This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.
***
After a year of consistent harmony, and a long backpacking trip through South America, Benjamin and I decided to have a baby. We were ready. I was ready. All those years I spent alone putting my waitressing earnings toward my mortgage, I was saving up something else, too: my ability to give. While in hibernation, my desire to love someone had never gone away; instead, it had been stockpiled, like dollars in a safe. Now I opened the safe and discovered I was wealthy. For years, I had taken good care of myself. Now I could afford to take care of others.
Surely that would bring happiness, right?
I hadn’t always wanted children; while.married to Jake I visited a gynecologist and asked for a tubal ligation. Wise man: he gently refused.
My choice to have children came along with my choice in partners: Benjamin and babies were a package deal. It was during one of those early phone calls that he asked me if I wanted kids. When I told him no, he asked me why.
“I want to do other things with my life, I suppose,” I said.
“Like what?”
The moment that followed, though brief, was a long one. Within it, I realized that I didn’t know the answer to his question. and though I didn’t tell Benjamin right away, it was also the moment I realized I might have kids.
Humble beginnings for a major life choice. And yet, this time, it felt right.
***
For the first three months of my first pregnancy, my nausea was constant. Other than that, though, everything seemed fine. Normal. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t. We never found out what caused things to go wrong.
When Jane was born, she was long and fat. She had flawless skin and a pug nose and full lips and long, thick hair and fingernails well past the tips of her fingers. She looked healthy, but she wasn’t.
She wasn’t breathing.
***
The night Jane died, Benjamin and I washed her whole body, one part at a time. Benjamin changed her diaper and we took turns combing her long dark hair. Then Benjamin went to the lobby to wait with some of our friends while I dressed the baby in a pink floral dress and a knitted cap.
Benjamin came back. “Are you ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. It was about nine-thirty.
A nurse came, and I picked up Jane for the last time. Pushing the respirator, the nurse led us to a hospital balcony. We walked slowly and I saw tears in her eyes.
I sat in the chair on the balcony that faced the city. One of the nurses asked me if I was ready for them to take the oxygen tank away, and I said yes. She did so, then both of the nurses left, saying they would be right inside the door if I needed anything.
And then, for the last time, we were alone.
Next to me there was a railing and on top of it there were the iodine tubes and a wet nap to wipe her face with. I picked up one of the tubes but I couldn’t make it work so I put it back down and began to pull the tape off Jane’s mouth without it. It came off easily and, in a way, I was relieved. Then I took the respirator out of her mouth.
For the second time, I looked at Jane’s face without the respirator.
It was beautiful.
I opened the wet wipe and began to wash Jane’s face. Her lips were still pinched from the respirator and I wanted to smooth them out. I rubbed the cloth over them again and again, but it didn’t work; they wouldn’t go back to the way they were when she was born.
Still, I kept wiping them. Then I wiped the rest of her face, over and over. At the time I didn’t know why I was doing it; it just felt right somehow. Later I realized the reason: it was something a mother would do.
It made me feel like I was caring for my baby.
As I wiped Jane’s face, the tears came, and I let them. I cried in wracking heaves without shame. After half an hour the nurse came out with a wet wash cloth, taking the wet nap I’d been using.
I wiped her face some more.
After a while, I pulled Jane close to my chest for the last time. Then I kissed her. My last words to her were, “Please don’t leave me.”
I said it many times. It was all I said.
Another half hour passed. Finally, I decided I was ready, and shortly after that, as if in confirmation, it started to rain. I gathered Jane’s blanket around her head and mine around my shoulders and we went back inside the hospital.
***
The day after Jane died, I woke up after a long sleep and cried, thinking, I should have held her more. I should have slept every night at the hospital.
“It was too short,” I told Benjamin, and yet, in the days to come I realized that along with the grief, there was something more. As I chose her urn at the funeral home, and wrote her eulogy and hosted her memorial service, I was a more vulnerable person than I’d ever been before. Sometimes during high school, I had lost the ability to cry except in the most rare of circumstances. Now, I cried, not just for Jane, but for the larger reality that this thing we call life is so utterly relentless. Jane made me a mother, and what that meant, I realized, was raw fear and pain. My four days with Jane felt much like most parents feel at least some of the time.
It felt like being a mother.
The grief I experienced was difficult, but it wasn’t long before I realized that it felt different from depression. Depression feels like being stuck in quicksand, while grief comes in waves, temporarily overwhelming you then washing away. Depression crying feels endless and wallowing, but grief crying feels cleansing.
And the difference between these tears was huge.
I had wanted to be there when Jane’s oxygen tubes were removed. Benjamin hadn’t, and we were both surprised by the other’s choice. Almost as soon as Jane was born grey with the cord wrapped around her neck, I knew that I would have to feel my feelings.
Buddhists like to say that one can feel pain without suffering: pain happens in the moment, but the stories we tell ourselves about the pain are what causes the suffering. Though through the months that followed Jane’s death I experienced a grief I’d never known before, I also experienced myself as someone who could handle it. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t suppress my difficult feelings. Instead, I allowed them to come, and noticed that I could handle them.
I learned that I was strong, that I could get through it.
Many years after having my first child, Jane, as I was working my way through the self-help canon, I discovered the book Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. Basically, the book teaches you how to feel your feelings without judgment in order to release them, but until I read it, that hadn’t been my habit.
Grief and depression are very different things. Suppressed grief can turn into depression, or it can be a healthy experience. After letting all that emotion out, some of which had been buried long before I gave birth to my baby, I actually felt less depressed than every. I was more sensitive but in a healthy way.
Who knew?
***
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.” Lao Tzu.
“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.” Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.
***
It’s Zen, only more practical. Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.
