Small Magic

Images in my mind from the past week...
In no particular order:

A local department store going out of business.
I go after work one day to see if I can find any sweatshirts for Dahlia
Amid the picked-over merchandise.
I wander for a while in the infant-toddler section
Like a ghost yearning to return to another plane
Of existence.
Nobody sees me...
Nobody there sees ME,
The real me whose arms could almost be holding Tikva
As I shop for her in my imagination.
I picture what she would look like in things I see,
A pink, orange and yellow dress she'd look so beautiful in
With her golden skin and dark hair.
Winnie the Pooh pajamas,
Tiny jeans.
So pretty, my Baby Girl... I walk on.

I find two sweatshirts and a shirt for Dahlia.
I get in line to pay and almost get into it with a woman in line
About whose turn it is next.
I have no energy to fight with her
But I go to the counter first,
Thinking, Leave me alone. I've had a shitty year.
She has no idea, just thinks I'm a bitch.
I walk out like a ghost.

I had a dream one night about Tikva.
In my dream I could picture her toddling around.
She was so pretty, so pretty.
White dress, dark skin, black hair, black eyes, big happy smile, dancing.
I knew in the dream that I was just imagining her that old...
Then... Tikva was still an infant
And still alive in the ICN.
We felt so tired with the back and forth, back and forth to and from the ICN.
We couldn't take the endless feeling of it all,
The unknowns.
We asked them to move our daughter to another hospital,
And to not tell us where she was.
We thought it would be easier if we just let her go there,
Trusted them,
And let it go,
Let her go.
But it wasn't...
I couldn't handle not knowing - ever - if she lived or died.
So I asked them to tell me where she was
So I could go to her
And be with her no matter what.

Tuesday night, a Hanukkah party with our Bay Area Jewish community,
People we have known for years,
Who know us deeply, love us unconditionally.
It is comforting to be in the fold of their love,
Of each other's love,
Surrounded by the delicious smell of latkes frying in oil,
Inescapable.
I reconnect with girlfriends I haven't seen in months.
People tell me, (a hint of surprise in their voice?) You look good.
I definitely don't feel invisible.
I am energized.
And when I get home, I'm exhausted.
Connection is draining these days even while it charges me.
I find that I don't realize it in the moment,
Probably because I am so nurtured by it.
But afterwards I feel it, that desire to do less socially,
Especially in large groups,
To conserve my energy for myself,
Especially in wintertime,
Especially now that I have to give some of my energy to others at work.

I overheard a conversation somewhere else that pissed me off.
It was two young women talking about nursing.
One had just started taking prerequisites to go back to school to become a nurse.
The other, who works in something completely unrelated to medical care,
Was telling her not to sell herself short and "just become a nurse"
When in a few extra years of school she could become a doctor.
I hate conversations like that
Where people talk with great conviction about something they know absolutely nothing about.
As if nursing and doctoring are anything close to the same kind of work,
One just a mediocre, unmotivated version of the other.
As if you can even become a doctor in "just a few extra years."
(Has this person been through the 10+ years of medical education I have seen friends go through?)
But more importantly: As if you are selling yourself short "just" becoming a nurse.
Instead of screaming at her, Do you have any idea what nurses really do, how important they are?
I left the room.

I read this the other day,
This babylost father said it all
About God
So beautifully, so true to my heart.
I've thought a lot since about how much can go wrong when a baby is born,
If a baby lives to be born.
How come this is now my life,
My community?
It always will be...
At least I'm not here alone.

When I was at the candlelight ceremony at UCSF on the 14th,
I said to the nurse practitioner who heads the palliative care program,
(Maybe that's what I'll do when I become a nurse?)
It's striking how many of us there are,
I wish there were less of us here today.
I thought I saw a young boy I'd seen in the elevator to the 15th floor
Sometime in the summer when I was going to see Tikva.
He was there in the ICN visiting his baby sister.
When I saw the boy I thought was him at the ceremony,
I got so sad thinking that little girl didn't make it either.
Later I realized that it wasn't the same boy
Because his mother looked about 6 months pregnant
And the timing wouldn't have worked out for her to have had a brand new baby
In June, July or August.

June, July, August...
That wasn't so long ago
But it feels like another lifetime,
The one that changed me forever.
I don't know what to say about 2008
Except that I'm ready for it to end.
I no longer feel like I am leaving Tikva behind
If I leave this year with great relief.
It's not possible for me to leave Tikva behind,
It's just not.
And yet it's sad to feel that way about the year my daughter lived.
It's the only year I'll ever have with her,
The only one.

Dahlia played in the kids' room at the candlelighting afternoon
With the other kids who had lost siblings.
Dave and I spent an hour making scrapbooks and picture frames for Tikva's photos.
Then we went to the sharing stories workshop
And sat in a circle of family and friends of children who had lived challenging short lives and died too young.
The love of mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and friends oozed from the circle.
One mother of a teenage daughter, the young girl a mother herself
To a baby born too small and sick to live for very long,
I will never forget hearing the older mother say about her daughter,
In going through her pains, in caring for her baby, she showed me a maturity I am deeply proud of.
A woman whose daughter died at a year and a half of a cancer that took her life in just three months
Coming to us to ask about our child and tell us about hers,
Still carrying so much grief over a year later...
How could she not?
Friends there to support moms and dads who had lost babies,
Apologizing if they had not been able to be more present when the baby had been alive.
A baby's uncle saying that his niece lives on through him,
That when he had held her she'd sensed the fear in his heart and cried.
They all wore t-shirts in honor of Princess Tanaya
Who lived for 10 months.
We met her parents in the parking garage afterwards...
Kinship.

I hugged Stephanie, the ICN social worker who had been there for us since I still carried Tikva.
We told each other we'd missed each other.
I told her she was smaller than I remembered her in my memories,
Probably because to me she felt so big,
Like a rock.
I found myself missing that place where everyone understands me
And I am not a ghost.
We sat together in the candlelighting,
A room full of ghosts no longer,
Seen, silent except to light a candle and say our children's names.
I lit our candle and Dave carried Dahlia as she said her sister's name in the microphone.
I watched in awe as Stephanie lit her candle for...
Probably more babies than I can imagine.
I was asked to read this standing in front of the candles.
I adored listening to a sweet man reading this.
The invitation and program from the candlelighting now go in Tikva's box.
The scrapbook is ready for the photos I ordered prints of online.
The picture frame Dave made is ready for a photo of Dahlia with Tikva
For the big sister to have in her room.

When I read that babylost father's blog post about God the other day,
I clicked around some of his other writings and found this blog
About a tiny little girl with a brain tumor
Working hard to get well at UCSF.
He doesn't live here, the babylost dad - he lives across the country.
Yet he's paying attention to someone way out here,
So close.

I know I'm not the only one who is so aware of how much struggle there is all around me.
I know I'm not the only one who has had a very sick child.
I know because it's part of the conversation these days,
Maybe because I'm older and I know more people with sick parents
Or sick partners
Or who are struggling themselves.
Maybe because I am more open now that I have lost in a way I had never lost before?
Maybe because I've always been hypersensitive to things around me,
Emotional things
And there is just a lot of pain in the world right now?
I don't know why
But I notice it.
And it does make me cry
And it does make me realize that it's probably not going to change back in the other direction in my awareness
Now that my eyes are wide open.
I'm not the only one thinking about all this...
How we are all interconnected,
All fragile,
All wondering, What is going on with us?

I open Tikva's jars and smell her lambie, her duckie, her blankie.
They still smell like her.
What is that?
Is that magic,
The way someone's smell remains?
Is that their soul,
So that when the soul leaves the body
There is no longer the person's smell on that body?
I smelled Tikva after she died and we were back upstairs in the ICN.
I smelled her in her neck, where she had always smelled most like her.
Her smell was gone.
I smelled the top of her head and there was just the faintest hint of her still there
As if her soul had left through the top of her head
And a tiny spark of it was still there
Barely.
There are kabalistic teachings that the soul leaves the body through the seventh chakra
At the top of the head
To return to God.

When I touched Dahlia's soft skin on her back yesterday,
I could feel Tikva,
Right back in the ICN where I had sat next to her,
My hand almost entirely across her soft warm back.
Mystifying, how both of my girls feel the same when I touch the back and front of their hearts.
What is that...
A shared family soul?

Last Friday afternoon, Dave and I went to see Milk at the Castro Theater.
I had one of those I love San Francisco because it's the funkiest place on earth moments I've been having a lot lately.
Moments that make me sad in advance at the idea of leaving here again come summer.
Moments that help me to relish living again in this special place
Even though I'm the ghost who isn't really supposed to be here now.
Dave and I met at the theater so I parked my car a few blocks away
And smiled inside (and probably outside too) as I walked by groups of
Handsome, proud, free and abundant gay men,
Holding hands, arm in arm.
What a tremendous place, this little hub unlike anywhere else in the world.
Men have been coming to the Castro, to San Francisco,
From all corners of the world and the country
To live freely as themselves for decades.
This place, this place where I walked to see a movie about a man who helped build the gay rights movement.
And I got to see it in the Castro Theater.
Because right now, San Francisco is where I live.

Dave went to the Hazon conference today.
Dahlia and I are spending the next four days together.
I'm at my best with Dahlia when I immerse myself completely in being with her
Undistracted.
Without planning much of the day,
We had a magical Christmas for two Jews who have no connection to the holiday.
We joined family at some friends' to prepare 56 meals for the homeless living in San Francisco's industrial district,
Too far from the soup kitchens and churches to travel for a hot Christmas dinner.
We drove from there through the empty streets of the Mission to Union Square
Where Dahlia spontaneously decided that we should try ice skating.
I haven't ice skated, I'm pretty sure, since I took lessons for about a year when I was 9 or 10
(I even convinced my mom I needed a white skating dress)
But strangely you don't forget how to ice skate any more than you forget how to ride a bike.
Dahlia was fearless, and found it amusing when she got wiggly and almost fell many times.
With every loop around she got better and better.
My little girl was ice skating...
I have these moments sometimes when I realize just how big she already is.
We oo'ed and aah'ed looking into the department store windows at the Christmas decorations
(Which this Jew secretly adores... all those sparkles and lights).
Then we found an open pastry store by the cable car stop and got day-old pastries
To take to the movie theater at the top of a beautifully lit empty shopping center.
Dahlia can sit through a movie now
As long as I let her be the wiggliest kid in the theater,
Today's restlessness compounded by the fact that her butt was wet from falling on the ice rink just before we left.
We went for Thai noodles after the movie
And made numbers and letters and shapes out of chopsticks.
Walking back through Union Square to our car,
We stumbled... of course... onto the giant menorah lighting that was just happening
In the shadow of the even more giant Christmas tree.
Jewish people holding candles of their own
And singing Hanukkah songs.
It was a completely besheret
Meant to be kind of day.


Happy Hannukah
Merry Christmas
May the new year ahead be peaceful
And full of small magic,
Light amid the darkest moments.