What Do We Do?

A Poem That Helps Me Meet and Rewrite History

As I age, I have learned more about how traumatic experiences land and live in our bodies until we meet them with whatever they needed at the time. Thus, certain painful experiences come back to me as thoughts, images, memories and body responses. They don’t come back to haunt me, though it might seem like that to some. They return to be cared for with love, and with the life experience that I have now, that I did not have at the time. They come back to be held in meditation, in movement, in loving circles of community, in walks on the land—so many different ways.

For some days I have had images coming from a very specific day and time in my life. It was the moment that my husband and I returned home from the hospital after our daughter died. We were so empty and confused and so full of unbearable pain. We did not know what to do with ourselves and no one else did either.

With the images arriving, so did words here and there, and I had the sense that there was a poem wanting to come, but mostly, there was healing that wanted to come. In the writing of this poem, I could finally, after all these years, imagine and discover for myself what might have made this time a healing time for us. Everything in me longed for my whole system to understand what would have been helpful for me at a time when I could not know. Now I know and am grateful for that. To now have the images of being with wise, courageous, and healing community then, changes the experience. It’s like going back in time re-writing history.

This is a very intense poem, for a very intense experience. I could have softened it for you, but I needed it be as it is; this is the way the experience was encoded in me at the time. Read it only if you dare to be touched. I only publish this because some of you tell me that these are the ones that are the most meaningful to you.

There is so much more I could say about all this and how my experiences of loss have made me the way I am, in ways that I like, though would never have asked for. I think I’ll leave this one right here as it is.

What Do We Do Now?

Now that we are home without our daughter
who lies in the hospital morgue
waiting for an autopsy 
that might give us some idea of why she is not with us,
in my arms,
at my breast,
what do we do now?

Later, undertakers will pick her up, and I’ll see her again 
Before her body is incinerated into bits of bone and ash.

But meanwhile,
What do we do? 
And I mean in this moment, like right now? 
What do I do? Can I even find a next breath?
Parents offer to come over but that doesn’t feel right.
They might try to make us feel better, which would not work at all.
None of us know an appropriate ritual,
none of us are free enough to wail and keen
and wail and keen
and rip our clothes and tear out our hair.
That would be an appropriate thing to do,
But we cannot.

So her father and I walk around the house, upstairs and down,
Sitting and standing, crying and not. 
Completely unmoored.
Here, but not here, in shock and in grief.
What we can feel is so overwhelming, we try to distract. We can’t.
We are here with it all, and it is SO much.

We are so young,
Untouched by death except for a couple of grandparents who lived their full lives.
We are old enough to have ideas of how it should be
and this is not it.

My breasts are hard, exploding with milk that will never be suckled. 
They hurt almost as much as my heart does.
I sit in the hot shower and sob as I try to express a little milk—maybe this is one ritual I need.

Where are the many people who would surround us with love,
Hold us,
Not leave us alone with our guilt and sorrow?
Where are those who would come even when we said. “Don’t come,” 
because we would have been so wrong?
Where are the ones who would snuggle with us in warm blankets,
Who would feed us and put us to bed, lying next to us?
Who would take us on walks, help us breathe in fresh air and scream our pain?
Where is the community who knows what we need
When we do not know?
Where are those who understand that I will never be the same,
Nor should I be,
And can help me journey to this new land?

Where are those who are not afraid of death, not afraid of us, 
and who know that our dead daughter’s father needs deep care and tenderness too?