Grief Math ✍🏻
In our “parents of dead babies” group there was a woman who birthed twins and only one survived. She showed up at the group about a month after her loss and she still hadn’t told anyone other than close family that one of the babies died. Her matter of factness with the group was at odds with her inability to speak the truth to friends and coworkers, who would ask her about the babies, and she’d say “they’re fine.”
There was a defeat in her that I recognized — not wanting to deal with the emotional reactions that I or others had when I spoke about my tragedy. Even so, I wanted to say to her, “You know you’re setting yourself up to be the crazy one? The one who can’t do simple math?” But none of us said anything. That wasn’t the point of the group; we were there to share our common grief and listen — no commentary.
Of course I know it’s not about math. But that’s the thing with grief, we want it to be concrete and logical, but it’s not. Two minus one = one is not an obvious concept when freshly mourning. And zero, forget about trying to make sense of zero — that’s exactly what you don’t want to think about. The void you wish to fill is exactly what’s most haunting, and a concept you pretend doesn’t exist until you hit a kind of bottom where you have no choice but to accept the fact that you will never get that child back.
There was the mother of a 39-week stillborn baby who was flabbergasted by her cavalier sister, who had just found out she was pregnant and announced it on Facebook when she was a mere seven weeks along. “I mean, didn’t she learn anything from what happened to me?”
The shock, the devastation, the anger, the sadness, the fatigue: everyone in the group was traumatized. I hated going to that overly-fluorescent hospital basement room, I hated being a part of that club. I hated listening to other sad stories and, as cautioned by the group leaders, I usually felt worse after each session. But where else was I going to go to start processing the fact that my baby had died in utero, and I had unknowingly carried a dead fetus in my body for over a month until it was recognized at my 20-week check up? Who else would listen to me detail the horror of having to wait five additional nights to get the baby removed? Who else was willing to let me replay the medical nightmare that followed that — hemorrhaging, plasma transfusions, unsympathetic interns with vocal fries who actively demonstrated how disgusted they were with me and my body when they helped change the blood soaked pad between me and the mattress? “Ew, it smells.”
The accounts of each demise in the natal loss group were visceral and sad, but the one I find myself wondering about the most is the woman who was tormented by the baby nursery she wouldn’t put away. I imagine her now, six years on, and wonder if the room still exists as a wish, a shrine, or a grave. Did she have another baby? And if not, would she ever be able to unpause the image of the fully-decorated nursery before she learned the baby had died?
I remember her from two consecutive meetings. She was relatively young, late twenties maybe and, like most women there, unaccompanied by her partner. She annoyed me because her sadness came off as inauthentic and helpless. I know it’s horrible to admit that I was judging other bereaved parents for the performance of their grief, but I just wanted her to snap out of a naïveté that wasn’t serving her.
Her story was a repetitive loop about how she was tortured by her baby’s room. “Put it all away!” I wanted to yell the second time she told the story. She acted like she was forced to go in there, like she didn’t have a choice, and would get really confused about the memories that she wasn’t going to get to have. Yeah, that’s what I was reacting to in her — she came off as powerless, stuck in a resentful future — and that scared the shit out of me.
She would describe looking into the room at all the stuff — and then she would start to stutter. “I see his crib and I can’t believe there’s no — I mean, when I go in there, I sit in the — I see his — so many — we were ...”
I close my eyes as she’s talking. I don’t want to look at her. In my mind’s eye I see her in the doorway to her nursery, not crossing the threshold, but gazing in — and thus begins the horror movie. The horror of silence and stillness that sneakily morphs into magical thinking as she becomes convinced that each speck of dust, once accumulated and undisturbed for a certain unknowable amount of time, will bring the baby back to life.
The last time her flesh encountered these objects she was still pregnant – altering the room would betray her memory, her desire. The room cast a spell on her and the room will live on — even without the baby — only because there is no baby.
Trauma made us all time travelers skipping time as a means of dissociating from facts and feelings that our brains couldn’t yet process. Some were stuck in the future imagining how old the baby would be and what milestones the kid might have reached. Some were stuck in a loop before their demise — replaying moments when they were still happy and pregnant, genuinely confused about why that wasn’t the case anymore. And me, I was stuck on the moment when I saw in the doctor’s face that something was horribly wrong with my sonogram.
All of us were trapped in our narratives, unaware that we were spider and insect, predator and prey - victim and victimizer, spinning and spinning, getting caught over and over, until some kind of healing would emerge. But how? Grief never lets you know...