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My spirit was troubled and I did not want to trouble my son. I was his mother, and he looked at me continuously as his gauge, his guide to feeling. A mother’s state tells you the state of the world, tells you how to be; a mother gives life and then she interprets life for her child.
When it happened, our son was not yet three years old. I was his god, he was mine. I made him, he made me. This was the understanding between us, our vital bond. When our son didn’t sleep, I didn’t sleep. When he was frightened, I shielded him. When he laughed, I made him laugh harder. We were a tangle of bodies, hand in hand.
When I got home from the hospital, I knew that I needed to wear a certain expression for our son, use the voice that was so familiar, move my body in a competent way. I needed to be legible, to be his mother, but all I felt was dissonance. I could not explain to him what had happened, why my arms were empty. I was in grief. To be in grief is to be elsewhere. I was static, slow, but my mind was electric with animal hypersensitivity.
Once our son was asleep, night opened and I entered it. I had a glass of scotch beside the bed, painkillers. My husband said, “Be careful.” My milk had come in, and with no baby to feed, my body hurt. My body was alone in its hurt. My husband was now on the other side of something I could not cross. He was unreachable or I was unreachable or both. We were not in the same reality. Like an aerial view of my life, I could see where I was and where I would need to go for my life to remain intact. But dangerously, I did not know that I wanted to go there. In those early days of mourning, I wanted to stay inside my fractured state, my nothing state, to protect my state of grief because it kept me close, it kept me tied to the child I had just lost.
***
In 2009, nearly 15 years ago, at the 20-week mark in my pregnancy, I experienced a stillbirth. I started to bleed on a flight home from a writer’s festival. I remember other passengers helping me with my luggage. I was alone. I was showing and wore a dress that highlighted my contours. I had that incandescent look of promise and possibility. I remember the horror I felt when I saw the blood, remaining expressionless on the plane, my husband picking me up at the airport, calling our midwife, and our midwife’s words: I can’t promise anything. I remember the ultrasound technician describing our baby as a supermodel—as if that mattered—and then leaving the dim room, getting her supervisor, her supervisor’s face. I remember on the door of our hospital room there was the image of a dove.
I labored, and the hours were endless and excruciating because we knew their outcome, we knew the labour was a false exercise. I gave birth to our child, our second child, who was dead.
Stillbirth is the right word because it binds two words that should never be together, that are touching.
I kept our baby on my chest through the night.
The nurses asked whether we wanted to see the chaplain. No. The nurses dressed our son in a white suit crocheted by volunteers, and they took photographs of him. A record that he was real, as over time memories thin and disintegrate into dreams. The sun was beginning its pale-winter creep across the window. It was December, a gray, brutalist sky.
The nurses said it was time, he was starting to change. They took our baby away. My husband made arrangements with a funeral home, called family, drove us home. Where to cry? I have a small wooden box on my side of the closet that contains our son’s ashes. My husband built the box. My husband was a genius at grief. He experienced it so completely that he could exit it. I did not. I went into an obsessive relationship with grief. Grief loved me and it punished me; it gave me what I needed.
Chrissy Teigen had a stillbirth at 20 weeks. Also a son, a son she named Jack. She wrote an essay about it, and she published photos of herself in her hospital gown and cap, bent forward in agony, weeping. She published photos of herself holding her dead son. In her essay, she wrote with boiling rage to all of the judges who’d decried her choice: “I cannot express how little I care that you hate the photos. How little I care that it’s something you wouldn’t have done. These photos are only for the people who need them. The thoughts of others do not matter to me.” This tells me how much the thoughts of others matter to her. This tells me how much she cares.
***
I care. I’ve always cared more than I ever wanted to.
There is no right way to grieve. I heard this a lot inside those blurred first months, months that stretched into years. I was a slow processor. Chrissy Teigen seemed to be a fast processor, fast as the internet, fast as her fame. I had no idea how to grieve. I will venture Chrissy Teigen had no idea how to grieve. There are no instructions. The mother is blamed, though we are sorry for her. What has happened to her is devastating, unimaginable, a vicious fate, but she must have done something wrong or been wrong in some way, somehow. Something inside her was broken, something fundamental. She did not make the life—she should explain herself with grace; for instance, as we say we are sorry for her, she should demonstrate that she is sorrier—or she should just disappear entirely and fade to nothing. Should Chrissy Teigen have been less graphic about her grief? More private? Did Chrissy Teigen grieve wrong? Why does a woman in pain, a woman who articulates about her pain, make our society so angry?
I met a woman who had had an experience like my own, like Chrissy Teigen’s, losing her child at the 22-week mark, birthing a death. She was the most magnetic woman, a friend of a friend, in the city for one night. As we spoke, she cut her hair over a garbage can. She wore gold ankle boots and a satin Adidas track jacket. She told me about the shrine in her home she had built for her lost child. Her other children would gather there and the family would speak about their lost child, commune with its soul. I listened closely and with an acidic desperation as at last I was comparing griefs with someone who had insider knowledge. Men compare mythologies. Women compare griefs.
By then, I had turned brittle, strange, bone thin with stress and dread. My husband and I fought; I felt ill at ease with our friends. I had no idea how to calibrate, how to fit inside a social code; it was like I was half-monster or half-monk. I was maimed and my transfiguration had no name. I was erratic with our son, strict and then not strict, there and then not there. I hated myself; I hated my body—my body had betrayed me. And here was this radiant woman, unhaunted because she had done something tangible and actual with her grief.
After the stillbirth, my midwife sent me to a grief counselor; it was a free service, at a different hospital, the session was a half hour, the commitment low. The grief counselor’s tiny office was neurotically packed with objects, papers, books. I felt crowded by her things, by her, by her chair which was too close to my chair. I felt crowded by time—how could I possibly fix a swarm of feeling inside a half hour? The scale was wrong. There was a precision and sternness to the grief counselor that I liked. She was the counterweight to my frantic, aimless state, so I begged her for what had always come most naturally to me: words. How do I explain what happened to our young son? The grief counselor asked me questions, and from my answers, she made notes on a small piece of paper. She gave me the script. I delivered it to our son. I told him, “The baby was beautiful, he was perfect, but he was sick, and we lost him.” My son asked so tenderly and with such worry, “Where?”
After my stillbirth, I did not write fiction for nearly 10 years. I did not write fiction because I could not look inward. I kept myself from myself. To write fiction is to tap into an unruly vein, it is to sequence the debate inside your heart. It is to be in conversation with yourself and to give that conversation form. This alchemy is described by Virginia Woolf: “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.”
Fiction is the shrine.
When I started to write again, my hands were on fire. My fingertips went numb. I wrote my new novel, Daughter, at a pace I hardly understood. Grief is generative. We are told to get over it when grief has its own velocity. I came up into writing through theater. I love theater because, in its very form, it is a shared experience in the dark. I consider myself a very private person but see that I have become a very social writer. I am impatient for collective feeling.
I have never looked at the photographs the nurses took of our son. I don’t need proof of him. He was and is inside of me. It took me 15 years to write about my experience of stillbirth. Words attach us to life, to how life feels, and words attach us to each other; they close the distance between us. And yet, now a mother of two, I could only write this essay when my sons were not in the house—not even not in the house, but hundreds of miles away and off the grid on wilderness trips. I could not access and revisit that time with them nearby, their footsteps on the stairs, their voices echoing in the hallway. When my body was in the world but I had left the world—I’ve kept this self and this time separate from my sons. I think of Maggie Smith’s refrain from “Good Bones.” As she cycles through darkness after darkness, she writes: “I keep this from my children.”
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