Picking Up the Pieces

Originally posted at The Way of the Rose Facebook group April 10, 2020

Novena Day 51

The Glorious Mysteries

The rosary is a circle that asks us to always look at the long story, not just the immediate circumstances. Today is my mother’s birthday; she would be 98 years old if she were alive today. She, too, suffered the loss of a child. My brother Charlie was born with a hole in his heart before the era of routine open-heart surgery. He made it to 28 before his heart gave out. Though our stories were very different, engendering different kinds of challenges, both of us were able to heal. I hope that the following is helpful to others who either face a similar challenge themselves or are close to someone who does.

Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Resurrection

After Zane’s death, the synchronicities continued. Bill and I had both worked in his old company with a man whose wife was pregnant at the same time I was the first time around. In fact, their baby was due the day after ours. They, too, were expecting a girl. One night, the week before our daughter was born, Bill came home obviously shaken; he told me that their baby had been stillborn. We knew how much we were anticipating our new life with our daughter, and we couldn’t even begin to imagine trying to deal with such pain and loss. Worse, we knew that seeing either of us would only remind them of what they had lost. We had absolutely no clue how to handle such a situation, and looking back I know we didn’t handle it well.

We buried Zane on Long Island with my brother Charlie who’d died when I was 12. My minister friend was there once again to help me through this transition. She planned a funeral service with me and took the initiative to contact a woman who ran an organization on Long Island for grieving parents. She had even picked up a packet of materials from her to give us. On the way to the cemetery, I opened the packet and looked through it. Among the papers and pamphlet was a book, Dear Cheyenne. I opened it up. Inside the front cover was a sticker indicating that the book had been donated by another couple in honor of their baby girl who had been stillborn in 1999. My breath caught and I abruptly began sobbing. The couple who had donated this book that was to help us deal with our overwhelming grief was our old coworker and his wife.

A few weeks later, when I was struggling to sleep at night and sleepwalking through the days, I took Kalea to the library. We passed a loaded return cart on the way to the children’s room. On the top shelf I caught a glimpse of a bright red “ZANE” emblazoned across a book cover. As if pulled by a magnet, I approached the cart and picked up the book. “Zane” was the author’s name. Just Zane. I turned it over in wonder to read the blurb—and nearly dropped it. The book’s main character was named Zoe.

What are the odds? So low that it was obvious to me that even as his family traversed the valley of the shadow of death, Zane was reaching out to me to reassure us that all was well with him. Even in my despair, I could feel that there was no real line between him and me. If I sat quietly, I could feel him with me, loving me as he had that night I held him.

It was experiences like these that carried me through the awfulness of the months that followed. And there was an awful lot of awfulness to follow.

Difficult as it was for me to handle Zane’s death, Bill found it much, much harder. He didn’t have any sort of faith to sustain him, and Zane’s death triggered a return to the unresolved trauma of his mother’s death from cancer when he was 18. He was tortured by guilt, constantly rehearsing the actions he could have or should have taken that would have saved our baby, even though Bill was the one who’d heard straight from the medical examiner that nothing we’d thought of would have changed the final outcome. Our hindsight strategies would, in all likelihood, have merely prevented us from having the few glorious hours we’d had.

But Bill refused to believe it. He convinced himself that Zane’s death was evidence that we were bad parents who didn’t deserve a second child. He knew that wasn’t a logical belief, but he clung to it anyway, and it initiated began a downward spiral that proved very difficult to pull out of. It also created a divide between the two of us. I knew there wasn’t anything healthy about wallowing in guilt, and I refused to feed his obsession. Instead of finishing each other’s sentences, we no longer even wanted to hear the end of each other’s sentences. I was desperately trying to keep my own head above water for the sake of the child we already had. Later he told me he’d begun to believe it was inevitable that I would leave him. That made him emotionally abusive toward me, which—irony alert—got me thinking I might have to leave him to save myself and our daughter.

Those were some very dark days. It appeared that I had lost my marriage, the best thing that had ever happened to me, as well as my child.

That’s when I got the phone call. In a last desperate move—a Hail Mary pass, if you will—Bill asked me for help. He’d been thinking a lot about killing himself. In fact, he was so close that the only thing stopping him was the fact that he couldn’t figure out how to do it so that it would not inflict more trauma on Kalea and I. Even as I registered that things were worse than I had dreamed possible, I knew this was the moment I had been waiting for. My love had finally hit bottom and was willing to do whatever it took to release the pain.

I told him I knew my old therapist could help him; I would call him right away. Bill began intensive therapy almost immediately, and the turnaround was astonishingly rapid. After nearly two years of non-stop grief I finally felt like I could breathe again as my husband made his way back to life and to me.