In the interest of continuity, here is today's photo:
I have already blogged about the MISS Foundation, so I won't reinvent the wheel with this post, but I have been thinking about this topic of community for a while.
Years ago, I read this book, and it really resonated with me (it's Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, in case the link stops working). It was discouraging to learn that we are generally becoming more isolated, our lives are segregated from each other, and community, civic, religious, and political participation have plummeted over the last several decades. The effects of the loss of community are negative and profound. I vowed to create or re-create community in my own life.
Over the years, I have done only an OK job (at best) at cultivating community. It is important to have people in one's life, and to BE that person, to count on, whether it is delivering a meal, last-minute babysitting, filling in for each other with work assignments, helping someone move, borrowing milk from the neighbor, offering a shoulder to cry on, etc. Part of having/being that person also includes helping those less fortunate than myself and fostering real friendships. I have done better in some areas than others.
Well. Nothing puts the concept of community to the test like a big traumatic event: mine obviously being the recent death of my son. Whether I was good at being that "community" for someone else or not, I desperately need it now. And I needed it long before Weston was even born, when I was put on bed rest.
Apparently I did a better job than I thought at creating community in my life, because, as I have stated over and over, my community has delivered. Or maybe I don't deserve that much credit and just happen to know a lot of really amazing people.
My community has met physical needs (through running errands, delivering meals, and babysitting) and emotional needs through an overwhelming amount of love and support. So many of you have shared your own stories of loss with me. I grieve with you and feel honored that you have let me into parts of your private lives.
And now I have become the "less fortunate:" in need of the volunteering efforts and helping hands of strangers. That's where the MISS Foundation fits in (and the strangers have quickly become friends). I literally don't know what I would do without their help. That is why the concept of community is so important: without a desire to be engaged in the world around us, what would happen to the less fortunate? In my case, I shudder to think about it.
And, oh, how I love the Internet. There are plenty of negative things about it, but it has greatly expanded my community. I live in Arizona but went to school in Texas and, consequently, have friends all over the country. The Internet has enabled me to be in touch with many people of whom I probably would have lost track otherwise, and who have been a huge source of support.
As I have said previously, grief is so isolating. And infant loss, stillbirth, and miscarriage losses bring additional issues to the table for whatever reason. I have heard so many stories of women in previous (and current) generations losing their babies but never talking about them again. The losses were just swept under the rug, and it was as if those beloved babies had never existed. As if losing your child isn't bad enough, to not be allowed to remember that child would just heap more devastation. It is unfathomable to think that people wouldn't talk about or mourn the loss of an older child, so why should it be any different with the smallest babes?
Our society has come a long way in dealing with death and grief over the years. A few weeks after Weston died, the social worker at the hospital told me that, thirty years ago, when she started working in the NICU, they would never have photographed a baby after his death or memorialized him at all.
So, what does this have to do with community? In the hours after Weston died, we had no idea what we needed. But being invested in your community, in other people, eventually penetrates the biggest institutions, including hospitals. So we got to spend the entire day with Weston after he died, we got treasured photographs, and we have piles of mementos made by volunteers (whom we have never met) who simply wanted to make the NICU more comfortable and homey for Weston.
And we are not having to grieve silently either. Shannon heard a sermon on mourning fairly recently. In Biblical times, mourners wore certain items of clothing and cried in the streets. There were designated time periods in which the mourners simply mourned, publicly, and others took care of their needs. Other cultures continue to have similar rituals as well. So, the American, 21st-century version of Biblical mourning, at least for me, is blogging (and dyeing my hair!). Speaking up and speaking out has enabled me to have my needs met.
I have learned, in the harshest way possible, the importance of community. It (you!) has saved me. I miss my baby so much it physically hurts, still. But cutting myself off from my community would cause another type of death.
My community participation must remain virtual at this point. I do not have the emotional strength to literally go out into the world yet. In the meantime, maybe I'll reread Bowling Alone and contemplate how to strengthen my community.
To create organs for neighborly help and initiative, to meet face to face for personal assessment and vivid discussion, to take part on communal celebrations, not in vast anonymous masses, but in a circle of identifiable faces and persons, all these survivals of aboriginal village life are still necessary. They keep intact the close chain of sympathetic responses in which man first securely established himself as irrevocably human: these friendly eyes are the indispensable mirror in which the self beholds its own image.
~Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man
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