Four Years

Today was the anniversary of our daughter Sydney’s death. She would have been 4 years old. The day was insultingly sunny in Barcelona, as if the weather were set on ignoring my sombre mood.

Demian and I went to the central cathedral in Barcelona to mark the day. Going to the central cathedral was our third attempt at getting into a holy place to light a candle to commemorate Sydney. First we tried Santa Maria del Mar, our favourite church, located in the Born. It was closed. Then we tried Sant Just, a little, old church in the back streets of the gothic quarter. It too was closed. I was dismayed. What did it take to gain access to a church these days? Weren’t they supposed to be havens for the poor and needy? What about the (increasingly rare) devout community? Shouldn’t churches be working hard to ensure the devout could pray in this city?

Finally, we decided we would try the central gothic cathedral of Barcelona. It was bound to be open, if for no other reason than that tourists would want to see it.

We were too right. It was indeed open, but to gain access you had to pay. This went against the grain for what we had in mind. We were not tourists, going to take pictures, to ooh and aaah at the filigree and stained glass windows. I went up to the counter and pleaded with the security guard, a lady of indeterminate age with an impassive face and impossibly blonde hair. I told her that we just wanted to light a candle for our daughter, who had died four years ago. She shook her head, immovable. My shoulders slumped and I slunk away. My eyes scanned the crowd of French Canadian tourists clustered at the door of the cathedral. I was looking for Demian. I found him and shook my head. I tried to tell him across the room that it was a no go but started to cry instead. It seemed like this of all things shouldn’t be hard. We were just trying to remember our daughter with a sober little ritual that was private to us and being turned away three times was too much.

I made my way through the crowd to Demian, crying all the while. It was the first time I had cried all day. I had survived the morning like any other day, dropping off Sasha at daycare and then working.

But at that last unkindness, big tears that felt as old as time started to roll down my face. As a big, deep wound re-opened in my heart, I felt like I had cried those tears before. It was the familiarity of the sadness that was hardest to bear.

Then the security guard called me over a second time. She must have seen me bow my head and had second thoughts. She smiled encouragingly and waved us hastily toward the entrance. At that, I was really undone. I can just barely hold it together when people are mean, but kindness....well, kindness has a way of undoing me. As we entered, I began to sob in earnest.

I understand why people say that you never really get over loss, you just learn to live with it. More specifically, you learn not to think about it every single second of every single day. You learn to fill your life up with the present instead of the past. And it mostly works. But when the past creeps back in, once, twice, three times a year, it hurts just like the first day. It really does. There is an ache, a gaping space that feels hollow and familiar, the worst combination.

A lot of the time, I have trouble accepting that this has happened to us. It’s hard to remake us into the couple who lost their baby. I don’t feel like we are supposed to be that couple. Not that there is a stereotype for this, of course there isn’t. No one should be that couple. It feels as senseless today as the day it happened. At this exact time four years ago, I was trying to be brave, saying my good-byes to Demian at the door of the operating room, before being wheeled in for a C-section that I knew would yield a dead baby. It is horrifying to think of that now. At the time, I was dead calm. I was laser focused on nothing going wrong with me during the procedure. I kept thinking that Demian absolutely could not lose his wife as well as his child. I guess I was trying to control an uncontrollable environment. I remember being obsessed with my blood pressure levels, alert to any changes on the little monitor and determined to be the first to notice if anything went awry. In the short few hours before the operation, I had even envisioned what I might do if something went wrong, especially if I lost consciousness and saw the proverbial “light” coming toward me. My plan was to picture as hard and as vividly as I could hot footing it away from the light, so that if it happened, my brain would know what to do, and would walk away from that light, back into this world. Too much Grey’s Anatomy TV, I guess.

Anyway, it was at this time four years ago that all that was happening. I remembered it all today with raw, edgy clarity. Once I calmed down enough to talk, I mentioned this to Demian as we walked slowly through the cathedral, breathing in the cool, musty air and appreciating how big and imposing and solid the whole place was. He hugged me.

Demian and I are not religious. At times like these, I wish with all my heart that I could believe in a religion – I don’t really care which one. I would like to rely on writings that were set down millennia ago to help me get through this.

I feel like I am in a strange no man’s land, where I need the guidance that monotheistic religions provide, but cannot force myself to believe the doctrine. It’s the same scepticism I bring to counselling and other forms of therapy. I guess it’s born of a rather arrogant confidence in my own brain. I struggle to believe that I could come across someone really convincing, really helpful, a true guide in the world.Along with a host of other reasons why I find it difficult to believe.

But wouldn’t it be nice? I love the religious rituals that attend most of life’s big moments, the signposting that religion brings to life’s big decisions (this is right, that is not) and all of it contained in a Book, layers and layers of the wisdom of centuries, packed together for me to drink up and interpret.

So, I feel this need for calm, timeless guidance in my life, to help me recognize when I am at a crossroads and help me make the right decisions. But darn it, I cannot make myself believe the Word, much as I would like to. I envy the people who can rely on religion to guide them in life, it must be such a help at moments like these.

As it is, in our no man’s land, Demian and I muddle through as best we can, sometimes blithely strolling through life and sometimes clinging to each other. This afternoon was more on the clingy side. I think we are doing alright at being our own guides. And we love “borrowing” religion every once in a while, such as today, to lend weight and solemnity to something we wish to commemorate. It feels right. And I hope it isn’t offensive to anyone.

Today, we chose to light a candle in front of a small chapel, nestled in an alcove of the lovely, light-filled cloisters that are attached to the main cathedral. The chapel was built in memory of the Virgin of Light, which felt right. We lit two candles. One for Sydney. And one for Tatum, the daughter of a friend of ours who died last year, just days old. The candles are burning now, side by side, in front of the little virgin. I like to think that Sydney and Tatum are protecting their younger siblings Sasha and Bohden, respectively.

Heroes and Pity Cases

Over the past four years, Demian and I have been called many things. One of them is hero. Some people see the way we survived Sydney’s death as something heroic. I appreciate the sentiment but reject the title outright. To me, a hero is someone who runs into a burning building to save someone. All we did was run out of a burning building, and it was to save ourselves. That doesn’t sound very heroic to me. We saw that we were burning, so we ran out.

We’ve also been called pity cases. Not in so many words. But you can see it in people’s eyes: the pity that laces their looks and their words. I hate that as much as I hate the hero title. I do not feel like an object of pity. Pitying us would be a disservice to the wonder that is our 23-month old son Sasha, to our attempt to live gracefully with what has happened to us, and also to our future.

I prefer survival. If there is a title I am comfortable with, it is survivor. We have survived this. That is all.

I haven’t written much for a while and I apologize for that. I am discovering that I am what you might call a trigger-happy writer. I need an emotional trigger to begin to write. For a long time, I’ve felt like blogging about the antics of our son Sasha, but resisted on the grounds that this was supposed to be a blog about Sydney and grief, nota blog about Sasha and what a marvel he is. But I think I might co-opt this blog into a vehicle for all sorts of musings, including Sydney, Sasha, life, the universe, and everything. Please stay tuned.