In March of 2013, we lost our son Bix four days after his projected due date. It was without a question the most deeply upsetting experience of my life. My pain and the pain I felt for Bix’s mother Roxanne, was and remains ineffable. Therefore I will not attempt to describe it. Those who have experienced such an event know. Those who haven’t can only imagine. I will say however, as we were told and I knew even then from having endured other losses, that time — and active dedication to the process of healing — would eventually puncture a small hole into the blackness through which we might crawl.
Beyond the obvious emotional impact this had on our lives, there were practical concerns. When we were finally ready to leave the house we had to find new restaurants. Every one of our favorite places knew we were expecting a child and it was too daunting to have to explain what had happened each time we were greeted by an eager face that would invariably grow long. Regardless, it would be inevitable that each us would have to confront this several times. For instance our favorite ramen place knew Roxanne, we thought, much better than me — as she brought food home from the place far more than we ate there. Once we chanced it and I left Roxanne in the car while I picked up a to go order. It turns out the guy in the kitchen did in fact know I was Roxanne’s other half and asked from the kitchen across a small crowd, while I waited in line at the register, how the baby was. Actually I think he asked what he was, a boy or a girl. I said a boy…and that he was doing fine.
Then there was a matter so particular to this day and age: how to deal or not deal with this in the context of social media. This was less of an issue for Roxanne than myself who participated more actively — and revealingly — here on Tumblr, Instagram, and on Vine (profusely and in a rather high profile way at the time). It seemed at once hypocritical to omit this experience from the self-chronicling I had been doing in these realms, yet preposterous to even entertain the notion of exhibiting such personal aspects of my life ever again.
After a couple of days of barely being able to even stand, to leave our bedroom, I decided to gather my photographic equipment from upstairs and document our post partem, no matter how bleak. The first picture I took was the second exposure of a double exposure I had been planning for months. Several days before Bix’s due date I had set up my Polaroid Spectra, locked down the tripod, marked it with tape, did several test shots, and took the first exposure of what I imagined would be the most blissfully perfect marriage of art and self-documentation in my personal canon. I shot the first exposure of Roxanne as she stood in the doorway of our bedroom, 9 months pregnant, and looking towards her future self — who would be seated on the chair in the foreground with her new baby once we got back from the hospital. I think it was the next day, maybe the day after, that she stopped feeling him kicking. That camera perched upon that tripod loomed those first few days home from the hospital, an eerie relic of so much expectation, frozen in time, containing only the happier half of an incomplete photo.
When you lose a child, at Cedars Sinai anyway, you are presented upon discharge, with a small green cushioned box, called a “memory box.” The name alone is chilling. I don’t want to paint too grim(ly honest) a picture, because I don’t want to make someone feel something they are in no mood to feel. Nor do I want to give the impression that we are trying to elicit sympathy. I don’t want to pick at a wound which took so much time to scab. I don’t want to cinema-tize our experience, one of the rare experiences in my life that felt wholly genuine and completely untainted by artifice and self-reflexivness. I will just say that watching your much, much better half being wheeled out of a hospital without her child and with a fucking green box in its stead is an experience I would not wish upon my worst enemies. We have never opened this box, though we are grateful it exists. It contains photos of the beautiful child we held for mere minutes, his hat, and I’m not sure what else.
So after a few days and steeling ourselves we took the “after” exposure of of my “before/after” picture. Roxanne is holding the green box as I kneel at her side. I started a private companion blog, here on Tumblr, too cleverly called Home is Where the Hard Is. I struggled with whether to go “public” with the blog and acknowledge the glaring omission in my various social network profiles. At the very least, I thought, such a blog might preempt questions about our child from those who did not receive the email I sent the second night we were home, titled “Sad News.” It might prevent comments about the missing child I had already begun to exhibit in a fashion, in what in hindsight seemed a morbidly prescient “series” that was intended to culminate with the birth of our child I was making on Vine, for instance. But the exhibition of this photo, of our grief, seemed too dark, even for me, even for someone who had always distilled nearly all his experience through some sort of meta-tation. Covered with tattoos, I opted not to turn his legacy into hipster grist or my arm into a graveyard, as it already contained the initials of a dead friend and a portrait of my beloved gone dog, Jack. This was simply too deep, too authentic a pain to remove myself from it in any way. And as much as I thought it might make us feel less alone, less like freaks, to illustrate our experience for others with whom we might co-miserate, Roxanne was not ready to do this. Not at least, until we had come out the other end — the extent to which that might even be possible. And I concurred. Niether of us wanted to belong to this club. We went to one meeting for grievers like us and we never went back. The grief of these survivors, unconsolable and years old in some cases, was too much, too discouraging for us. We would heal. We would tackle the pain, immerse ourselves in it, let its miserable breathtaking waves wash over us, wake us in the night. But we would not let it define us. You can click on the link of the blog that never really was, to see the photo, which I only just looked at for the first time in over a year. Or not. I’m not entirely sure how appropriate it is or isn’t. I doubt I’ll ever exhibit in any fashion the entire chronicle of our grieving which I shot, as I am wont to do, in every conceivable format. That will likely remain only ours. But the sole shot on that ghost blog, the double exposure, in as much as it is a testament to our grief, is moreover a testament to our strength, to Roxanne’s strength, of which I will never cease to be awed.
I will never forget Bix or feel untouched by his brief life, lived only in utero, but with which we both connected so deeply, But having just discussed what had happened to us, and that we were expecting again, on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, recorded months ago but which aired yesterday, I feel we owe it to our new son Bud, to our first son Bix, and to those who have experienced such devastation, to exhibit this new double exposure on very old Polaroid film of an expectant couple and their future selves…this time holding their newborn son the night they came home from the hospital.
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