I have a flash drive that contains pictures of the night that Beckett died. It’s kept in a safe in our bedroom. A primary nurse, one who always took more responsibility of our family than anyone else, came in to be there when he passed. She took photos of us as we all cried and tried to say an impossible goodbye to our baby. I can still remember her, face red and wet with tears, moving silently throughout Beckett’s hospital room and taking pictures of everything happening. I was grateful, knowing even as I braced for impact that this was something I may someday want. The click of the camera mixed in with breakthrough sobs from the little group witnessing our brave boys final moments. Later, weeks after we had left the hospital, I worked to track down the flash drive. I spoke with the hospital, and eventually with the nurse herself. A few different phone calls, some text messages, and even an email later, it arrived in the mail. I’ve never opened it. All that work. So much effort. And it sits, undisturbed, in that safe. I am glad to have it, glad to know where it is and have access to it. But I don’t know when I will check the contents. Maybe never. A lot of how I cope with grief is telling myself I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. Aside from continuing to live each day without my son.

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My commitment to Beckett’s life and death borders on holy. I am devout and attentive in my love for him. But I also turn away in the strangest ways. I don’t want to see the pictures. I have seen pictures of his death. In fact, I expect that many of the images captured on the drive are very similar to the ones my mother took herself that terrible morning. We have those pictures on each of our phones, and I have seen them countless times. But when I think about looking at these new images, I don’t want to. Sometimes I think what happened to me was horrible enough and now that it’s over, I just want it to stop. Of course it never really will. But in a simple, child-like way, sometimes I think I can make it. If I just don’t look. If I just pretend.

I feel that our family has coped through our tragedy very well. Tyler and I still laugh with each other and hold one another. Moira is as exuberant and excited about the world as she was before. Life ever flows. But constantly creeping in on the edges, I see it; the terrible sadness, the fear, the anger. Someone recently asked me how often I think of Beckett. The answer is in every second. In every moment of every day, I think of Beckett. Each breath. Each step. And so while I can never, and would never, be separated from the thought of him, I find my body and mind protect themselves by periodically coming to a dead stop, as though the shroud of grief I wear becomes so weighty I must become still if I am to continue to bear it. Sometimes this happens as my thoughts start to wander down the now well worn paths of dark questions. Sometimes it’s when a sad song comes on the radio. And sometimes it’s when a package arrives with a flash drive inside it. I can’t. I won’t. I literally hide it away and don’t think about it anymore.

Is this a healthy way to cope? I don’t know. When we knew it was likely that our time at the hospital was drawing to a close and not with the outcome we had hoped for, many caretakers mentioned that we should not be ashamed to seek help when we went home. While I was away from Beckett’s room, my mother asked the same primary nurse what she could do for us if the worst did come to pass. “Make sure they see a therapist.” she said. “And keep her from putting everything on the internet.”

I chuckle to myself as I write that sentence, because that is the exact opposite of what I have done. It was always my intention to talk to a specialist once we returned from our five months at the hospital. But as the days stretched in to weeks, I found my brain was less jumbled than I had expected. I wasn’t suicidal. I wasn’t devastated by depression. I was hurting, and I continue to hurt, but the anguish of Beckett’s death had replaced the anguish that had existed before it, that of the constant not-knowing. It was as though before he and I had been two fish floundering on the shore, gasping, just trying to survive, together. As soon as he stopped flapping beside me, I was dropped back in to the sea. I could breathe, but I would never see him again. I can swim my old currents, swim new ones even. But I find myself longing to be fighting for breath on the beach again. Strangled and scared but whole.

The sad, unfortunate truth is that 2016 taught me to live in my brain unassisted by specialists. I learned via trial by fire. When Beckett’s diagnosis came, I looked for a professional to help me. If the system failed me in any way, it was here. I asked my regular OBGYN office, the perinatologist I started seeing, and the prenatal care staff of Children’s Hospital all about psychological services to help us during our high risk pregnancy. The first time I asked, I said it matter-of-factly. Obviously, there must be countless mental health services available during a trying pregnancy such as this. No. None. All three facilities all but shrugged. One doctor gave me a brochure on grief counseling. Another on postpartum depression. “I know it isn’t what you are looking for, but it covers some of the same concepts” he said. I threw the postpartum depression one away. But the grief counseling information I filed away for the future, “just in case” I thought, still months away from even delivering my poor complicated child.

So in the worst limbo of my life, I learned to turn inward and work to tame my chaotic mind on my own. I had lots of time and a bad situation to try to make the best of. March turned to April, May to June. July came, and so did Beckett. No time for mental health then. We were in the arena and the fight was every moment. Where limbo had been hardest on my brain, nothing could rival how difficult Beckett’s health problems were on my nerves. The fear and love I had come to know while he was in utero was now amplified by the sight and smell of him before me. Basic survival was the name of the game, and any thought I had ever had of mental health services lay in the lifetime I was living before he was pulled from my womb.

Then of course came his death. And in sight of that brick wall before us, I told many friends and family members in a very collected way that plainly, I would need help after all of this. Because I was traumatized and seeking help is what traumatized people do. I was going through the motions, even then. Saying what seemed right in a situation that was anything but. Putting my pants on, brushing my teeth. Making plans for a funeral and plans to call the number on that old pamphlet for grief counseling. But I never did end up doing that. In fact, when I later organized everything concerning Beckett’s life and death, I actually threw it away. I knew that while seeking professional help can be a wise and very appropriate thing to do in circumstances like ours that it wasn’t what I needed. And that it wasn’t what I wanted.

What I wanted was to put everything on the internet. I wanted to turn inward and then back out again, with a heart filled with love and loss on display. To face myself and face the world as the changed person I now was. For me, I had wanted the help when I didn’t know how to live with what was happening to me. When I was frightened. What I truly was looking for then was someone to tell me everything was going to be okay, and that was a service that existed only in my fantasies. It lived alongside other fantasies like “maybe he was misdiagnosed,” and “maybe it’s not as bad as they expect.” Now, I know my mind better than ever before. There is no fear left for Beckett, but still some fantasy. Maybe I’ll know him again in a different way. Maybe he’s just out of reach, around some metaphysical corner.

I might decide later on that I need the professional guidance to continue healing from my loss. I am so grateful that services like those exist and I know that they are always an option. I know they are not needed because one is weak or broken, but because the people that walk a road like this have wandered in to a world that is difficult to interpret. But for right now, my eyes are seeing clearly. Still upright eight months later, I don’t need a professional to see my hurt because I acknowledge it everyday, with a fresh mind and a steady beat of my heart. No one can know how to do that better than I. After all, I was his mother.