Two years...

Two years ago today at this time, everything was fine. In fact it was more than fine, I couldn't have been happier. It was a glorious late summer day (just as it promises to be today). I still remember the spring in my step as I walked my enormously pregnant self to the hospital for the tests my doctor recommended 'just to be safe'. I loved being pregnant with Ezra, and swollen ankles and all, that day was no exception.

I had absolutely no inkling how drastically and completely the world was about to come crashing down around me.

In the two years since, I've come to own my new self...more sad, more cynical, more connected, more compassionate. But sometimes I do miss that naive happy woman.

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But this day is not about me. It's been two years today since Ezra quietly slipped away. Two years since I was sent home from those tests as everything looked 'ok'. Two years since that car ride home where I started feeling 'stomach cramps', two years since I was balled up in bed with the worst kind of abdominal pain ever, much more so than my labor with Micah. Two years since that dreadful car ride back to the hospital. Two years since we heard those words 'your baby has passed away.'

And I still don't really believe it all happened. If I really focus in on that cruel truth, it makes me want to howl hysterically like I did in the first moments after we learned he was gone. How is it that my big boy, my first boy is not here?

My sweet sweet Ezra, I miss you and love you so very much. Every day. Especially today. Always.

Guest Post from Ezra and Micah's Daddy: Ezra in the September issue of Glamour Magazine

I wouldn't have expected this, with the second anniversary of Ezra's birth and death approaching, but Glamour magazine asked me to contribute a part of an article dealing with a woman who lost her baby after seven. months of pregnancy.  They wanted to include a section on what fathers experience from the loss of a child.  I'm happy, at least, that this subject is getting the attention it deserves.  Hopefully this will help others.  Please check out the September issue of Glamour (print edition) if you can.

After

If life were a movie, it would have been the scene following a cataclysmic event the night before. The morning blurred by a deep fog which hugged the ocean, obscured the tops of buildings, and made anything moving or colorful a surprise, veiled until the moment you were upon it.

But life is not a movie and there was no catacylsm the night before...just some quiet stolen moments on a morning walk with my living son, who woke too early in a beach house filled with sleeping family members.

But it got me thinking about life...after. Ezra's second birthday is just weeks away. This month, August, my season of grief, I keep waiting for the cataclysm. Waiting to feel drawn back into the depths of grief that I experienced in the weeks leading up to Ezra's first birthday. Waiting to be reduced daily to a puddle of tears. Expecting a torrent of rage or deep despair. And while I still may end up there, its not where I see myself going this grief season.

The reason is this: every day now is a day after. Every day is a day without my son Ezra.

The sadness has settled into my bones, it is part of my everyday. Ezra is in my thoughts and heart daily. I continue to parent my lost son as I parent my living one. I push giggling Micah on a swing at the playground, taking note of the empty motionless swing next to him...wondering what it would be like to be pushing two boys on swings. I mentally cringe when I meet two year olds, calculating in my head the possibilities (would he have been that tall? would he be as articulate?). I feel deep stabs of jealousy as I watch siblings who are close in age interact, particularly when it is two boys. I treasure my "new mom" friendships with mamas of babes close in age to Micah...and yet can't help but wonder about the new mamas who should have been my friends had Ezra lived.

It is true I have refound joy. And yet the sadness is ever present. The sadness is every day...after.

Gone

I never intended to stop writing in this space when my Sunflower arrived.

I will admit that for much of the past six and a half months, I pretty much shelved my grief. It's not that it hasn't been present. I haven't had time to be present with it. Particularly in the first several months, I found parenting a living child to be far more challenging than I ever imagined. Not that I would trade it for anything. It just surprised me that I found it overwhelming...isn't this what I had been waiting for at least the last three years? This was supposed to be the easy part, the happy ending, no?

And it has been happy. Micah gives me a good reason to have a heart full of joy every single day. My Sunflower loves to smile and laugh...big huge belly laughs. It feels like he was sent to us to bring the laughter back into our home, to make sure we smile every day. I actually didn't know it was possible to be this happy again. And yet full of joy or not, my heart still has a hole in it.

Lately the grief has been getting to me, something about Micah turning 6 months and the slow march toward our grief season of August seems to have created the perfect storm. Ezra would be nearly two years old. And when I stop to try to wrap my mind around that, the idea that in a different universe I'd be running after a TWO year old while my 6 month old desparately trys to crawl, I just crumble.

I look back at these almost two years and I almost don't believe it is my life. How did I become this woman, the mother of two boys, one so wriggly and ALIVE, and the other so positively and absolutely...gone.

I just miss him, I really really do.

Guest Post from Ezra and Micah's Daddy: A Tribute to Fathers and Children Forever Separated

June was always a big month in my family. My father's birthday, my birthday, Father's day and my parents' anniversary all jammed into a period of a few weeks.

Last year’s Father’s Day was a bittersweet one for me, and I imagine that from now on, Father’s Day for me will always evoke a bit of happiness mixed with pangs of grief. Last year at around this time, I was mourning the loss of my son Ezra, who had died only months earlier. Ezra’s placenta tore from the uterus a few weeks before his due date, cutting of his oxygen supply in utero. My wife had to go into labor to give birth to our son who had already died. I held him, and laughed and cried at the same time. I laughed because I was happy to see my son’s adorable, silly face for the first time, and I cried because I would never hold him again, never get to see him grow up and reach all of life’s milestones. And we buried him several days later, but not before reading him a bedtime story. And I never thought I’d have to bury my own child, ever. As I literally buried him in the ground with a shovel, at the cemetery, I felt as if I was burying part of myself as well.

For those who have lost a child, you know what I mean. For those who haven’t, I hope you never know such pain and emptiness. There is no loss greater than the loss of your child. It is the hopeless nightmare that does not subside. Eventually, you learn to live with your loss and incorporate the memory of your child into daily life. You must do so if you are to regain any sense of a normal existence, whatever normal means. You learn to live as a new person with a new sense of normal. But the pain never goes away entirely, nor should it.

So on that Father’s Day weekend of 2009, I was a father deprived of my son in physical form, though he remained buried in my heart. And at the same time, there was joy. My father was recovering from major surgery, and I had made countless trips back and forth from Philadelphia to New York City to visit him in the hospital. Though he was frail, immobile and only a hint of his formerly robust, colorful, loquacious and trash-talking self, he was still Dad. I said goodbye to him that day, wishing him a happy Father’s Day and all that. He gave me a mile-long stare unlike any he had given me before. He had a peaceful look on his face, as if somehow he was alright no matter what.

The next week my father died.

We were so different, yet so much alike, my father and I. He was a veteran and a union guy, while I have dual Ivy League degrees. While his tour of duty in the Army took him to Japan and Korea, years later I lived in Japan as an exchange student, studied Japanese in college, and worked in Tokyo for an ad agency and a bank. Both of us were blessed with a strong sense of community service. My father was active in his church and his V.F.W. post, while I became an activist, writer and advocate armed with a law degree. Both of us experienced racial discrimination, which is par for the course for black men in America. And I’ve had experiences and opportunities my father couldn’t have imagined, and yet he was partly responsible for them happening, and for my access to them.

This year, I observe my first Father’s Day without my father, who lived a full life, and a second Father’s Day without my son, who never had a chance to live life. And Dad is now looking after his grandson in that far away spirit world, which gives me some comfort.

In that year since my father left us, my son Micah was born. And what a joy he is! He seems to smile all the time, more than his father or grandfather ever could. Micah, it seems, was made to order for parents who needed smiles in their lives, and once believed they’d never laugh again. But why couldn’t I have both of my sons with me on Father’s Day?

Often I think about the fathers who lost their children, and the children who lost their fathers, whether through disease, famine, war or terrorism— or handgun violence in the streets of America, or corporate malfeasance— you know, crimes committed on offshore oil rigs or in coal mines. Fathers are separated from their children by prison bars miles away upstate, in this land of the incarcerated, or senseless permanent wars half a world away in Eurasia or Eastasia or another designated enemy.

Men who cannot be with their children, and people who are separated from their fathers might not be in the mood to celebrate Father’s Day, and that is ok. What is important is that we learn to honor and remember those we love when they are not or cannot be with us now or ever. And you don’t need a special day for that.

Guest Post from Ezra and Micah's Daddy: Burying Your Child

On Friday, Rachel Maddow had a man on her show.  His daughter had been killed in 1995 in the Oklahoma City bombing.  He said the pain is still there.  When your parents die, you bury them on the mountaintop, he said.  But when your child dies, you bury them in your heart, and keep them there.  So simple, yet so profound!

On Laughter

Micah put himself to sleep laughing the other night. Ok, he doesn't exactly laugh yet, but as I watched on the video monitor, he cooed, gurgled, and smiled himself to sleep in his crib. Melted my heart entirely.

Micah sleeping on his own is brand new, he's only been doing it for 2 to 3 weeks. See, my second son was the newborn who would not sleep in his own. Even those first few nights in the hospital after he was born, he refused to sleep in the hospital bassinet -- I spent those nights sitting up in the hospital bed, staring in amazement at this new little being as he slept. We came home and tried to get him to sleep in the co-sleeper bassinet next to my side of the bed - if he fell asleep he'd be up 20 minutes later, searching for a snuggle. Every night would begin with an attempt to get Micah to sleep in the co-sleeper; every night would end with a baby snuggled against me in bed. All of his naps were taken in a sling or wrap on me or his daddy. Delerious from sleep deprivation, we had a conversation with our pediatrician about safe co-sleeping practices, and for the first couple months were co-sleeping out of necessity, as opposed to choice. Not that I judge those who choose to co-sleep, but as a babylost mama who works professionally in child welfare, I was terrified at first -- I had visions of dead babies floating in my head, all the co-sleeping nightmares of which I have learned through my work. But night by night I got more comfortable, and began to love all the snuggles and ease of breastfeeding that comes with co-sleeping. It seems Micah was sent to make up for all the snuggles I missed out on with his older brother.

But we knew eventually Micah would need to learn to sleep on his own -- I won't be on maternity leave forever, and certainly it's a good skill to have. We set about doing some limited sleep training with Micah, and in the end, some combination of our hard work and the cognitive development that comes with hitting the 3 month mark, resulted in Micah's new found skill of crib sleeping. For the most part, he seems to sleep longer and better on his own. So I now have new found freedom...and already miss his night time snuggles terribly.

All that aside, watching Micah coo and smile to sleep got me thinking...about laughter.

My father told me that the first thought that flashed through his mind after he learned that Ezra had died, was that I would never smile again. And yet I remember distinctly the first time I laughed after Ezra had died. It was the day after he was born, and involved an episode of incontinence resulting in a large puddle beneath my hospital bed. So absurd, I couldn't stop laughing; at the time, it felt like there was nothing left to laugh about in the world, but at myself.

Over these last 19 1/2 months, we have of course learned to laugh again. We've laughed with each other. We learned to find joy in the simplest things. In fact, I think that's one of the many lessons Ezra taught us - to appreciate the tiny joys the life offers, to laugh when we can. But our laughter has always been tinged with sadness, or perhaps more precisely, guilt. It's the guilt that only babylost parents can feel for actually enjoying themselves, when their babes are not here.

Listening and watching Micah laugh himself to sleep made me realize that true laughter, unconditional laughter, re-entered our lives on the day Micah was born. We laugh despite ourselves. We laugh because our son is just so cute, just so snuggly, just so full of smiles...and just so alive. It's only when I stop to think about how much we laugh, that the guilt creeps back in. We should have had all these moments of unconditional joy with Ezra too. And yet Micah keeps me laughing...each and every day.