that conversation

It really was kind of anti-climactic. I called my mother's cell phone (she's doing the Jack Kerouac thing in an RV with her husband and their monstrous cat). I said hi and she said hi. Then I said that I had some news and I told her the news and she asked me when the due date was and how other members of the family felt about it. I told her the due date and said I hadn't really told anyone else yet. And that was basically it.

We don't do effusive in our family, and, under the circumstances, congratulations or how wonderful would have seemed completely out of place. Anyway, I'm pretty sure we were both thinking exactly the same, unsayable thing: I really hope this one doesn't die too.

Since that conversation, I've been thinking a lot about the fraying of my family ties in the last two years. I've never been especially close to my mother or father, but we got along just fine and I spoke to them regularly and sometimes I visited them and sometimes they visited me. The death of the twins changed all that -- for a long time I didn't want to do much other than work and sleep. I didn't want to talk or eat, I cried all the time and I cringed when they talked about their other grandchildren.

A lot of the literature about grief and grieving explains that it's perfectly normal for the bereaved person to feel anger, or even rage. I've seen much less written about the anger of the mourner's friends and relatives. Of course, like the mourner, friends and relatives are often angry that this bad thing happened, angry, perhaps, at the universe, the gods, the unfairness of it all.

But, in many cases, I think they're also very angry about the loss of their old relationship with the mourner. They don't know or particularly like this new, sad person. They want things to go back to the way they were, to reconstruct the world in the shape it was before everything shattered. At some level they realize that that's not going to happen, but it's probably not all that uncommon to be furious at the grief and the griever, blaming them for making it impossible.

I'm sure that not everyone has this reaction and, since it's generally not socially acceptable to be angry at someone because they're bereaved, I think that many friends and relatives don't express these feelings directly or, perhaps, aren't fully aware of them. But in the last two years, I've felt a dark undercurrent of rage directed at me from both my parents, and for a long time, I couldn't make any sense of it. Why were they angry that I was I sad?

It's taken me all these months to be able to put it into words, but after my talk with my mother, as I hung up the phone, I had one of those kaleidoscope moments, when the tumbling shapes of colored glass rearrange themselves into an intriguing new pattern. John 9:25. I once was blind, but now I see. And I sat there and thought about the last couple of years, about my mother and father, and the way that my relationships with them have faded and withered and I realized that I'm not the only one who's lost a child.