat addled; it’s my birthday after all, and we’ve been enjoying the Burgundy, a good bottle Papy brought back from France and gave me to celebrate in style. I get up a little too soon, telling Lola I’m going to come back, but Dan hears the protests, goes in to kiss her goodnight and tells her what she wants to hear: yes, Lola, daddy will sleep with you in your room, fold down the spare bed next to yours, cuddle you all night if he has to. Sucker, I think. As Lola’s cries turn to song – I can hear her singing Old Macdonald – I sit down to carry on writing, and I can’t help reflecting on what Barbara Kingsolver might call my outrageous fortune.

Kingsolver is just one of the writers I related to after Maia died; another was Mark Twain, whose own daughter, Susy, died when she was in her early twenties. I found extracts from both Twain and Kingsolver, side by side, in one of the diaries I kept with me. So much of the writing I devoured during that time was devoted to grief, and often it would be presented in the form of a journey. Shipwrecks were a common metaphor. I wrote in my diary’s margin: “amazing how the writing I love talks about ships and shipwrecks. Obvious I suppose. But so true.” The contrast between the Twain and Kingsolver extracts I’d copied down in my diary demonstrate that there is a transition from raw sorrow (Twain) to coming to an understanding of sorts (Kingsolver). We have to find our own way through it. Nine years on from Maia’s death, I’m finally ready to write my own memoir: it is a journey into and out of a void, a story about grief. There may or may not be shipwrecks in it, but there’s definitely a snowstorm.

 

From a letter Mark Twain wrote to a friend after the death of his daughter

(Note: the underlining, caps and comments are all mine, as I used them in my diary):

“Do I want you to write to me? Indeed I do…the others break my heart, but you will not. You have a something divine in you that is not in other men. You have the touch that heals, not lacerates.”

(I want THIS in a friend.)

“And you know the secret places of our hearts. You know our life – the outside of it – as others do – and the inside of it – which they do not. You have seen our whole voyage.”

(Amazing how the writing I love talks about ships and shipwrecks. Obvious I suppose. But so true.)

“You have seen us go to sea, a cloud of sail, and the flag at the peak. And you see us now, chartless, adrift – derelicts, battered, water-logged, our sails a ruck of rags, our pride gone. For it is gone. And there is NOTHING in its place.”

 

From “High Tide in Tucson”, by Barbara Kingsolver

“In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for along time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.

It’s not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another – that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.

What a stroke of luck. What a singular brute feat of outrageous fortune: to be born to citizenship in the Animal Kingdom. We love and we lose, go back to the start and do it right over again. For every heavy forebrain solemnly cataloging the facts of a harsh landscape, there’s a rush of intuition behind it crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.”

Hold the Grommets!

Here is a little respite from my favourite subject of death, courtesy of my six year old's glue ear. The NHS cancelled our meeting with the ENT consultant yesterday, as they had failed to conduct an important test in time for the appointment. I wasn't best pleased, but D was delighted; it meant she could participate in sport's day instead. On the way home, she was bubbling over with joy; her team had won! "I think," she mused, "we were especially good at the Herbert Race." I wasn't entirely sure which race she meant. "Oh, you know! It's the one with the little yellow things that you have to jump over." Oh yes. Hurdles. 

What is tragedy?

Last week I was browsing the college bookshelves and hit upon a slew of random books, each sparking ideas for themes giving context to my memoir, such as displacement and travel (I lived in the US for 11 years), uses of autobiography (what is memoir but this), and female self-representation (I can’t write a book without understanding my own vision of identity, and particularly motherhood). I found about eight books that I couldn’t leave behind, so I took them all out. When I got them home, it was the smallest, simply written, most unassuming book, Adrian Poole’s Tragedy that had the biggest instant impact. That one word – tragedy - began reverberating in my head and refused to go away. It took me back to a moment over eight years ago, to a coffee shop in Minneapolis, in the heart of the American Midwest. 

I was sitting in Starbucks overlooking a snow-filled street, meeting with my bosses, Anne and Mary, before going back to work. I’d had a baby four weeks before by C-section, and was still hobbling around in discomfort. The day was so cold, my nostril hair had frozen (it’s a very odd feeling; when that happens, you know the day is going to be below zero Fahrenheit.) Minneapolis has something of a second city looming over the city streets. It’s called the Skyway, and it’s a consumer Mecca of shop-lined bridges linking offices (and yet more shops) so that Minnesotans never have to go outside. You can insulate yourself from the harsh conditions to the extent that you can leave your house via the integral garage and drive to a heated parking lot in the system: you don’t even need a coat. So there we were, coatless and hatless, sipping lattes in our brown leather armchairs, discussing my new baby: nothing odd about that, except that Maia had been born 15 weeks early. An early Christmas present, as the obstetritian put it.

            I was incredibly optimistic about how Maia was doing, and I proudly relayed all my stories about Maia to Anne and Mary. My daughter was robust and feisty for a 25-weeker; at five days old, she’d astounded us by coming through surgery to fix her patent ductus arteriosus. (The “flap” that normally closes at birth, allowing a baby to breathe air, had remained open: it was a common problem for a baby born on the edge of viability.) I laughed as I described the everyday task of changing Maia’s tiny preemie diapers; they swamped her impossibly tiny bottom, which was about as big as a plum. But the best story of all was the one about New Year’s Eve. While everyone else was out drinking themselves to oblivion, my husband Dan and I were holding Maia for the very first time: holding her, skin against skin, heartbeat against heartbeat, trying to pretend that the tubes, the screeching alarms and the flashing lights didn’t exist. In the middle of the intensive care unit, sitting in a rocking chair, I closed my eyes and tuned in to the smell of Maia’s skin, her silken dark head cupped under my hand, the Barbie-like limbs curled up tightly under her soft belly, tickling my own. It was heavenly.

“It’s so tragic,” Anne said.

Tragic? I couldn’t understand what she meant, not at all. I had an amazingly strong baby who was going to survive, despite the odds. She was small and, while what she’d been through was immense, we were convinced the worst was over. What did Anne mean by calling my baby “tragic”? Maia was alive, wasn’t she? I pitied the other babies in the intensive care unit: Maia was in crack-baby company. Their stories were tragic. The nurses reassured us that Maia had had the best start; she was bound to do well. And for the first six weeks of her life, that was true. Having a preemie was overwhelming, it was frightening and stressful, but we had hope, we had good care, and we had each other. Tragedy was not a word I would have picked to describe Maia’s existence.

Until she died.

Tragedy, catastrophe, devastation: these were all words that took on new meaning. I understood them now. They were real, no longer figments of my imagination; they mutated from distant, amorphous, conceptual terms to the here and now. I couldn’t get Anne’s comment about Maia being tragic out of my head. How could I have been so optimistic? I wept at the fourteen days I'd wasted back at work when I should have been with Maia. I’d been saving my maternity leave, so that I could spend time at home with Maia in the spring. I was worried about losing my job if I took extra leave. So I spent two weeks at an ad agency researching ways to sell more dog food, in between breast pumping in a cupboard and seeing Maia at lunchtimes. At the end of that fortnight, when Maia was six weeks old, she became critically ill, and we moved into the intensive care unit to be with her night and day. Three weeks later, I watched my child die. I took the rest of my maternity leave, nursing my grief, my devastation, my catastrophe, instead of my beloved child. I was still pumping milk and Maia was dead. Then, and only then, did I realise what Anne had meant. It was a tragedy.