Not Sorry

Weston died seven months ago today. "Lucky" seven. I can't believe it's already been seven months. I can't believe it's only been seven months.

Grief has become my friend, my steady companion. She is always around. Sometimes she intrudes, sometimes she hovers in the background, but she never leaves. Sometimes she is the only thing I hear and see, and sometimes she is drowned out by other sights and sounds. I usually see her when I look in the mirror.

To the post title. I am sorry about a lot of things. I am sorry Weston died. I am sorry that my placenta failed him so horribly. I am sorry that I didn't spend every second of his life by his side, and I am sorry that Caroline doesn't get to grow up with her little brother. I am sorry that Shannon and I have been robbed of the experience of raising our son.

I am sorry that my writing is so lazy that I am going to break a cardinal rule and start most paragraphs in this post with "I."

But there is an equal number of things I am not sorry about. Possible over-generalization alert: I believe that women, in general, apologize way too much. We apologize when someone else gets in our way or inconveniences us. We apologize when we can't hear someone. We apologize to strangers when our children act like children. And on and on.

Being a litigator, which is still male-dominated (although increasingly less so), I learned pretty quickly that apologizing all the time was not going to cut it. So I stopped doing it so often. And that was a warm-up to what I'm experiencing now.

For the Christian reader, this attitude might seem inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus. After all, he instructs us to turn the other cheek and love our enemies. But I think this truth can be pursued without turning into a doormat. This does not mean it's acceptable to scream at the person who cuts you off at the grocery store or in traffic. But you can still let them go ahead of you. I'm just saying it's not necessary to apologize. It's not your fault someone else is blind or a jerk. (I had another word in mind, but it doesn't belong in a paragraph about being like Jesus.)

The same logic applies to grief, I think. I am not who I used to be. My priorities have changed: I have less energy for some things and more energy for others. I forget things. I cry a lot, sometimes over seemingly random things. And I am not sorry for that.

I am not sorry for crying in front of you. MY SON IS DEAD. There is nothing worse. I am going to cry a lot, and I can't always control it. It is a natural, human reaction.

(I have actually gotten very good at not apologizing for this one. If I cry to the point where I have to stop talking, I simply say, "Pardon me" or "Excuse me.")

I am not sorry for ignoring your baby. It does not mean I don't care about your baby. But if I'm ignoring your baby, it means that you and I are together, and we are together because you (and your baby) are someone I care about. (And if I have already ignored your specific baby, you probably know who you are, and you know how much I treasure our relationship.)

I am not sorry for ignoring or flaking on your social invitation. In addition to my heart, I swear Weston took a large portion of my brain with him when he died. I have probably forgotten that you want to hang out. Or I do not have the emotional strength to do so right now. If I haven't seen you since Weston died, I WILL cry when I see you. And even though I am not sorry about that either, sometimes I just don't feel like crying. I do appreciate the invitation and will take you up on it someday (if I remember).

I am not sorry for saying or doing "inappropriate" things. If you have not lost a child, you have NO IDEA (thankfully) of the unspeakably awful thoughts that go through my head all the time. I can't always keep a lid on them, or I will go crazy. I AM NOT THE PROBLEM. Cultural expectations to keep my thoughts and feelings bottled up are the problem.

I am not sorry for being selfish. Well, maybe I am. But I have little capacity to change that right now. I do try. Grief is inherently selfish (have I said that before?), and it is so exhausting. My heart is too broken to be able to take on anything else right now. There is a lot of empathy hidden deep in my soul, and I am confident that it will show itself someday. But, right now all I really care about is that you know I have a son named Weston and that he is deeply, deeply loved and missed.

I am not sorry for not feeling sorry for you. Your house is too small? You have wrinkles? Your kid pulled all the toys out of the closet and made a mess? Someone pissed you off during the Oscars/Super Bowl/whatever? Your phone died? I DON'T CARE. My son is dead. CAOS, stillbirth, prematurity, SIDS, cancer, genetic conditions, accidents: they exist, and they take the lives of our children. And you're upset because your feet are too big. I'm not saying you can't vent to me, but...seriously, do I really need to explain this paragraph further?

(I'm realizing that each one of these "not sorries" could fill an entire blog post itself, but I'll spare you all right now.)

I am not sorry for being human. Before Weston, I was literally unable to complete a thought about losing a child. It was that horrifying. I know I wasn't alone in banishing the worst-case scenario from my head. Now, I am living the nightmare, the completed thought, every day. Frankly, it's a miracle I have held onto my humanness and that I am actually functioning within my family and in society. Grief is messy, it's complicated, it's multi-faceted, it's paradoxical in every way; in essence, it is a microcosm of the human experience. Ultimately, it is the expression of undying love. To grieve is to be vulnerable is to love.

These slips of the mind, these emotional outbursts, these uncomfortable exchanges: they happen because I love my son. I will never apologize for loving Weston.