Dear you,

It’s April, which means National Poetry Month, which means the weather does who knows, which means we’re out of Pisces season and into the more go-get-em Aries (thank god).

I spent March actively sitting with things that scare me. On a work trip to teach patient advocacy at a university in Las Vegas, I used my free time to confront the ways my brain creates problematic patternings that come from hurt, trauma, loss, and scarcity.

Obviously, changing the way one functions, copes, and metabolizes is not something that is done in just one month. Nor should it be. However, the last six months of my life have been full of grief, endless rain, physical pain, stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness; I was ready to work on the common denominator of myself.

So I approached it the way I approach everything: as a scholarly pursuit.

This decision to start actively sitting with wounds and things that frighten me isn’t an entirely new one; I first felt the need to move into another level of therapy and healing last May, while reading Yosa Buson on a park bench in Los Angeles. I was nearly at the end of my tour, I had lost two friends to unspeakable things (one to an accident, one to a long and painful illness), and my dream of having a book in the world had come true. I was strangely undone by the juxtaposition of those two things.

“Coolness – the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell.”

Reading this poem struck me, much like a large piece of resonant metal would, and I’ve never forgotten it. It is always the poem that starts and ends my meditation as I hear the bell chime. “If you ever find yourself wandering off in your practice,” Tara Brach once said, “Just follow the sound of the bell as long as you can.”

I started sitting with the things that scare me (abandonment, not being good enough, social anxiety, grief) because I had reached a place in my healing where it seemed possible to do so without damaging myself; through somatic therapy, talk therapy, EMDR, writing, books, and community (and yes, sometimes even medication) I’ve built a strong base.

I also started meditating because I wanted to be less afraid of dying.

While the death of my maternal grandmother seemed sudden, comparatively, the death of my paternal grandmother was a long, long goodbye. Visiting her was always a practice in sitting with death and dying. At a point, she had been dying for so long that I stopped seeing her hands as they were when I was a child; I gave manicures to nails brittle and aware of time passing.

I’m currently working on translating a collection of poems by an obscure-even-in-his-time Patagonian poet. Today, translating an epitaph on infancy, I came across this line he wrote:

“It is good to understand that we are made of memory,
that time grows without listening to us.
That there are many things we do not understand.”

I turned to a kind of spirituality known for practicing robust and sacred understandings of the rituals of loss and dying, and this was a wise instinct; despite my relatively young age, I’ve experienced more death than most I know who are in a similar station and generation and citizenship in life. It makes good sense to need something larger than our Western framework can hold — and our Western framework does poor work of containing the complex shadow lives of death, dying, aging, grieving.

The white static that happens for people who can’t bear children after they pass their child-bearing years. The solitude of a person who outlives their friends. What to do in the face of a long illness. What to do when your nicest friend is battling terminal illness way too young.

Things that helped change these confront my damaging patterns, my loss of people I love, my creeping self-doubt and bone-tiredness with grey:

• sound meditation (whatever you like, even music, but binaural beats and Tibetan singing bowls worked best for me) 
• visualization (my favorite included imagining being inside of a dirt devil of all of the things I am obligated to do, and then stepping through it to the other side, where a field — in my case, due to my upbringing, cotton — waited for me) 
• disrupting my thoughts with breath* 
• getting right with taking naps (and understanding just exactly how complicated sleep is — for example, we’re the only animals on the planet who force ourselves to get all of our sleep in one fell swoop) 
• active journaling 
• anything & everything by Tara Brach, who combines psychology with mindfulness better than most anyone I’ve seen (and whose voice sounds exactly like my therapist’s, which is comforting to me)

It’s true that your brain cannot be reprogrammed in a month. However, I just went to the same, massive writing conference I go to every year—I just returned last night. It’s 15,000 people who all extrude their loneliness and observative introversion and careful natures and breakup baggage and book deals into the bowels of convention centers at rotating cities every year. It’s a conference I need to go to for my career, and in the past it has filled me with all of the aforementioned toxins, but has also been a beautiful, overwhelming mix of seeing massive amounts of people I love all crammed into bars and coffee shops and libraries and public halls to hear just a few lines of their favorite authors. To click their tongues and shake their heads and say “damn”.

Going this year endowed with the ability to disrupt my body’s anxiety response with breath was life-saving. I felt like I imagine Kevin does in Home Alone, when he seeing the glowing red face of the furnace in the basement and yells I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU ANYMORE!

It didn’t hurt that Portland was falling all over itself in magnolias, and the sun shone for three days straight at 70 degrees, that I had champagne in the sun with friends, that I got a few freckles and got my cheeks kissed by beloveds, that I overheard two young poets I’d never met before talking about my book in glowing ways, without knowing I could hear them. It didn’t hurt that I came home laden with books that I immediately dove into, and that this week, though it’s raining, I have Spring Break and I am only one day in and have felt so inspired that I’ve already written four new poems.

It doesn’t hurt that my life has been here, beautiful and shining, the whole time. When I need reminding, I can just follow the sound of the bell, leaving the bell.

I love you,
July

“What day is it?” one of my students asked in class last week, twirling his pencil.

“The 87th of January,” another quipped back, without looking up. Exactly, I thought. What other month does time slog its snowshoes through, leaving long slashes of slow footprints, like em dashes running through us?

This feeling of slog, of internal snow, is further compounded if you are grieving. If you have death anniversaries that lift their bone-sharp faces and resonate throughout winter, through the naked birch and dead ivy, the live oak and wild fennel. The totemizing nature of my love of planting tulips has never escaped me; with bulbs, you sit with the secret knowledge that a fully-formed, beautiful thing is under the soil, a little bastion of Better And Warmer times ahead.

The tulips in my yard are starting to poke through. Only one more month.

It has been years since I’ve intentionally born witness to the largess of January — as previously mentioned, I often go away, to some hotter clime, some place with friends who are good at the stick-shift of levity, a place where a cold glass sweats with your want of it.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a prolonged moonmoon state—the full terror and beauty of knowing that I'll eventually disperse.
Click To Tweet

But here I am. Sitting in the thoughtful shadow period that comes after losing loved ones. If you think losing grandmothers, especially both at the same time, is a kinder grief because of their longevity then you’re mistaken. Rather—and especially because I am a person who has also lost a mother (the Januaryist of all January anniversaries)—it feels like loss in triplicate, a kind of loss that secretly underscores and seeps; it becomes more compositional and embodied as the world continues its overwhelming ballet.

I am a person who obsesses; this has always been true. Rather than suffering from depression, I suffer from manic hyper-focusing, wherein I zoom in on something and fixate wholly. Right now, it’s embroidery and textile art, a revelation that is hardly a revelation, considering that both of my grandmothers and my mother, respectively, loved to craft. One year, when my grandma Sagert was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she spent an entire year embroidering hummingbirds.

Everyone she knew received at least one ornament, made from scrap fabric, embroidered all over its small and powerful body. I even received a thick white quilt, covered in needle-pointed birds, too beautiful to use everyday.

When she died, my friend Michelle sent me an article about hummingbirds and their incredible hearts. I asked her how she knew and she hugged me. It’s the powerful language of matrilineage. It’s the powerful language of our own collective inwardness, an eternal January.

Did you know that moons have moons themselves? That little submoons orbit the larger moons, pulled in and taxonomized as just another satellite in the gravitational pull of that celestial body. These submoons are called moonmoons (Incidentally, I’m working on a chapbook with the same name, forthcoming).

Moonmoons don’t have a long shelf life; they become engrossed in the larger bodies, or they drift off eventually and break apart. More often than not, they turn to energy that surrounds the larger moon itself.

Another thing: the (moonmoons) cannot stay in orbit around the Moon indefinitely because of tides.

Last week, I received an envelope of photographs that once belonged to one of my grandmothers. When I opened it I discovered that it was full of photos of me as a baby, sometimes with my grandparents, but often with my mother.

My mom died in a January in 1992, and the date has always been a hard one. This year felt particularly brutal, because of the legacy of archemom-types who had just died the month before—those who had been connections to this elusive woman I have loved, and known in the hazy aftermath of death more than in life. I spent the day sending care packages to friends, reading and rereading Meghan O’Rourke’s The Night Where You No Longer Live, and being quietly alone.

The thing about moonmoons is that they never get to be big moons. They eventually lose the groove of their orbit, the speed of their path in a predetermined direction. They fade away, become something larger than themselves. And perhaps that’s a better metaphor for childhood than simply saying that a human child eventually becomes an adult human. Children themselves don’t become moons anymore than adults are fully-conceived moons. Those bodies and ways of moving are temporary, but resonant.

When I look at these photos, I see the largeness of the adults around me—their outward shyness and joy, the way they tilt and move with grace, and observe a kind of order that butts against the senseless things they have, are currently, or will have to navigate outside of the space of these photographs. It’s hard to believe that I am now one of them, and that nearly all of the adults in that photo have fallen from orbit, become absorbed by the darkness of a universe we know very little about.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a kind of prolonged moonmoon state—the maddening circling of an elusively larger entity, the full terror and beauty of knowing that I’ll eventually disperse. That’s the kind of heavenly torture of grief, the slog and winter of it, the bulb before the tulip. There is, admittedly, something lovely about it—after all, we are rarely graceful at sitting in the same space as mortality and staying quiet.

Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
— Meghan O’Rourke

Happy New Year. Happy first walk around whatever body of water is closest to you, first meditation, book read, friend hugged—happy first everything. I know as well as you do that time occupies an elastic-ly arbitrary shape in the world, but I am not about to deny myself the deeply satisfying reward of closing up one year and beginning a fresh one. And if you’ve got similar neurosis around organization, I empower you to do the same.

“Ooooh, I’m being empowered!” P—my partner—always jokes when I say this. “Thank you for empowering me!”

Still, it’s challenging, isn’t it? The way we come face-to-face with the things we’d like to leave in the last calendar year, the things we expect ourselves to be able to cleanly cut away from just because we scrawled that we would in 2019?

For me, this has been apparent in the savagely unpredictable landscape that grief occupies. It’s truly a wild ride. Even as a person who has experienced a good deal of loss in my life, I find myself caught in the Mariana Trench of it: darkness that abounds and about which we know nothing.

This month, I lost both of my grandmothers. In the same week. I also lost a friend. The details of my friend’s death are still being sorted through, so I won’t publicly talk about them, but I will talk to you a little about my grandmothers.

For those of you who have read my work at The Establishment, you know that I lost my parents at a young age. I was adopted by my maternal aunt, and raised by her, her husband, and my maternal grandparents. We all lived in the same trailer park. My stepdad’s family—the man who had still been married to my mother when she died—I have also stayed close with, including and especially his mother.

My grandmothers were of the Silent Generation, though that is the only thing they had in common: the way their movements were informed by a kind of careful attentiveness and disgust with waste that only economic scarcity can instill. My maternal grandmother, Donleita, was a diva who loved leopard print, fanfare, and Jesus. My step-grandmother, Marjorie, was a dressmaker who out-earned her husband (but never talked about it), couldn’t cook to save her life, and had grown up on a farm in rural Oregon where they kept things cold in a hole dug in the dirt. Her father drove Greyhound buses. Her brothers helped load pianos off ships coming from South America. Both women taught me grace, the love of a good cup of coffee, how to sew, how to use lipstick as rouge, and how to survive in a world full of callousness.

I feel strange around my friends—bone-tired, unable to make small talk, monitor my intonation appropriately, or respond quickly enough to jokes. As I walk them to the door, I know that our visit was not one that included me at my best. That I took too long in moments when I needed to be faster, or was too swift in moments that required reflection.

If you’ve been witness to that, it’s not you, it’s deeply me. Please be patient. Please keep being kind. I am hopeful that it will pass quickly, and I also know that healing takes whatever time it needs, no matter what boundaries I try to enforce upon it.

P and I have an annual tradition that we are unable to make happen this year due to the events that unfolded in December: in January, we go someplace hot. We leave behind the wet, gray sog of the Bay Area in January, trading it in for Joan Didion on the beach in the Yucatan, or a cooking class in Bangkok. We save all year so we can circumnavigate not only the drear of post-holiday come-down, but also so that I, specifically, can hide from ghosts; nearly all of my major death anniversaries occur in January. This is some kind of mercy or some kind of sadism, I haven’t quite decided. The slew of deaths last year, however, happened in December, and the funerals themselves are in January.

As such, we’re home. Wearing forty layers of clothing in our 19th century house that leaks hot air (original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful).

Still, we managed to go to Los Angeles for two brief days this last weekend, to meet family for a short trip that brought some levity and kindness to the month. P, always the adventurer, took us to the Marciano Arts Foundation to be blown away by art—Ai Weiwei’s ballooning sculptures of bamboo and silk, namely, that intersect ideas of ancient legend, kite-making, and the refugee crisis. While wandering through the huge, brutalist modernist halls of the Marciano, we encountered work by Bunny Rogers, the 27-year-old who’s making waves in the art community with her work around Columbine.

The piece of hers that we saw was immersive; you are invited to walk into two rooms that are full of falling snow made of paper. Projected on the wall is an animated video of a girl playing piano on a stage. The description of the piece said the following:

Rogers relies on corrupted memories to piece together a narrative that both mourns its origins and begs for resolution. Her videos, A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium (2017) and Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) depict rehearsals of ceremonies for mourning.

My mind went wild at this concept of corrupted memory—what is that, I wondered from my required two-foot distance. A security guard eyed me, looking wary.

In Rogers’ case, it seems to be about the intersection between mourning (a public/private thing) and popular culture/media/cartoon. After all, the reason the pieces are so resonant is because the animated videos reek of after-school-special, and yet are heavy-hitting in their emotional resonance: Columbine. Columbine is a beautiful, pansy-like flower that needs special care, yet the first Google search of its name produces articles upon articles about the school shooting. You need to clarify—”Columbine flower”—in order to get results for the thing that came far before 1999.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized. I know that we tend to take the fractured pieces of our grief and try to hold them up to everything and everyone to see where they fit — to the sky, to see how or if the light shines through. To the face of another, to see if they match the color of their pupils. To the work we do in the world, to see how our own mortality serves us—if we’re doing this living thing right, or paying appropriate homage to those who have gone.

The reason the idea of corrupted memory is so fascinating to me—and potentially a new lens for looking at the way public and private intersect—is because of the way it relates to the identities of marginalized people. I thought, for example, immediately of Elizabeth Marston saying that femme identity is “an unauthorized copy of femininity.” Disallowed.

The fact of the matter, too, is that public and private lines are even more blurred than they once were; social media knows when I’ve been talking to my friends about menstruation, or celery juice cleanses, or that I’m sad my niece and nephew are growing older. I regularly spill my guts on Twitter, unconcerned with being too much. I write thinkpieces, for heaven’s sake. And while I do believe that visible vulnerability is an evolved strength, I also believe it’s because my concept of myself and the internet have both become less defined as opposite of one another—and in that sense, they’ve corrupted.

We position ourselves as opposites of the virtual world, and that is important, somehow, to maintaining autonomy from the internet. But as free media begins to look more and more like personal narratives (which are nothing new — personal journalism really took off in the seventies, thank you Queen Joan Didion), our information becomes, as Bunny Rogers gestures to, pixelated.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized.
Click To Tweet

What does it look like for us to embrace this corruption, at least in times of grief? To allow the soft, shape-shifting of these entities to create for us a kind of collective consciousness that we can pull from in order to enhance our experiences of feeling?  

The fact of the matter is that we need more complicated ways of thinking about our reactions, responses, and selves as individuals—and especially how we as individuals become parts of a whole (community/family/nation). We readily offer that kind of generosity of mindfulness to art, but we rarely do that for ourselves.

Perhaps I should think of myself as an exhibit more frequently—one that depicts provocatively and image-istically, and has a juxtaposed title.

Say, Self Inside Self Inside the Tomb of Marie Laveau

Woman in Flannel, Head in Hands, Stonewall Inn

A Portrait of a Dinner Party at Pearl Harbor

How would you title you?

Several years ago my father died suddenly on my first day of vacation. I had been working over 60 hours a week for a non-profit for three years. I was regularly told I was an incredible employee, often going far above and beyond what was expected of me. I had just been promoted.

A week after my father died I returned to work. I was in shock, I had just barely begun to grieve. I was tired and I managed my pain badly. I began having panic attacks. I desperately needed a break. A month later I asked if there was any way I could have another few days of vacation, as I’d spent my previous vacation planning his sudden memorial and was emotionally and physically exhausted. I was told no. I trudged along, worked ridiculous hours, didn’t have the time or energy to process my grief. Eventually, I was fired. I was told I had become too inattentive, made too many mistakes.

I told myself I was lucky I didn’t yet have a family to feed. I was lucky to qualify for unemployment, which just barely allowed me to eat and live while I continued to grieve and look for work. Not everyone is so lucky.

There are no laws in the United States protecting workers who are grieving. In the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act there is no specific, mandated provision for bereavement leave. And while the FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) requires certain employers to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid family and medical leave to eligible employees, this is only unpaid leave, and the only employees eligible are those who work for private employers with 50 or more employees for each working day during each of 20 or more weeks in the current or preceding year.

So if you work for a company of 45 people, you aren’t even covered for unpaid leave. If your company has 1,000 people for almost four months out of the year, you are not covered. If you are a part-time employee, you are not covered. To deal with this gap, a lot of companies have their own policies when it comes to grief. And a lot don’t.

I trudged along, worked ridiculous hours, didn't have the time or energy to process my grief. Eventually, I was fired.
Click To Tweet

Although most professionals recognize that grief is trauma that can affect people physically as well as emotionally, employers often don’t take this into account while making policies regarding leave. This is common when it comes to death, as if we are afraid we will speak it into existence, death is an experience that we do not address until it is absolutely necessary. Even then it is in hushed tones, and in the U.S. it is like we are embarrassed by our grief. The irony of course is that it is an experience we are all guaranteed to have. We will all lose those important to us. We will all die.

Just as employees should be expected to take time off to recover from the physical trauma of surgery, employees must be given time to heal from the very real trauma that is grief. But instead, people return to work, like I did, distracted with the pain of losing someone, lacking sleep from planning memorials, lacking money from unexpected travel, in desperate need of rest. It is not ok that we have to be financially well off to have time to grieve. You shouldn’t have to earn time to heal.

We are not all affected equally by this injustice. A complete lack of grieving time in non-salaried positions disproportionately affects Women, PoC, and poor people, and especially those who find themselves at the intersection of all three oppressed groups.

Just as wages are not equal for everyone, the same is true when it comes to benefits. Part time employees rarely get paid leave, and when they do it is short compared to how long it takes for most to heal from the trauma of death, which according to most experts is at least 3 months to a year or more to begin to feel some semblance of normality. About 59% of all wage and salary workers in the United States are paid an hourly rate. This means that almost 60% of our employed citizens aren’t legally required to have unpaid leave right off the bat. And most families can’t afford a period of a provider not getting paid anyway.

The irony of course is that it is an experience we are all guaranteed to have. We will all lose those important to us. We will all die.
Click To Tweet

41 million people in the U.S. live in poverty. When you are living check to check, you cannot afford to miss work for more than a funeral, if that. But a funeral does not adequately prepare someone for life without a spouse, or for the depression that can follow a parent dying. Simply put, it isn’t enough. Merely taking the time to grieve can pull families even deeper into poverty.

What happens when you already live below the poverty level and someone close to you, like your partner, dies? Not only are you suddenly missing your partner’s income, you are expected to continue to work to earn your own income like nothing has happened. The average lifespan is about five years longer for women than men in the U.S., and about seven years longer worldwide. Statistically it is likely women will experience the death of a man close to them in their lifetimes. If a woman relies on that man for income, she can now left on her own to fend financially.

Women, especially women of color, are more affected by a lack of bereavement leave, as they are more likely to be single heads of households with children. It is no longer the case that almost all houses are relying on a man’s income. In 2015, 42% of all households with children under 18 had a woman earning most or all of the household income. More than 80% of Black mothers bring in 40% or more of their families’ income. And yet there are almost double the number of women in the United States working part time as men. This means that women are disproportionately affected not only by less income but also by a lack of benefits, including bereavement leave.

Oppression happens in a number of ways. Not giving people time to heal from trauma means they must fight for a way forward through other oppressive systems with the extra burden of being hurt. Black people are 13% of the U.S. population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.

Not only is there a clear wage gap based on race, it has been found that this gap follows employees from position to position. Because a WoC made less at her last three positions, she will make less at her current position. Pairing this with the likelihood she does not have benefits including bereavement leave, and you have systemic oppression that can affect a family, and generations to come.

It benefits everyone to have bereavement leave. When employees are fully rested and supported, productivity goes up. Employees are less likely to quit their jobs when given adequate vacations and sick time. This is true for most benefits. Additionally, it costs money to hire a new employee. Nurturing and adding to your current employee’s skillset with new training is much less expensive than utilizing your HR department to conduct interviews, hire someone new, and train that new employee all the while covering an empty position. Allowing employees time they deserve to heal ultimately costs less.

Not giving people time to heal from trauma means they must fight for a way forward through other oppressive systems with the extra burden of being hurt.
Click To Tweet

Bereavement leave can be done well. In Sweden, every employee can have up to ten days of paid bereavement leave a year. In Canada, “When a member of an employee’s immediate family dies, the employee is entitled to leave on any normal working day that falls within the three-day period immediately following the day the death occurred.” As long as the employee has been continuously employed for three months, they are also eligible to be paid for the days they are out, up to three days.

Everyone dies. Everyone experiences the death of loved ones at some point in their lives. Our fear is doing us a disservice. We are underprepared for the inevitable. We must have systems in place to allow for necessary healing. We must have policies that make leave available for workers who are mourning, because it affects us all. A lack of bereavement leave is oppression and it must be addressed.

Frida Kahlo’s “Henry Ford Hospital” (Credit: flickr/libby rosof)

By Miriam Jameson

Almost two years ago, I was at my doctor’s office, receiving some of the worst news of my life. I don’t remember what the room looked like, what the doctor was wearing, or where I was seated.

I remember that I wanted to scream after the doctor told me: “This happens to 1 in 4 pregnancies — it is very common — and I am so sorry.”

I remember how this made me feel — like a statistic.

I remember feeling like I didn’t have the right to cry.

It was a moment I’ll never forget.

***

In May of this year, I sat at the piano, unsure of what was about to happen. As a songwriter, I don’t plan ahead, or indeed “compose” in the conventional way; instead, I prefer to create improvisational music as I’m moved to do so. This is not how most create, but it’s the only way I know how — to take the authenticity of a moment and hit record.

That day, confused as to why I was feeling so heavy with emotion, I had a vision. In my mind, I was rocking the baby we’d lost, filled with the entirety of a mother’s love. It was from this emotion, this image, that I began to record “Baby J.”

Art has long been used as a tool to process grief, and through that, to create something beautiful; it’s an extraordinary transformation, and a deeply powerful one. As The New York Times put it in a story on artistic creation post-9/11, “Artists have always combated grave tragedy with grave beauty.”

Miscarriage grief can be particularly profound; our national discourse on the topic is so limited that many who have experienced it feel they must bear the burden alone, in silence, which makes the act of artistic expression all the more impactful.

Frida Kahlo began painting in large part as a response to her own miscarriage; in paintings, the surreal aspect of losing a child manifested itself in her signature style — as in the painting “Henry Ford Hospital,” containing a red baby floating above her hospital bed and naked body, connected by rope. Countless other paintings, murals, and photo collections, as well as films, have been created in response to pregnancy loss.

And of course, music has long been a medium that those grieving have turned to — from Lily Allen in “Something’s Not Right” (“We had forever/We never got it together/I waited for you/For you I made it better”) to Hillary Scott in “The Will” (“I may never understand/That a broken heart is a part of your plan”).

Beyonce has spoken candidly about how pregnancy loss inspired her song “Heartbeat,” in which she sings, unaccompanied, “You took the life right out of me/I’m longing for your heartbeat.”

My own song has no lyrics, instead expressing the pain of miscarriage through a short, simple melody alone. But in all these acts of creation, there is a connecting motivation: using art to express something that often feels like it can’t possibly be expressed.

The most beautiful thing about sharing “Baby J” is that it’s not about me. It may be my feelings in the recording, but I am the “every woman.” Because whether you have five children, no children, don’t want children, or have left it for the future to decide — you may have experienced loss. And that loss cuts to the center of who we are as women.

I invite you to listen. And if you’re so inclined, I encourage you, in moments of grief, to create.

***

Just three months after writing my song, I learned about something I had been oblivious to my entire life: October is National Infant & Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month. Upon learning this, I sent out a flurry of emails — to bloggers, to organizations — in the hopes of collaborating to assist in their efforts, engender a more open conversation, and encourage creative works as a way to inspire healing.

As timing would have it, I connected with the executive director at First Candle, a nonprofit devoted to providing support and free grief counseling to those who have lost a child. For the month of October and in honor of National Infant & Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month, 50% of proceeds from “Baby J” on iTunes will go directly to First Candle.

***

Lead image: flickr/Martin Howard

I grew up against the sprawling backdrop of the cornfields, in a college town 75 miles west of Chicago. Despite my physical disability, my father made sure that I had a normal childhood — the kind that feels like the perfect home movie when you look back years later as an adult. We chased lightning bugs in the summer and sledded down snow hills in the winter.

Life was simple.

And then my father was diagnosed with sinus cancer and died by suicide about a month after finishing treatment. After that, things weren’t so simple anymore.

People talk about all the things that happened before the suicide . . . what led to it, the warning signs, etc. But what about what happens after? The devastation. The people who are left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of a life they thought they knew. A life they know, down to the very core of their being, will never be the same. Ever again.

How are we supposed to cope? How can survivors even begin to make sense of all the pain and confusion? That gnawing, sinking feeling in your heart? It just won’t go away. Where’s the instruction manual for navigating this dark, unfriendly terrain?

My father’s death wasn’t pretty. His death was ugly, the kind of ugly that makes you just want to run away. It’s the kind of ugly so dark and unimaginable, you never see it coming. The kind that can make you feel like you’ll be lost forever in a sea of grief. It renders you powerless as its tide pulls you out farther and farther, and you begin to wonder if you’ll ever make it back alive.

How are we supposed to cope? How can survivors even begin to make sense of all the pain and confusion? That gnawing, sinking feeling in your heart?
Click To Tweet

There were no final days spent sitting by his bedside, where we all were able to say everything we wanted to say to each other. There was no comforting hospice care. Those loose ends left dangling at the end of every life? They weren’t neatly tied up in a pretty box with a bow on top; in fact, many of those loose ends are still dangling more than a decade later, whipping around wildly in the air.

He got to say all his goodbyes in a letter he left us. We didn’t. He got his “closure.” We didn’t. Instead, he left us with open, gaping wounds. People say that with suicide, a letter is helpful. They say that the survivors who get one are lucky, as not everyone leaves their words behind. But my father’s letter just painted a confusing portrait of a man who, it turns out, I didn’t even know — a portrait of a man who wasn’t my father.

His letter left me with more questions than answers, in the end.

More consuming than even my father’s actual death, I’ve come to realize, is processing the way he died. No one wants to feel like their loved one would rather leave than stay; it’s the ultimate heartbreak, the kind that bears down on your shoulders, leaving you unable to breathe. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he wasn’t supposed to die like that. The superhero doesn’t give up halfway through the movie — he gets up and keeps fighting. Our story, at least the chapters with him, were not supposed to end this way.

Since my father’s death, some friends and family haven’t talked much about him. It’s either because they don’t know what to say, don’t want to upset us, or, perhaps, it’s just too painful for them. But this denial, their failure to speak of him, is something I struggle to accept. How can someone be such an important part of your life and then just vanish from it? People act like my father never existed at all. Sometimes I just want to scream, “CAN’T YOU SEE IT?? HE’S STILL HERE!”

And he is here — in everything I do, in all my little quirks that remind me of him, in my red hair that he passed down to me.

More consuming than even my father’s actual death, I’ve come to realize, is processing the way he died.
Click To Tweet

Memories are my way of keeping my father alive. They make the past feel within reach again, a necessary comfort when you feel like your life now and your life with your loved one are two completely separate existences.

The word “suicide” is like a black hole of sorts. It’s expansive, never-ending, and dark; no matter how much you talk about it, there’s always more to say. Always. I wish I could say that I know no one can relate, but unfortunately, I know far too many of you can. Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States. We are, in fact, in the middle of an epidemic, with suicide rates at a 30-year high.

So I know that many of you are grappling with what to say, trying to find the words to comfort a family member, a friend — possibly even yourself. It’s been 13 years since my father’s suicide, and I still fumble, every single day, to find the right words. So today, I will write them. Not just for my father. But for me and for you — and for the millions who live with the effect of suicide every day.

Suicide changes you forever.

The idea that a loved one died so unexpectedly and so violently shakes you to the very core of your being, and as much as you may wish to deny it, you’ll never be the same person ever again. I never really understood this until I grieved my father. Slowly, however, I realized that not only was I grieving my father’s death, but I was also grieving the loss of my “old life.”

I think, in the end, the real journey I’m on is learning to say goodbye to my old life, not just learning how to say goodbye to my father. It’s important to remember that sometimes, I — you, we — need to try saying hello to our new lives, if just to see how it feels.

And please, please continue to talk about your loved one. Whether you’re angry or sad or reminiscing about happier times, it’s important to keep your loved one with you. Keeping quiet is akin to letting the suicide win. Don’t let it. You owe it to your loved one — and most importantly, you owe it to yourself.

For the group of us who knows so intimately that life will never be the same, my heart is with you.

Sometimes I fear that I will be mourning forever, that there is nothing ahead but more grief. That no matter what actions I take, each day will begin with remembering all the people I have lost and all the love I am missing. I am afraid I will spend most of my hours ignoring the living, breathing love around me because I miss what I used to have.

The word “miss” is not right. It feels so much like death steals away the people we love. It feels like we are owed more time. It feels like the universe is cruel, and that we deserve better.

Grief made me realize how entitled we feel to life.

Death comes laced with injustice. This is especially true when we lose our loved ones to unnatural causes; we lose our families to poverty, to war, our children are killed by those meant to protect them — and it isn’t fair. Even when death is “natural” it still steals your loved one suddenly, which isn’t right, either. It still feels unjust to those left alive.

We all fight death differently, but it mirrors the way we fight other injustices. Sometimes we passively resist death, silently strong, holding ground as long as possible like those who sat in diners, not so long ago, refusing to move, boldly proclaiming their humanity.

Often, we fight together, marching against death but also for change, like so many of us who have witnessed the chanting of thousands making a difference in public policy. It is rare that we accept death on its face. It is rare that we let our loved ones go without a fight, without an effort toward what would be more just.

The morning my father died, I was the one to affirm that it was time to turn off the machines keeping the shell of my father warm, the one that was rhythmically pushing air into his lungs and blood through his veins. This was not the moment that hurt the most. It was the moment just before, when we were sure he was gone.

Death is not always immediate. It often creeps in the corner, in plain sight for the worst 24 hours/two months/three years of your life, waiting to snatch the person you love. For me, it was 24 hours of waiting for death to come. I was 28, my brother was 19, and the person who had, at one point, been a stay-at-home dad, who had argued with every authority he’d ever met, who attended 40 years of protests, always on the side of what was fair and just, who had carried me on his shoulders so proudly, who pushed our swings, who made our sides hurt with his hilarious sarcasm was suddenly gone.

Once his brain no longer functioned, we did exactly what he wanted, we turned off the shell in which it once lived. After the endless five-minute drive home from the hospital, the rest of my family fell asleep. When the hospital called, I was awake and answered after one ring.

“I’m calling for the family of Arnold Millard.”

“Arnie.” I corrected her. As if he was still alive to care. A tear rolled down my cheek.

“Yes. I know this is a hard time, but. . .”

Organs need to be donated right away. You don’t have much time to consider if you want to save a life, provide sight, donate much-needed skin to burn victims — or if it is more important to keep your family member’s body intact for burial. My father always made it clear that he felt only one of these decisions was just, and therefore what he wanted done with his body.

“Oh,” I said to the woman calling from the hospital, relieved to know the answer. I’d just spent 24 hours not knowing the answer to anything. “Yes, please, he was an organ donor, of course, please use anything you can!”

It turns out you can’t do it that way. You have to go over every possible piece of your loved one’s body and give permission.

“Do we have permission to donate his kidneys?”

“Yes.”

I remembered my family and a friend’s family marching in Washington, D.C. for the 2004 March for Women’s Lives. My dad was so proud that we were all together.

“Do we have permission to use his skin for grafting?”

“Yes.”

I thought of being a young thing, holding my father’s hand, his palm so much larger than my own, him lifting me into the sky and onto his shoulders so I could see the thousands around us, all marching against war.

“Eyes?”

“Of course.”

I realized then that he would never see all I had left to accomplish, all the truths of my own I had to learn. He would never see me share my knowledge with others through my writing. He had been so proud to see my name in print on playbills, but he would never see me or my name again.

“His heart?”

“Um,” I could barely breathe. “Um, he died of a heart attack. He has — he had a metal valve, it was supposed to, I mean it did. . . ”

As a child, for far too long I thought that boys and girls had different heart sounds. Because my father was born with a damaged heart valve, he lived with a pig’s valve until I was a toddler, and after that he had an upgrade to a metal valve and his heart ticked. As my mother and I both have quietly beating hearts, I figured it was because we were women, and men had ticking hearts, like clocks, like metronomes. My father was a musician, playing bass and guitar in several jazz and Klezmer bands. It made sense.

My brother was born when I was nine. Eager to be a big sister, I changed diapers, took great pride in showing him off. One day I hugged him close and realized something alarming.

“I think something’s wrong,” I told my mother.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, his heart, it doesn’t tick,” and the moment it was out of my mouth I saw my mom’s smile. My cheeks turned pink with embarrassed realization.

“Yes, I understand,” said the woman on the phone. “Could it be donated to science if it is found to be viable?”

My father was, among many other things, a scientist. He had degrees in business and chemical engineering and took great pride in his ability to be logical. My dad knew that in the United States, an average of 79 people receive organ transplants each day. He knew that 22 other people die each day because of a lack of donated organs. He was aware that every ten minutes someone new is added to the list of people who need organs.

He knew that if he had a different heart defect, he would be on a list too.

My dad was the one who told me there were people who were able to circumvent being on an organ donation list due to financial privilege. “A list,” I remember him saying, “There is a list of people who right now, at this moment, could fill a stadium. A list of people who need lungs to breathe, eyes to see, a heart to live — and we regularly bury all of these useful items in disgustingly expensive wooden boxes.”

My father had always made it clear he didn’t want any money spent on disposing of his corpse — he considered it silly. While attempting to fulfill his wishes, it still cost thousands of dollars get his ashes in a nondescript box to sprinkle in the Pennsylvania water where he’d spent each spring feeding ducks. We were lucky we had the means to do this.

While my father taught me many important lessons with words, there is one he taught me by showing, not telling. An atheist, he rejected organized religion, but we still went to temple and celebrated Jewish holidays. Though he may not have realized it, he was teaching me the importance of tradition, of ritual to promote community, the value of preserving the good parts of culture. I still hold this lesson dear.

But he also taught me to weigh the importance of tradition with knowledge of science.

So, maybe your value system requires you to bury your dead as “whole.” But when someone who is not an organ donor is embalmed, their organs are thrown out. Literally, thrown in the trash. If they are not thrown out, organs are punctured and filled with embalming fluid. No matter what, your loved one is not being buried “whole.”

Even if you choose to bypass embalming, I must ask, does your belief system, which may have been invented before organs could be reused, which may have had its peak when we died at the average age of 40, does that system really value dead bodies over live ones? Do you?

To those who fear that a doctor who normally works hard to save lives would see your organ donation sticker and suddenly value another patient over you and let you die, there is no basis for this belief. This is a myth and a powerful one; it is keeping people from life-saving organs. Stop giving it power by repeating it.

The grieving will never end. However, my ability to live with it becomes easier and easier. As I learned to think of my father in past tense, it was helpful to know I did exactly what he wanted; it was easier because it was right. He would tell you it was just. I gave my father’s heart away and I hope my family chooses to honor me by making the same just choice.