I bought a menorah. It’s a gleaming petite silver bridge of small cups, and this one is devoid of the Star of David, a dreidel, Hebrew glyphs, or anything else “Jewish” about it—discounting the thing itself. And this is not a celebration of light, but rather a different kind of struggle. This is why I’m lighting my first candle today.
Once, a long time ago, I was
In my youth, naïveté, I got pregnant when I was 20, with
I keep finding it hard to write it and keep I t one the page. I got pregnant. I had a baby. We named her Akira. She’s dead now. 14 years ago. I keep crossing and uncrossing these words. Writing and rewriting them. This is my big secret that I want to share. But even the words, as I write them. They don’t seem enough. Or right. They I feel trapped by them. Or I don’t want to let them out. Come back to haunt me or make me remember.
But I am a writer. And words are my tools, but they are such blunt and dull and inappropriate instruments today.
Back to the menorah. And this Vigil for Akira. The need to commemorate. Need? Commemorate? I feel that I
Last year, was a at this time, I was running a grief marathon, thirteen years after Akira’s death. It was early February and I had felt walked around was going about my days with a dissociative feeling that I’d forgotten something. What was it? Keys? Wallet? Important meeting? I was doing something mundane—folding the laundry, let’s say—when I felt an immense sadness fall on top of me. Stunned, and hardly breathing, my tears came on hot and steadily. I wailed.
How could I have forgotten that my baby’s birthday? The day The hours I spent in the hospital faded blue room, meditating through my contractions, walking the wide halls in my robe and johnny. I’d forgotten? I’d forgotten how it snowed that night and how the falling flakes glittered in the yellow halos of street lamps outside my window. I’d forgotten that Erik, Papa-to-be, sat came and went from the room, as much as his comfort would allow. I’d forgotten that.
The forgetting is not usually hard. Most Februarys, I am Akira’s birth and death anniversaries come and go as easily as blinking dreaming, sometimes a chore, but not usually. And I , the echoes of which haunt but do not control my waking life. The nine days when I was a mother to Akira and I were in the same world together seem like another lifetime away. I was a different person then. I’ve got a good and happy life without her. I’m moving on. I am more than this death.
So why last year did it hit me so hard? I checked the calendar during the initial crying spell. Akira would have been 13 years old that day. The hardest thing about remembering my dead child’s birthday is that it will always be joined with remembering her death day. Can’t have one without the other.
Dan came home from work and found me in an emotional mess. When I cry, I go all out hurricane mode: snot, tears, wet cheeks, soaking shirt. Uncontrollable. I had probably abandoned the wash and curled into a little ball on the futon, until he came home, after which I felt better, but far from normal.
I’d forgotten it—the mess of tubing and electrode wire that had connected her to the machines behind her. The days of blipping oxygen machines and green monitors. The gentle-speaking nurses on their rounds. Who can forget the city-within-a-city feeling of Dartmouth’s Medical Center, and that I walked so hard every day up and down those stairs that I, in a moment of weakness, used the elevator to the third floor of David’s House, to the room we lived out of? I have not forgotten I’ve forgotten the green and cream striped wallpaper and the wing chair and the canopied bed. I’d forgotten until then that I rocked her solid and stiff body in the nursery, after we’d disconnected her. That the light was yellow and dim. I remember that the Doctor cried as he told me the news. And that I The blonde nurse who was tending Akira once reminded me to eat and gave me her package of peanut butter and crackers and I’ve forgotten how it feels to force yourself to swallow. It’s okay that I’d forgotten the ugly parts, rights? I don’t want to continually remember this. But I do. I don’t. But I do.
And so I bought the menorah
The next day after my complete and utter breakdown, I went to work in an unusually fragile state. I considered telling my co-worker, a mother herself, what was going on. Actually, I’d wanted to tell her for a long time, but never found a way to slip it into conversation, nor the courage. But I knew she would understand and feel for me. I could trust her with my feelings. But whenever I’m faced with coming out as a bereaved parent, I always chicken out. I did that day too. I put on my best, most cheerful smile and greeted the customers as best I could. I handed them their coffees and their change. I tried to act normal. I felt like a fake. And I took frequent bathroom breaks to collect myself, and to give the tears the privacy they deserved.
I got through the day without incident and trudged home to cry without interruption. Dan, once home from the office, calmed my nerves and offered himself up to my abuse and amusement. I mean that in all goodness. I cry on his shoulder and vent about what’s bothering me. And he, in his own sweet way, brings me out of the cloud of despair with his humor and gentleness.
I didn’t know Dan when Akira was born. I wouldn’t know him for another seven years. Because, frankly, it took me that long to pull myself out of grief enough to join in with the regular world again. Start joining clubs and taking classes. Make friends and date again. I couldn’t have asked for anyone as kind and forgiving as he. And in my 14th year of bereavement, and he takes my sorrow and spins it into sunshine.
Erik, the My baby’s father and I broke up. Usual story. Though it wasn’t because of Akira. We had been on and off and we’d both decided it was better to call it quits—before we knew we were pregnant. He’s grown up in a broken home, and mine as actively breaking. We decided to stick together for the baby’s sake, and rented an apartment and made a stab at giving our kid the normal upbringing that neither of us had. We probably stayed together for about another month after she passed. Both of us grieved in our own way, separately, and didn’t know how to support one another.
I moved out to my own apartment and have been on my own ever since, until I started dating again.
As much as I write, I don’t know that it will all get said. This is just a little bit—an introduction. My plan is to light a candle for every day she took a breath (assisted or not), during her anniversary dates. So if this series of posts seems a little like too much information for you, please check back in after Valentine’s Day, when I’ll have moved on with myself. But for those of you who are reading, please know that this is all a part of my healing process. And that I am writing right now because I can’t tell you directly. This is the truth. I simply can’t talk about it. So if you’re reading and would like to acknowledge it in some way, please simply say “I’m reading your Vigil for Akira. Thanks (please keep writing, etc.)” or something like that. Make it short. Because I can really only handle a small cursory glance over the whole subject. Any more than that would be too much. But you do not have to acknowledge or respond. I am doing this for my own sake. If you’d like to pass along this blog post and share it, I’d fine with that too. I think it’s a necessary part of my “coming out”.
Just to make a long blog post a little longer, here’s a little poem I wrote during a writing generation workshop with Jan Frazier, to whom I am greatly indebted. I’d attended a month-long poetry retreat at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT in 2004 and presented this along with some other poems for a manuscript critique with Richard Jackson. He said this was the strongest poem of the bunch. It’s not changed much and was published by bakkamagazine.com in April 2008. I wrote it for my friend Vada, who was bedside with me for some of the worst times.
ICU
my fingers clutched
in futility the flesh
we cursed the blood
that would not flow there
your toes the size
of dime-store pearls
were fat with fluid
and black as the night
I birthed you
we talked I recall
of everyday things—
as if you were already
barefoot on the porch
brushing a doll and
I was squat shelling peas
