I’ve had three early miscarriages. I didn’t name any of them, nor do I “celebrate” the birthdays or due dates or anything like that, but I will defend to the end the right of a grieving mother to mark her loss any way she wants. I belong to an online support group for people who are experiencing subsequent pregnancies after a loss, and let me tell you, there are mothers there who go the graveyard every single year on the baby’s loss date, and take balloons and cakes and every other thing under the sun and more power to them. Some of them even have pictures of the dead babies, and that REALLY makes people uncomfortable, but more power to them. What are they supposed to do, just FORGET that the precious angel ever existed? These are well-adjusted people; they just have developed their own way of dealing with the most devastating loss anyone can ever know.

You will never know how hard it is to get over delivering a still baby, so I would say you should try to be less black-and-white in your response. I know you get defensive when criticized, but you are dead wrong when you say “celebrating his birthday is not healthy, period.”
It’s not for you to say. Marking the occasion of a beloved child’s death is not unhealthy in my book. The Jews light a candle every year (yarzheit) to commemorate the death of a loved one; is that unhealthy too?

She should get grief counseling and come to terms with her loss in her own way, but having a family that thinks she’s loony surely doesn’t help. She needs to talk to people who understand, and her family and you don’t. Period.

And just for the record, people say stupid things like “it wasn’t a REAL baby” ALL. THE. TIME. After I had my first miscarriage, this woman I worked with, who didn’t know, said with a giant smile, “How’s that baby coming along?” and I answered, “Oh, I’m sorry [yes, I’m apologizing to HER], you didn’t know, I had a miscarriage last week,” and her face turned white and she TURNED HER BACK on me and never spoke to me again. Ever. She still hasn’t, and it’s been two years! A Bible-beating Christian co-worker said, “Well, it was God’s plan. Besides, you can have another, can’t you?” My response to that was, “Well, then, fuck God.”The look on her face cheered me up for days.

Sorry this is so long, I know you have other things on your mind.

J.

Dear J.,

I’m terribly sorry that you’ve had to go through that.And you are right.I have not, as of this writing, lost a baby.I do not know what it’s like.Of course I don’t expect women who have lost children to read my column and treat my advice as gospel — in fact, I don’t expect anyone to read my column and treat my advice like gospel.It’s advice.It’s worth what you’ve paid for it.

But I have to remind you that Lise’s mother didn’t write to me, asking how she should cope with her loss.Lise wrote to me, to ask how she could help her mother move on.That’s what I addressed.Vine letters ask me what I think; I tell them.Feel free to dismiss that as defensive, but…well, read the disclaimer.I don’t, and can’t, have experience with every situation.

And with all that said, I still maintain that celebrating the birthday of a child who did not see even one birthday in life is morbid.Visiting the grave with flowers?Sure.Carrying his/her picture?Fine.But the birthday thing…there’s an element of denial there that doesn’t seem healthy to me.I don’t sit down every September 6th with balloons and ice cream in honor of my Nana’s birthday, because…she’s dead.I remember her on that day, and on the anniversary of her death, and I feel sorry that I didn’t get to know her better.But she is no longer living, and that’s the bottom line.It’s one thing to remember the dead, but it’s another thing entirely to carry on as though the dead still do the things the living do.

Sars —

I’ve been reading Tomato Nation like it was my job since I discovered it a month or so ago.I squirted soda out of my nose reading your essay “Book Smarts.” A bill from my ENT will follow.

This is in response to the letter about “Bob.”

I too am a New Yorker.I had a hell of a day a couple of Tuesdays ago.I didn’t lose anybody, and, apart from seeing the gates-of-hell cloud roaring at the end of the avenue, I didn’t watch it go down anywhere but on live TV.But I am afraid.

I admit that I was a chick who was a bit freaked out by the whole Y2K thing — not because I thought the sky would fall, but because a friend of mine in the news business told me that there were rumors that there would be a terrorist attack on Times Square that night that would start World War Three.I went to Cape Cod with a bunch of friends and convinced myself that the 100 granola bars, vanilla scented votives, and leftover Vicodin from a dental perscription stashed in the trunk of the rental car would see us through the apocalypse.

Crazy?Maybe.Too many sci-fi novels read under the covers with a flashlight in my youth?Defintely.Adequate preparation for the way last Tuesday would make me feel?Not one little bit.

I’m not proud of it, but I’ve never been this kind of scared in my life.Even my new best friend Rudy Giuliani can’t make me feel better.The fact is, the world changed.A war has begun, and it started with an attack on American soil.I know Gee Dubya wants me to raise my flag to full mast and act like I’m fine so the bastards won’t know they got me down.The problem is, the other shoe is still hanging there, waiting to drop.

Maybe “Bob” feels like that shoe is going to fall on his head.That’s not sympathetic-response grief, and it doesn’t come from another deep-seated problem.It’s a real and not unreasonable response to what is actually happening in the world right now.I’m not sure what the co-worker can do about it, but I think he needs to recognize that the way Bob is reacting is not necessarily out of proportion.

Successfully Terrorized

With all due respect to your correspondent, I think comparing this to Diana grief is unfair.

That was a bizarre reaction to the admittedly sad death of one woman who was a stranger to almost everyone who grieved her.This is…well, this is world-altering.This will change our laws.This has the very real potential to change our constitution. This will certainly change the world in which we grow old and in which we raise our children.

Many of us have loved ones who are being sent overseas right now (my nephew is on his way); many of us didn’t know anyone who was lost in the WTC but knew people who lost friends and family.Beyond that, the sheer enormity of the loss is continually staggering, and it takes a while for even the most sensible people to get their head around that.This weekend as I was playing fetch with my dog and not thinking about about the terrorist attacks at all, I suddenly stopped as a thought struck me: over 6,000 people.That’s three times the size of my little hometown.That’s ten times my high school.That’s half again the size of my freshman class at UCLA.That’s one-third of the people in the neighborhood that’s been my home for the last ten years.

Even people who aren’t watching TV and who have stopped reading the personal accounts (I have had to stick to online media since the 12th, because at least then I can avoid the barrage of horrible, gut-wrenching personal stories) are still processing this.We’ll all be processing it for a long time.

It’s only been two weeks, and people grieve in very different ways and at different speeds.If, in six months, people on the other side of the country are still afraid to leave their homes and are still sobbing every time someone mentions New York City, then it will be time to tell them to get a grip.But two weeks?To come to grips with this sort of thing? Not everyone is there yet, and I think that’s still in the range of “healthy.”

Xeney

Dear Terrorized and Xeney,

We all feel a lot of things right now, regardless of where we live, or what we saw and from where.We’re scared.We’re angry.We’re sad.Each of us deals with those emotions in different ways, and it’s going to take a long time if it ever gets done, and that’s fine and normal and what have you.

But the sense I got from Mr. Freeze’s letter is that not only can Bob not function normally, but that Bob doesn’t want to function normally.Believe me, I felt the same way for a few days.Why on earth should I do laundry with seven thousand dead?Why on earth should I go grocery shopping with a smoking mass grave scarring the city I call home?Why, indeed?Well, because I’d run out of underwear and Diet Coke.Because my life did not stop.And, you know, I don’t know why.I don’t know why my life put me downtown on that particular day when I never go to that neighborhood, I don’t know why I didn’t get closer or move farther away, I don’t know why I walked home, in a pair of goddamn flip-flops, in the middle of a terrorist attack, and survived — I don’t know why I survived at all.I don’t know why I was spared when parents were killed, when hundreds of firemen lost their lives.The country’s going to war, the legislature’s talking about suspending civil liberties, twelve cars are just sitting there in the municipal garage in my hometown because the people with the keys aren’t ever coming home, and I sit here in Canada and watch it on the fucking news and I don’t know a goddamn thing.

Except that I lived.And that, in spite of everything, I have things to do.

I don’t want to sit here and deliver a happy-crappy up-with-people sermon on living each day like it’s your last or honoring the dead by living a meaningful life or whatever.I mean, it’s not bad advice, that stuff, but it’s too pat, and this isn’t about “showing those terrorists they didn’t tear the fabric of America.”But those of us who lived must continue to live, or what’s the point?We can’t just stop in our tracks and let the grief and shock and fury and confusion take over, because then what?Throwing up our hands and saying, “Fuck this — I can’t go on in a world where this can happen, it’s too much for me,” well, okay, but what’s next?Life is short — but, at the same time, it’s long.We’ve got to fill the time somehow.

Everyone has the right to feel what they feel, for as long as they like.But we have to try to make room for that in our lives somehow.We have to rearrange ourselves so that we can live, and so that we can live with the tragedy, and it’s time to make that effort.It’s hard at first.It seems pretty pointless.The mind drifts back to the grief, inevitably.But we have to try.There’s nothing else to do now.

In a lot of ways, I got lucky.I didn’t have to watch it on TV.I saw it from the ground and my brain thoughtfully sent me into emotional shock for fifteen hours, so I got through it.But the shock wore off eventually, and where did that leave me?Well, as it turns out, it left me in New Jersey, with my two hungry cats marooned in Toronto, so I got in the car and I drove, because I had to.I still had a life, somehow, and I had to get back to it, somehow, and I cry every day, for the dead, for my lost city, for wishing I could put my little brother in my pocket somehow because God put me on this earth to make sure no harm came to him and how can I do that from so far away, for every big sister whose little brother wound up on a poster in Union Square.And then I blow my nose and get on with the damn advice column, because I can’t cry all day.That’s how I feel.That’s the world I live in now, where I can’t protect Mr. Stupidhead from anything, and the people I love keep walking around as soft and breakable and flammable as they ever did, and I end phone calls to my mother by promising that I won’t fly anywhere or get hit by a bus or die before she does some crazy way, and that sucks, but then a 7th Heaven recap comes in, and I edit it because that’s my job, and it’s funny as hell, and I laugh, because that’s the world I live in.I live in a scary, hilarious, sucky world just like the rest of us, but the point isn’t the world.The point is that we live in it, and so does Bob, so let’s hear it for the man with the big lips when he says, “Faith has been broken, tears must be cried, so let’s do some living after we die.”Dealing with it doesn’t mean facing the wall and waiting for it to end.

[9/26/01]

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