Just
Keep
Knitting
a journey of healing through
forgiveness,
faith, and
fibre
LONNA CUNNINGHAM
Copyright
2012 by Lonna Cunningham
All rights reserved.
Published both electronically and in print by
Apple
Jack Creek Books
ISBN 978-0-9878626-1-7
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Thank you for respecting the hard
work of this author.
~
for Nolan
~
Table of Contents
Appendix B: Knitting Abbreviations
Foreword
I have always known that my life has taken some difficult turns: the death of my infant daughter, my husband's brain tumour, and the family drama that continued after his death all took their toll on me, to be sure. Still, I'd survived and my life was finally looking up. My son was doing well, I'd married a wonderful man, I had a good job … my life was better than it had ever been.
One night I was awakened from a sound sleep by chest pain that didn’t go away. Other than the fact that my chest hurt all the time, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with me. Then the headaches started, and the intermittent spikes in my blood pressure, and still, the doctors couldn't find anything wrong. It must be stress, they said. I resisted that idea: my life was great, it couldn’t be stress! Then I thought ... what if all the old chaos hadn't really been dealt with quite as thoroughly as I wanted to believe?
And indeed, that was exactly what was going on. The physical pain I was experiencing was my body’s way of getting my attention, and it wouldn’t go away until I could let go of the anger and fear that I still carried from the chaotic events I had thought to be safely in the past. The next problem was one of practicalities: how, exactly, does one let go of anger and fear? How, precisely, does one work through old feelings? What does this mean in actual, concrete terms?
This book is my answer those questions.
Forgiveness, I discovered, is not just waving your hands in dismissal and saying, “it’s in the past, I’ve moved on, it doesn’t matter”; nor does it necessarily require that everyone becomes best friends again. When you look at the situation with new eyes, when you discover a way to see everyone involved with compassion, then the anger dissipates on its own. The Forgiveness sections of the book describe the changes in my thinking that helped me to make peace with my past.
Healing is also about faith. I am a Quaker, and though my theological perspective probably seems unorthodox to a lot of people, I do believe that we all need the help of the Divine in our daily lives – especially when we are dealing with deep hurts and fears. No matter how you may envision God, I hope that the prayers and meditations in the Faith sections of this book are an encouragement to you. You are loved, you are cared for, you are not alone. Just listen … God is there, in the silence.
As for Fibre, I took up knitting and spinning a few years ago. I truly wish I had started sooner: the rhythm of knitting is like meditation, and working with wool and other natural fibres is a deeply grounding experience. The way that a ball of string transforms itself into fabric beneath your hands is magical, and directing that process awakens the creator in you. As I walked through my old memories, a knitting project appeared in my mind for each chapter of the story and as I wrote, those ideas were transformed from visions in my head to finished objects in my hands. Each chapter includes instructions and pictures to guide and inspire you so that you can create your own variations of these items. If you don’t knit, I hope that the projects described here give you some ideas for the weaving, crochet, painting, woodwork, quilting or other creative handwork you enjoy. The inner stillness that comes over you as you work is a form of meditation that can help you get through the difficult days. As Elizabeth Zimmerman so famously said, “Knit on, through all crises.”
Just keep knitting!
Chapter 1: Listen
When chest pain wakes you out of a sound sleep and won’t go away … listen.
When your blood pressure goes up to 144/100 ...
listen.
When the doctors say “your heart is fine, your lungs are fine, your
chest wall is fine … follow up with your GP”...
listen.
When your GP says “perhaps it’s stress that you aren’t
conscious of” …
listen.
I didn’t want to listen. I know what stress is, thank you very much. I’ve had two round trip tickets to Hell and lived to tell the tale – I know stress really, really well, and this isn’t it. My life is better now than it has ever been! How could I be suffering so much stress that I’d be in almost constant pain, unable to sleep, and feeling like my head’s about to explode … now, when I managed just fine back when things really were crazy?
It made no sense.
But my body would not be quiet. The pain got worse.
Listen, my body said. Listen to me. It’s time.
Time for
what?
Time to finish the old work.
I’m too busy. Go away.
You are not too busy, and I am not going away. Listen.
I
have things to do. Can’t this wait?
It’s waited long enough.
:sigh:
And so I booked myself off work and sat down to hear what my body was trying to tell me.
Some days I feel like I’ve already lived two lifetimes. My first child died from a severe neural tube defect on the day she was born. The pain of that loss changed my life completely: that’s when I really started to wake up and take a look at what it is to truly live, to be in the present moment, to make the most of the time we are given. Losing her was Hell on earth. Nothing in my whole life has ever hurt as much as saying goodbye to my baby – it truly felt like someone reached into my chest and tore out my still-beating heart. I got so tired of crying and aching and missing her, it was exhausting and sad and unfair and it hurt.
My son Nolan was born a year later, and things got better. His smiling face healed many of my sorrows – though the pain of my daughter’s death did not fully ease for several years, and once in awhile it still catches me off guard. She’d have been seventeen this year. I do wonder what she’d have looked like at seventeen. She had dark hair and dusky skin and a round face, and she was beautiful to me, even in death.
When Nolan was about a year and a half old, my husband Allister, who had always been a fairly even tempered kind of guy, suddenly became insanely jealous and controlling. I tried everything I could think of to mollify him and keep him happy – I gave up my friends, I stopped going to the gym, I kept my opinions to myself – and I felt myself shrivelling into a dry husk on the inside, the love I had once felt for him suffocating under a crushing burden of anger and resentment. We went to counselling, but no amount of talking seemed to make a difference: he said all the right things when we were with the counsellor, and at home, nothing was any different. Eventually I moved out in a last-ditch effort to save our marriage. Perhaps, if we started ‘dating’ each other again and weren’t faced with the multitude of challenges of living in the same space every day, we could put things back together.
It wasn’t until I was in my own condo with the door safely locked behind me that I finally realized I’d spent months huddled on the very edge of the bed, unable to relax, even in sleep. I was so afraid of him, yet I could not articulate the cause for my fear: he said he loved me, he never hit me, so why was I so terrified? In five short years he had gone from the love of my life to an angry stranger, and I had no idea how this had happened.
Just before Thanksgiving, Allister was admitted to hospital for what everyone assumed was a nervous breakdown of some kind. I wasn’t there – some of his friends took him in after he started acting strangely while having dinner with them, and I was asked to stay away lest my presence make things worse. Two days later I got a phone call at work from the neurologist who’d examined him, and she had bad news. “He has a brain tumour,” she said, “and he is refusing to let us contact his parents.”
And the conductor shouted “All aboard for Hell!”, the train whistle blew, and I was dragged on board again.
Thus began the worst years of my life. Allister’s tumour was located in the part of the brain that governs personality, which of course explained why he had changed so drastically from the person I had known, and why no amount of counselling could help us repair our relationship. This also meant that for the rest of his life, I had to deal with a stranger who wore the face of the man I'd married but whose brain was scrambled in such a way that he was utterly self-centred with no trace of empathy for anyone … not even his own child.
I probably could’ve found a way to work with that stranger, though it would not have been easy. I did try. When we realized what was going on, I moved back home to care for him. I took my vows seriously: in sickness and in health. I quit my job and borrowed money from the bank and from friends to buy him everything he wanted for his ‘last go’ – a trip across the country by train, a brand new Lexus SUV. Allister worked for one of the big Fort McMurray oil companies, so I knew that his disability pay would cover our living expenses and that when the inevitable occurred, life insurance would pay off the bills for the luxuries he wanted in his last days. We’d be fine.
Two months later, his parents stepped in and reclaimed their son with the ferocity of a pack of wolves fighting a stranger off their territory. They told me in no uncertain terms that I was to blame for Allister’s illness. I was a bad wife. I caused him all kinds of stress with my terrible behaviour, and everyone knows that stress causes cancer. Logically, I recognized that all this as the outburst of hurting parents who needed someone to blame; logically, I knew that I was just the convenient target and that none of it was actually true … but that didn't make it hurt any less.
I was unceremoniously kicked out of my husband's life: he had a friend phone me “to convey Allister’s need to have the house to himself during his recovery”; though of course I no longer had anywhere else to live. Allister didn’t even blink when I said that if I was leaving, Nolan was coming with me – of course, that was fine with him. Since he wasn’t allowed to drive and didn’t want the Lexus anymore, he said I should just keep it – though I couldn’t possibly afford the payments for it, never mind the fuel to drive it. I was unemployed, I had emptied my savings, and now I was being told to leave the only home I had.
I knew that arguing would be fruitless. In less than two weeks, I found a job in Edmonton for half the pay I’d been making as a contractor up north. I rented an apartment and took what I needed from our house – the bed I’d had as a girl, my son’s things, the everyday dishes and cutlery, a few pots and some CorningWare, a fold out couch I’d had in university and the old kitchen table from out on the deck. I left the crystal and the china and all the ‘good things’ behind without a backward look, swapped the Lexus for a 4Runner, found a daycare for Nolan, and went to work.
The next two years were one crisis after another. After months of seeing Nolan only when it suited him, Allister served me with court papers demanding shared custody and regular visits. I reluctantly agreed, but asked that all visits be supervised in light of the medical issues at play. As Allister was effectively living with his parents, this wasn’t really a big issue, though it was perceived as a grave insult.
You see, Allister and his family were certain that if we all just kept a positive attitude then Allister had a good chance of getting well. Discussing his condition or mentioning the possibility of his death was therefore both unnecessary and unhelpful. In any case, they said, Nolan was far too young to be told about death and illness; children should be protected from those kinds of things. I disagreed: days after the tumour was found, I had shown Nolan the scans so that he could see the huge mass in Daddy’s skull and understand why everyone was acting so strangely. I told him that the doctors would try hard to make that big lump go away, but this kind of tumour isn’t the kind they are able to fix. Nobody knows when, but probably before you are big, Daddy will die. Nolan accepted this calmly, as most children do. They can handle the truth – it’s the lies they can’t accept. Allister’s family insisted that I was wrong to be so forthright, and the tension generated by the differences in our approach to Allister’s illness made those years even more difficult.
Eventually, the tumour made its last charge: Nolan told me that Daddy was now in a bed in the living room and not talking to him. A few days later, I got a phone call at work. It was “a message for Nolan”, Grandpa B said. “Tell him that his dad died this morning.” That was it. Nolan wasn’t allowed to go say goodbye, his father was cremated, and we muddled through the funeral services, gripping the tattered shreds of our dignity with both hands.
Then, just as I thought life might settle down at last, my child support payments stopped. I was told that nothing could be done until the will was settled (this is patently untrue, but I had no money to pay a lawyer to get it sorted out). Nolan asked for some of his toys and a few mementos of his father, and his requests were ignored. Eventually, a few things showed up on our doorstep, but dealing with it all was so difficult that we just gave up and did without.
Twelve months later, the overdue child support was finally paid up and regular payments resumed, but that year had been long. When I was finally able to find out the dollar value of Nolan’s actual inheritance (which took me more than three years and the intervention of a lawyer), I was shocked to see so little money. The generous life insurance had not been left for him. So much just disappeared, and all I could think was that Allister could not possibly have intended for things to end up this way. But, things are what they are, and we managed to make ends meet. Eventually the drama quieted down, though it never really did get resolved. Support cheques usually show up on time, and I just have to hope they keep coming.
So much drama takes a toll on a person, though. Sixteen years of one thing or another, with the moments of peace and quiet few and far between … it’s no wonder that I now find myself with my chest tight and my head aching, off work for however long it takes to get all of this sorted out and to get my body’s alarm system reset to a lower threshold. My counsellor describes it as Delayed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which makes sense.
I’m trying to help my body let go of the tension and fear: it is safe to slow down now, safe to relax, but I’ve run at high throttle and kept my guard up for so long it’s a lot of work getting my body to reset. This will take some time and a lot of concerted effort. This book is part of that effort.
Forgiveness
I’m trying to find the path to forgiveness, but it is a difficult road. I’m still really angry at the injustice of it all, and I long for things to be made right. I can’t change the situation, though, so I have to change my outlook. It’s not easy, but I’m working on it. It’s the only road to peace.
Perhaps, if I tell the whole story and leave nothing out, not even the ugly parts or the bits where I behaved badly … perhaps then I can work through it, one step at a time.
Faith
God, this pain is frightening. I don’t understand why I would fall apart now, after I held it together for so long, but here we are. I really thought this was all behind me, and I don’t want to put my whole life on hold so that I can work through my old feelings. Like it or not though, I’ve gotten the message loud and clear – the only way out is through.
~
Mom always said that we are only given the grace we need for each day; we don’t get it ahead of time. The strength we need shows up when we need it and not a moment sooner. Well, I need strength to do what I have to do now. Okay, God, here we go. Hold tight, okay?
Fibre
When my mental health crisis hit in February of 2011, I was in more or less continual discomfort – every day my head hurt, my chest hurt, and I was staggeringly tired. I felt like I was at loose ends, not knowing exactly what was wrong, unable to pinpoint the source of the trouble but aware that something definitely wasn’t right and I needed to get some help. Fortunately, the Community Mental Health clinic provided quick assistance: I phoned in and explained my situation, and within a few hours I had a call back from a counsellor. He encouraged me to book an appointment with my regular therapist and said that yes, I really did need to take the time to deal with this now, and no, I wasn’t crazy. All the old issues were demanding my attention, and it was important to listen and rest and recover.
Realizing that I would be spending at least the next few days at home, I wandered into my fibre room and stared at the yarn stash. Complicated lace was out of the question, I was too scatterbrained for that; I needed to work on something beautiful and soothing that didn’t require too much concentration. My hands settled on some yarn that I had bought at a garage sale, several soft and fuzzy fat balls in a warm rose colour. That particular yarn is no longer made, but it was a thick alpaca/acrylic blend that seemed just right. I headed to Ravelry to find a pattern, and the Chinook Scarf appeared on my list. The Chinook is a shallow triangle worked from one tip to the other, and you can make it pretty much any size you like and with any yarn you have: use needles that are the right size for your yarn (check the ball band recommendation), then figure out how much yarn you have and divide it in half. Knit until you’ve used up half of your yarn, making the triangle bigger as you go, then use up the other half of the yarn, making the triangle smaller as you work your way down the other tip of the scarf. It's mostly stockinette stitch with a bit of simple lace on one edge and a rolled edge on the other, so it's got enough variety to be interesting but not so much that it's overwhelming.
Chinook Scarf
This pattern is reprinted here with the generous permission of the designer, Ali Green. Pictures of a variety of finished projects as well as a free downloadable version of the pattern (which includes a chart for the lace border) are available on Ravelry. If you stop in there, please take a moment to thank Ali for the wonderful design and for her generosity in sharing the pattern!
Suggested Yarn & Equipment
Use absolutely any yarn that strikes your fancy – it is wonderful in a bulky yarn for a thick shawlette or in sock yarn for a lighter scarf. A cotton yarn will lie flatter than something with more memory and spring, but the slight curl you get from the stockinette stitch doesn’t seem to affect the way the shawl looks when worn. The Chinook pictured here was made with two skeins of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Bulky.
Use needles to suit your yarn (check the ball band, and go up or down a size if needed to get the weight and drape of fabric that you want). You may find circular needles comfortable for this project, particularly if you use a bulkier yarn, as they will keep the weight of the work centred in your lap.
Standard knitting abbreviations are used throughout the book, but if you are in doubt of the meaning of any of the terms there is a complete listing in Appendix B.
Part 1
CO 9 sts
Set-up row (WS): k3, yo, k2tog, pm, k1, sl 3.
R1 (RS): k to one stitch before marker, kfb, sm, k3, yo, k2.
R2: k4, yo, k2tog, sm, k1, p to last 3 stitches, sl 3.
R3: k to marker, sm, k4, yo, k2.
R4: k5, yo, k2tog, sm, k1, p to last 3 stitches, sl 3.
R5: k to one stitch before marker, kfb, sm, k5, yo, k2.
R6: k6, yo, k2tog, sm, k1, p to last 3 stitches, sl 3.
R7: k to marker, sm, k to end.
R8: Cast off 3 stitches (you will have one stitch on right hand needle), k2, yo, k2tog, sm, k1, p to last 3 stitches, sl 3.
Repeat these 8 rows until half the yarn has been used, ending after a row 8. Join second ball of yarn.
Part 2
This is almost identical to part 1, but instead of increasing (kfb) on rows 1 and 5 you will be decreasing (k2tog) instead. In other words:
R1: k to 2 stitches before marker, k2tog, sm, K3, yo, k2.
R2: k4, yo, k2tog, sm, k1, p to last 3 stitches, sl 3.
R3: k marker, sm, k4, yo, k2.
R4: k5, yo, k2tog, sm, k1, p to last 3 stitches, sl 3.
R5: k to 2 stitches before marker, k2tog, sm, K5, yo, k2.
R6: k6, yo, k2tog, sm, k1, p to last 3 stitches, sl 3.
R7: k to marker, sm, k to end.
R8: Cast off 3 stitches (you will have one stitch on right hand needle), k2, yo, k2tog, sm, k1, p to last 3 stitches, sl 3.
Repeat these 8 rows until 9 stitches remain, ending after a row 8. Cast off loosely, and weave in ends. Block to even out stitches and open up lace pattern if desired.
Admire your work. Wrap yourself in it as you prepare for your journey, or give it to someone you have been meaning to thank for their kindness.
Chapter 2: Jessica
In the fall of 1992, a handsome electrical engineer named Allister showed up in one of the computer classes I was teaching. Chatting over coffee, we discovered that we had been at university around the same time and had friends in common, and I agreed to meet him for a date the following weekend. That went surprisingly well; so much so that I instantly felt that marrying him was the right thing to do. Within a couple of weeks (yes, weeks) we got engaged, planned a wedding for the following year, and let the current carry us forward. There were a few times during our engagement when I wondered if perhaps I’d rushed into things, but my doubts never lasted long. Allister took such pride in referring to me as his fiancé, he sent me roses at work for no particular reason, and he seemed quite happy to spend the evening with me doing ordinary things like making dinner and watching television. It was a predictable and safe kind of life, not too exciting, not too boring. It suited me just fine.
We had a lovely wedding, went on a nice honeymoon, and returned to Fort McMurray where life continued to follow the predictable and safe routines we'd established during our engagement. We worked our regular Monday to Friday jobs, watched our favourite shows on TV, went out to the movies now and then, and made the five hour trip to Edmonton once a month to shop and visit our families. Our lives were no different than those of our friends and neighbours, and I couldn’t imagine wanting anything more.
One hot July weekend I decided that I must be coming down with a mild flu. I was feeling really tired and under the weather, though it seemed like the sort of thing that would probably pass in a few days if I just took it easy. Then I looked at the calendar: that mild cramping in my belly should’ve meant the onset of my monthly cycle, which hadn’t arrived yet. It occurred to me that pregnancy could also account for the exhaustion and vaguely queasy sensations I was experiencing, and with our less-than-stringent attention to birth control it was certainly a possibility. I mentioned it to Allister, who seemed vaguely uninterested in such female concerns, and picked up a pregnancy test at the drugstore in case things didn’t change in the next day or two. When the queasiness was still nagging at me the following week, I decided it was time to find out if my suspicions were on the mark. Sure enough, the result was an unmistakeable yes. I took a deep breath and tried another test, just to be sure. Same answer. Wow.
We had planned to spend the first year or so of married life doing a bit of travel and enjoying concerts and theatre and the like, then we would find a nice house and settle down to start a family. A pregnancy now was definitely ahead of schedule, and it was sort of scary to think of becoming a mother already, but, really, there wasn't anything about our plans that made this particularly difficult. We wanted a family, after all: if it was a little earlier than we'd anticipated, well, that was okay. Admittedly the whole thing was a bit nerve-wracking, but it was still really exciting.
Allister was at work that day, and I was home alone. Still shaking from the surprise of seeing that big plus sign on the test strips, I called to tell my husband that our suspicions had been confirmed – I was pregnant.
“Oh!" he said. "Umm … well … did you wanna do the ‘A’?” He cautiously used a euphemism for the word abortion in case someone outside his office door might overhear his conversation.
I was shocked. We were practicing Catholics, for heaven’s sake! He was suggesting an abortion because this was happening a few months earlier than we had intended? We could afford a child, we wanted a child, and he was actually asking if I wanted to abort the pregnancy?
At my incredulous reaction he immediately started to backpedal. “Oh, I just meant that it’s up to you, whatever you want is fine. Yeah, it’s great, a baby would be great, and umm, yeah this is a bit earlier than we planned, but yeah, sure, of course it’s good news.” That wasn’t quite the reaction I’d hoped for, but assuming that it all must have come as a bit of a shock, I let it pass.
Thus began the usual round of first-time parenting adventures: telling our families the happy news, going to doctor’s appointments, reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting over and over again, shopping for maternity clothes, baby clothes and cloth diapers. We found a lovely two bedroom house with a big yard, a huge kitchen, and a possession date of February 1. The timing was perfect – we would be able to move in and have everything in place by the time the baby arrived in late March. It seemed like everything was magically falling into place.
Of course, being good parents-to-be, we signed up for prenatal classes at the local health unit. As I was getting ready for our first class one night in January, I felt a trickle of fluid run down my leg. It wasn’t the big gush that everyone describes when they talk about your water breaking, so I really wasn’t sure what was going on. Besides, I was only at 30 weeks – I still had two months to go so it couldn't be that, not yet. My mom had worked as an obstetrical nurse for years, so I called her and asked what she thought was going on. She very calmly suggested that I call the nurse at the hospital and see if they wanted me to come down to be checked out, and I knew by the careful stillness in her voice that she was worried. This could be a problem.
The hospital did, indeed, want us to come down right away. I figured we were looking at premature labour and that I’d likely find myself bored on bed rest while trying to hold off the birth as long as possible. My sister had been born two months premature and her early months were a terrible struggle, but neonatal care had improved a lot in thirty years, so I wasn’t really all that concerned.
The nurses were able to confirm within just a few minutes that my water had indeed broken, though I wasn’t having any contractions yet, which was encouraging. An obstetrician was called in to do an ultrasound (the first of my pregnancy) and as he scanned, I could tell by his expression that he’d found something troubling. He checked, and rechecked, frowning, and finally packed away the equipment and left the room. A few minutes later, he came back with a solemn look on his face.
“Your baby has a serious neural tube defect and will most certainly need more care than we can provide here. Since your water has broken labour could start at any time. We can keep you here if you want, but it would probably be better if we were to transport you to the city now. It’s up to you though.”
I nodded numbly. "I'll go now."
A nurse led us to a private room so that we could make some arrangements. My mom and dad were quick to answer the phone, though by now it was almost midnight – Mom had been pretty sure that something wasn’t right. We arranged for my parents to meet the air ambulance when it arrived, and Allister went home to pack some things and start the long drive to Edmonton.
While I waited with an IV dripping medication into my arm to prevent labour from starting, the doctor who had been taking care of all my prenatal visits came to see me, looking uncharacteristically rumpled in his sweats and t-shirt. He had made the late night trip to the hospital just to tell me how sorry he was to hear that the baby wasn't okay. I could tell that he felt guilty for not having ordered routine ultrasounds (which would have detected the problem much earlier on), but as I was perfectly healthy and there was no reason to expect any problems, we hadn’t bothered. I reassured him that I wouldn’t have been able to terminate the pregnancy anyway, even if I had known, and this way, I had all those months of happiness with my unborn child.
My doctor took his leave when the medics arrived to shuttle me from the hospital to the waiting plane. I remember the flashing lights, the roar of the jet engines, and the calm, reassuring voices of the medics, but my mind was focused on the child I carried, trying to come to terms with the fact that the baby wouldn’t be with me for much longer and that soon I would have to say goodbye. At last, with a chilly blast of winter air, I found myself being wheeled through the ambulance bay at the city hospital. There were my parents and my sister, waiting for me. They held my hands and gave me their strength, their solid presence more comforting than I would have thought possible. Bustling nurses installed me on a high risk prenatal ward, and as labour still didn’t seem to be starting, we were left to wait for morning when more tests would be run. We listened to the clock tick the night away, the long red second hand clicking noisily whenever it tried to pass the top of the hour, hiccupping louder and louder until it finally shoved past whatever obstacle it had encountered and started around again, only to repeat the irritating staccato dance sixty seconds later.
Allister arrived in the early hours of the morning, family members came and went, and eventually the noisy clock and the increasingly busy corridors outside my room said that a new day was beginning. After more prodding and monitoring, I was taken for another ultrasound so that the doctors could get a better look at the baby. The sonographer was using brand new equipment and explained that the man standing behind her was just there to help with the unfamiliar machine. Translating what I could of their acronym-laden conversation while staring intently at the monitor beside me, I realized the extent of the problem – this wasn’t just a bubble in the spinal cord, this was a massive malformation of the brain itself, right at the base of the skull. This baby wasn’t ever going to be okay. That much damage to the structure of the brain is incompatible with any kind of life outside an institution, and I knew it. Death would be a mercy for this child.
Glancing over her shoulder at her assistant, the sonographer said “I’m just going to Doppler the defect,” and suddenly, my body was shuddering with sobs. She hadn’t said anything particularly upsetting; she simply meant that she was going to document the blood flow going in and out of the damaged part of the baby’s brain. Somehow, though, her few words cracked my resolve, and I fell to pieces. My baby was hopelessly broken. My baby was dying. I tried to hold still, knowing that my heaving sobs were making it impossible for the sonographer to get a clear image. She gently offered to get my husband from the waiting room, but I knew I’d just cry harder if he were with me, so I shook my head and gripped the bed rails with white knuckles, holding my breath to try and force my body to stillness. She worked a few moments longer then said, “This poor lady has had enough, we’ll stop here,” and I abandoned myself to the wracking sobs of heart-rending grief.
Another day of hospital routine went by in a haze of meal trays, thermometers, and blood pressure cuffs. Late in the afternoon the neonatologist came in to describe what the scans had revealed: our baby had a neural tube defect that was referred to as an Arnold-Chiari Type III. It wasn’t a genetic error, but a fault that develops during the early days of pregnancy (translating the doctor’s words for my husband the engineer, I explained that the blueprints were fine, but there’d been a major construction mistake). In the first weeks of pregnancy, the spinal column starts off as a long trough which gradually closes itself up, much like a zipper being pulled upwards from the base of the spine towards the head. In this case, the zipper didn’t make it all the way to the top, and a gap was left at the spot where the spine joins the skull. The neural structures that should have developed inside the protection of skull and spinal column were malformed and unprotected, meaning that the baby might not survive labour and delivery, and would almost certainly die a short time after birth. Since labour generally starts within 10 days of one’s water breaking – usually sooner rather than later – we would have a little bit of time to prepare ourselves, but that was all. There was no chance that the outcome would be anything but sorrowful. The only good news was that they could tell us that the baby was a girl, which meant that we would be able to choose a name for her before she arrived. I wanted to be able to say hello and goodbye properly.
As I absorbed all of this information, I realized that somehow, deep down, I had known that things weren’t right. I remembered dreaming about something being wrong with the baby and the doctors attempting strange medical procedures in an effort to repair her but without much hope of success. When, in the waking world, the doctors told me she was going to die, I didn’t feel the refusal or denial that would be so understandable in circumstances like that – instead, I felt like I had just been reminded of something I’d known all along, something important that I had somehow forgotten for a few moments. It was a strange sensation, hearing such awful news not as a surprise, but as a confirmation of what I already knew to be true. Still, difficult as it was, I felt better knowing exactly what we faced.
Longing for real food and a comfortable bed, I asked if I could stay at my parents’ house while we waited for nature to take its course. There was nothing anyone could do for the baby, after all, and as long as I didn’t develop an infection there was no real risk to me either. Given the situation, I couldn’t see why I should eat hospital food and put up with beeping monitors and noisy intercoms when I could be resting in familiar surroundings, eating my mother’s home cooking and sleeping in a real bed. The doctor agreed, and with instructions to keep an eye out for fever or blood pressure spikes and come back at the first sign of labour, I was released. It was with a sense of great relief that I sank into the safety and familiarity of my parents’ home.
Ten days passed, then twenty, then thirty. I went to the hospital every week and was checked for signs of infection or changes that might suggest labour would begin, but there was nothing. I wasn’t ready to let her go, I suppose, and so my body held on. Allister was able to work at his company’s Edmonton office, but I stumbled around in a daze, grieving the impending loss of this child and trying to process this sudden shift in my reality. All the baby clothes could be packed away. There would be a funeral instead of a baby shower. The nursery in our new house would be empty. For six long weeks I spent my days weeping softly, miserable with the discomfort of late pregnancy, afraid of the impending delivery, and heartsick with grief.
In a way, despite the long and sad days, the delay was a blessing. Allister went to Fort McMurray to finish packing and moved our things from the apartment and into the house. We purchased a burial plot at the cemetery. We chose a lovely christening gown for her to wear in her tiny casket. We took our time selecting the readings for the burial service. And we chose her name.
We had originally decided that if we had a girl we would name her Zoe Michaela, but since Zoe means life it didn't seem to be the right name for a child whose time here would be so brief. I looked through the baby name books again and found the name Jessica, which meant God is watching. It was perfect, particularly as Psalm 139 was one of the readings we had chosen:
My frame
was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes
saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written
in your book
before one of them came to be.
And so the baby had a name, Jessica: the one that God had been watching all along.
Despite my grief, I was able to rest after a fashion. I discovered that I was unable to watch television or read books as I couldn't maintain enough concentration to follow even the simplest story line, but I found great comfort in crafting various small things: children's art kits from the craft store kept my hands occupied as I painted ceramic refrigerator magnets and coloured window stickers with bright markers. I didn't know how to knit back then or I would surely have produced enough cotton dishcloths and boring scarves to supply a household for years; I just knew that I needed to be making something, anything, as long as it didn't require much mental effort and kept my hands busy. Somehow the act of creating, even if what I made was neither complex nor particularly beautiful, made me feel better. I have seen the same impulse in others suffering from grief and loss, and I firmly believe that putting your hands to whatever creative endeavour calls to you – no matter how silly or senseless it may seem to others – can help you to cope with difficult times.
When I reached full term, we decided to go ahead with an induction: it was time to say goodbye, time to let her go. On the morning of February 13th I was checked in to the labour ward, and I gritted my teeth through twelve hours of drug-induced contractions. Morphine didn’t seem to dull the pain, though it did permit me to fade into unconsciousness between contractions. After a long day with very little progress, the nurses decided we should get some rest and try again the next day. I slept for a few hours, but at midnight I awoke in hard labour and morphine didn’t even begin to take the edge off the pain. I was terrified: I simply couldn’t see how I could cope with anything more and I begged them to sedate me and just wake me when it was all over. Thankfully, an epidural worked quickly and without any complications, and I finally relaxed. Still hazy from the morphine, as I drifted into sleep I thought I could see a pair of angels standing in the corner of the room. They were two young men with dark and tousled hair, their feathered wings folded against their backs, wearing scuffed blue jeans and wrinkled white t-shirts. Honestly, they looked more like construction workers on a break than divine messengers, leaning against the wall and casually knocking ash from their cigarettes as they sipped coffee from brown paper cups. These were the angels sent to escort our baby back home, they were waiting for Jessica. I found their presence oddly comforting and I closed my eyes, content to sleep under their watchful gaze.
Just after ten the next morning, Jessica arrived in a hushed and quiet room – she didn’t cry, she didn’t wake, but her tiny, shallow breaths told me she was here with us, even if just for a few moments. The nurses gently dressed her in a pink jumpsuit with a hood to cover her malformed skull, then wrapped her in a pale yellow blanket that some kind soul had knit for families like ours. When my daughter was finally placed in my arms, I kissed her small forehead and marvelled at her perfect fingers. Her skin was dusky and she had a head full of dark hair, one brown eye barely open. I hummed Jesus Loves Me and rocked, content to hold my little girl at long last, even though I knew it would not be for long. Woozy from medication and exhaustion, I gave her to Allister – we knew she wasn’t going to live long, and I wanted him to have a chance to hold her while she was still here. Minutes later, Allister nudged me and said that the baby was shaking: though his arms were indeed rattling with nerves and tension, Jessica was completely still. I reached out to lay my hand on that tiny chest, and I could tell that her little heart had stopped. Glancing up, I saw that the corner of the room was empty. The angels had taken her, she was gone.
The nurses came and quietly filled in papers, gently measuring and weighing the baby, making ink prints of Jessica’s tiny hands and feet for me. A photographer came and took pictures. Allister’s family still had not arrived, though they’d been called hours earlier. My family were waiting down the hall, but we had always planned to have Allister’s family come in first because this baby had seemed to be very important to them and I knew that my family would wait if I asked them to. I couldn’t comprehend why my in-laws still hadn’t arrived: the induction had been booked a week in advance, they knew we were at the hospital, and Allister had called them early that morning to say that it was nearly time and that they should come right away. Throughout the morning, Allister kept looking at the door, but though nurses and doctors came through, his parents didn't. After waiting another half hour, we decided that it was time to change plans, and I asked the nurses to fetch my family.
Mom and Dad and Dawn came in smiling wearily, quietly gathering around to welcome this new member of our family. My mother held her first grandchild and exclaimed, “Oh, your Auntie Dawn was smaller than you!” My father and my sister wrapped those tiny hands about their fingers. We loved Jessica, it was as simple as that. It was quietly peaceful; the room felt imbued with love and compassion. It may be difficult to imagine if you have never experienced a moment like that, but in truth Jessica’s birthday was beautiful and lovely, in the gently sorrowful way of loss. Even the nurses commented, afterwards, that they had rarely seen a birth so peaceful.
Suddenly, Grandpa and Grandma B bustled through the door, my mother-in-law waving a dozen roses and cheerfully saying “Happy Valentine’s Day!” I was stunned: they were this late because they had to stop to buy roses? Did they not realize that their son needed them here? And although I realize that people often say inappropriate things when faced with difficult situations, surely with six weeks’ advance notice one could come up with something better than “Happy Valentine’s Day!”
Thankfully, my mother stepped into the awkward moment by offering to put the flowers in water, and as she took the roses to a side table, I nodded towards the still child in my arms and asked my in-laws if they wanted to see the baby. Coming to the bedside, Grandma B exclaimed over Jessica’s long fingers (“Fit for the piano, just like Grandpa Art’s!”) and Grandpa B proclaimed her beautiful. No, no, there was no need to uncover her head, that wasn’t something anyone needed to see. I held Jessica close to my heart amidst the noise and chatter, and felt the exhaustion and sorrow creeping up on me.
The rest of that day has mostly faded into a morphine haze, but I clearly remember the wrenching ache in my chest as I was at last wheeled out of the room, craning my neck for one final glimpse of my tiny daughter. I didn’t want to leave Jessica to the cold, I didn’t want to go home with empty arms, but I had no choice.
Three days later, Allister lifted Jessica’s tiny white casket in his arms and carried our daughter to her final resting place. My milk had come in that morning: a painful reminder that I had no child to feed, no one to cradle next to my skin and rock to sleep. The empty space in my life felt too big to ever be filled, the pain too great to ever be eased.
I talked about Jessica to anyone who would listen, told the story of her birth over and over, looked at her pictures every day. Some days, I screamed in rage, hammering my fists into the wall, shouting to the heavens that I missed her, that I wanted her back, this wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair ... I shouted my way from fury to agony to grief, always coming back to the unending sorrow of loss; sinking to the floor, weeping, crying, whispering I miss her so much. Other days, I just made a cup of tea, sat in my rocking chair, and let the tears quietly run down my cheeks. Every day, I missed her.
For weeks, I cried every day. I gave up wearing mascara as it just ended up smudged, blackening my already sunken eyes. Grief was exhausting work and I was tired of weeping, tired of sorrow, tired of the ache inside. Then, one day, I realized that the tears weren’t coming quite as often. I discovered that I could remember her and smile – sadly, yes, but I was glad to have had her in my life, even for a short time. Eventually I realized that it was possible to let go of the pain without letting go of my love for her. I was healing.
Forgiveness
I wasn’t an easy person to live with during my grief. I remember accidentally banging my forehead on a cupboard door and bursting into frustrated, pain-wracked sobs that had less to do with the minor ding to my skull than the constant ache in my heart. That kind of thing happened quite a lot in the first few months after Jessica's death, and I’m sure it was difficult for those around me to know how to react when I burst into tears for no apparent reason. Fortunately, most of the time, I was alone when it happened. Spending time in the quiet safety of my house was good for me.
Grief is a long, difficult road. It was a year before I stopped carrying her pictures with me everywhere I went, and it was five years before her birthday could come and go without me being completely overcome with sorrow. I found the change of seasons to be disconcerting – how could the world just keep on going when she had died? How dare the trees come into bloom without her here? How could the fall frosts possibly be arriving, when she had only died a few short weeks back in the depths of winter? Slowly, though, the very fact that the world did keep moving without her in it helped me to start moving again as well. In the summer, I took roses to her grave. In the winter, I went and made snow angels next to the bronze marker that says, simply, “God’s Baby”.
One of my greatest needs was to be sure that Jessica was not forgotten. I framed her photograph along with the hospital ID bracelets and the hand and footprints the nurses had made for me. I dried the flowers that people sent in sympathy and made wreaths and Christmas ornaments from them; I printed birth notices and mailed them out; I visited her grave whenever I was in town. That first Christmas, when there should've been a baby in the house but there wasn't, one of our friends left a Christmas ornament in the mailbox along with a short note that said they were thinking of us. The ornament was a beautiful angel blowing a trumpet, personalized with Jessica's name. That small gift was the most thoughtful thing anyone could have done, and it made me happy in that strange, grief-mingled way that one becomes accustomed to after months of mourning. I smile every year now when I place that angel on the tree, remembering both my baby girl and the kindness of my friend.
I was angry about Jessica's death, to be sure, but the anger was never directed at anyone in particular. Someone once told me that anger is always a secondary emotion: it layers itself on top of frustration or sorrow, disappointment or fear. I knew, even then, that the anger I felt was pent-up sorrow struggling for release and I never felt the need to blame anyone for her death, not even God. Some babies are born broken – I had always known that. I just happened to be one of the mothers with a broken baby. It hurts, oh it hurts, more than I could have thought possible ... but it is just how things are sometimes.
I didn't blame myself, either. I hadn't known of the protective effects of folic acid supplements, nor that they need to be taken by anyone who has even a remote possibility of becoming pregnant, not just by women who already know they are carrying a child. The neural tube forms within the first four weeks of gestation and if it's going to form incorrectly, by the time you realize you're pregnant it's already too late. I told every woman I knew who was of child bearing age to start taking maternity vitamins right away, and I knew that next time, I’d be more prepared.
I was, however, very angry with my in-laws, and completely puzzled by their behaviour. How could they not have been there for their son? What was with the roses, anyhow? How could they act as though this was all some unpleasantness that should be gotten past as quickly as possible? At the funeral, my father-in-law had told me not to cry, Jessica wouldn’t want me to be sad. I managed to stammer some polite response, but in my fury what I really wanted to do was to shove him down the stairs: if I died, I would certainly expect that my mother would cry for me ... it would be strange if she didn’t! I knew he meant well and that he was just trying to say that he wished I could feel better, but recognizing that didn’t seem to alleviate my rage.
The whole thing made me feel as though Allister’s parents did not care that we were suffering, that they were oblivious to the fact that their son needed their love and support. All I could do at the time was vow that I would never again try to guess how they would behave in a difficult situation and to avoid talking about Jessica when I was with them. Avoidance actually worked pretty well, since we didn’t see them very often anyway, and though the heat of my anger eased with time, it never really went away.
I’ve thought about it quite a lot in the years since Jessica’s death. I don’t really believe that anyone meant to be hurtful, and I don’t believe that Allister’s parents didn’t care about our loss, either. Even then, in my grief, I knew that the hurtful things that were said and done were probably unintentional. I now suspect that my in-laws were just not in a position to face the intensity of the situation and needed to find ways to keep it all at arm’s length.