thank you

I just want to take a few moments here before Nanowrimo starts - and I devote even more of my time to writing! - to say "thank you" to all of you who have been reading my blog this month. I know it probably hasn't been easy going along with me on this journey, but it has been comforting to have companions. I appreciate that you have stuck with me and continue to offer support, even if it's just by coming here and keeping track of what's happening with me. It makes me feel a little less alone.

Also, thank you for the comments. I've received some very wonderful and touching comments and emails from you all, and they really do make my day. They help me remember that there is a whole group of people out there who care about and remember Lauren, that Geordie and I are not alone in mourning her absence. That means so much to me.

Thank you, for everything.

my new reality

So, I had a really good day with my husband on Wednesday. We went out to a nearby town (Mishima) that we’ve always meant to visit but never had the chance to do so while I was pregnant. We've been through Mishima dozens of times before – it’s the largest train station in our area. We changed trains there to get to our hospital, and it’s also a shinkansen (bullet train) station, so we always came through here on our way to Tokyo. We’ve always wanted to be able to linger but never could. Today, we did. We visited Rakujyuen, a big and extremely beautiful park that had imperial connections during and after the Meiji Restoration. In addition to the extensive gardens, they have a small collection of animals and a petting zoo, which Geordie enjoyed. He’s a very hands-on type of guy.

Then, we walked to Mishima Taisha (Mishima Big Shrine), which we knew was large but was much larger than expected. It was getting dark by that time, so there weren’t many people around, but it was obvious that the shrine was preparing for an upcoming celebration – Shichi-Go-San. This means “Seven-Five-Three,” and it’s a traditional festival day that celebrates the growth and maturation of children; specifically, boys aged three or five and girls aged three or seven (hence the name of the festival). The children are dressed up in colorful kimono and taken to their local shrines to be blessed and for families to pray for their continued health and growth. Shichi-Go-San is held on November 15th, but sometimes children visit earlier than that, for various reasons. By the time we got there, it was really too late for anyone to be there for any celebrations, which was good. It’s hard for both of us to be around young children now. It hurt a little bit thinking about how I would’ve liked to bring Lauren to a shrine in a few years for her Shichi-Go-San visit. I used to like to think of how pretty she would look in a kimono, how proud we would be of her.

And I’m so angry now! It was hard to be angry in such a peaceful, beautiful place like Mishima Taisha, but I feel it now. Why did this happen to her - to us? Why is it that we have to let go of our dreams for the future? Why are we the ones who have to mourn our daughter, while others can continue to dream and smile and laugh and LIVE?

In these quiet moments, I find myself taking all these hopes and dreams I had for Lauren and turning them over, and I can almost feel them happening. She's so real to me that I can see her doing all these things that I wanted her to do, I can hear her laughter – I may never have heard her voice, but I can hear it and know that it's her. I can see her in my mind, standing there before the shrine, dressed like a flower, and she looks back at us because she's run ahead – she's just like her father, curious and impatient and needing just to GO and run – and she's so lovely in the sunlight, a free and wild creature, unruly dark curls bouncing around her face, and she smiles like a supernova. And her father hands me the camera, and she squeals as he chases her and catches her up in his arms and swings her around, and I am filled with so much love for them because they're mine and I belong to them. THIS is how things are supposed to be, THIS is what should be the reality, and the cold, gray darkness I'm living now is just a nightmare that will pass into the night.

Except this nightmare never will pass; it is my world now. It is my every waking moment, the pain of which is so great that I often think it shall destroy me. Shatter me into pieces. Again. And again. Every day, I try to put myself together again. Some days I’m more successful than others. Some days, I fool myself into thinking I’m alright again. But the illusion never holds up. I look into the mirror of myself, and I see there the happy, laughing mother and her bright-eyed daughter, and I know it should be me and Lauren.

But it's not. And the anger at how unfair it all is flows out of me, and all it leaves is emptiness. The anger doesn't help; nothing can help. I will always have an empty place inside me, an empty place in my life where Lauren should be but isn't.

waiting for a rainbow

In the vernacular of the pregnancy and baby loss community, a baby born after a loss is called a rainbow baby. The idea is that this child is the rainbow after the storm that was previously endured, the culmination of a hard-fought battle against despair and grief. Some women go on to have two, three, or even more rainbow babies; others struggle to have one. For those still trying, they are living, breathing gifts of hope, a promise that not everything is lost.

Even so, it's a long, difficult road for those hoping for or carrying a rainbow baby. I'm terrifed at the prospect of getting pregnant again, even though it's something that I want very much now. From the first day we went into the hospital, Geordie and I knew that we wanted to try again. Lauren was an unplanned pregnancy, but she brought so much love into our lives, so much hope. As frightened as we were of becoming parents, we also knew that we wanted her. We wanted the family that she made us into. We wanted to love her and each other, and we wanted to raise her together. Nothing felt more natural. And as soon as we knew she was gone, we knew we wanted that for ourselves and for Lauren's memory.

It's not that a rainbow baby is a replacement. Lauren - or any other lost child - cannot simply be replaced. There will never be another baby like Lauren. What there will be is Lauren's younger brother or sister, someone just as unique as Lauren was and just as special. Another baby won't be Lauren, and that's as it should be. People don't have more than child because the first one is faulty, after all. No child is a replacement for another.

I hope it will happen for us. Someday. Not yet. We're not ready for it yet, in so many ways. Some people try again as soon as they get the all-clear from their doctors; we won't be doing that. Our first few months back in the States are not certain ones - we don't know where we'll end up or what we'll be doing or what our living situation will be like. We want to be settled before trying again; we want to avoid the stress of uncertainty and moving that we went through this year. Being pregnant again will be stressful enough; we want to make it as easy on us as possible.

Also, emotionally, we aren't ready, and it will probably be a while. I've read a lot of stories of women who try again two or three months afterwards and have their babies around the due date of their lost child. I don't think that's something I could do. It's not just the closeness to Lauren's due date, even though there are so many reasons why that would make me uncomfortable (I can't bear the thought of sharing Lauren's day with a rainbow baby, who should have a day of his/her own). I don't know that I could be pregnant again as I was pregnant this year, experiencing all the same things as I experienced them with Lauren. My rainbow baby will be a new baby, and I want new experiences. I don't want to relive everything. And three months is not enough time for me. I don't have the strength to try again so soon. I want to, more than anything, but I know it won't be right for me.

And, one more thing - probably the most important thing. I'm scared. Not of being pregnant again; I've found that I can survive that. Likewise, I'm not afraid of labor and delivery, as I know I can also survive that. I'm afraid of what all baby-loss mothers are afraid of: losing another child. The odds of that happening are small. But it can still happen. I won't be fooled by the innocent naivete of the pregnant woman who has never felt a loss. I see life now through the eyes of experience, and I wonder that it might not be possible for me to simply enjoy being pregnant now. I want to enjoy it next time, appreciate it for everything it is. But how can I? From the moment I feel my baby moving, how will I be able to think of anything else? How many minutes - hours - will I spend lying on my side, waiting to feel that life is still nestled within me? I don't want to be scared my entire pregnancy, but I doubt I can trust myself not to be.

It's really for this reason that I will need time before trying for our rainbow. I need to know that I can trust myself and my body to have a healthy pregnancy; I need to have confidence that I can give birth to a live, breathing baby. But I do know this - I'm waiting for the day when I can hold my rainbow baby and look into his or her eyes and know that things are alright. A rainbow baby won't bring Lauren back to me, but it will still bring something wonderful into my life, and I want that. I want to bring another child into our little family, a child I never thought I would want to have, a child I never would have thought to expect. I want more than anything to meet Lauren's younger brother or sister.

what I see when I close my eyes

I’ve been reading a lot of pregnancy and baby loss blogs lately, and it’s both heartbreaking and inspiring to read the stories of families who have lost their precious little ones. Hardest of all, though, is seeing the images of their children. Over and over again, at nearly every blog I visit, there are the pictures of infants loved and lost, dressed in clothes that were supposed to be their going-home outfits and cuddled by their mourning families.

I used to think this was on the morbid side of things, but that was before I knew better. That was before I had a reason to think about why those pictures would be so important to a family and why one might come to regret not having them done.

Because my wish right now – besides actually having my daughter with me, which will always be my greatest wish that will never come true - is to have a picture of her. Immediately after the delivery, I did not have the presence of mind to think about asking for pictures. I’m not even sure if that’s something Japanese hospitals do or even allow. It wasn’t until later that night, when I closed my eyes to go to sleep and all I could see was Lauren, that I realized that was the only way I was ever going to see her. I would not be able to see her again, not as she was when she was born, not as she was when she was new and whole and belonging to us, to Geordie and me.

Worse still, I will never have anything tangible to hold and cherish, nothing to remind me of her face. I will never have anything to show to her grandparents; they will never know how beautiful and peaceful she looked. They will never see the slight curl of dark and still damp hair over her little ear, the soft patch of eyebrows over her closed eyes, or the gentle roundness of her cheeks. I will have nothing to show people when I tell them about Lauren; I will have only my memory, and that’s not something I can just hand over to people to help them see that she was real and beautiful.

Greatest of all is the fear that I will forget what she looked like, the curve of her chin and her little button nose. It was so brief, that moment with her – how can I make those few minutes stretch into a lifetime? As much as it hurts to see her sweet, sleeping face in my mind, it would be worse still to forget her. Right now, I can close my eyes and see her, but how long will that last? How long will it be before the image starts to fade and all I can do is guess at what I once saw every time I closed my eyes? I don’t want an idealized image of Lauren – I want her. I want to remember the small patches of red on her forehead and chin where she had lost skin during the delivery. I want to remember her tiny ears flattened down, her nearly lipless mouth opened in a perpetual yawn. She was beautiful to me as she was; she would have been beautiful to me no matter what she looked like.

But physical representation of Lauren has been lost to me now, and all I can do is cling to the memory I have of her. I cannot go back and tell myself that pictures are necessary, a comfort rather than a cruel reminder; I wasn’t ready to know that then. I wasn’t ready to think about it then. And now it's too late.

Too late to help her, too late to save her, too late to take pictures of her, too late to hold her, too late to kiss her goodbye. It will always be too late.

bye-bye, Juntendo

When most people think about hospitals, what usually comes to mind is not pleasant: injury, illness, death. Going to the hospital is a bad thing; it means something is wrong with you. It also means money is going to probably come out of your pocket, which would be another reason people don't like hospitals so much.

Aside from my personal experience, my observation of hospital activity has been punctuated by the creation of new life. I spent more than half of the last year in birth clinics or ob/gyn wards, surrounded by women nurturing babies, their growing bellies testament to the life brewing inside them. Or else there were women coming in for their post-partum check-ups, carrying their newborns with them, cradled close to their hearts, and looking tired but happy. From February to September, I watched them and felt a kinship with them. We were mothers in the making, carrying new life within us. We had nothing to be afraid of.

But I know better now. I knew then too; I was just too afraid to let those terrible whispers take hold of me and force me to face the stark truth of existence, that life is often tenuous, and it can go as quickly as it comes. Those tendrils of fear come creeping in all through pregnancy, and we push them away in our certainty that everything will be alright. And for the most part, that's true. The majority of pregnancies go without a hitch, and life comes screaming to meet the world.

And for the rest of us, we have lost that innocence. We know that life can be silenced in a moment, even before it's had a chance to draw its first breath.

Geordie and I went in for my post-partum check-up today. We knew it would not be easy; it's been hard enough seeing families just while we're out and about. Now, we would have to sit in the ob/gyn waiting area, just as we had four weeks earlier when our daughter still had a heartbeat. Only, this time, we would be alone, just the two of us, surrounded by lives still growing and lives newly born.

I would not wish the loss of a child upon any woman, but it's so hard to watch a mother with her baby and think, Why me and not her? Why my baby and not that one? Why couldn't I keep my daughter alive? What's wrong with me? It's not malevolence that makes me think such things, it's just the sheer unfairness of it all. For 38 weeks, our daughter was healthy. I had a relatively easy pregnancy with no complications. How can all these women have strong, healthy babies while mine is lost to me forever? How could something like this happen?

The sad thing is that there are no answers to that question. We spoke to the doctor about what test results they had, and it's all the same. Lauren was healthy, her cord and placenta were healthy, I was healthy. There is no explanation. Unfortunately, that's the way life goes sometimes. I will always wonder if there was something I could have done to save, just as I will wonder if there wasn't, if it was out of my hands from the beginning. Life is funny that way.

As for the check-up itself, that went well. My body has made a full recovery from pregnancy and delivery. While this is good news, I can't help but feel a little betrayed by my body. My heart is broken, and my mind is hardly at peace - how is it that my body can feel so normal? I feel so thoroughly shattered that it's hard to believe my body is still in one piece. How could it go back to normal so quickly? I'm glad I'm healthy and everything is alright, but immediately after leaving the hospital, I felt that it was like I had never been pregnant at all. That all traces of Lauren had been erased from me and I had nothing to show that I had carried her.

But upon further reflection, I know that's not true. It may not be obvious from looking at me, but the wear shows on me in places that cannot be seen. In my heart, for example, where there will always be a place for Lauren. In my thoughts, daily. And should I need a more physical example, the memory of pregnancy in imprinted upon my bones. For as long as my pelvic bone exists, it will carry the marks of pregnancy upon it and be physical proof that I am a mother. For some reason, I find comfort in this, proof that my body will not forget what has come to be one of the most defining moments of my life.

In the end, it's a relief to be finished with Juntendo University Hospital. It was not my initial choice for Lauren's birth, but I don't regret going there. The staff treated us well, and they did all that they could for us. It's not a place I ever want to return to, but I will keep it in my memory for a long time to come, as long as I have a memory to hold on to. It is, after all, the place my daughter was born. They couldn't save her, and they can't piece me back together again, but it's where I saw Lauren for the first and only time, and that is an image I will carry in my heart for the rest of my days.

a place for lost children

The first overnight trip I made in Japan was to Kamakura. I met up with two of the teachers who had done GEOS training with me in Vancouver, and we spent a night in Kamakura and a night in Tokyo. Kamakura had been my idea. I was three months in Japan, and I hadn't yet had a chance to do any sight-seeing, though I had wanted to do some for a while. I discovered Kamakura through some online research and decided it wouldn't be too far for the three of us to get to, spread out across the main island as we were.


the view of the bay from Hasedera



I wrote about that first trip in a blog post or two about three years ago. At the time, I did not know the significance of the Jizou-do, which is a small area set one level up from the main garden. Hasedera was built upon a hillside, with stone steps leading from one level to another. The level above the Jizou-do could probably be considered the main level, as it has two temple buildings (one to house a gilt statue of buddha, the other for a large eleven-headed statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy and compassion). There's also a lovely view of the bay from that level. A pathway continues up the hill, twisting around and providing some wonderful overlooks of the area. It's an old temple, founded in 736. I generally prefer shrines over temples, but I've always loved Hasedera. It can be a very relaxing place at times.

On October 10th, the day Lauren was due, we made a trip to Kamakura specifically to go to Hasedera. During my second trip to the temple, I had learned that the Jizou-do was a special place for remembering "mizuko" - literally, "water children." The word typically refers to babies lost to miscarriage, but it can also be expanded to include stillbirths and abortions. When I was still in the hospital, Geordie and I had talked about the possibility of visiting a few places before leaving Japan. A while ago, I had promised to take him to Kamakura, and he mentioned that he'd still like to go. I remembered then the Jizou-do, the small area that before had meant so little to me but now meant everything. We agreed to go and pay our respects there and perhaps find some comfort.

Jizou is a Buddhist patron of children, a bodhisattava, a term which often translates to English as "an enlightened being." It's usually applied to persons who become enlightened and, motivated by compassion, continue to seek enlightenment for everyone. Bodhisattvas are therefore considered to be among the most merciful and loving of beings, as they have chosen not to enter a state of nirvana but to remain as they are to help others. Jizou's special realm is children, particularly those unborn or who died very young. He is a protector and a guide, and he is one of the most famous Buddhist figures in Japan. His statue can be seen along roadsides and innumerable small shrines; he is also considered a patron of travelers.



Hasedera in Aprl



Hasedera is most beautiful in the spring, when the flowers of the garden are in bloom. In early spring, azaleas brighten the area with their vibrant colors, and April brings the pillowy softness of the sakura with it. But Hasedera is most famous for its hydrangeas, which I have sadly not been able to see. Winter can be a haunting experience at Hasedera, the trees bare but still beautiful, an atmosphere of patience and serenity coming over the place as it waits for the return of spring. It's a temple that is very much grounded in the natural aspects of Kamakura, and it's for that reason that I've always been fond of it.



Jizou statue surrounded by
the memorial statues



The Jizou-do can be one of the most peaceful areas of the temple. The small structure housing the statue of the Happy Jizou is surrounded by hundreds of smaller Jizou statues, each one of them representing a baby lost too early. Several statues of Jizou are placed about the area as though to show the completeness of his role as warden over these souls. Geordie and I had come to this place to leave a piece of Lauren and her memory to be watched over by Jizou.



We went up to the main hall - where stands the benevolent Kannon carved from a single piece of camphor wood - and arranged to have a Jizou statue blessed and placed for Lauren. We could not place the statue ourselves, nor would we be able to search for it amongst the many others at the Jizou-do. This suited us. Lauren's statue will remain at the Jizou-do for two years, at which point it will be given in offering to Jizou and Kannon. Also, the sutras will continue to be said in memory of her, which is something that does give me some peace of mind. Lauren's little statue was also a comfort, though a far more difficult one to deal with. I burst into tears as soon as I touched the statue; it was another goodbye, another parting with my baby. But it was something I needed. I had not been able to touch Lauren, but the statue was a stand-in for her, and as I brushed my fingers along it, I was reaching for her too. As much as it hurt, it felt good to feel something solid and to imagine it was her. I needed that contact - that connection - more than I'd realized.



Geordie placing the flowers before Jizou

Afterwards, we went and prayed before Kannon and saw some of the rest of the temple grounds. Then we went back to the Jizou-do and paid our respects. We lit incense and cleansed ourselves, and we bought flowers to place before the large outdoor statue of Jizou. I had seen pictures of the smaller Jizou statues dressed in infant's clothing, but we found only one and did not feel comfortable adorning one with Lauren's things. Geordie took Rabbit-sensei's bow and put it over a statue's head, and that was sweet. We had brought with us a bib we had bought for Lauren, a cap Geordie's mother had sent for her, and a pacifier; we left these with the statue of the Happy Jizou amid the other offerings that had been left.
 

Geordie putting Rabbit's bow
on a memorial statue

Then we went on our way, leaving behind a bit of our grief along with Lauren's memory. There is nothing we can do that will completely relieve of us our grief, but each step we take, each action we take, eases it little by little. I know that I will never forget Lauren, just as I know I will always feel the loss of her in my heart and in my life. Perhaps in the future, the sharp sting of her absence will dull into something softer and gentler, and comfort will be easier to find. For now, we must only do what we can.