Funeral appreciation
Two days after my birthday, I was at work in the law school. I was eating lunch at my desk, a bad habit, and flicked onto Facebook. There was a post from my friend Karin.
She was living in Paris, with her partner, Ned, and their baby, Albert, who had been born in mid-December 2009. We had seen the first photos of him on Christmas Eve at my dad’s house, resting the laptop on my huge Z-filled belly, and cooing at his creased feet and dark, thoughtful eyes. They were planning a visit home to Australia in July, and we had plotted a meeting of the babies—hers, mine and Renee’s. After the accident I had been so heartbroken that Z would never meet Albert, that they would never be playmates. Karin and Ned were devastated for us. Among their busy-ness with their baby and Paris, Karin stayed in contact, remembered my birthday. But her post on 17 June was brief:
We lost Albert yesterday. they say SIDS—La mort subite—we cant breath. sorry for telling you this way.
News like this has a rushing sound, like a vandal, like a destructive wind. At first I didn’t understand and had to read it again. I wept and called Rima, sent this awful news in her direction. I wept for Karin, for Ned, for little Albert, for us and for Z. I wept because I knew the words to say, because it was all too familiar. I wept for the thought of him growing cold, and for the little voice that said, It is not just us now.
In the days and nights that followed, Karin’s words pulsed through my head, tapped out like a telegram, over and over again. La mort subite. And with it, the thoughts of his little form, lying cold somewhere in a Paris hospital. How could we undo this? What is it about death, that it has to be so damn permanent and non-negotiable? There is no ‘maybe’ left, only ‘never’. I was unable to work, to write, I frittered away time on the blogs, and the baby lost forums, weeping for all these babies. And on a friend’s blog, I came across the concept of tonglen meditation:
When things are painful and difficult, the quality of difficulty should remind us to have the thought, ‘Other people feel this.’ Isolation in our pain and the loneliness of our burden reminds us of our shared humanity.
I’d found solace in meditation before; in the short meditations within yoga classes, and in a meditation group at Newcastle University. Often in yoga, the instruction was to breathe in light or energy, and to breathe out anything you didn’t need; a pranic version of the tiny transfers of oxygen and carbon dioxide our lungs performed with every breath. Tonglen meditation ran counter to this logic. It instructs you instead to breathe in the hot, dark, heavy feelings of sadness, anger, of feeling stuck—not just for you but anyone else feeling the same way—and then to breathe out a sense of spaciousness, of light, of safety, of relief from suffering. There was a generosity to it that went beyond our own biologically acquisitive nature of bringing nutrients in, sending waste out. In biological terms, this was photosynthesis; taking in the unwanted carbon dioxide, sending out the oxygen that was needed—and in the process generating something new, an unexpected sweetness.
With tonglen I could breathe in those hammering words and the dark, sickly fever of la mort subite—for us, and for Karin, Ned and Albert. I could let the sadness shake me and be absorbed into my cells. And I could breathe out relief from the hammering, and the wish for his little spirit to be somewhere warm, somewhere good. And that he might just bump into Z and make knowing baby eyes at her. ‘You too, huh?’
My birthday present to myself was a t-shirt printed with a graphic of an African elephant in full charge. Dokkoon, the Indian elephant at Melbourne Zoo, had safely delivered her baby in February, but in following her progress I’d also discovered that zoo elephants have much higher infant mortality than do wild or semi-captive populations. I felt a solidarity for the elephant mothers left behind. Wearing my elephant t-shirt enabled me to get out of bed, to make decisions without tears, to feel maybe I could be like a mama elephant—all the more fierce with love because of my loss.
We flew to Sydney for Albert’s funeral. After the ceremony in the chapel, we followed Karin and Ned, carrying their boy to his grave. The Port Botany wind blew up the cliffs to meet us. It was a big crowd for a small person. On the way back up the hill, I saw Renee. We hugged, this time shaking with sobs, no big bellies between us. My brain knew that I couldn’t turn this into a statistic—that it is not normal, or usual, for two out of three babies to die. Certainly not in countries with modern medical care, certainly not for women educated to postgraduate level. Later, Karin and I stood looking at Renee’s baby, Anna, and held onto one another. ‘She’ll be our measuring-stick baby,’ said Karin. ‘That’s how big our babies would be. She will always be the right age.’
Sunday, 11 July 2010
It’s been a season of grief. Our own grief is becoming worn and supple, though it still catches at our heels, constrains the way we walk. We limp as veteran mourners into the new fresh grief of Karin and Ned for their tiny son, not quite six months old, and my cousin for her husband of 22 years. I’d never been to a funeral of someone younger than 60 before (how fortunate! what lucky planet was I living on?)—but we’ve been to two within a week now, and three in the last seven months if you count our baby daughter’s.
I now have a new appreciation for funerals—the time that goes into them, the importance of the small details, the careful, deliberate laying-down of ritual and memory. We sit on hard wooden benches, search for tissues, give much longer than usual hugs.
How precious it is to have a festival for the lost one you treasured—to put them in the centre, include them in the party one last time. At the funeral, two incompatible realities collide: ‘He is gone forever, we must say goodbye’ and ‘He will always be here with us, in our hearts’. Nothing can stitch those two opposites into a cohesive story, but this is the heaving, fractal reality. Instead we have to re-stitch our hearts around it—or let them break, brittle, on the floor. It hurts to stitch our hearts like this, when the needle goes in we think we cannot bear it a moment longer. We think everything our hearts are made of will shatter. Yet the laws of physics bend once again, and so do our hearts—sore and tortured by the thread, pulled painfully back into something heart-shaped.
I wished so much I could offer some sage advice to Karin and Ned on how to survive this loss, but the truth is that I’m no closer to finding ‘the secret’ than they are. Surely, it isn’t helpful to say, ‘If your loss is anything like ours, you will struggle to stay sane and find meaning, you will feel broken for a long time and your loss will creep its way into everything—your work, your sex life, your friendships, and into the minutiae of what you wear and how you cook.’
It’s the truth—but it is also true that we have times when things feel good, when it feels like the edges are coming together and we can laugh. And even if we did know the secret (I’m still hopeful) it would nonetheless be our secret to our loss, and would likely be helpless in the lock of their sadness.
I was so hesitant about coming back to Sydney—to look at these ‘before’ places where the imprint of being pregnant and pre-accident is so fresh. But once we were here, things were nowhere near as raw as I had imagined. Yes, I was here before—we drove these streets in our now-dead car, my tummy rounded and living, full of our now-dead baby. But things were wound-back then, and it felt surprisingly good to remember that witless hopefulness and presumption that everything would be okay. We drove past our old house and parked across the road, and I thought of the last time we pulled the front door shut behind us.
We were sweaty and gritted with the dust that emerged from behind the furniture. It had been humid since I’d woken up in the summer morning dark, to keep filling boxes. From eight weeks of pregnancy, Haloumi had been waking me early, but that morning it was my excitement as well as hers that propelled me out of bed—this was the day, the day we moved. What kind of insanity was this—to be moving an entire family interstate while I was nearly eight months pregnant? My own insane optimism, and the broad-braided rope of homesickness, were pulling me back to Melbourne. After so many hours, our hands papered with corrugated cardboard and the sweetness of packing tape on our teeth, the truck had finally left. Inside it, our things were packed tight like tetris blocks—an entire family life condensed into so many square metres. We’d tiptoed across the damp-mopped floors with the real estate agent to sign off on the condition report. The electricity company man had come and read the meter, and switched off the power. We’d wiped the place clean of our existence there.
The car was loaded with all our holiday things—I took it to fill up on petrol while Rima and the girls walked to the chicken shop, then parked it across the road, its nose pointing west to the M5, and Melbourne beyond that. We couldn’t go back into the house—we’d just handed the keys in. So we sat there eating takeaway chicken and chips on the nature strip across the road from our house (no longer our house) having an impromptu picnic—relishing for a moment all the work of packing and the relief of finishing it.
I had worked so hard—to convince Rima to make the move at all, to get the job leading us back, to organise the move, and in the last weeks, to sift and pack our things while finishing up at work and dashing to pre-natal yoga. At times my mum or Rima or the removalists had told me to sit down and have a break, but I felt strengthened by my very-pregnant state, not weakened by it. My belly was heavy, but even in my sweaty dirty state, sitting on the nature strip eating takeaway, I felt like a trailer-trash goddess—beautiful and potent.
Not that potent, as it turned out. But sitting in the car nearly seven months later with a saggy belly and our baby girl reduced to ashes, I could still feel the humidity of that December afternoon on the grass and remember my optimism.