Loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind, when that which is held is pulled beyond our grasp.
Stephen Levine
Crying
Last night, for the first time since I've begun Sitting With Sorrow, I cried. Crying doesn't come easily to me these days. But, last night I felt very sad and after lying in bed thinking about how sad I was, I started crying. I cried and cried and cried. I cried so much that my voice was hoarse this morning. (It helped that my 17-year-old-son was staying at a friend's last night.)
As I laid there crying, I was thrown back into the saddest moment of my life. My high school sweetheart and I were in a hospital room. I was giving birth to a baby who we had agreed to relinquish for adoption. My labour had begun around 6 a.m. that morning, and as evening drew closer, I was taken to the delivery room. My boyfriend was not allowed to come. When our baby was born about an hour later, I wasn't allowed to touch her - I must have heard someone say that the baby was a girl (no one was talking to be directly). I could see her for those brief moments when they must have been cutting the cord that connected us; she had dark hair and beautiful hands. I was alone, but I didn't realize it because I was out of my head from the drugs I had been given and talking to my boyfriend, who I thought was in the room with me. Then, a nurse wheeled me out of the delivery room, away from my daughter.
Thinking about that moment, I cried harder. This wasn't quiet crying, this was over the top crying. I could sense how much pain there was inside me, like a dark river winding through my heart. As I cried, one word kept coming into my mind - HELP. Looking back, I realized how much pain my boyfriend and I must have been in and I also saw how there was no one there to help us or comfort us. When we had agreed to relinquish our baby for adoption, no one told us that it would hurt this much. And, as I continued to cry, I realized that I wasn't just sad, I was angry. Very angry. The adults in our life had betrayed us and none of them were there to help pick up the pieces. (This story is not intended to be a commentary on adoption. It is my story and so, that is what I must tell. Trauma can result from many experiences: this is where mine began.)
Meanwhile, back in time, back in the No Mercy Hospital, I had pulled inside of myself, the way a fox might take shelter in its den. This is called dissociation. I dissociated and, for that reason, I cannot remember anything of what happened during the two or three days I stayed in the hospital. And that is also why, today, I still carry much of that grief with me. When I was 17 I had to let that grief go because it was too large for my boyfriend and I to handle. And so we buried it. Both my therapist and doctor say that in order to heal from that first trauma, I need to grieve it. And so, although my crying hurt, it was also sweet: a first step on the road to opening to grief. Grief counsellor and author, Stephen Levine, explains the wisdom of opening to grief. "I'm not suggesting that our grief will completely go away," Levine writes, "but rather that it can come to rest in the open heart and softening belly. . . Healing, then, becomes not the absence of pain but the increased ability to meet it with mercy instead of loathing." (Levine 2005:19)
I start with that moment when we lost our daughter because it is the hinge moment in my life. Years ago, my husband salvaged trees that had been cut down to use in wood sculpture. The largest, wettest trees took a monumental effort to split. He used metal wedges of various weights and sometimes the wood would split and sometimes it wouldn't. Usually, he could tell fairly quickly which it would be. Either the wedge would bury itself in the wood or after anywhere from a few minutes to nearly an hour, a small crack would appear. Then he knew, he told me, that the wood was going to "give way." That moment when I lost my daughter was like the first moment when the crack appears in the wood. My life was going to give way. It took another year for it to completely come apart. And that, too, was something I cried about last night. And then my husband made me a cup of cocoa and we sat together while I drank it and then I washed my face and went to bed.
