Fight Song

This is my fight song
Take back my life song
Prove I'm alright song. . .

'Cause I've still got a lot of fight left in me

--"Fight Song,” Rachel Platten

I am face-down on the tatami mats, their grassy smell mixed with the salty tinge of human sweat. My body is spent from a good hour’s worth of aikido training.

I am feeling on my cheek the coolness of the laminate flooring of my house, my fists still encased in boxing gloves, muscles shaking from countless jabs and punches.

I am lying on a thin pad at daycare on a remote Indonesian island, the 100-degree heat causing beads of sweat to slide from my temples. My eyes were shut tight as I feigned a nap since those who refused to take one would be beaten. I was wishing, as I wished every day, that my parents would come back for me.

“Get up, Daisy,” said my inner voice. “Get up.” And so I do. I summon the strength to fight gravity, rise to my knees, push up with my palms against the ground. 

“Are you scared?” my friend asked over the phone when I had just recounted to her that my daughter was dead, on a day when I was waiting for the hospital call to be induced. She had suffered a stillbirth around the same time as me, and it was the most candid question I had to answer. Yes, I was scared. Of possibly getting an infection from my baby having died weeks ago inside me. Of not being strong enough to suffer emotional turmoil as I was giving birth. Of needing to be wheeled into emergency surgery if my body did not cooperate. Of not having the courage to look at or touch my little girl. Of having to bare my emotions in front of everyone at her memorial service. 

Yes, I am scared. Of how I’d face life afterward with a death like this hanging over me. Of having to return to work, suffer through traffic, starting again at Ground Zero with a history of infertility and a fetal demise fresh on my reproductive record.

But I am a fighter. It’s what my body knows. It refused to give up on me. During labor, its sole focus was to was to expel what was already lost, and as the pain of contractions seared at my mind like hot coals and my body stiffened up from it, I could feel my spirit grasping at the will to continue. I wanted to live, and I fought for it.

I know grief is not linear, and that with sheer brute force, it could muster up a strength to send me back on my knees. Those days will be hard, days when I will battle time to get everything done and get to where I need to be. Those moments will be frightening, when I could be sitting in a random work meeting and suddenly be assaulted with fresh memories of loss and pain. 

But I am a fighter, and I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me.

Tears in Heaven

Time can bring you down
Time can bend your knees
Time can break your heart
Have you begging please, begging please

Beyond the door
There's peace I'm sure
And I know there'll be no more
Tears in heaven

--“Tears in Heaven,” Eric Clapton

I am in line to pay at the Asian grocery store, fresh produce piled on the conveyor belt. I had not made the effort to cook in months. My mom came by weekly to tend to Luc and cook for us, and friends sent meals to our door. I have always associated the act of cooking with love, and lately I had so little left to give. Piled in small cardboard boxes next to the cashier are “lucky money” red envelopes to usher in the Year of the Dog. The lady in front of me quickly picks out a packet, considers the design of golden dogs etched in foil on the bright red envelopes, and tosses a pack into her pile of goods to pay for. Spring comes upon us as Lunar New Year approaches. What has been my favorite holiday is now tinged with a wave of pain for the baby I was also to have ushered in this very year. 

Luc at "Cho Tet" (Spring Market)

It’s been a week since Thi’s memorial. Over a month since her passing. 

 The Bay Area weather suddenly warmed up in the last week. The bitter bite of winter winds eases up to soft and gentle breezes. Rain that slapped the ground gave way to warm sunshine that basked everything in a gentle, golden glow. The hills around our house grow a gentle fuzz of green as cows graze happily in the company of their springtime calves. There is a scent in the air of flower blossoms in bloom, of homecooked meals that drift out more prominently from houses, a scent that hangs more heavily in the warmer air. The grief that visits me now is of a softer kind, like how spring gently and surreptitiously blankets the land. But there is always a keen remembrance of the harsh winter, and every now and again, I feel the slap of memory, its resonating sting pulsing and leaving me reeling.

“When was the first day of your last period?” asked a nurse when I came to see my family doctor for a chronic cough. My mind jumps back to the late-summer day when I took that pregnancy test that eventually ended with me plummeting into despair. 

“How many pregnancies have you had?” asked the routine OB/GYN medical forms. “Any losses?” Even before my own, I always winced at that question, wondering how those who had gone through losses can spare the emotional strength to confess to theirs over and over again.

“When do you think you may want to come by to discuss what you’d like engraved on Thi’s headstone?” asked the funeral arranger at the cemetery we selected for Thi.

“How’s the baby?” people may yet ask if they weren’t informed of our loss.

I’ve been advised that it is normal to bounce around the different stages of grief, sometimes all within the hour, and sometimes spread out across days and weeks, until the grief becomes softer and softer with the passage of time. We are changed forever, having gone through something like this. We’ll never be the same person we were before. We can only look back with acceptance, and move forward with hope.