Twenty-four

 

Today looks like it's going to be a nice day, doesn't it?

Not quite as nice as your birthday back in 2002, though. 

That was a glorious spring day, full of life, with flowers, like this one I found down at the Chinese Garden the other day, blooming all around us. The little courtyard at Emanuel Hospital was a riot of colorful beauty the day you were born.

Which just made the day that much harder. I know, I say this a lot, but it was bitter hard knowing that each one of those fragile, ephemeral blooms would live longer than you would. 

Still is.

Today?

Oh, no, it's nowhere near that beautiful. 

Sunny, sure, but cold.

That's the way our winters usually are, y'know; sunny and cold or rainy and not-quite-as-cold. 

I wish you already knew that, that we'd had other winters and blooming springs to remember. That you'd grown tall and strong, in sun and shadow, that we could celebrate this day as a happy one instead as a slowly dwindling memory and a distant grief.

But instead, here we are. Having just this one day to sit together in silence.

And then, as always, you will go. The next day now almost a quarter-century ago when we kissed goodbye, you in your little yellow onesie that you took with you and returned to us only as ash and sorrow.

I miss you, love.

I always will.

I know your mother does, too, and she, and I, will keep your memory alive until it is our own time to get up and pass through that door you closed behind you, all those years ago.

Goodbye, love. 

Goodbye.

 

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002 

Twenty-three

 Hey, you! C'mere, let me give you a hug. You're not too big for that yet, are you?

Of course you're not. You're, well, still tiny, still only one day old. This one day, twenty-three years ago, when you left us, your mom and I, just a day after you arrived.

The only place your grew up was in our hearts.

This day, and all those before and after. The days I dreamed of and hoped for and never had. Dreamed of all the things we'd do together; good...and bad, happy and sad, cheerful or angry or bored or silly.

They never happened, did they, dearest?

Now there's only this day, the day you climb up the dark stairwell and sit beside me as I cry.

Because I still miss you.

Oh, yes; there's your little brother and little sister. Yes, they're great. I love them to pieces, and always will.

But today is about you, the big sister they never had, the little girl and young woman I never got to know.

This year was even harder because I'm not just missing you but missing your mom. The first time in twenty-three years we haven't had a partner to console each other, a friend and lover to give and receive comfort. 

I called your mom today. Told her that she was in my heart, and hoped that she could find some solace in that, find some peace. It's hard on her, y'know. She carried you closer than her own skin, slept behind your heartbeat for three-quarters of a year. She dies a little every time this year thinking of and missing you.

And so do I, in a different way.

Because every year, every time this day comes, I look into the darkness for the tiny flame that was your too-brief stay with us, to remember you, to grieve for you. To wish against all the years that we had another chance, knowing we never will. 

To have the years of you, child and girl and woman grown, father and daughter, loving and beloved.

So. Sit beside me for a little while. I promise I won't try and hold you when you have to go. But just now, for this time, just for this day, let me sit and dream the dream I dreamed, the dream of the you that never came.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Twenty-two

Oh, hey. I almost didn't see you there, sweetie.

C'mere. Siddown for a bit, can you? I'm just finishing this up, I'll be right with you.

That? Oh, it's some sort of IPA. Yeah, cliche, I know. Hey, I like 'em well enough, now that the Northwest is mostly over the "can you top this" bitterness craze. Go ahead, try a sip.

Yeah? Well, it was seven bucks at Grocery Outlet. Probably a reason for that, eh?

It's been a long year, hasn't it?

Retired? Yeah. Still working into that. Your mom is running in circles over at school; more to do, fewer to do it. Kid brother still gaming 24-7, baby sis ready to spread her wings and fly off to college...

Would you be there now?

Getting ready to graduate? Doctor, lawyer, beggarman, thief? Would you be working, instead? Putting in your forty hours behind a wrench or behind a desk?

Would you be cadging a drink from me like this, nasty hoppy IPA or what?

How much else would we have shared?

Your younger siblings share almost nothing with me. Your sister and I are both theater buffs, but she's very different from me in every other way. Your brother? I don't get him and never have.

And I never got the chance to know you.

I wish I had. I wish I'd been able to grow with you, to share your happiness and sorrow. To know you, as I had hoped, all those many years ago. But this day came, and went, and so did you, forever one day old.

I don't miss you the way your mother does. For her you're a huge hole in her heart, a part of her she'll never find, the end of her dreams for and of you.

I miss the you who never was. The little girl, the young woman, the strong daughter who, in the best way of fathers and daughters, stood by me into the grave and carried my memory beyond it.

Instead, we have yesterday, and today, and then you'll be gone again. Here, have another sip. Yeah, it gets a little better after a couple. Still not very good. Seven bucks worth.

But let's have a last round, you and I. And grin and shake our heads and look away, and when I look back you'll be gone.

Until the next time, love. Goodbye. I love you. I miss you.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar. March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Twenty-one

As always, today.

Fortunately it’s nasty, rainy, and cold…utterly unlike that radiant early spring through which you came and then were gone so swiftly. When every one of those bright, brief blooms would live longer than you did.

 

I often have much to say to you today, on your birthday, the only one you ever had.

 

Today, it's just this: I miss you, love. I'm grieved you are not with us today.

 

Today you’d have been of age to the drink taken, and I’d have pledged you with whiskey and love and pride, my daughter, my dear.

 

 
Instead, tonight I’ll pledge to your memory alone.

 

Bryn Rose Gellar 

March 1 2002-March 2 2002.

Twenty

 Well, good morning, my dear.

Yes, it's early, isn't it? Blame that damn cat, yowling to go out in the small hours. If your little sister would leave her hallway door open the wretched creature wouldn't have to wake the house trying to escape and I wouldn't be sitting here, lit by only a phosphor screen waiting for my coffee to brew.

Would you like some? It's Colombian, lovely, deep and dark, rich and earthy.

Do you like coffee?

That's one of the many, many things we'll never know about you, though, isn't it?

Would you have been a coffee drinker? Were you smart and sweet, or funny, sad and blue, calm or quarrelsome, happy and bouncy or grim as the death that took you today, this day, twenty years ago.

Your birthday, love. The only one we ever had.

Here. Have a cup, anyway. I'll put a dollop of sweet cream in it to cover the bitterness.

Good? I hope you would have liked it. I'd have liked to share this moment with you, your dark hair frowzy from sleep, your eyes heavy, your hands warm and smooth around the cup, here in the darkness we'd share.

I'm sorry that we only have this night.

Tomorrow you'll be gone again, gone as you always are, running on before me across that bourne from which no traveler returns. We have only tonight, your birthday night, to sit together and remember the you that could have, should have been.

Your mother and I miss you, dear. She the you that was, me, the you that never was, the you I'd hoped to watch grow straight and young and tall as I grow stooped with age.

That's good, eh, the coffee?

We still have the rest of tonight, until you have to go. So let's sit here, love, and listen to the sound of the rain that falls in the dark, falls like the tears I've wept for you, lost and gone these many years like the steam from a coffee cup, swirling and rising and vanishing like the night as the dawn spreads across the sky.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Nineteen

It's so difficult to imagine you as a woman grown.

You were, you will be, always one day old, the day we gained and lost you.

But before I lost you, while you were still tiny, you grew strong in my heart and straight and tall in my thoughts. You were my grown girl before the day you were born.

I couldn't believe that day would never come.

 But it didn't, did it, love?

You never grew past that day.

How could I have guessed? How could I have known, that the hug I would give you nineteen years ago tomorrow would be the first and last we would ever share? That the only place you would ever grow would be in my heart?

I will always miss you, darling. But this day most of all, the first and last day I would get to hold you, hoping even as I knew I could not hold you, that you had gone on before me, impatient, to that place where all the stars go out.

But I know that, after all these long years, that you will always go on, and I and your mother will always be left here behind, empty of you and aching for you and grieving for the loss of you, both the you we lost that day and the you who would have been standing before me today; strong and straight and tall, my daughter, my dearest heart.

Let me hug you one last time before you go.

You're so big. I'm so proud of you. 

Goodbye, love. Goodbye.

 Bryn Rose Gellar March 1, 2002-March 2, 2002

Eighteen

You're all grown up.

Now you're officially, legally, "grown". An adult. You don't need me anymore. You can do what you want, when you want to, and there's nothing I can do about that.

And that's hard. Because, first, you are and always will be my little girl. My baby daughter, my firstborn. No matter how old you grow. You don't remember my telling you this, but when you were, oh, something like fourteen you asked me when parents stop worrying about their kids and what they do, and I told you the story about Grandma Lawes and how she looked at me when I asked her that. Yep, about ten minutes after they zip us into the bag.

And second, because you will do goofy, stupid, scary, ridiculous things. You'll drive too fast. You'll drink too much. You'll fall for people who will be bad for you, or things that will be bad for you. You'll take dumb risks and fall into harm's way and - hopefully, if I and you are very lucky - you'll wriggle away through some special Providence or good fortune or pure dumbshit luck. And because you're "grown-up" all I'll be able to do is sit and wait and worry and hope.

Just like I did that day all those eighteen years ago.

What? No. Just something in my eye.

But now you're a woman grown. All those long years of diapers and lullabies and hugs and tears and drives to soccer games and quiet mornings and schooldays and hopes and fears have come to this.

Alone? No, no, never. You'll always have us, me and your mother. We'll always love you and care for you and care about you. We'll never leave you, even when you leave us behind.

Yes, lovie. You...what? Yes, leave us. You know you will. You already have. Yes. All those many years ago.

I know, I'm sorry, it's just that sometimes I forget how hard it was. Hard for us all. It wasn't what we wanted, love, was it? We came to that moment, and then instead of going home together you went on and we were left behind to miss you and mourn you.

It's still hard for us.

Because we never got to this day, did we?

We never got to stand here, you and I, with you all strong and young and full of hope and glory. And me, all full of love, proud of you, and hopeful...and nervous worried and scared of losing you to all that goofy, scary, ridiculous stuff. We never got to be father and daughter, never got to live through all those days and years.

You passed through our lives like a shadow fleeing with the sun, to vanish with the coming of night. To...how did I put it all those years ago? "Who ran on the tiny fleet feet that never learned to walk but which carried you swiftly, so swiftly from darkness to darkness."

And once again, I stand here, alone.

Every year. You're here, the hole in my heart.

Then gone again.

Yeah, this has been a long one, hasn't it? Sorry. Well, hey, it's not every day your little girl is a woman. You gotta cut your Da some slack today.

Because after this you'll go again. For another year, another and another and another and all of them, until I join you in that place where you've gone, that bourne from which no traveler returns, that place you have to leave for now. Yes. Now. It's time. Let's say goodbye so you can go. No, you're not too big to hug.

So.

Goodbye, love, Goodbye. I love you. Yes, I'll think about you, my big girl, my own. Goodbye.

I miss you already.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar March 1, 2002-March 2, 2002

Seventeen

Seventeen years ago this day you left us.

To this day we are still bereft.

Your mother for the baby she never cradled, the life that grew inside her all those long, difficult months fled before you took your first breath. For her hopes, her dreams, her plans, all the things you were for her gone in a bitterness that she still carries within her heart.

For me it was today.

This today. Today the morning after your birthday, when I would have given you the keys to the old beater Honda, with stern warnings about driving with boys who had been drinking and parking with boy who hadn't.

This today, where we early risers would have shared silent coffee in a darkened house, your hair a tousled halo about your face.

All the todays that we never had; the fights and the cuddles and the excitement and the tears. The skinned toes and the algebra tests and the silly laughs and the midnight fears.

Slowly the pain and the loss has diminished, as your tiny spark of life fades with the years.

Today I can write this without crying. Today I can think of you as just a loss, a grief, the greatest of many, instead of a ragged hole in my chest where this day ripped out my beating heart and held it before my face to taunt me with the brutal randomness of life and death.

Today I miss you with a wet-eyed sadness instead of a huge, remorseless, tearing grief.

But.

That grief is still there, my dear.

That hole where you should be, young and strong and tall and alive, is still in my heart and will be until it runs slowly down and stops beating. The way yours did, this day seventeen years ago.

Goodbye again, my very dear. Goodbye.

Yes. I'll be here again next year.

I'll make the coffee; rich as joy, dark as night, and strong as love.

And I'll sit and sip and wait for you to come. And we'll sit and be silent together, until you have to leave again.

Bryn Rose Gellar.
March 1, 2002-March 2 2002

I hope you will never know

I see that the national news is full of people squeeeeing about abortion.

Here's the thing.

As the father of a girl who was delivered stillborn at full term, until you've walked that cruel hard road yourself your options are pretty much limited to agreeing that the decision is that of the parents, any family and friends they choose to involve, and their doctors, and then shutting the hell up.

The notion that you, or I, or anyone not intimately known to the parents of the child and anyone they choose to involve, can make that choice for them, or should? It would be insulting if it wasn't so vile as to be beyond insulting.

No one aborts a pregnancy for fun, or out of carelessness, or without deliberation and grief.

Abortion, like adoption and stillbirth, is simply a tragedy.

Had I known what would happen to Bryn would I have advised my wife we should end her pregnancy early? Before she had two hundred and fifty-odd nights lying listening to Bryn's heartbeat? Before she spent days and weeks and months hoping and dreaming of a future that would only be dust and ashes and even, to this day, pain and grief keener than the sharpest blade?

Hell yes. I would.

If that makes me a murderer in your eyes, stand over the corpse of my daughter.

And tell me how much worse that could be.

Sixteen

Hey, love. Come. Sit with me.

I miss you.

Well, I know. Yes, I miss you all the time. But this time, every year, I miss you a little more, because this was your birthday and birthdays are special.

No. I didn't get you anything. I'm sorry.

Well, sixteen is hard. You are not a woman grown but not a child anymore, either. It's hard to know what you like, you change so quickly. One day it was all sparkle princesses and ponies, then it seemed like just the next day it was CDs and clothes and new soccer cleats. It's hard for your dad to keep up with you, you run so fast now.

I don't know how you do it, as little as you are.

You are little, sweetie. Only one day old, dust and ashes all these years. The only place you grew was in my heart, and in your mom's, who hurts for you so much she cries out for you.

I miss you, too.

But I miss the you I never knew. The little girl frightened of scary noises. The busy tween. The rude teenager. And, now, the young woman, strong and sure, lit from within with promise, like a star, or a lighted window on a cold lonely night.

There's just this one night, though.

Your birthday, every year, when you come and sit with me. And that night, like every night I miss you, again, and wish I could kiss you, just once, before we have to say goodbye.

Yes, love. Yes, I will wait for you here again next year, my very dear.

Goodbye. Yes, love, I love you. Goodbye, sweetie.

Goodbye.

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

~ David Ignatow

Bryn Rose Gellar March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

...in a quiet way and at an opportune time,

One of my favorite works of fiction is Tim Farrington's The Monk Downstairs. There's nothing weighty about it, it's just a pleasant little tale of life and love, a trifle that I enjoy because Farrington writes with a sort of breathlessly effortless grace, the kind of writing that makes writing feel easy and natural, as if you could just sit down and crank out that sort of perfectly simple yet perfectly weighted prose any time you want to.

But there's also a deeply sorrowful heart to it, and I remembered why I cried the first time I read it, over a dozen years ago but not long after my daughter Bryn was stillborn. It was this, and I hope Mr. Farrington forgives me quoting him at length.

"She had never allowed herself to grieve wholly before, she realized now. Not for her father, not for her grandparents. Not even for her marriage: she'd never allowed herself to face what it meant to fail in the central relationship of her life. To really remember that shining, innocent love she'd felt and everything that had happened to it. And this was why, of course; because some pragmatic, self-protective sense had told her that grief was bottomless. Skirting this sea, she had dipped her toes in; she'd wondered what would happen if she crossed the line, but it had always seemed that it could only be a kind of defeat, a drowning, a death.

And so it was.

But maybe it was not the end, to be defeated by life. Maybe that was even part of what it meant to be a human being; to recognize the way in which life had finally defeated you, to accept the ways in which death had come, to stop looking away from the failures of love, and to grieve.

To keep your heart open in this sea of silence; to drift in it, surrendering to its currents baffled and without recourse.

And at the bottom of it, to be surprised anew by love's simplicity."

And that's really it. It's a sort of munshin, a letting-go, the simple acceptance of the endlessness of grief, the release of struggle and denial against that suffering of loss. Some things are simply too grievous to be borne, and it is the trying to bear them that crushes you beneath their weight. It is only when you simply sink beneath them to that deep, still darkness that your heart and mind can then accept that that grief is part of you and always will be.

That, just as for the note to be there must be silence before, and after, there must be darkness for there to be light.

Knowing that does not lighten the darkness. But it makes the darkness bearable, a part of life instead of a denial of it.

Fifteen

Well.

It's that day of the year again, isn't it, love?

That day where once, or twice, or a handful of times I stop and really think about you.

Not in the usual sort of passing way that has become your visits to me of late; the random idle wonder at the sight of a dark head in a gaggle of teenage girls, or the fleeting memory of a still small bundle of yellow flannel jammie.

But a dead stop remembering you as you were, and remembering me as you were to me.

Not the tiny day-old baby girl that was all that you would ever be. That was your mom, who carried you all those long and fretful months. But to me; the gangly girl you might have been, or the petulant and angry teenager I hoped you'd avoid becoming, or the compact dark young woman who would one day stand over my grave and remember me.

Instead I got to stand over yours, and now I am almost all there is; your mother and I and a handful of our friends, to remember you.

I'm sorry you never got the chance to grow up into all those dfferent people, darlin'. I miss those people and all the other people you might have been but never could be. I wish that I was going home tonight to find you pissed off and arguing with your sullen little brother and pushing aside your goody-goody little sister and shouting at you to lighten up and lay off your siblings, which says something pretty brutal about how much I miss the you I'll never get to know.

I do enjoy our little visits on this day, troubling as they are at times.

I wish you could stay for a while longer. But tomorrow you'll be gone. Again. As you were, and as you always will be, even though in your quiet and ephemeral way you'll be here as long as I am. That doesn't really count. Not next to the you that isn't here with me.

And, look; it's time to go already. Yes, I'll miss you. No, I'm sorry, you can't stay longer. Yes. I'll think of you again.

I always do.

Goodbye, love.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Fourteen

I'm sorry I haven't thought much about you, darlin'. Between your little brother being a pest and a pox and a trouble, and your little sister being absorbingly adorable, and my worries and fears about my surgery I've been a little preoccupied.

I know, I know. I'm sorry. I know that's not right. Especially now; fourteen is a hard age, the real beginning of the time you would have spent fighting for attention, fighting to become your own woman instead of a child, or an appendage of your parents. You would want to know that your dad was minding you, but not too much. Parenting you would have been like doing good tactical reconnaissance; being there, constantly alert to the slightest of changes, while somehow never being visible.

And there's the whole "time and distance" thing, too. It's becoming more and more difficult to see you as the newborn you were, the baby who was never more than one day old, locked like a damselfly in amber into that day fourteen years ago when you passed us on your fleeting race from the darkness of pre-birth to the darkness of death.

Instead I see you as the young woman you could have but never will become, the daughter I had but will never have.

And I grieve for you as the past I will always lose, as the future I will never have.

Today I will be too busy, too worried, and too frightened to think much about you, and for that I will grieve as well.

But I will think of you, if only for a moment. I promise. I won't forget you.

My daughter, my dear, my lost one. Today I will mourn for you, again, dust and ashes these fourteen years.

Bryn Rose Gellar March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Thirteen

Thirteen years gone
But still in my heart,
New like tomorrow,
Sour like the hurt of a stolen kiss,
Dark, like shadows of loneliness.
I recall...
I remember...
I still feel... I know
Everyday the presence of your absence,
I endure the weight
Of the emptiness you left behind,
Thirteen years but still...
Even now still
I, in the silence of every breath
Pray, even if...
Just for a few minutes with you...
Again.
I never got the chance to say.
I never got the chance to say I love you.

~ Ezediuno Louis Odinakaose

Bryn Rose Gellar

March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Twelve

Now that you are ashes more than a decade the pain of losing you comes in wondering, this time every year, who you would be if you had ever had the chance to be.

You would be twelve years old this morning.

Would you be still abed, bleary and quiet?

Would you be up early, bright-eyed, chattering and happy and excited?

Would you be our serious little dark-eyed girl? Or would you be our rambunctious and energetic little tomboy? Athletic and fierce? Quiet and thoughtful?

What would you love? People? Pets? The wild? Books? Music?

Would you act with your body in impetuous haste? Or with the patient deliberation of your mind?

Would you be kind? Would you be loving?

Would you still be alive?

For if we learned nothing else, we learned from losing you that there is no tomorrow. Tomorrow is a dream, or a nightmare, or may never come, lost in a wilderness of grief and fear.

There is today, sometimes there is only today, and today is your day, the day you were born and the day you died, twelve years ago today.

We miss you, dearest, and we always will.



Bryn Rose Gellar March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Bryn's Lullaby

I didn't have the heart to call this the "Friday Jukebox" although, really, that's what it is.

But for this particular Friday the music isn't here because I like the music but for what the music means to me.

When we were waiting for baby Bryn we did all the things that prospective parents do; prepared her nursery, sifted through names, thought of and dreamt of what our lives would be like together with her.

During that time I fastened on this:

It's actually a horrible song, really, probably originally Irish but best known from the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, called "The Willow Garden" or "Rose Connolly". In it the singer has murdered his lover in a spectacularly gruesome fashion and is now going to hang for his crime.

I have no idea why I thought that this would make a terrific lullaby, but I did.

I only got to sing it to her once, and by then she was past the hearing of it.

It is an old song and not a popular one. You don't often hear it. But whenever I do I think of her, and what might have been, and the small portion of my heart that died with her twists and burns and reminds me that dying only touches the dead once, but the living that remain behind die again a little every day they remember the lost.

The Lost World

Eleven years ago today I lost you.



Once you were the darkness that consumed the center of my heart. Once I would have given everything to have you back, to change time and regain you.

But not any more. I know your mother feels very differently, but you lived beneath her heart for almost a year, and she loves you in a way I can never do.

For me you are a memory of a hope, hope for a future that was lost the day you were born. To have you back, to have that future back would mean that I would have to give up my today. Give up all the ten years since, give up your little brother and sister, give up the woman who I loved and who has grown to became the woman I still love, give up myself and the man I have become.

That seems too much for me to ask, and yet in a far corner of my heart I feel like that you're dying again because I would refuse to ask for it if I could.

So all I can do is grieve for you, my dear, and for me; for the world that never was, and now never will be.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Bryn Rose Gellar March 1 2002 - March 2 2002

Who's Your Daddy?

Busy couple of weeks combined with, sadly, a grim headshaking despair at the ridiculous inability of about a third of my fellow Americans to put down their fucking teabags and accept things like paying taxes as the price of civilization and the lunacy of the idea of returning our nation to the open oligarchy of the Gilded Age that has kept me silent.

That, and March is roaring in like a sorry, soggy, mangy sort of lion and with it the annual stations of my personal cross. Ugh.

But thinking about Bryn made me think of parenting in general, and that, in turn, turned me to a couple of news items pitched at me or dropped on my digital carpet like a particularly noisome headless mouse by some friends of mine.



And, speaking of noisome things, when you have come to recognize the sound of your dying cat's ass exploding it may be that the time has come for said moggie to find herself half in love with easeful Death. I'm just sayin'; the laundry list (and I do not speak figuratively here) of the items you have shat on is getting longer than your tail, cat, and you've shat on that, too. I've spent fifteen years with you curled on my lap, little friend, but this incessant incontinence is wearing on my patience and the overall aroma of the house as well.

Still, it seems monstrously unfair to end a life, even a small life, because the end of that life has become nothing worse than a rather embarrassing and physically unpleasant nuisance.

Anyway, the main reason I started this post is because a friend of mine - who is childless by choice and chooses to continue as such - linked to this article and, yes, it is fucking Newsweek but that in and of itself should not be an excuse. The author's point is pretty straightforward:

"As younger Americans individually eschew families of their own, they are contributing to the ever-growing imbalance between older retirees—basically their parents—and working-age Americans, potentially propelling both into a spiral of soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor and creating a culture marked by hyperindividualism and dependence on the state as the family unit erodes."

But more to my point is that this is a pretty standard screed you hear from the sort of anti-tax/pro-oligarchy types mentioned above; OMFG! We're not breeding! We're dooooomed!



Not mentioned in these screeds - and not mentioned by the author of this Newsweek thing - is that the subvocal corollary of this wail of despair is that "us wealthy white people aren't spawning..!" Or white people, anyway, wealthy or no. The enthusiastic breeding by the lesser sorts beyond the Law - the blacks and browns, both imported and domestic - aren't mentioned. It's the prospective dearth of precious whities that seems to be being mourned here.

That's pretty goddamn ignorantly racist, but, whatever.

But beyond that is the entirely, painfully, bone-stupid obliviousness of the damn thing.

Because the human bottom line has always, always, been that once people - and the people are usually but not always women because women end up doing the most of it - gain the ability to safely prevent pregnancy they do.

I've talked a fair bit on this blog about parenting and my take on it. That take hasn't changed. It's not really hard and it's not really work. If anything the worst parts of parenting are most similar to the worse parts of warfare; hours, days and weeks of endless, mind-numbing boredom spiked with irritating trivialities interrupted by brief moments of heart-squeezingly frightful terror.

So, not surprisingly, if you're sane and not a Duggar the first thing you do when you find a way to have sex and not have babies is to use it.

L love my kiddos. Usually. They're typically sweet and loving, silly and imaginative and vigorous and gentle.



But they're also kids. Raising a kid is often like playing catch with a Labrador; you're gonna get bored a long, long time before the kid or the dog. What's your limit on My Little Pony or tic-tac-toe or playing with LEGOs? I have no idea in absolute terms but I will tell you that it's way lower than your kids'.

And they're also greedy and short-sighted, demanding, irrational, and their intellectual horizon is typically about the far side of this room. They're often whiny, and fight with each other, and my wife, and me. Their little lives are a constant struggle for attention, which is wearing when you're at the stage where you're constantly struggling for dignity and a little silence.


So what did this Newsweek idiot expect? That all those smart twentysomethings were gonna take a kiddo HEAT-round for Team America? That Joe and Molly were gonna give up that loft in the Pearl and move to Clackamas and start cranking sprogs out of her belly like water out of a hose so our journalist can be sure that there's someone to change his Depends thirty years down the road? That those young white folks would throw themselves on the baby grenade so the national demographics aren't all jacked up in thirty years?

Sorry, pal; people don't work like that.

So my bride and I chose to go down the kid road.

But I won't pretend for a moment that that road's been a cheery nonstop ride, or that there's something wonderful and virtuous about it. The pavement's cracked and rough, the scenery's nice in spots but damn deadly dull in others, and there's not a single goddamn way to be sure that the entire journey won't be for nothing when you get to the end and the sign there says "convict" or "unemployed layabout" or "surly lout" or "whiny drama queen". If you learn anything during parenting it's that you get about 1 or 2 out of the 10 things that influence how and who your kid turns out to be. Or IF they turn out to be; this Friday is an ever closer reminder that all that love and care and wishing and hoping can end in a sifting handful of ashes.

But that's another thought for another day.

Ten Years of Yesterdays

Tomorrow is always ephemera.

Today is a fact, is happening as we move and speak and act, is created as we live and collide like atoms in aether with others living their lives in their own ways. Today is the play we're writing as we live it, passing moment by moment into yesterday and past history.

But tomorrow is a chimera.

Much of our tomorrows is entrained by our todays. But there's always an uncertainty, a randomness that makes tomorrow nothing but a vague sort of promise half-muttered, half-heard until the remorseless wheel of Time brings it to us as the next today.

Being human we love - have always loved, probably always will love - the idea of messing about with yesterdays and tomorrows. I think it has something to do with our contrasting the mutability of tomorrow with the intransigence of yesterday, and the contrast between hope and regret.

"If we fall in the race though we win
The hoof-slide is scarred on the course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin
Remaineth forever Remorse."
~ R. Kipling

If we could only go back and change this or that yesterday; say the "right" thing instead of the wrong one, do this instead of that, love more wisely, act more quickly, fight harder, think faster...if we could just do all of that we would have saved that beloved, not lost that marriage, gotten that job, become wealthy, happier, greater than we are today, and present ourselves with an even greater tomorrow.

I got to thinking of all of this while writing the two preceding posts.

Because there was a time when if I could have I would have stopped time, reversed the spinning Earth, undone the hidden tragedy that took my elder daughter's life, diverted my world into another tomorrow where little Bryn lived and grew into that young woman who burned the offering at my grave.

But...

If Bryn had lived...

The world that cascades from that chance spins off into an infinity of mirrors.

With a living older sister my son, even if he arrives as such, becomes a different kid. And there's no guarantee that Mojo and I even have a son; perhaps our second child is another daughter. Perhaps we never have another child.

And with a living daughter, we certainly don't go through the insanely difficult and painful adoption process that finally, through some bizarre miracle comprehensible only to Loki, the God of Mischief and several junior functionaries working for the China Center for Adoption Affairs, provides us with the little girl who we know as Missy Shaomei. That little girl becomes someone else, in some other lifetime. We never know her.

And having sat up with her just last night (she was feeling quite unhappy with a sick headache from having fallen asleep with her glasses on combined with a stuffy sinus) I can't contemplate that with anything but horror.

So to change the past we change the present, and the future; to regain a lost daughter we have to lose another.

That's not an exchange I could, or would, make.

So I have to release that phantom-Bryn, that skinny girl wrapped in night-bedclothes, that stern young woman standing over my grave, to retain my very real Missy who is at this moment cuddled up with the Yellow Blanket and her beloved "stripey wubbie" watching some sort of awful Air Buddies movie her brother adores.

And - while a part of me grieves at the betrayal - the greater part of me is not displeased with that.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes that the problem with result of making the inflexible pledge of death before dishonor means that time will produce only the dead and the foresworn. I am in the unenviable position of the latter; for my living daughter I must foreswear any wish to restore my dead one.

I'm sorry about that, lovie, but the dead must bury their dead. I have a now-dear child that calls to me from this side of the Veil, and I would - even if I could, even if I had the power to change yesterday to be otherwise - go to her.

This time next year I will grieve for you again. But buried in that grief is the smaller sadness that I would now choose her over you, choose the life I have over the life that might have been, choose the messy reality of today over the unrealized promised of the tomorrow that never came.

Burnt Offering

Last night I had a dream.

-- --

The sky was low and gray; it should have been late February or, as it is now, early March when Oregon wears all the colors of the rainbow from steel gray through dark gray to gray-green.

Though the rain had stopped the mournful firs were still dripping from the drizzle that had ended in promise of more rain to come.

Entropy had split the little group that was leaving the cemetary, dividing into ones and threes, talking quietly among themselves as they looked to find their cars for the wet ride home.

But the young woman who remained was still and silent, looking down at the wet grass.She was of a very middling sort; medium height, medium build, the hair escaping her dark headband a sort of midtone brown, her eyes a quiet hazel. Her face in repose was an unremarkable sort of oval, pointed chin small, brow smooth, her best feature that clear gaze now hooded with thought.

But when she spoke her voice was anything but midrange, instead, a startlingly deep contralto that cut through the distant street noise with a hint of brass.

"When I was a girl I never understood what you meant." she said to the ground before her feet. "And then when I grew up I didn't want to hear about it." She reached into her pocket as she continued. "But when you got sick last spring I remembered what you'd asked for. So. Here."

She bent a knee and laid the shallow brass bowl down next to the ash-spot on the grass. And, still genuflecting, placed several small items in the bowl; a spring of holly, and one of juniper, and four short hair-clippings.

"That's from Mom, and Shea, and one from me. And that sad little one is yours, what you had left after the chemo. It was the best I could do."

She removed a small vial from the same pocket and poured the contents into the bowl. Then struck a match and dropped it into the oil, which flared up in a smoke twining with the scents of juniper and hollyberry mixed with the acrid reek of human hair."You did the best you could, too. I miss you already, Dad. Thanks. Goodbye."

And my daughter Bryn straightened up and waited for the flame to burn down to ash.

And nodded her head once and walked away into the misting rain.

-- --

Of course, in life my oldest daughter never lived to burn a momento mori for me; instead ten years ago today I held her tiny body and felt her heart run ticking down and stop. Felt her little arms and legs grow cold. Held her and hugged her and wept over her.

And when I think of that day now, I can only weep again and remember why Heroditus said that only a great fool desires war more than peace, for in peace sons bury their fathers, while in war fathers bury their sons.

I cannot describe the loss of your child,except to say that there is as yet no nepenthe for fathers who bury their daughters.