Grief Resume (8 months)

by Heather Carnaghan

Today I should be distracted from my writing by a nearly mobile, chubby cheeked eight month old.   Instead, I sit in silence reflecting on the extensive grief resume that I’ve built while sitting in a rocking chair next to a crib that has never been slept in.  

When I walked into this nursery eight months ago, I sat slumped on the floor staring at Charlotte’s name painted across the wall for hours.  I remember thinking, “now what?”

Without recognizing it, even in that minute I had begun to build a grief resume.  I started from the bottom, right there on the nursery floor, where everything is a minute by minute battle. I dressed stitches and researched ways to soothe engorgement without a baby to nurse.  This hodgepodge collection of resources started on post-its, as bookmarked websites, and dog-eared pages in stacks of grief books given to me by well-wishers. My husband suggested organizing it into a website so I wouldn’t lose anything.  This seemed like a reasonable thing to focus my energy on, so I created the very first page on CharlottesPurpose.com, “Maternity Leave Without a Baby”.

I started writing.  I began a journal of letters to Charlotte and wrote poetry in those minutes where sentences were hard to string together.  Authoring an idea in this way made me feel as though I had accomplished something. I had recorded a raw feeling exactly as I felt it so someone else might begin to understand.  

Corpse Color
The day you were born
still and silent
my heart was shattered into fragments
so sharp that they  pierced through my whole life
leaving wounds that will never heal.
I held your tiny hand
and stroked your chubby cheeks.
They grew cold as my own warmth seeped out of you
and the corpse color crept over your perfect toes.

Due Date
All of the broken promises
of this beautiful and awful date
ae heavy in a place in my heart
where, now, there only exists stolen hope.
Who I was and who you would have been
died that day
and left me with all the parts of motherhood
that the drug of a newborn’s smell subdues.
How cruel it seems that I also have this love
that is so deep that I will take all of these awful things
if they are all I am meant to have of you.  

Grief
Grief, like a mountain
is born from the crashing
of two giant tectonics that shouldn’t meet
but do so with such force
that the whole earth crumples at that fault line,
an accordian fold that cannot be flattened again
                                              despite our monumentous human efforts.                                             

                                      
A theme emerged in my writing.  There was despair, certainly, but there was also hope. 
​

New Growth
The blinding, slashing rain
of this wretched storm will pass
and it its wake
new growth will rise up
from seeds I never knew I planted.

Jack Pine
the humble Jack pine
whose seeds are born in wildfire
this phoenix of trees

Forward
Forward.
Mechanically we march,
battered, but vaguely certain
of a thicket ahead with less thorns.​

I began writing our story.  In that first month I was horrified that I might forget even a tiny detail about my daughter’s life and I knew that was all I had.  So I wrote. And wrote. A paragraph became a chapter, then a book.

Meanwhile, CharlottesPurpose.com was growing.  I had continued to research support systems, grief resources, and the science of stillbirth.  The site exploded from a single page to ten, then twenty.

One day I was clearing out a room with the plans of turning the old office into an art and yoga studio to help with the healing process.  I came across my wedding dress and cried because she would never wear it. When I had no tears left, I noticed a long-forgotten sewing machine in the corner.  It had been abandoned years before when I realized that I couldn’t sew a straight line for a pair of curtains. An idea formed slowly as I layed rubber yoga flooring and lined up the art supplies in neat rows.  The Youtube sewists said creating an infant gown was “easy”, so I plugged in the sewing machine and stole an old bed sheet from the linen closet. My first attempt looked like a kindergarten art project, but by the fifth, seams were lining up.  I forgot what my wedding dress had looked like. An enormous chapel length train flooded out of the box as I lifted it from the preservation box.  The fabric was smooth and elegant, perfect for a baby’s burial gown. I clipped a block of fabric off haphazardly so that I couldn’t chicken out, then traced the very first pattern for The Wrapped in Love Project.  Soon I had donated wedding dresses flooding in faster than I could repurpose them and three new sewists joined the project.

While grief engulfed me and made me desperate to stay still, Charlotte gave me direction and meaning.  Each day- even on the worst of them- she forced me out of bed to get her brothers ready for school.  She wouldn’t let me sit idly in my sadness when there was a website to build, a story to tell,  and a wedding dress to repurpose. One week before her memorial, I was abruptly given a tiny window of time to apply for a job I had worked for several years toward.   I got dressed that day, not in the sweats that had become my uniform, but in clothes that I would have worn to work.  I’m not sure why, really, except that I needed to feel as though I was truly the person in the resume that I was compiling, and I wasn’t convinced that person still existed.  I was granted a meeting and interviewed with a panel of six stoney faced principals who didn’t know that I clutched a fox stone so tightly under the table that my knuckles were white and the engraving left an imprint in my palm. They didn’t know that I had given birth to, and cremated, my child less than two months before, or that every answer I gave was followed in my head with, “Can I really lead a school brimming with living children when my own is gone forever?” I smiled, genuinely glad to be finished, and thanked them for the opportunity that I doubted would be extended.   Three days later, I opened an email congratulating me on being admitted to the pool of Assistant Principal candidates.

I had  never faced a panel interview before this year, but in less than six months as a grieving parent, I managed to be summoned to intimidatingly large panels twice.  My principal nominated me for the Teacher of the Year award, so I was asked to interview at the head of a massive table with twelve principals and school leaders.  Once again the fox stone was present and heavy in my pocket as I considered their questions. While interviews are uncomfortable, they are predictable. You can expect the handshakes, the stares, the quick fire questions.  What a non-loss parent might find strange is that celebrations and gatherings are far more stressful. Small talk always leads to “How many children do you have?” That seems innocuous enough, except that the loss-parent is faced with the dilemma of either being the ‘downer’ in the room or dishonoring their child's existence.  These events can be as big as an awards dinner where you are expected to give an impromptu speech to hundreds of people, or as small as an annual community barbeque (dripping with baby girls) that I happened to be pregnant with my daughter at the year before.

My eight month grief resume includes new skills like resilience, poise under pressure, metal stamping, and website design.  It lists triumphs like parenting two grieving toddlers, returning to work and writing curriculum from scratch, incorporating a small business, and starting the 200 people strong Bereaved Optimist’s Book Club.  This eight month grief vitae includes raising $3,000 for a Cuddle Cot, sewing more than 70 infant burial gowns, weathering countless milestones, and conceiving another child.  It includes a new network of colleagues and world changers, all unique in their own loss experience, but united in their insatiable will to survive it.  Each of our grief resumes look different. Some loss parents have forged cross country moves to escape the sight of painful triggers, others have built altars filled with mementos of a tiny life. Generosity abounds in this community of loss; weighted bears, care packages, and Cuddle Cots are donated in babies’ memory in the hopes that these things might soften the blow for someone else,  even for a single moment.  They run races, and host fundraisers so that even one family can avoid the fate that they have been dealt.  

When we are in the deepest, darkest parts of our grief, it is hard to see that the seeds we are planting are taking root.  It took me eight months to realize that I have indeed made growth.  From this vantage point, it is easier to see that my loss did not weaken me at all.   It made me a more appreciative and attentive parent.  It made me a more generous and genuine human being.   It made me a pillar of resilience.   When my baby died, I was given a blank page instead of Charlotte’s life story. It’s my job to write it for her, and I am proud of this first chapter.  ​