i was catching up on old new york times book reviews this morning and came across one from a few weeks ago that reviews a new book about john f. kennedy. since 40,000 books (that’s not my usual hyperbole, it’s the real number quoted in the review) have been published on the kennedy presidency, assassination, family, haircut (that’s my hyperbole) since november 22, 1963, the reviewer discusses the canon of kennedy literature and many of its suppositions, one of which is that in the aftermath of the death of their infant son, patrick, john and jackie kennedy grew much closer and the event ended his seemingly compulsive womanizing. i’m not a person who goes in for kennedy mythology. i think he was probably a handsome and charismatic man, and that as one of nine children, developed a knack for setting himself apart. i think he was the child of people with more privilege than brains (joe kennedy was a notoriously lazy and downright bad ambassador) and behaved as such. i have no desire to romanticize the guy–i just don’t care that much. but i do 100% think that the loss of his son would have changed him. i have a sort of slogan about couples who lose a child, and i just realized i’ve never said outside my head: you either cleave or leave. (that “cleave” itself can mean to become so close you’re nearly indistinguishable or to be parted also works. you cleave or you cleave, really.) that they, like edgar and i, cleaved to each other, i can absolutely believe.
after i read that part of the review, it occurred to me that i thought the kennedys had another child who died too, and found that yes, they had a stillborn in 1957 who “jackie called arabella” according to her wikipedia. i’m not sure what the fuck that means. no one else ever talked about her? she didn’t necessitate a name because she was stillborn, but her mother insisted on one? she was a sort-of person, so some people used her name but not most? most people will tell you the kennedys had two children, and that caroline was the oldest. i’ll tell you they had four, two daughters and two sons, one of whom died on july 16, the very same day as my own son passed, and that caroline was second. and that jackie kennedy lost her youngest son and then her husband within 3 short months. and maybe that’s why she married that guy whose boat upholstery was made out of whale foreskin or whatever. maybe she wore big sunglasses less as a fashion statement and more as something to hide behind. maybe she seemed so calm when her husband’s head was blown off because a worse thing had already happened to her. or maybe i’m just projecting myself onto a woman with whom i have nothing in common but the heart-wrenching loss of children.
i’ve been kind of spiraling lately, which is part of the reason i don’t write. the other part is, as i said before, that what i’m doing now is “grief work,” and it is neither describable nor tolerable, to the reader or the writer. i spend most of every minute doing a weird sort of dance with the knowledge that my son died, pulling it in and feeling its shape, and then becoming overwhelmed by it and pushing it away, usually with a combination of very deep breaths, tears, and xanax. it feels like tangoing with satan. you pull him close to look at this horrifying ghost of a thing, a countenance you never needed or wanted to see up close. but he’s there and not going anywhere, so you pull him in and examine him, expecting to have the realization you’ve had about every frightening thing you’ve ever encountered in your whole life: it’s just not that scary up close. instead you find that the nearer it is to you, the more blood-curdling it actually is. as you see each tiny detail, the fear and horror do not decrease. rather you discover unknown and unseen terrors that sit right below a translucent skin. from afar, you thought he was just red. upon closer inspection, you realize he’s covered in blood. so you push him away, only to try again tomorrow to hold him close, hating him, raging against him, and knowing that he has become an undeniable part of your life. yet there is no slow easing of tension, a begrudging and gradual welcome into your life. he will always be satan, and you will never accept that he’s here. and yet, even without your permission, even with your screaming and flailing and beating against his existence, he stays.
yes, i just described my grief as satan. it is hands-down the most accurate description i’ve hit upon thus far. i don’t know why it took me so long.
the other thing i feel these days is tremendous anxiety, the likes of which i had never experienced (and if you know me and my history of anxiety, depression, and panic attacks, that’s saying something). we had an appointment with our neonatalogist to go over laszlo’s autopsy, words that should simply not exist. laszlo’s autopsy. not only should that not exist, that there are words for that thing feels anathema to my very existence. i cannot exist in a world where “laszlo’s autopsy” is not only a thing, but a paper that i have folded up somewhere, a document that tells me exactly how much my son’s stopped heart weighed.
i just had to stop typing for several minutes and stare that those words. his heart weighed 146 grams. i will never not know that number. i will never stop thinking about that tiny heart fitted softly in the palm of my hand, in the space of my own beating heart. 146 grams.
then we had a meeting with the high-risk OB, who was the first doctor who i felt like just did. not. get. it. i won’t get into what she did and said because it’s like picking a scab every time i do, but suffice it to say meeting with her sped up this spiral.
since those two meetings, i’ve felt like i’m inside a gif (just stay with me for a sec) of a person walking a tightrope 30,000 feet in the air, at the moment she realizes she has no net. she sets one slippered foot in front of the other, adjusts the bar in her hands for balance, and as she crooks a toe over the rope, she shifts her eyes’ focus just slightly from the rope to the net she knows is below, only to find it’s gone. and it’s a gif because it goes over and over again. there is no resolution where she finds the net missing and so she scurries across the tightrope to safety. and she doesn’t fall. she just stands on the tightrope, paralyzed as she realizes over and over that anything could happen now, that there is no tragedy off limits, there is nothing holding her together, nothing making sure the worst doesn’t happen; that any step from here could be her last.
so why keep moving at all? to move out of the metaphor, why get out of bed in the morning? why go to work? to make money that can’t do anything to fix what’s wrong? to keep health insurance that didn’t protect the health of the one who mattered most? why keep going when none of it means anything, and the only things that do mean anything are snatched away without cause or warning?
see, this is why i haven’t been writing. sylvia plath is like, girl, you sound really sad. i want to clarify for those concerned that yes, i’ve voiced these feelings to our therapist, no, they are not abnormal. yes, it’s normal for existential crises of this magnitude to occur after such a traumatic loss. yes, i will tell someone if i feel like i’m going to hurt myself or someone else.
that’s all i’ve got for now. i’m going to go brush my teeth because, even though i don’t care if they all fall out of my head, i’m willing to keep going through the motions.
for laszlo 