A Fifth Season is a place of pause to grieve the death of my first and only child. A season characterized by reflection on the big stuff and the little stuff that this mom encounters as I parent the memory of my child, and my child, in loving return, parents my heart.
This summer I taught music teaching techniques as I have done for years. The first day of teaching, I walked into a classroom to get materials ready. On the piano was a book opened to "Close to You" by the Carpenters. it made me smile. I thought of Caitlin Anne and singing this song to her everyday along with the other lullabies I sang each visit.
This was her father's song that his mother sang to him as a lullaby, and because she sang it to him, I sang it to Caitlin. The next day and the next day, the book remained opened to that song. I didn't change it and neither did anyone else. We used the piano, but never closed the book or put it away.
I didn't want to lose the opportunity to accept the invitation to sing the song, so on Friday of the first week, I sat down and played and sang it. Uninterrupted, I plunked through the chords and added a bit of harmony and sang the melody softly. When I finished, I left the book open.
Saturday, we received news that the lump they found in his mother's lung was cancer. The news knocked the air out of me. I don't think that song was a sign from Caitlin to me. It seems Caitlin sent a song to her grandmother through me. Belief makes things real.
We have become witnesses again to a family member's journey home.
The song remained opened until the end of second week.I took a pictures of the book on the last day I taught, and shared them with Caitlin's grandmother in the hospital the following month. She smiled, and looked at her son. "That's our song."
At some point in time, I check in with myself. Some milestones blur, you see, and without reflection you can miss them.
This past week, I sang everyday. Drank wine everyday. Walked, swam, and laughed everyday. I listened and told stories everyday.
Unplugged from every technology that requires a plug or battery including my camera, I aimed to be present rather than documenting presence. I participated in life everyday. Woven within this participation of thoughts, words, music, and experiences was my daughter's presence.
My Caitlin, with me always.
In the sound of twigs giving way to my footfalls and calls of loons on the lake, in the trance as my arms roll over each other in the water, in casual and deep conversations, in the peaks of the musical phrases, and in the quiet reflection during fatigue from a hard and glorious day--just before a restful sleep.
So, I've been perusing through folk songs from long ago. One in particular I found amusing and particularly at the final verse, I found my self silently nodding, . The opening verse is:
There was an old man at the foot of the hill, If he ain't moved away he's livin' there still, Sing heigh, diddlei, diddlei fie! Diddlei diddlei day!
As I sing through the verses and the story goes
Devil shows up.
Farmer fears Devil will take his son.
But, the Devil wants his wife.
Wife goes to hell and fights back so much that the Devil brings her back.
The final verse made me nod my head.
There's one advantage women have over men: They can go to Hell and come back again.
Sometimes that's just what it feels like we do. We get drug to hell by agents out of our control, but somehow through shear force we fight our way back. I don't know how, but somehow it happens.
For "Perfect Moment" Monday, I share my kitchen concert for DH. You can't see it very well, but Caitlin's blue bracelet is on my bow hand. This avenue for music making for me continues to provide some healing. I'm grateful.
An update on my new music learning endeavors. The cello rocks! I play three scales and a rendition of "Rueben, Rueben," that would make one weep. Ha! I wanted to share how energizing it is for my mind. The synapses must be firing in ways I can't imagine; after practicing for an hour, I went back to WORK---writing an article. That's right instead of being too tired, I was energized. Making music (not just listening)---that's the key. [Pun intended!]
Here's something else lovely, when I look down at my bow hand I see a blue and yellow "buddy walk" bracelet with Caitlin's name on it and it makes me smile inside. I wish she could hear me play the cello.
. . . and for my birthday gift to myself I went to a strings class to learn how to play my cello. My lovely cello that I've had for a year, that DH gave me as a gift so I could engage in music again, because I wasn't able to sing after Caitlin died. But I still didn't have the brain power or confidence to learn anything new. Ah, but, I went today and committed to learning to play my cello. So far, I know how to hold, how to tune, and how play with up and down bow on open A, D, G, and C strings.
Life is good. Looking forward to playing Caitlin's songs someday on cello and discovering another way to make music!
I sometimes listen to music on YouTube, and I wanted to hear this song again because it's still rattling around since that Walaid, Delayed, and Detoured day. I usually open another tab and let some music play, while I work or surf for other information. But, today, I wanted to study the lyrics as I listened, because there is clearly a reason my mind and heart are not done with this song. I was reminded how inspirational the song is for me personally, especially as a bereaved mother. Also, the connection to the religious iconic figure from my faith is pretty powerful as well--beautiful words the writer hears whispered from a bereaved Mother. While I'm ruminating, I catch an error in the lyrics typed for the video, "here will be an answer" instead of "there will be an answer." Well, there it is, a kernel of something new I gained from focused study on something my mind wanted me to look at (though it didn't know about this error), I think that error might be a typical unconscious statement of how this song is used to speak to how the song may have the power to comfort.
Here's what I mean: "There" means, the answer will come someday, but "here," means an answer, and for me meaning, is here already, embodied in melody and voice. Meaning that is fashioned in my mind and heart as I remember Caitlin in the here and now, perhaps as the light that shines on me. And answers are here within myself, as I explore my connections with my religion and my reason.
This is another pic of one of the frogs who comes to visit us on our deck. When I catch 'em on my porch, I am compelled to take pictures. There is such interest in their faces. And recently I learned that the two snakes who took residence in a pile of bricks close to our house, eat these very kinds of frogs!
The summer has been a time of getting things cleaned out. We shredded hundreds of documents and took lots of clothes and shoes to the St. Vincent DePaul bin. I included a bag of my pregnancy clothes. Plenty of tears during this event. I couldn't help but note the irony in seeing that I had purchased three polo prego shirts with butterflies on them---a symbol now of Caitlin's spirit in this world, now transformed, but beautiful.
And this, is proof to me that I still have joy in my heart. This was captured while I was teaching my pre.scho.ol music group. And my smile surprised me, I barely recognized myself.
Luke Jeram brings art to the streets of London and soon-to-be other UK cities with "Play me, I'm Yours."
I love it. Seeing people gathered around a piano with smiles and wonderment on their face. And, it seems a bit of confusion . . . doesn't music come from an iPod? You mean regular people can make music? Don't you have to be a star? An American Idol?
Nope.
I love that Luke Jeram in his art has provided a way to help people make music for themselves, and the real people that gather around to listen. Love it. We need the arts to live.
Here's a couple videos. But, don't expect a commercially produced recording. The art in this is more powerfully in the experience of those who make the music, and those in their physical presence.
The lyrics from "Let Me Be The Music" by David Friedman speak to me. Firstly, because it suggests that we return to this earth not in that ashes to ashes way, where our bodies are reclaimed by Earth and other life springs from the earth, but rather we return in sound. We return as music, a sonorous reification of love.
It's cool, I think. Really cool. I cannot find a free sound file for you to hear the music of these words, but hope the lyrics might speak to you and provide a bit of hope for you as you read.
Seasons come and season go, and somehow they were meant to show, that life and love are never really gone.
So when my journey here is through, I'm certain there is just a new hello, and so when I travel on
Let me be the music. Let me be the music of love I have known. Let me be the melodies in the wind and the trees that sing to the lost and alone. Let me be the sweet refrain in the sound of the rain or a rippling stream. Let me be the lullabies that close the eyes of children when they dream.
For music has no walls or bars, it bridges time and space. It only asks the senses to surrender. It sweeps us to the stars and makes us one in its embrace. It has no fences. It has no gender.
So let me be the music, the beautiful music of love. Let me be the voices of spring that rejoice in the things that blossom and grow. Oh let me be the music, to come again as music. The beautiful music of love when I go.
I wrote about a dream where I saw myself sitting on a blue marble bench. Because it stuck with me in my waking hours, I wrote about it and that helped me release its hold to me. I have a personal conviction about dreams. I believe they have meaning. I believe that if I work at it, I can discover the reason why my mind needs to work on something in my unconsciousness, because I'm unable to work on it in consciousness. Sometimes that's because I don't have time or it's too difficult. Here's what I discovered about the blue marble bench.
1) It exists. In fact there are four of them outside the building that houses the preschool where I volunteer.
2) My volunteer work is teaching young children music, and I sing many of the songs I sang to Caitlin when she was alive.
3) I love teaching young children music. I teach them to use their voices, to learn to move creatively to music, to pay attention to life with their ears not their eyes, and to express themselves through creating their own songs and musical sounds. It's rewarding work, when teachers and parents tell me that their children love music, but more importantly when they tell me that they see that their children are musical (when they never were before). Of course they are! Music develops as a mode of expression long before speech, but I digress.
4) My heart was in deep sorrow every time I sang those songs and watched little precious faces light up -- faces that were not my child's face. And one of those cold blue benches was where my heart sat, while the rest of me nurtured other people's babies. I don't resent that nurturing, it's the kind of mother Caitlin has. I am, however, distressed that I nurture my child's memory and no longer nurture her in this physical realm.
And that I believe, is the meaning of the dream of the blue marble bench.
This blog has been a tool for me to use in pausing and reflecting and allowing myself to grieve as I need. I reread my posts on a frequent basis, and when I wait a day, I sometimes have this experience that I'm looking inside my thoughts from another point of view.
Without deleting my own thoughts, I wish to edit, rather to clarify.
Saying that I don't connect with God's loss of his only son, is not dismissing the magnitude of God, rather it's bigger than that. It is so far beyond my understanding that my lame attempt to use my human feelings to connect do not aid me in the least. And when others suggest a human connection, I can't wrap my brain around it. I chose to focus on a connection that I can make, that with a bereaved mother. I did not focus on the significance of who Mary's son is historically or according to my religious tradition, because that would take me into proselytizing and this blog is not about preaching or witnessing to others about belief. Part of this grief journey includes making sense by taking all the broken pieces of me--mind, body, & spirit--and refashioning them to fit in new ways--beautifully painful ways. I'm comfortable with both reason and religion and so while I may include religion, I will do my best not to preach it.
In short--I love that song, and I think it can speak beyond a particular faith or belief, and I don't know why I felt it necessary to begin with a religious discussion. Well, actually I do know why--it's because I am incapable and unwilling to shed the essence of who I am and where I came from. Which brings me to song #2. And I would change just one line: "I am Caitlin Anne's Mother" (Well, and I'm not young either, so that lyric would have to change too--heh heh).
I caught this song by Patty Griffin in one of my many searches for music to include on my iPod playlist "Caitlin & Mom." The song is "Mary." It speaks to me, because it reaches deep inside of me and resonates the strings of a loving bereaved mother.
I shrink when people tell me that God knows how I feel, or that I must remember that God gave his only son. I'm stunned, because for me, there's little sense in this. If we're gonna go all Bible-literal here (which I will barely attempt, so put your bible away--you won't need to get those verses ready for quotin'.), God was separated from his son for three human days; I can't even imagine what that would feel like for him. My mind goes crazy--if Caitlin had come home after three days?! But this is crazy talk. I won't launch into a ridiculous discussion of what God feels or what some proselytize that God feels, because, I can't imagine. I'm left unconnected to God's experience, and I know better than to play a comparison game with another bereaved parent.
There's nothing wrong with me for feeling this way; it's simply an honest statement of how I feel. I seek a lesson that goes beyond any literal translation or dogma articulated by others. Mary waited the rest of her life to see her son (until ascension for those who believe in this aspect--I mean it, put the Catechism away this is not an attack on an established religion, I'm just trying to be inclusive).
Mary was left to grieve--and it is that experience that resonates with me. Being left to grieve, is something that I not only imagine, I live.
The birth and death of a child, and the mother who nurtured that life, loses that life, and is left to grieve and continue her motherhood is a timeless story. I'm one of millions of mothers who experience this. And because this is an archetypal story, I am held by Mary, My Mother. She was left as Griffin sings, "cleaning up the place." And Caitlin's passing left me to clean up the ordinary. I cleaned up our house by putting away the dead flowers from funeral, the stuffed animals that laid in her crib, and her clothes, and books, and sympathy cards. And in "cleaning up," I made a new place for Caitlin in our home. More importantly, I'm left to tend to my heart, my soul, and my mind, and make new meaning and find ways to survive and thrive. I remain behind to hold those whose hold me in my sorrow, to mend and maintain relationships and foster new ones. Caitlin couldn't stay a moment longer, and I am left stained by her death and still loving because of her life, still nurturing, still her mother. I must "lift the shroud" that is my task.
In Griffin's song, the Marian anthem lives on. The dedication and honoring of a woman who suffered the loss of her child, helpless to change the course of what was to be. Mary becomes every woman "covered in roses, covered in babies, covered in treetops, covered in stains." who suffers and endures, and from that sorrow new life and new joy emerges. From my little world to the world, I find that others have found that Griffin's song aids in expressing this sense of everywoman. Dr. Estes describes Africa as a bereaved mother in the opening of her article with "Mother Africa: for hundreds of years she's groaned under humans who have harmed her by looting her treasures, setting enmity between peoples, and by forcing stones atop her greatest minds and hearts so they could not grow into giants." And she later calls for Griffin's mother Marian anthem to be the "prayersong" that petitions for Marys everywhere to endure with strength and a great heart.
But, I digress. In short: I found this song, it makes sense to me for little things and big things.
Was it not well to leave all things as he had found them, In silence, at the end? Might it not be that in this great dream of time In which we live and are the moving figures There is no greater certitude than this: That, having met, spoken, Known each other for a moment, As somewhere on this earth we were hurled onward It is well to be content with this, To leave each other as we met, Letting each one go alone to his appointed destination, Sure of this only, needing only this-- And silence only, Nothing but silence, At the end?
[Since Wolfe's poem poses a question, my answer is no. The silence is part of the music, the vibrations of life that we cannot hear living, but perhaps we will become when we pass. His phrase "hurled onward" described for me that feeling of being put on this grief journey--not my choice, I was hurled to this path with Caitlin's death. And the letting go, is excruciating and once again, there is no choice but to surrender to it.]
Carly's latest "Under the Tree" prompts have already brought about many baby loss mama's to share beautiful tributes, thoughts, and healing meaning making. And her questions this week, have brought me to join them.
Do you have a special place in your home for your baby/ies? What is it like? Do you have any rituals that you perform in memory of your baby/ies?
We have pictures of Caitlin in our living room, work, wallet, and everywhere anyone with living children would keep pictures. In our home, I purchased a stand alone white closet that holds all of Caitlin's clothing, her toys, books I read and sang to her, her hospital combs, lotions, pacifier, and cards of congratulations and later sympathy. This is where I add other items that come to be Caitlin's. It's meaning for me is that she belongs in fabric of our lives, and this is one way I parent her memory. The closet also includes DH's things and some of mine. So, we use it on a daily basis.
The other special place is Caitlin's grave site. Her stone with her name on it is important to me and I go and visit when I need to be where her body is. I do have a ritual of sorts. I bring my iPod and play the "Caitlin & Mom" playlist of songs I sang to her, songs of healing, songs sung/played at her funeral, and songs since her death that help me think of her. I usually squeeze the toy to make funny sounds, because that's something I used to do for her in the hospital and she loved those funny sounds and followed the toy with such intent. The toy still works, and some day I know it won't because of the weather or because it will get lost or taken--it happens I know. But for over a year now, I visit and squeeze and Caitlin and I listen to giggles, whistles, and bird tweeting. It used to make me cry because I miss her so terrible, but it also makes me smile because I remember her life.
At some point in my visit, I visit each of the other graves of those in the baby section, just because I know how important it is to remember our children. Before I leave, I touch and kiss her name, and I talk to her. Sometimes out loud, because it helps me to hear me say her name and feel the vibrations of my voice going to where her spirit is.
[I don't have enough energy to answer all the "Under the Tree" questions, but I'm grateful for the prompts to further healing for all of us who gather under the tree.]
DH and I have a few TV shows we watch, and fewer still that we will record. Well, I love Sunday Morning, so we record and then after church we drink coffee and watch the stories about life, politics, art, music and bet on whether the nature scene will include birds or not (it usually does!).
Well, today there was a story about Phoebe Snow of "Poetry Man" song fame, but oh, that song is not what defines her. The interview with this songstress was poignant and real. She told her story of her daughter who suffered afixiation at birth, and lived until she was 31 with her Phoebe. Phoebe's grief was apparent and so what the strength and joy of telling her daughter's story. I was grateful she told it. She talks about how hard it was to sing after her daughter died, and the tears that were already welling in my eyes at last let go. Her friend Linda Ronstadt told her that she had to sing about Valerie. In Phoebe's performances, she now dedicates a song she originally wrote for her mother, and now sings for her daughter. I immediately went on iTunes to download below is a youtube vid if you would like to listen.
The lyrics that most resonate for me are "Everything good I am you taught me. Everything good I am." It's not that I started out as an unloving person, but Caitlin made me love in ways I didn't know I could. This growth of understanding and actively loving in deeper and more profound ways is typical of parents with living children, I know. But, my experiences is that another dimension is experienced when too soon that love must be expressed through grief. One struggles to express love to a child no longer living. You hug the air, stare at the moon and try to pull it to you, and wonder at how the world continues when all has ended for you. Then you struggle to love in this new strange world, and something bursts open in you--an echo of the first time you saw your child only louder than the first sounds of love in your heart, a bit of a reverse echo, if you will. And this something makes you love others more, love nature more, love struggle more. The possibilities for loving overwhelm you that sometimes you are rendered inert and other times you write, paint, and, as Phoebe shares with us---sing.
The song's title is "You're my Girl," and the album she describes as a "love letter to my daughter."
If I could find a way I would sing you a Christmas lullaby to warm your heart and make it beat again
If I could find my voice again I would sing you a lullaby that would wrest you from His arms and bring you home to mine
If I could find the tune I would sing you a lullaby that would wake you from your peaceful slumber to peer into the eyes of your mother and know I love you
But I remain silent standing in the blanket of snow that covers you now I feel the angel tears from heaven that fall upon my cheeks
This summer I taught music teaching techniques as I have done for years. The first day of teaching, I walked into a classroom to get materials ready. On the piano was a book opened to "Close to You" by the Carpenters. it made me smile. I thought of Caitlin Anne and singing this song to her everyday along with the other lullabies I sang each visit.
We have become witnesses again to a family member's journey home. 
