Incompatible with Life

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...

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...