Cafe Surreal

The vegetarian diner in Wisconsin was not crowded, and there were many empty tables. Nevertheless, our party of 10 was asked to wait in the mostly-open and mostly-unused upstairs party room. There was a piano, a fully-loaded bar, several tables, some upholstered chairs, and a couch. A couple other parties sat around the small tables with board games in front of them. It was so hot I thought I might burst into flames--so I headed back downstairs to wait outside the restaurant, in a landscaped garden.

Our waiter, let's call him Phil, wore a pink short-sleeved dress shirt with a button-down collar and a madras-plaid ribbon-shaped bow-tie which looked sort of like this:

Phil came around to take our drink orders, and everything seemed normal, if a bit languid. Our drinks came, and Phil eventually showed up to take our food orders. This is where things went hooey. He seemed to have trouble understanding everything that AJ said, even though she spoke English plainly and clearly.

"For an appetizer, I'd like an order of the hummus, please," she said politely, "but I'd like chips with it instead of bread." Then she ordered a veggie burger with cheese for her entree.

"Would you like pita bread with your hummus?" Phil asked, having short-term memory or hearing problems.

"No, thank you," AJ said politely and patiently, "I'd like corn chips instead, if you have them."

"We have some nice pita bread," Phil insisted. "You don't want that?" AJ somehow remained cool and collected, and tears formed in my eyes from holding in a giant guffaw.

"No," she said. "Just corn chips. Do you have corn chips? That's what I'd rather have."

"Oh, corn chips, sure, no problem," Phil agreed. "Would you like me to bring that with your dinner or before?"


Beat. "Before," she said. "Since that's what typically happens when you order an appetizer," she did not add.

"So I'll bring it out a little before the rest of the food," Phil said. Oh, yes he did. I was glad he was standing behind me and was unable to see the look on my face. I watched AJ carefully, and she kept a straight face.

"Yes, that would be great," she confirmed, even though normally on our planet, this would not have been necessary; and when Phil moved on, we exchanged "what-just-happened-there!" glances.

Then Phil had problems understanding my FIL's order. "What's 'vegetarian sausage,' " FIL asked innocently, having never partaken of such a oxymoronic food group.

"It's...vegetarian sausage," Phil said, appearing to be completely oblivious to his utter lack of helpfulness. I waited for him to offer an addendum listing the primary ingredients, or the herbs and spices designed to mimic the pork-sausage flavor of a meat-lesss sausage--but he just continued to smile obliviously at my FIL. FIL, a risk-taker, ordered the suspect breakfast non-meat anyway.

My MIL ordered the Thai banana boat from the appetizer menu: fried bananas served with coconut curry peanut sauce. Learning from my SIL's ordering challenges, she clarified that she would like the banana as her entree, and that she would like it to be served when the other entrees were served. We were pleasantly surprised when it arrived, as desired, with the other entrees.

When AJ's veggie burger arrived, it was cheese-less, but the sides were as requested; but Mr. Peevie's veggie burger had unwanted cheese. AJ pointed out the error to Phil, who asked, "Oh, did you want a cheeseburger?" No one who has ever tasted both a cheeseburger and a veggie-burger with cheese would ever mistake the two--but Whatever!--AJ continued to patiently explain her wishes to the well-dressed but inexplicably confused Phil.

"You don't actually HAVE cheeseburgers here," she gently pointed out, "but I would like cheese on my veggie burger." Then she and Mr. Peevie discovered that his veggie burger had the cheese she was looking for, though his plate had the right side dishes--and they made the switch.

Phil looked confused, but solicitous, wanting to help. "Do you want me to get you a different plate?" he asked--and I don't know how we didn't just completely give up.

When the check came, we were all in agreement: Phil deserved a large tip for the effort he had put forth in attempting to decipher our neediness. He was our hero, an inadvertent Yoga Berra who entertained us with his unexpected confusion.

"Large tip," AJ said to her husband as he paid the bill. "Large tip. That was far too entertaining to not be rewarded."

But honestly? I don't think we'll be back. It was just too much like an episode of Twilight Zone for my comfort.

Untitled Poem, by M. Peevie

Petrichor
dust and rain
ethereal droplets
dance,
evanescent
lilies murmur,
lilt, and wither
demure and articulate.
She's weeping,
gently weeping.

Sometimes Shopping Is Not All That Fun

I was facing the worst summer experience of a mature woman's life: buying a new bathing suit. I knew I was in for a rough, sweaty few hours--and not in the fun sense; so I doubled up on the Xanax, strapped myself into three pairs of Spanx™, and headed out, the plaintive opening notes of an old Western shoot-out scene playing on a loop in my brain. I knew there were good odds that I would not come out of this alive.

At Kohl's end-of-season swimwear sale, I found 20 racks of strappy bikini separates in junior sizes, and no size Matron Full-Coverage Super-Structure Underwire Stomach-Disappearing bathing suits. Next store.

At Sears, I strolled through an entire Kardashian Kollection, but found no bathing suits, Kardashian or otherwise. Next store.

Undaunted, or maybe a tiny bit daunted, I headed into JC Penney. I didn't care about the recent defenestration of their CEO; I didn't care about their ongoing battles with One Million Moms; I just wanted swimwear that would not get me harpooned on the beach.

I found racks of mom-approved tanks and tankinis, and started piling suits on my arm. What size am I? I wondered. 14? 16? 18? 22W? I took suits in all sizes, figuring I'd optimistically start at the smallest. My last suit was a 14, I figured, and I was down one fibroid-packed uterus, so maybe the scale had been lying and I was still wearing the size of my lost youth.

Alas, it was not to be so. That size 14 wouldn't come up over my knee-budgies, those baseballs of flab just above the inside of your knees that on babies are so adorable you have to grab them and squeeze them and say "budgie-budgie-budgie" but on a full-figured middle-aged woman are just, um, unfortunate.

Then I tried on some larger sizes, which fit, sort of, if by "fit" you mean that after wrestling and sweating and swearing and yanking and contorting while reaching behind your back and stretching the fabric beyond its tested tensile strength you finally end up so tightly encased in stretchy polyester that every opening appears to be cutting off circulation to one extraneous body part or another.

The styles varied from criss-cross bust-lifting tummy-tuckers to frilly bandeau-topped sea skirts that covered several inches of thigh real estate but fooled no one. Many of the fabrics featured large florals that were more than vaguely drapery-esque. Every time I put on another suit the fat woman in the mirror stared back at me with an expression of mingled horror and disbelief. She just could not believe that any human would consider this exercise to be a good idea.

And yet, there I was.

I made it through. I bought not one, but two suits. I will wear them until they, like my current swimsuit, have become practically transparent from being over-worn because I DO NOT WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS AGAIN ANY TIME SOON.

Have You Ever Seen A Bunny Blink?

A plump bunny hunkered in the dirt under the evergreen shrubs in our front yard. She sat, still and unblinking. When I walked past her, her head turned slightly to track the threat, but otherwise she did not move.

I do not find bunnies to be magical as some people do, but I do think they're generally adorable as long as they keep their greedy paws off my Swiss chard. So I felt a twinge of apprehension when M. Peevie called me at work the next day about our own little Benjamin Bunny. 

"Mom, do bunnies have eyelids?" she asked with innocent curiosity.  

"Do bunnies have eyelids?" I repeated stupidly. "What?" Every conversation in my workplace has an audience, and the surrounding cubicles erupted in giggles.

"Yes. There's a bunny on the sidewalk in front of the house. He's either dead or asleep. He's not moving, but his eyes are open. Do they have eyelids?"

"Hmmm," I said, "I don't know if bunnies have eyelids or not, but you sure gave everyone here a good chuckle!"

"Why are they laughing?" she asked. "If you don't know the answer either, then I guess it's not a dumb question!"

"I guess I just assume that they do," I said. "Also, I don't think a bunny would sleep out in the open like that."

"Well, I've never seen a bunny blink before, so I didn't know," M. Peevie said, sticking fiercely to the Scientific Method.

"Well, that's a good point," I said. "I've never seen a bunny blink either--so I'm just guessing that they do indeed have eyelids."

When I arrived home, there was no bunny sleeping with his eyes open on the sidewalk. My thoughtful Next-Door-Neighbor (NDN) had handled the haz-mat clean-up, and I was grateful.

We Have Disappeared

I was making dinner and Mr. Peevie walked in the door from work.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," I said back. I chopped an onion for Indian Mother-In-Law Savory Ground Turkey.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Fine," I said, peeling and chopping a hunk of ginger.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said, smashing a garlic clove under the flat blade of a chef's knife.

"What are the kids up to?"

"I don't know."

He was quiet for a moment or two. Then he observed, "You seem to be kind of short with me."

"You seem to be kind of needy," I said helpfully.

"Well, I am!" he defended; and he had every right to be so.

I glanced up at him; he looked stricken. "Well, so am I," I said, with more than a tiny bit of coldness in my voice; and I was. I had no emotional energy to care for his wounded heart. I resented his neediness. I kept cooking, and Mr. Peevie walked out of the kitchen.

The loss of Aidan has changed us and broken us. We are empty, defeated, and fragile. We are facing what feels like a bleak future without our middle son: 40 years (give or take) of making new memories, none of which will include Aidan. It's unfathomable and wrong.

With Mr. Peevie, I find myself short-tempered, hyper-sensitive, and intolerant of the slightest offense. I can't stand his neediness, but if he were not needy, I would perceive that as a deficiency of grief, and would find a passive-aggressive way to punish him for it. I'm so messed up.

Clearly, bereavement strains relationships, sometimes to the point of breaking--but the research does not bear out that divorce is statistically more common among couples who have experienced the loss of a child. In fact, "methodological limitations associated with sampling and difficulties in tracking divorced couples make it impossible to draw clear conclusions about marital disruption" after bereavement, according to the National Institutes of Health. We just don't know.

But what we do know is that loss changes us. Our family has disappeared, and a completely different family has taken its place.

We have been snatched away from our most intimate relationships and have been deposited into a household that looks and sounds and feels alien. We are all changed; everything about our family has been touched and altered.

The way we relate to each other is different: Our hugs are longer. Our rituals are more prominent and precious. Our arguments are more rare and more painful; our apologies more tender. Our conversations, leisure activities, family events--everything has changed. Sometimes we seek each other out; other times, we retreat to our own forms of escape. 

We never stop thinking about the son and brother that we have lost, and he is with us, in us, bruising us with his absence.

Distance

Today, April 21, we remember our Caitlin on her birthday. She would be 19 this year. I wonder how old she is in heaven. I wonder if she and Aidan are buddies. I wonder if there are buddies in heaven.

Caitlin was born at 22 weeks, weighing only 13 ounces (369 grams). We wanted the doctors to take her to a hospital with a unit that specialized in micro-preemies, to work on her, to save her. They couldn't, they said. She was too small (less than 500 grams), they said, and her gestation (less than 25 weeks) was insufficient.

We held her for her whole life. We looked at her and wondered at the tiny perfection of her fingernails and wept at the transparency of her skin. We gave her the name of my grandmother, Libby, for her middle name. I told her story beginning with this blog post.

Since we lost Caitlin, I have wept with many other families who have lost their children. My friend Rock Star, who's little boy died at full term before he was born. My friend Rofu, who lost her twin boys well into the second trimester due to a rare genetic abnormality. My friend Donkey, who lost one of her triplets in the first trimester and the second at term, shortly before his sister was born healthy.

So many other families in our circle have experienced the devastating loss of a baby in late pregnancy or shortly after birth that it feels like it's nearly as common as having a healthy full-term baby. It's not, of course: 

Rates of pregnancy loss decrease as the pregnancy progresses. Overall, about 10 to 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies and 30 to 40 percent of all conceptions end in pregnancy loss. Miscarriage that occurs at 13 to 14 weeks' gestation usually reflects a pregnancy loss that happened one to two weeks earlier. Approximately 1 to 5 percent of pregnancies are lost at 13 to 19 weeks' gestation, whereas stillbirth occurs in 0.3 percent of pregnancies at 20 to 27 weeks' gestation, a rate similar to that of third trimester stillbirth. (Source here.)

You feel like you can't go on, when you leave the hospital with empty arms. You feel like the rest of the world should stop, because yours did. You feel like the most important thing anyone could know about you is that you had a baby, and she died.

And for the first few months, for the first year, maybe longer, this is your life. You pull the seatbelt around your waist and you think, "I'm not supposed to have a waist yet." You go to church or for a walk around the block, and you quietly resent the pregnant women and any woman holding a baby. You avoid going anywhere near the strollers and baby clothes at Target.

You feel like your face looks different, that anyone who looks at you can see in your eyes that you had a baby, and she died. Maybe they can.

And gradually, but not linearly, you cry a little less, and then a little less. When you meet people, you are able to tell them that you grew up in Philadelphia, or that you still love to play softball. The conversation about the baby you lost is not always the first conversation any more.

Is it easier, or harder, or just different, to mourn a child with whom you never had a chance to create memories, compared to mourning a child that you've nurtured from infancy to almost manhood?

I think I need a little more distance from this present grief to really know.

Everything is Harder

Everything is harder.

I know I recently wrote that everything is easier--but it's not. It's harder.

Walking up the stairs in my house, from the first floor to the second floor is harder. Aidan's bedroom door, plastered with goofy drawings, stickers, a photo of Buddy Holly, and Einsteinian wisdom ("Imagination is better than knowledge") faces the top of the stairs. I walk up those stairs at least five times a day. I stop in front of his door, a canvas of accumulated tokens of his eclectic interests. If he were here, I would be starting to nudge him to remove them and start over with a blank slate. Now, I think they might stay there forever.

I walk past his room and look in, still expecting, hoping, to see him kneeling next to his bed, the laptop open in front of him, his papers spread out on the blue camouflage comforter. But instead, his room is empty and neat. The bed's made. Most of his stuffed animals remain in his room, except his two favorites: Manny the manatee who lives with me, and Dot, a big floppy stuffed dog, who lives with M. Peevie.

It's harder to concentrate on anything but grief. It's harder to focus, harder to read, harder to motivate myself to do anything meaningful or productive.

It's harder to be compassionate and kind; it's harder to forgive. Why is this? I think when we do these things--when we show compassion or kindness, or forgive someone who has wronged us, we pay an emotional price. I don't have much of a balance in my emotional account, and I'm often overdrawn. The people who see this most often are the people who most need my kindness and compassion: the other Peevies. There are others who are sad and suffering, too--but I have very little to offer them.

It's harder to go to sleep at night. When I lie down to sleep, the images come. I run through That Day in my mind, with the feckless hope that if I do something different, or if the paramedics arrive sooner, or if the ER docs try a new technique, the outcome will be different. Or my mind goes to the ER waiting room, where we gathered to begin to process the idea that Aidan would not be coming home with us. He is behind that door over there, still and silent. I couldn't bring myself to go in. Maybe if I had gone in, he'd be OK.

It's harder to wake up in the morning. I'm exhausted. Grief is physically, mentally, emotionally exhausting. I didn't sleep well. I don't care about anything anymore, so why bother. I think I should be in a better place by now--it's more than four months. But frankly, I don't want to be in a better place, ever. I don't ever want to feel better about losing Aidan. I'm conflicted and confused.

It's harder to think, and to write. It's harder to be organized and coherent. It's harder to find the right words, because there are no right words.

Everything is harder.