Tears and Tree Frog Fingers: Notes on Grief
There is a disquieting weight to grief. It follows wherever my husband and I are. It quadruples when we're in the same room. This deluge of gravity offers the near promise of dragging the walls and ceiling and furniture inward onto us both. To implode our house, the house that is suddenly too big and too silent. To crush the bodies we never thought could be so fragile.
I can't help but wonder if this weight is what I felt missing from Adeline once she was gone. She was too light. The heft of her enormous personality and her fighting spirit and all the love we poured over her was missing. Her tiny hand that had affectionately wandered across my skin and tangled itself in her daddy's chest hair went feather-light. I instantly longed for all the intention in the grasp of her tree frog fingers.
I have done nothing but long for her since. I am cloudy and unfocused. Nothing means what it used to.
There is no counterpart to an orphan. No real term for parents whose child has died. The internet calls us "Loss Parents." I'm a Loss Mom and my husband is a Loss Dad. We have been orphaned by the loss of our daughter.
She died, and we were unceremoniously shoved through the back doors of a club we never wanted to enter. In point of fact, we never even considered we might find ourselves anywhere near it. It is a place in the periphery. It exists in the obscurity of averted eyes and the endlessly perpetuated notion of impossibility. Only ever visited by someone four or five or eight degrees removed from the person sparing it a glance. Never them. Never us.
We live now in this dark place, lit solely by the broken hearts of other Loss Parents. We wander amongst one another. We feel the brush of sad, empathetic fingers as we pass. As we weep and howl facts about our little girl and her tree frog fingers into the dark. As we pray someone will hear us and remember her with us.
Some of our friends and family visit. We touch their hands through the marred glass. We beg them not to be afraid to come back. We beg them to be gentle with us. We beg them to say Adeline's name for as long as they live. Because we will.
When the doctors came out of surgery, they told us to follow them to a small room for families who need quiet. But I knew they did not mean us. The families whose babies and children were going to live needed protection from us, from our grief. I told them I didn't want to go. I went anyway.
The nurse sat beside us. The two doctors sat across from us. The matter-of-fact one, more gregarious and acclimated than the taller one, said what I naïvely thought he still might not say. Even in this small room meant to insulate passersby.
"I'm so sorry. I wish there was more we could do."
I screamed and wailed and sobbed until I thought my chest would shatter. I thought my lungs would crack and disintegrate. I thought my heart would splinter and burst. I was a hand grenade. Every three seconds I was certain I would detonate. Every three seconds I didn't. I was just three seconds closer to being forced to live in a world without my daughter.
The matter-of-fact, gregarious doctor was telling us how Adeline's room would be staged when we were ready to go back in. He was telling us how we could hold her as long as we wanted, how they would ensure she was comfortable while we tried to convey a lifetime of love before she slipped away. Before the heft of her transformed into this implosive gravity. Before the rarer form of this bastard of an infection she never should have contracted forced her to orphan us.
I don't make wishes anymore. I used to. All the times you learn to as a child. When the clock hits 11:11, when you see a shooting star, when you blow out your birthday candles. I held my breath against panicked gulps of air and worried sobs in every tunnel I drove through on the way to her that last day. I held my breath and I made my wishes. The wish I wished the hardest would not come true. Our baby girl was stolen from us little more than twelve hours after the bastard of an infection began. So, wishing is a reflex I am unlearning. 11:11 is just a time, shooting stars are just burning space trash, and birthday candles just serve to make cakes a little prettier. I have no more breath to hold in tunnels.
Our daughter was our oxygen. We have been forced to try and evolve into the kinds of creatures who can manage without. For us, looking forward or back delivers only pain. There is a sliver of time, a scant twenty-five to twenty-six days, that must somehow sustain us for a lifetime. That was what those twenty-six days were. Her lifetime.
We have so much more love to give her. Because she is no longer here to receive it directly, it, too, is forced to evolve. It takes shape in our grief, in our tears, in the laughter we find when telling someone about the stink-eye she gave the nurses or the way she would stand her tiny diapered butt in the air when she felt excited and indignant. Our love has nowhere to flow but out into the world now. All we can do is beg you to receive it.
Please, discover our little monster. Walk with us and learn about our Adeline. Spread word of her as you see fit. Feel the love we've lent to you when you hold your own children.
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