Bummed

To be completely honest,
Right now I am feeling bummed.

I feel bummed because it's cold in my house
And the cold makes my joints achy,
And I feel my least favorite season - dark cold winter - approaching.
(Once in a while I look forward to winter,
To the opportunity to really GO IN,
Deep inside myself,
To that most profound and sacred place of healing.)
My body doesn't like winter, though.
Everything about me just does better in warm weather,
Like Hawaii...

I think this every fall/winter/early spring:
I need to get one of those UV lamps to stare at so that I don't get too depressed.
I also think: How on earth will I get through it when we move to a place that actually has real winter?
(No need to go there now...
Enjoy another mild San Francisco winter.)

This year feels so different, though...
The sadness so much more profound,
The going in more big,
Everything more raw.

Tikva felt so close to me when I woke up yesterday morning,
It was like I could practically touch her tiny hands.
Then an email waiting in my inbox, from someone very close,
Someone I know loves me,
Yet you can't really understand completely unless you've been,
Unless you are,
Where I am.
There was too much there in the email
And my heart dropped...
Too much information about other babies,
Healthy babies, babies who are alive and whom their parents can hold.
And I just can't do that anymore...
Receive that kind of information without saying anything.
I'm not there yet, and I don't have any idea when and if I ever will be.
But right now I can't receive that.
I'm not interested in seeing photos of healthy babies.
I'm not interested in hearing about baby showers,
Sleepless nights because baby was up teething,
First birthday parties,
Easy pregnancies...
Unless I am the one to ask for it, I just don't want to hear about it.
I just can't.

(It's not that I don't care...
I think you can understand, right?)

(I still wonder if they really truly know how lucky they are...)

I'm trying to get comfortable with the new way in which I connect with Tikva...
As my angel floating on the breeze,
In the two amazing Red Tail Hawks gliding on the wind
Practically following Dave and me yesterday at Ocean Beach and Sutro Heights.
For the most part, I do a good job feeling her there,
Feeling comforted that she is still here with me, all around,
Free and unencumbered,
Not the one burdened by grief and yearning.
(I wonder sometimes if her spirit ever yearns to be
In a body, in my arms.)

Then just when I get comfortable,
Something comes my way that feels like a giant reflection right in front of my face,
Contrast showing me all the ways in which I don't have Tikva:
In my arms, healthy and well, home and nursing at my breast,
The promise of her growing up along with me into the future.
That just hurts too much, and then I feel like I can't feel Tikva's spirit that is all around me,
And I say to her, like I did yesterday as I drove past UCSF on my way home from the farmers market,

"Tikva, where are you? I miss you."
Then she answers in the Red Tail Hawk... two of them even.
Here I am...

It's not anyone else's fault, that I feel this contrast so vividly.
No one else is responsible for what I see, how I see.
I am the one who sees it so intensely, I know that.
So for now I'm choosing to avoid it as much as possible.
I can't avoid it completely,
Not unless every pregnant woman or small child all of a sudden moves away from San Francisco.
But I can ask not to be presented with more of it than I am ready to take in.
I can say that right now I am probably not the one who is going to get super excited to receive anyone's baby news or children's photos.

I wonder if anyone around me ever thinks I should be past this by now.
That I had plenty of time to prepare for this outcome,
That it's time to move on to a place where it doesn't hurt so much to see another baby in someone's innocent arms.
To be honest, I'm not scheduling my process based on anyone's ideas,
And I am aware that even I put limits on myself that aren't helpful.
I know grief and healing are a spiral of continuous rings,
And that you have to revisit hard days even amid easier ones.
It doesn't move in a straight line, and it doesn't have an end.
I am not expecting to heal from this in any way I am used to.
Rather, I am learning to integrate this reality into my being,
My forever changed and awakened being that I am just barely starting to get to know.

Another bummer yesterday: A mom from Dahlia's old preschool from last spring
Coming up to me at a birthday party and telling me she was sorry about everything.
Last time any of them saw me, I was still pregnant, very pregnant,
Awaiting her arrival, everything unknown and unwritten,
Anything possible.
Now I'm the one who lost her baby, the one whose baby died,
(The one whose baby touched hearts all around her.)
I don't like being that person in other people's eyes,
But right now I am.

And to be honest, I dislike it just as much when people don't know.
I hate feeling anonymous.
I hate being just another regular woman
When what is huge right now is that I am Tikva's mom.

Something that felt good on Friday: Wearing my I'm with Tikva t-shirt to the dentist's office.
The Jewish dental hygienist asked me to remind her what Tikva means,
So I told her and then shared that Tikva was my daughter who lived for a short time this summer.
I didn't need to have a long conversation about her,
But it felt good not to pretend that it was just a t-shirt,
And that Tikva to me only means hope,
Not my Baby Girl who flies on the wind now as the Red Tail Hawk,
And has nothing to do with my heart that is broken and forever changed.

It feels so much better to tell people about Tikva
Than to gloss over the huge drippy hole in my heart.

My sweet friend Lisa reminded me that, "The hole is part of the whole."

Pretending nothing has happened, that Tikva didn't exist, that Dahlia is my only child
Makes me feel empty, lonely, incomplete.
I think that's why right now I can't share the joy of those around me who have healthy new babies,
Because then I have to cover up my grief or ignore it or put it aside, put it away.
Because what new parent wants to hear about the grief of someone whose baby died?
I don't think my grief is going to make anyone feel especially comfortable,
And I can't care for someone's discomfort when I have to care for my own right now.

I'm bummed because I have to get a job now,
In this uninspired and uninspiring economy,
In an industry I am so tired of,
And join the masses of regular joes going to a job every day.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against working
And I have always felt good about working in the social sector.
It just feels so dull, so boring, so anticlimactic after all that has unfolded.
I'm bummed that I didn't do something practical in college so that I didn't find myself more than 15 years later doing work I no longer feel a passion for.
I'm bummed for the same reason Dave is bummed to still be personal training when he so yearns to be a rabbi already -
I wish I could be a nurse already, but I have a lot of time and work to do before that happens, we both do.
I'm bummed that I didn't go to nursing school straight out of college,
That I didn't take any useful science classes in college and have to start from scratch now.
I'm bummed that I'll be in my 40s when I finally make my career change.

I know... It's useless to have regrets.
But I do have them, and right now I just feel bummed.

Bummed, mostly, that when I woke up this morning
Feeling Tikva so close that I knew her tiny warm sleeping body had been curled up in my arms in my dreams,
I had to remember that I was just dreaming.

I did something big on Friday on my way home from the dentist's.
Consciously, with intention in that moment, but not planned much in advance,
I drove on Parnassus all the way past UCSF and then back.
Slowly, stopping my car for a while and staring up at the 15th floor
From up really close just across the street,
Amid all the regular bustle of the place.

I cried the whole time, sunglasses on and Kleenex in hand to dry my dripping tears.
I breathed deeply, just took it all in
And acknowledged this: This is the place where my daughter LIVED
Her entire too-short life.
It's not just where I prepared for her arrival.
It's not just where she was sick or just where she died,
But it is where she lived.
It made me cry deeply, but it felt good to drive there.
It felt good to be amid the familiar flow of people moving back and forth across the street.
It felt good to wonder at all that goes on in each of those many windows,
On the 15th floor and all the other floors.

It all felt like the week after we finished performing To Kill A Mockingbird in high school,
When the show was over but the set was still up on the stage in the auditorium,
And I walked around its emptiness amid the ghosts of all that had unfolded there,
Could almost hear my friends and me reciting our lines.

It felt good to be wearing my I'm with Tikva t-shirt as I went there.

For the past week I've used my cell phone camera to take a few pictures of it:


Trying to capture the UCSF that I pass every day,
(Difficult to ignore - it is so massive in the not-so-distant distance.)


The UCSF that I drove slowly past on Friday,
(The last long window on the right at the very top,
That's where our story unfolded.)


The sunset glowing on the many buildings of UCSF,
The eucalyptus forest of Mt. Parnassus next to it.
(Pretty in a way...)

I feel calmer when I pass it now,
Since I drove consciously there on Friday.
It is less this haunting place in the distance,
This monolith on a mountain,
And more just a familiar home for my grief
As I am letting myself explore my grief right now.
It's fitting that it is huge, that is is intense,
That it is a place that holds hope and suffering,
Triumph and struggle,
Together.

Kind of like life...