Ten Tips for A Grief Prevented

If awoken mid-REM cycle and agitated off to a maternity ward, nurses will show the pregnant party infinitely more empathy than you the emissionary emissary. If they counterfactually call her “mumma” + epidurally catheterize her a bottomless fountain of fentanyl while offering you the polysubstance addicted blogger not a measly Oxycontin 80, then focus on the breath and swallow your resentment.

One: If an anesthesiologist places her phone where a nurse had recently placed a bloody cervix stretching glove, figure that’s just the cost of doing business and unobtrusively engage the anesthesiologist in the “does consciousness reside in the microtubules”18 debate.

Two: If a no-nonsense head nurse suggests, “If you’ve got nothing better to do you can tidy up your big pile of scarves and Goethe volumes and McDonalds coupons, ” mutter as you tidy that, “The no-nonsense individual is rarely little more than all-nonsense. ” Resent when this nurse 18 (Barlow, 2015) whispers to your wife and mother-in-law as if you weren’t there. Feel called to be a nomad. Feel about as necessary to this nascent coven as that low-down rake murdered at the end of Robert Altman’s Three Women. If all you can muster in response to the pregnant person’s shrieks of anguish is irritation, joke glibly of how the oscillating TOCO scores on the contraction monitor sound like the techno soundtrack to a Gaspar Noe film. If in response the head nurse issues you a look of utter contempt, recall Rainier Maria Rilke’s sentiments on irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative moments try to make use of it as one more means of grasping life. Cleanly used, it too is clean, and one need not be ashamed of it; and if you feel you are getting too familiar with it, if you fear this growing intimacy with it, then turn to great and serious objects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Seek the depth of things: thither irony never descends—and when you come thus close to the edge of greatness, test out at the same time whether this ironic attitude springs from a necessity of your nature. For under the influence of serious things either it will fall from you (if it is something fortuitous), or else it will (if it really innately belongs to you) strengthen into a stern instrument and take its place in the series of tools with which you will have to shape your art. 19 i.e. ‘There’s a time and a place, fool. ’

Three: Try to recover a sweet love that you knew. See in your mother-in-law’s eyes a love for your wife you might again manifest. See that same love in an old English nurse named Deirdre. If it’s way past midnight and the pushing has begun, note that the lion’s share of the birthing process involves nothing less lurid than Deirdre’s vigorous fingering of the pregnant person. If there’s a less lurid term for prenatal fingering other than “digital masturbation, ” doubly problematic under the circumstances, please suggest it in the comments.

Four: If your wife is too jacked up on fentanyl to properly splay her legs for further digital coaxing, find yourself enlisted to hold steady her right gam. Endure a front-row view of the whole gory tableaux. Heeding Deirdre and Rilke’s anti-irony chastisement, resist the urge to compare this tableaux to a bowl of raw hamburger meat.

Five: Should pushing prove fruitful, you will see the crown of a head. Oil will be poured into the hamburger bowl. Hair will become visible. The baby will be pulled out. The baby will be thrown on the mother presently factual. The baby will not be breathing. The baby will not be moving.

Six: If a dozen doctors and nurses attend to the code pink called for your baby, love him in that instant of life or death more than you have loved any woman you’ve ever 19 (Rilke, 1943) sacrilegiously called ' baby. ' Find sinister the appearances of two fractal reflections of yourself espied in the window pane above the aspirator. Associate their presence with the aspirator’s temporary sputter. Fear they may be deflecting your Hail Marys. If you remember the Lord’s Prayer a bit better, recite many from memory.

Seven: Meet the pleading eyes of the mother still factual: pleading with you to save the baby, or for so little as an update, to do this one thing right, to dispel the fractal murderers, to be worth something for once. Hear your name,

“David!” while wading through the Night and Fog of agency panic. Request the forgiveness of your debts until a cry to the end of time forgives them, and though you’d dreaded the sound of a baby crying due to your irritability and chronic low-mood, the child’s voice will sound finer than Bob Dylan at the Beacon Theater in your New York dreams. Following this cry Marcel_Proust will raise his eyebrows and throw his hands up in extreme comic exasperation, i.e. ‘Might have been better to have been born with the ability to breathe, eh? Still, it can only get better from here, a baby must wager. ’

Eight: Give a thumbs up to your partner and her loving mother. Diagnose Marcel_Proust as, “Going to make it. Going to be just fine. ” Hear what you perceive as griping and groaning from the fractal shadows in the window pain of the post-prophetical.

Nine: If you thank the doctors and nurses who have saved your son with their quick thinking and competence, they will appear stoic, i.e. ‘All in a day’s work, ’ because every twelve-hour shift they fight a war on this battlefield where every stillborn birth still hurts. All the anguished mothers and fathers. The permutations of heartbreak, desolation, and guilt. Resentful accusations of “Why didn’t you do anything?” or “What took so long?” Yet they return deliberately and daily into an arena where all of a mother’s dreams may need to be gingerly removed from her arms and incinerated.

Ten: Consider what might have counterfactually come manifest: returning to the Etobicokean crib and bassinet and bottle drying rack and all the baby toques and t-shirts that women are biologically-mandated to buy for other women’s babies. Imagine placing that crib out by the curb or else leaving it for fourteen months while risking a recurrent fate, the crib and the sleep sacks a daily reminder of what’s befallen you and may befall you again: the classic four-word Hemingway poem titled For Sale— Baby shoes; never worn Know in this future contingent the bottomless depth of genuine grief. Understand with uncharacteristic humility that the limits of grief extend beyond all sisterly scope. And but rather than contritely abandon your grief blogging, i.e.

“What am I gripin’ and grievin’ about anyway when people are putting cribs by the curb?”—rather than that, double down, double down on shining whatever stupid and silly and inconsequential light you can shine into the darkness, for if we are to address the question of “Why do bad things happen?” then every fractal fool—the holy and we compromised by self-interest alike—we must testify through the unique prism of our pain.