.life and loss.
BAM! Week 8, Aug 7, 2010
Last night I decided to make a footbath and get some quiet space after a really busy, happy, emotional, challenging, fun week. As I was picking baby roses from the yard I was reminded of a Baby Rose I know only through her mom’s writing about her loss and grieving process. This led me to think about another family who marked the birth and death of their son this week. And as I was arranging my bowl of white roses I found myself wondering about my brother who would have been 52 today. So my easy, casual BAM! shot of me relaxing led to a remembrance of a person who left too soon, before I could even say a proper hello but whose life will always be carried with me. He had the sweetest of smiles and the gentlest of souls and I find it startling how much I miss him though we never met. There are a few things I want him to know and there is only one way I can tell him:
Dear Bubby,
In my baby book, there is a yellowed scrap of newspaper with a crease running diagonally down its center where someone folded it to fit on the page. The headline screams a declaration of happiness about my birth but it always confused me. Scattered throughout the book are images of my earliest days full of family and smiles but I see the places where you are not holding me, where I am not gripping your finger. Mom, Dad, Lisa, even Aunt Sherri all look pleased with me but because I read that newspaper clip I don’t understand for the life of me why? I could be no substitute for you, someone they had all loved so much for so long before me. Only Mom knew me through tiny flutters but you, you they had hugged, read to, played games with, pushed on a swing, taken camping. They had you and they lost you. Who am I to come in and take your place?
It’s never made sense to me. Why am I alive and you aren’t? Everyone loved you so much- I can’t begin to tell you how much. I know because I’ve lived with the magnitude of that love in the magnitude of the gaping hole you left behind, one I felt expected to fill. All I can say is, thank god I wasn’t a boy.
I get that the road was slick and that Dad made a bad choice in turning so suddenly when he missed that corner. I get that it was a huge misfortune another car was in place to broadside our family, hitting your door and ripping off the side of the car. I get that Lisa was lucky to walk away with scrapes even though she was forever changed seeing you ruined next to her. I get that it is a blessing Mom only broke her arm and blacked out, taking away her memory of the impact and sparing her the agony of what followed. I get that Dad found his namesake lifeless in the seat behind him and held the enormity of that in his heart always. I get that it was an accident. What I don’t get is why it was you and not me? Why did Mom’s womb protect and hold onto someone who was only a hope? Why was a perfectly wonderful son traded for someone who had not yet been held, kissed and adored? They had tucked you in at night, kissing your sweet head through your sandy hair and loving your gentle, happy smile. Sure it would have hurt to lose me. They would have been devastated. But I cannot imagine that the heartache could compare to losing a child they already knew. I was not yet part of the family and it’s never seemed fair to me that my life was given in place of yours. As if my future life mattered more than yours already did.
I’ve spent my entire life feeling inferior and trying to make up for it.
That story in my baby book informed my life more than the pictures of my very days. In spite of evidence that I was alive and loved I clung to the belief that I shouldn’t be, couldn’t be the way you were. That it wasn’t okay. I sabotaged myself before I even got started. Told myself I wasn’t enough, couldn’t be as perfect as I needed to be to be worthy of this life I was so privileged to have, the life that really should have belonged to you.
I divided us into two categories and it shaped my understanding of life: what we have and what we don’t have. We can either have what we have or we can dream and plan for something new. I began to feel that under some cosmic rule there could be one or the other but not both. You were lost so I could be and I’d better appreciate it. Whoever put that damn article in my baby book made a huge mistake, wrapping my beginning with the leaden ribbon of your ending. Intertwining my life and your death doesn’t make sense. My five year old mind didn’t understand that as I began to read for myself and finally formed some context of how you left our family. Of course I was a source of joy when I was born after months of grief. Of course I was doted on and made everyone happy. But what a burden to bear, to be the holder-up of everyone, as I thought was my role. So I learned how to please, to make sure everyone was happy. Of course. That’s why I was here, right? I began to wonder, what is my purpose? If I lived instead of you then there must be some great mission for me. I’m supposed to do something big, I thought, so I became a dreamer and a thinker. What am I here to do to be worthy of this life stolen from my brother? Something important…
So you know what happened, right? At some point I got tired and decided to swing to the other side as far as possible, to do what I wanted. I’d been angry for a very long time without knowing it. Then I realized I was feeling something real. Through my pain I finally saw that you and I are not mutually exclusive. That dreams and hopes are just as important as the reality of our lives. That we can have both or choose to let the other go or a thousand points in between. That there can be death in life and life in the face of loss. That I am as important as you and there is room for both of us to be loved. For who we each are…and were. I can live even though you didn’t that day.
Your story is not all of mine, but a part of it. Your death changed our family forever and altered how I may have been parented had you not been taken so soon. When I turned thirteen and three weeks I was acutely aware that I had now passed your age and I took you with me on teenage adventures, guiltily reminding myself you never had them. Big decisions like college through me into a frenzy of getting it right, not wasting my/our life. Then someone told me that maybe it’s possible I’m not here to do something big but to maybe parent kids who will. I now know what bad advice that is, but then, at that time in my life, the clouds parted and I felt so relieved. Maybe I could cut myself some slack. Then ten years later I had kids and knew I had to be the perfect parent to nurture these souls destined for greatness (and let me tell you, they are great.) So I went from perfect daughter to perfect mother, still missing the point. The pressure was still on.
Then a few years ago I stopped trying to control it all. I looked at my whole children and understood the enormity of their very existence; that they were here, just living and breathing, playing and exploring and connecting and loving. It was enough. I let my kids have their own dreams, without any value of their size or importance. My role is very clearly as their facilitator and caretaker, not their director. They have the time and the space to be who they are. That’s life, their life, and it’s wonderful.
So I was left with only myself for which to dream and for whom to hope. Yes, I now understand that I can do that. See, I still have my wonderful life with my beautiful family and I can still hope for more. That’s not selfish- that’s called living. That’s not giving life for one and letting the other die. That’s finding a way to squeeze every drop of possibility and happiness out of the days I have.
I was wrong with those categories I created. You and me- we aren’t either/or but rather and/if. If there’s pain, I can still find joy. If I feel empty, I can fill up. I can have love and I can have more. If I am alive, I can live. If I forget how, I can learn again.
What our family has always known is this: to have loved and lost is better than to have never loved at all. There’s room for us both. Knowing that now, I finally figured out that big, important mission I have here, to make this life worth living. I always envisioned that we met as I was coming in and you were going out. You stopped me and told me about Mom and Dad and how to love them. But that wasn’t the biggest piece of the puzzle. What you didn’t whisper in my ear was what I needed to discover for myself on my own journey. With you and without you, I’m learning how to love myself.
Carrying you with me always,
Your baby sister, Flo
Link to last week’s BAM!: Week 7
