Incompatible with Life

I was introduced to the concept of choosing a focus word for the New Year by a dear friend who was participating in the One Little Word scrap-booking challenge. I did eventually sign up, but abandoned ship after the first month when I realized that my capacities and supplies for creating visual art of any form were limited. The idea of selecting a word to grow into over the course of the year stuck with me, though, and I’ve continued the practice. As the old year closes, I pick a word that speaks to me—a word that embodies a change I need to make or something I’d like to expand in my life. I always make a collage of magazine photos and text that exemplify that trait or concept. The collage isn’t exactly a vision board, just a cut-and-paste visual reminder of my word. I hang it in a place of honor in my bathroom—don’t laugh, that idea came from a licensed therapist—where I see it often enough to prod my mind into remembering it. The first year I tried it, my word was SHINE. I’d

Silent night Holy night All is calm All is bright Hospital bed Middle of night Doctors and nurses Witness the plight Round yon virgin Mother and child Holy infant So tender and mild Tiny blue babe Fights for each breath Mother and father Await her death Sleep in heavenly peace Sleep in heavenly peace.

It was eight o’clock when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I called to Scott, who was otherwise occupied with carting in armful after armful of holiday loot from the car and dumping it under the artificial fir tree in our foyer.  This brief sojourn at home was the midpoint in our annual Christmas Eve tour of gorging and gifting. Having finished a traditional holiday dinner at my mom’s, we’d stopped at the house just long enough to unload the current batch of presents and let the dog out before hopping back into the car for the next round of merriment at my sister’s.  I opened the door and there, on our front porch, stood Santa Claus, flanked by a sullen pair of teenagers in green and red elf hats who were clearly mortified to be spending the night before Christmas trailing their dressed-up dad as he canvassed the neighborhood for young believers.  He must have been a neighbor, but I didn’t recognize the face under the beard and—I’ve got to admit—I felt a little bit sorry

Our 2006 Christmas photo, two months after Anna's death. One of the hardest parts of losing a baby is the wondering. A stream of questions without discernible answers emerges in the wake of loss. Who would this child be? What would he or she be like? What parts of family temperaments would have merged to create his or hers? What would family life be like if this little member had lived? Which of this child’s interests and talents would we be supporting as parents? And, conversely, which of his or her quirks would be driving us berserk? These are the questions that creep up on me in the middle of ordinary days and haunt me in the dead of night. When I lost my youngest daughter, I lost any semblance of the future I’d planned. My sugar-candy former life dissolved into a murky puddle of grit, gratitude, and grief. What appears clear on the surface—even now, years later—is muddied and dark at its depths. One of the ways I cope with sadness is by imagining what life would be

Loss takes many forms--the loss of a job, the loss of health, the loss of a loved one. Every year, we are reminded that the holidays magnify loss. Yet as we approach the holiday season, much as we’d like to provide support, many of us wrestle with how to reach out to a grieving friend or family member. We imagine that by acknowledging their pain, we'll somehow reopen the wound or destroy a mourner's fragile peace. We're afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing, or worse yet, being rebuffed for our efforts. It's not as difficult as it seems to provide support to someone who is suffering. All it takes is the willingness to put ourselves in their shoes. Thoughtful consideration of how we would want to be treated if we were in their position enables us to plan a course of action. If I were living with chronic, life-altering illness or injury, would I feel up to steaming full speed ahead into the usual hustle and bustle of the holidays? How would I reconcile my

I had a disappointment last week. I’d submitted my book to an indie writing contest and the winners were to be notified by Thursday. I didn’t get the notification. It’s not that I expected to win. Wait, scratch that. My disappointment indicates that indeed, on some level, I did expect some kind of recognition. Maybe I wasn’t expecting to take the grand prize, but I was hoping for at least an honorable mention. Acknowledging that was the first step in being able to let it go. Once I recognized my expectations as a cry for validation, I saw them clearly as a self-imposed burden of proof meant to silence the inner critic who keeps raising doubts about my writing talents. My disappointment wasn’t about the quality of my work—it was about my need to prove myself. What I am learning—slowly, painfully, and inevitably the hard way—is that disappointment is an inside job, rooted in my expectation of how the events in my life are supposed to turn out. I keep slapping my preconceived

Now that the thirty-one days of Pinktober have passed, I feel safe enough to vent a bit of frustration with the whole breast cancer awareness movement.  Don’t get me wrong—I recognize that fund-raising is a necessary underpinning of medical research, and I appreciate societal commitments to eradicating disease. It’s just that I’m not sure there’s anyone in America who is unaware of breast cancer, and it seems that more and more companies are skipping the altruism part and going pink strictly for profit. Despite the tidal wave of pinktastic merchandise that floods October to amp up awareness, breast cancer continues to be diagnosed and, more disturbingly, to claim lives.  Current research suggests that the emphasis on early detection has backfired, leading many women through unnecessary treatments for cancers that were never going to become invasive. However, the body of medicine remains confounded on how to predict and prevent metastatic breast cancer. Even with the la

Why? For parents of pre-schoolers, it’s the most vexing of questions. For those in the throes of the mercurial challenges of life, it’s the most perplexing. There is no sufficient or reasonable rationale for why bad things happen to good people, or for why fate smiles upon those who seem to thrive on exploitation of others. There’s no rational explanation for why some moms and dads are blessed with copious numbers of healthy children, while other would-be parents are denied even one. Or why one person lives to be 100, outliving everyone they know by twenty years, while a young child dies in a tragic accident. Why does a tornado bear down on one block while leaving the next untouched? Why, for that matter, is one baby born into poverty and another into affluence? And why do the squeaky wheels always get the grease while the quiet ones—no less in need of lubrication—are totally ignored? It’s tempting to attribute another’s misfortune (or your own good fortune) to fat

My grandma was the luckiest person I ever knew. Buy her a scratch-off lottery ticket and it was sure to be a winner. Take her to the horse races and, betting $2 to show each race, she always broke a little more than even. Bingo games, Superbowl pools, it didn’t matter what—if someone was going to walk away with money, it would turn out to be Grandma. She never abused her luck. She avoided casinos and saved her gambling for the church picnic. She also paid out her winnings to anyone who ended up to be traveling with her—usually her grandchildren and great-grandchildren—generosity being a hallmark of her spirit. I did not inherit her luck. I’ve had pockets of good fortune, but not usually of the monetary variety. I never win the football pool, I only break even at the horse races if I stop betting early, and the last batch of scratch-offs I bought paid out only to other people. Yet in the past year, I’ve found myself drawn to the lottery. Not the scratch-off kind, but the we

On the day that I buried my infant daughter, I received a card from a distant relative on my husband’s side. I’d call it a sympathy card, but the hand-scrawled message from the sender negated any comfort it was meant to bring to us. “It’s so refreshing to hear of a couple choosing life over abortion.” Refreshing? That’s a word that wouldn’t make my top million descriptors of the experience. Was it excruciating, soul-crushing, and bone-wearying? Yes. Refreshing? Not in the least. I’ve tried, over and over again, to understand what would prompt someone to think such a thing, much less write it in a missive to the bereaved, but I can’t find a reasonable explanation, other than the fact that it’s easy to arm-chair quarterback the lives of people you’ve only met once. It’s easy to judge when you don’t have a vested interest in the case at hand. It was precisely that fact that led us to a private funeral for Anna. After months of being asked if I was going to terminate the

Grief has a long shelf life. It lurks at the back of the mental pantry, pungent and putrid, flavoring everything around it. Years after a deep loss, it retains its potency and—at expected and unexpected moments—seeps out of its container in a toxic spill. I’ve learned to accept the grief I carry as part of who I am. I do not make a habit of wallowing in it, but when it leaks into my daily life, I’m forced to bring it to light and air it out before I can force it back into confinement. October is, for me, the month when the barrel of grief is tapped. Anna’s birthday is an expected catalyst. Every October, I cycle through the beautiful, terrible memories of birthing and burying my baby. My teen-aged daughter and I are at each other’s throats in the weeks leading up to October 10 th , bristling at real and imagined offenses and jabbing at each other in verbal sparring matches. Our tongues take leave of our brains in what can only be termed a temporary period of insanity.

Family portrait by six-year-old Sammy. Note that I take center stage in a larger-than-life role. Mothers are biologically hard-wired to ensure the survival of the species. They are charged with preparing their offspring to leave the nest by teaching them the skills they’ll need to navigate the world independently.      With reality television shows and women's magazines glorifying the exploits of pushy and meddlesome moms, controlling moms who demand that their children live up to unreasonably high standards, one gets the sense that modern mothers grade themselves on their children’s achievements. From the women who trundle their pre-schoolers from one resume-building activity to another, to those who spend the equivalent of college tuition on their kids’ elite sports leagues and dance teams, many moms seem to believe that it is their level of devotion that determines their child’s destiny. There was a brief spell, very early on in my parenting life, where I coul

True gratitude is a fundamental appreciation for life that runs deeper than the "name one thing you're thankful for" discussion that occurs at the Thanksgiving table. Like optimism and pessimism, gratitude is a matter of perspective. We rarely recognize just how good we've got it until some of that good is taken from us. Loss makes us acutely aware of what we've previously taken for granted. I didn't appreciate the natural symmetry of my body until I surrendered a breast to cancer.  I didn't respect the functional utility of a full head of hair until I had to rely on substandard alternatives to sop up sweat, protect my tender scalp from sun, and keep me warm at night. I didn't understand how great a miracle it was to conceive and deliver a healthy baby until my unborn daughter was diagnosed with a fatal chromosome disorder. It's not uncommon to wallow a bit when we suffer a hardship. It's easy to slip into a puddle of s

My name is Laura and I watch the Real Housewives more regularly than I'd like to admit. I’m a vicarious visitor to Orange County and New York, used to spend a lot of time in New Jersey, and occasionally duck into Atlanta and Beverly Hills, just to see what’s going on. It is a bit of an addiction, the Housewives series. I was a latecomer to its explosively entertaining parties. I’d never been big on binge watching television and, honestly, it wasn’t until I began treatment for a breast cancer recurrence that I had the capacity and desire to collapse onto the couch and seek mindless diversion. It didn’t take me long to find the Bravo network, and it was almost impossible not to develop an affinity for their alternate version of female reality. Perpetual reruns of previous episodes got me quickly up to speed on the characters and their almost comically surreal and wacky hi-jinks. I also didn’t have the energy to find the remote and change the channel. For those who aren&

Brown hair, maybe blonde Blue eyes, like her sister Round cheeks, stubborn jaw A grin full of mischief The sum of our parts Put twice together In the daughter we know And the one lost forever

I love to run. Or I used to. In the past five years, body has gone from expressing mild resistance to running to flat out refusal. Injury, pain, and general malaise would be the three top descriptors of my post-cancer running career. I’d built my identity around my status as a runner and, even as my relationship with the sport soured, I held onto the hope that with enough time/training/nutrition/motivation my post-cancer body would return to pre-cancer performance. I had never been a run-every-day-to-keep-a-streak-going kind of runner, but I loved the endorphin high of a good run. I had never been fast, but I did track my distance, pace, and race times religiously, comparing current race pace to prior runs and rejoicing with each new personal record. I celebrated every incremental increase in mileage, owned more than my share of training magazines and manuals, and had at least one race-like event scheduled for almost every month of the year. I ran solo for stress relie

My mother is a firm believer in rummage sales. Throughout my childhood I was encouraged to go on an annual purge of my toy collection, to cull the items that I’d held onto mostly out of the comfort of familiarity and send them off to a new home. I was an anxious child and this task always pushed me to my limits. I was never quite ready to let go and even the promise of jingling coins adding up in my piggy bank was not enough to loosen my grip on the long-forgotten and ignored items in my toy box. As I got older, though, I began to see the wisdom and beauty in it. When you release something that no longer works for you, you free yourself from the burden of unnecessary clutter, and bless someone else with your bounty. The older I got, the more easily I handed off unworn clothing, uncomfortable shoes, and outgrown home décor. This release did not extend to my relationships, however. I held on long past revelations of irreconcilable flaws of character, kept a firm grasp even i

Though my oncologist was not thrilled with me quitting tamoxifen, she did give me her blessing. “Take a break and see how you feel. Just promise me that you’ll consider starting up again.” I stopped taking the pills and within a few weeks noticed an improvement in my energy level. My hot flashes were less frequent, weight management a bit easier. Running, my favorite leisure activity, stopped feeling like a chore. I couldn’t quite ratchet my pace back up to pre-cancer levels, but I could finally hold my own with my running buddies again. I harbored a small hope that stopping the medicine would put me back into my previous ovaries-still-in-action hormonal state of being. Sadly, aside from one scant period right after I abandoned the drug, my body stayed stubbornly stuck in menopause. My symptoms weren’t nearly as bad as they’d been on tamoxifen, but they were still there, mocking me. I started to have doubts about my decision. The drumbeat of, “What if?” reverberated in my