The signs are there. I find myself thinking thoughts such as this: "Sadness floats in me like marrow bones in an old soup pot." I'm having trouble focusing at work. I'm starting to get anti-social. I have the urge to journal. This is serious.
Let me tell this publicly, so at least I'll be held accountable. (For what, I don't know.) I'm a little fuzzy on some of the details, because I picked them up in bits and pieces over the years, but this story is not about the details.
A long time ago, 14 months before I was born, my mother gave birth to a baby girl. Or, almost did. There was a prolapsed umbilical cord. The doctors didn't catch it in time. The baby girl who would have been my older sister (assuming I would even have been born) did not survive the journey into this world. She went straight on to the next one.
Legally, she never had a given name. Her paperwork said simply: "Baby Girl Lastname". All I know of what happened next is that the Salvation Army "took care of things". I suppose my parents were grief-stricken and bewildered. They didn't know where to turn, and the Sally Ann offered their kind assistance in making burial arrangements.
I don't know what the Jewish tradition would have been in such a case. It's a measure of how wrong things were in their world that Christians stepped in to offer help, and my family accepted. I don't know about my father, but it's not something that my mother would have consented to under lesser circumstances.
My mother makes a special donation to the Salvation Army every year, in memory of their kindness, and their generous help at such a wrenching time. I also drop a few coins in, or more, whenever I pass one of their kettles.
I have not asked for more details than were offered to me, because it is such a painful subject and I haven't wanted to re-open old wounds. To my father who will certainly read this, I thought about calling you for fact-checking, but decided I'd rather lay out the pictures I've been carrying in my head all these years, and then let you correct me later. The pictures I have, right or wrong, and definitely incomplete, are what I've been working from.
So far as I know, there was no memorial service. There was no one from her family in attendance at her funeral. Her body lies in a cemetary somewhere in Ottawa, where I've never been. I'm told that "the family" didn't want to talk about it, and so everyone tried to carry on as though she'd never existed, just looking to the future. Trying to forget.
I've always felt sad for that little baby, my elder sister. I know my parents will never forget her, but she should have had more than just that. And my parents should have had more support at such a time of enormous loss. It was a tragic situation made worse by silence and confusion.
I think of her sometimes. How I grew in the same womb-space, only months after she had been there. How I travelled down that same tunnel to the light, passing through the place where she died on my way to life. Wondering if these shared spaces link us somehow.
I also think of how it might have been for my mother, although I'll never really know. In my life, on the balance (so far), there has been more sadness than joy. Even before my birth. I think of my fetal self as a teabag in the cup of my mother's belly, brewing in reverse, being flavoured by the sadness that flowed through her body.
I think of my elder sister every now and then, with a passing wistfulness. I never knew her, have never visited her grave, so she always seemed a bit unreal. But...
When I went to Tak's funeral, it was the first time I was present at an interment in which the deceased had been cremated. When the funeral car arrived, Tak's remains were brought out, enclosed within a wee wooden box. A tiny coffin. Almost big enough to hold an infant.
I watched Ken kneel to place the little box in the ground. Watched as earth was shoveled on top. Felt numb. Went and ate lunch. Carried on an otherwise normal day.
But that night, I fell apart. It all came crashing in. It was 1971, the Salvation Army people in their uniforms, saying prayers by the graveside, and that lonely little box going down into the earth. My heart broke for my mother, and my father; for the baby; for my family. I cried until my face hurt, my back cramped, my jaw ached. I cried until I couldn't cry anymore that night, but it didn't feel finished.
And since then it has all been swimming around just under my consciousness. It's all in a big, jumbly mess, getting confused with grief at not having my own children, and sorrow for all the recent deaths in my circle. My sadness for my mother for that old loss is all mixed up with my sadness for her present divorce.
It's like everything in my family that ever hurt us and pulled us apart swelled up inside my heart, even as the holidays brought some of us together. Being close and loving my family (even as it is broken into pieces) makes the (re)open(ed) wounds ache, because I care.
I used to feel that there was no end to the losses in my life. By the time I'd almost recovered from one, another would come crashing in. I lived in traumatic environments for so long that I felt I would never catch up, never be done with all the grieving so that I could actually have a chance to heal.
I'm in a safe place now. And I know I need to get through these griefs if I want to move forward. So I'm not going to fight them when they come up, or hide them, or try to soldier on through. I am healing, and this is how I do it.
