one of my most vivid memories of the week after my baby's death is a conversation i had with my mother.
maybe "conversation" is giving me too much credit. it was maybe one or two days after i'd gotten home from the hospital. i had taken the kids over to my parents' house. i don't remember what set me off, but i remember totally disintegrating. it didn't take much to make me cry that first week.
i remember sitting in a rocking chair in the living room. my mother held me while i sobbed, as i tried to explain to her something i could barely put into words. "it's like a black hole, and it's coming for me," i said. "i wake up and i know it's coming for me. when i put my kids to bed, i know it's waiting for me. i can distract myself for a few minutes, but i know that black hole is waiting for me, and it's getting bigger and bigger, and it's going to suck me in, and i will never get out."
"let me tell you a secret," my mother said. "everyone has a black hole. you may never know they have one, but it's there. the trick is to learn to stand at the edge and say, 'you're not getting me today, hole. i'm not falling in today.' "
i think about this a lot, now, as i go through life. in my head, i call it black hole theory. i find myself looking at the people i pass in the grocery store, the people i pass on the walks i take with my kids, people i speak to every day and people i barely know, and wondering, "what's your black hole? what keeps you from falling in?"
sometimes i feel like losing my baby has removed a layer of varnish from my entire world. i feel as if i am seeing sadness and struggle in others that never registered with me before.
i see the pervasive ravages of chronic illness and physical pain. i see the toll of mental illness, the exhaustion, the stigma, the fear.
i see holes in the everyday fabric of people's lives where mothers and fathers and siblings and children should be, but aren't anymore.
i see the empty arms of families who wanted more children, and don't have them. i see the broken hearts of couples who ache to bring a baby home and are still waiting - five or ten or fifteen years later.
i see the loneliness and cruelty of inexplicably having to navigate life without a partner or family, in a world that so often seems made for happy families, where everyone else is an afterthought.
i see the anxiety and consuming self-doubt of feeling like a failure - at marriage, at parenting, at work - in a world where everyone else seems to have it all figured out.
i see people reeling from emotional blows inflicted by those that were supposed to love them the most.
i see so much pain and sorrow and anxiety, all beneath the surface.
because for the most part, as tragedies and crises recede into the past, that's where these holes stay, right? underneath our functional, polished exteriors. no one sees these holes in our hearts as we mow our lawns, fill up our gas tanks, or conduct zoom meetings. when we stop to make small talk with a neighbor on the street, when we bump into each other at the grocery store, these dark vortexes of pain aren't visible from the outside.
it reminds me of that saying about ducks - we all seem so calm and composed above the water, but underneath, our legs are endlessly paddling to keep us afloat. (yes, i am the queen of #mixedmetaphors.)
and it's so easy (for me, at least) to look at those calm, composed exteriors and feel bitter, jealous, resentful. look at them, i think. look how perfect their lives are. they were pregnant; they had babies. look how easy they have it. they've never suffered like i am suffering. what do they know about pain? what do they know about anything?
or when that composure cracks, when someone acts out or falls apart or doesn't measure up to our standards, it's so easy to judge them then, too. she's gone off the deep end. she doesn't have her life together. she's lost it.
it's so easy. but it's such a mistake.
because we don't know what black holes lie in each others' hearts. we don't know what thoughts are running through people's heads. we don't know what news they may be hearing for the first time or struggling for the thirtieth time today to internalize.
maybe you see me at school pickup and think i look pretty good; maybe i see you and think you look the same; and neither one of us knows how alone or anxious or inadequate the other feels, because we've both learned to soldier on, especially in public.
and maybe that is why it is so terribly important to be kind, above all else.
kindness, alas, does not come as easily to me as judgment and resentment and all the other demons i feel like i battle constantly, and battled long before i lost a child. but the more time i spend standing on the edge of my own black hole, looking down, the more convinced i am that kindness is the only thing that can save me from it.
i'm not talking about the astonishing number of ways so many people have been kind to me since my daughter's death, although that, too, is important. i'm talking about the sensitivity and kindness we people with holes in our hearts need to show others.
i think it is so hard, but so important, to look past our own suffering and our own demons to others - to the people who may seem so happy and lucky to us or the people who just seem impossibly different - and ask how they are doing. to recognize that they may be living with holes whose names haven't even occurred to us yet, just because those aren't our particular poison. to realize that, the same way it hurts us so much to see others taking for granted things which are hard for us, someone out there is watching us take things for granted - a healthy body, a loving partner, living parents, financial security, a successful career - that they would give the world for.
things that we, so transfixed by the swirling hollowness of our own pain, barely know we possess.
so let's be kind to each other. let's cut each other slack when someone makes a careless comment or isn't there for us the way we hoped they would be; let's recognize that others are struggling too, that others are doing the best they can. let's work harder to be sensitive when we make assumptions about how everyone lives, what everyone thinks, how everyone feels. let's think just two seconds longer before starting a meeting with, "so what's everyone doing for mother's day?" or telling that cousin at the family get-together, "what your little girl needs is a sibling!" or giving out unsolicited weight loss or medical advice.
we may never learn what someone else's black hole looks like. but maybe, if we remember that that darkness is an integral part of all of us, we can make it a little easier for everyone standing at the edge, looking down, to say, "not today - i'm not falling in today."
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