Triggers

Lou and I have a lot in common. Including, it turns out, our SLOS mutation. The c.964-1 G>C slice mutation. This is what we learned today, meeting with the geneticist at Georgetown, what we'll need to test for in our (hopefully) future baby. Harper was homozygous. If only there were bonus points for consistency.

Going back to Georgetown is still hard. It makes me feel shaky and anxious. The geneticists' determination to  give Lou the full Genetics 101 lecture didn't help. "I'm sure your wife can explain this to you better than I can," she chuckled several times. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, well, why not just let us leave so we can do that?

But maybe the lecture was good. It allowed me to tune out and begin to feel numb, away from my first instinct to cry and just run out of the hospital.

Last night, another SLOS baby died. A tiny girl, who looked so much like Harper, passed away in her parents arms. I copied and sent Lou the post her parents wrote on their FB page about her death. "This looks very familiar," I told him. We could have written it.

There was no time today to process that news. Too many meetings. Too many to dos. Not enough time to shut my office door and cry for a baby girl I didn't really know but who resurfaced so many memories that had barely begun to lie flat. So maybe my shakiness had begun even before I walked through the hospital's front door.

I've been reading a lot about grief. I want to say that it's some sort of driving need to understand the way I'm feeling, but I really think it's some form of self-abuse. Like picking at a wound. Or probing a sore tooth. Maybe it's just a way to feel less alone in my experience.

In any event, books and articles about mourning, loss, grief have a vocabulary all their own. In my head, I think of it as grieftalk.

One recurring theme in grieftalk is the concept of triggers. When people post items on discussion boards about bad days they've been having, they often spell out TRIGGER in capital letters, the way you might put SPOILER ALERT when talking about a book or TV show.

Triggers are the things and experiences that appear to interrupt your everyday existence to spend you spiraling back into grief. In my case, they make me cry, because I'm a cryer.

I live surrounded by wannabe triggers, but I've grown immune to them. The bassinet is still set up (our cat has taken to napping in the storage baskets), the crib still has clean sheets and is filled with soft baby clothes and blankets. A bag of maternity clothes is waiting to be taken to the basement for storage.

Triggers are a pain in the ass. As far as I'm concerned, they are the worse part of the grieving process because they, by their very definition, trigger absolute loss of control. I don't care if that's OK and normal and has no set timeline (grieftalk, grieftalk, grieftalk), I don't like it. I don't like that one minute I'm fine and the next I'm not. Not my thing.

Triggers can be obvious - newborn babies, invitations to baby showers, pictures of Harper, pictures of other SLO babies.

Triggers can be geographical - places that I last experienced while pregnant are big triggers for me.

Triggers can be complicated - like experiencing happy events that suddenly seem overwhelming and wrong because how the hell can anyone be happy when everything has gone so horribly wrong?

Happy triggers are the worst kind. The unintentional pain caused by others. There's no good solution to this. Others are either totally oblivious or awkwardly trying to change their behavior to avoid causing you pain. There's the sense that one's happiness shouldn't come at the expense of my pain. But I actually think it should work the other way - my pain shouldn't diminish another's happiness. So, I sneak off to cry. But at least those I love are happy, I hope.

The thing is, obvious triggers don't always set me off. Or there's a threshold point associated with them that I can never predict, much like I can use a sunscreen for weeks or months until one day it suddenly begins to make me break out. Allergic reactions are much like triggers. Time with a baby or at a happy event is totally fine, until suddenly it isn't. The pain starts, the world gets darker, it becomes hard to breathe.

This past weekend was full of obvious triggers, and geographical triggers, and complicated triggers. I am feeling haunted by an adorable pair of colorful baby pajamas, with a little lizard on the lapel and bugs on the footies, that I really wanted to buy. I could have bought them for someone else's baby, I told Lou. But I didn't want that. I wanted them for my baby. Only I don't have one.

TRIGGER.

Maybe tonight the numbness will wear off, and I can shed some tears for baby Graycen, who died today. And even more so for her mommy, whose journey, as I know too well, has just begun.