Circumstantial Despair
A new definition for mindset after baby loss and other types of loss
As in my first post, I’m so surprised that this isn’t a known and used idea.
In missing my sweet children, some days I can’t get up. I still have days like this, or parts of days, where I am so utterly tired I can’t lift my head off the pillow, and there is nothing to do but crawl into bed and let the tears come, as they will, stuttering and bursting like a faucet with air in the pipes.
I’m not depressed. I’m not anxious. I go through periods of higher anxiety, propelled by having to work to live on top of grief (I use the phrase “work to live” to mean working circularly only to eat/have shelter/use heating, versus working to gain anything), but it’s very clear this anxiety comes from schedule overwhelm. I also don’t mean to say I’m insanely busy, only that economic necessity means I juggle too many things, and grief means I have less bandwidth to do so; hence anxiety.
But generally, I don’t have poor mental health. I know this, because I’ve experienced both depression and anxiety in the past. I’m very calm now. The reasons for this feel obvious to me: 1. I have felt such deep beauty and love in my relationship for my children, and feel that still; 2. the brevity of their lives and the knowledge that it’s much harder, almost impossible, to get here, make me more grateful and in awe of my own alive-ness, 3. their enormous importance relative to everything else makes clearer the relative importance of all things and so I’ve let a lot go and hold a lot more loosely, 4. I don’t want their legacy to be that their mother gave up on her life, and 5. my hormonal profile has changed since being pregnant.
Like many people who experience trauma, the air is sweeter, sunlight is purer and gentler, the apple blossom falls on my skin in a world that gave me those I most love, and my heart is quieter and more sure. I experience limits as real and myself as more understandable. I know what I want, and who I am becomes clearer as I journey through therapy, my hands held and led by my children, following the example of their beauty and bravery,
But sometimes I think about dying. I imagine meeting them in the earth, as if going to bed in the softest covers, as if finally returning to that which means the most to me. About giving up on all the crap of life, including everything that seems meaningful or even is meaningful but not as much. Stop typing. Shed all possessions. Rest.
And, sometimes related but also not, I despair. Just last night I thought, “It’s not enough.” I look at a short life where I might suffer illness and think, “my whole life has been hard. There were so few breaks.” Alternately, I see a long life and can’t imagine how I will carry the pain of living without them through the long years of that life.
It’s hard to see a way that that luckier version, where I live for a long time, doesn’t end in suicide. I imagine if a partner or another child came along and survived it would be possible. But what about when my mum dies? Or if I never find love again? Or if that child dies or does not come?
It’s circumstantial despair. To lose a baby means to carry enormous pain. It prevents us from working to our full capacity. It isolates us. It makes life less worth living, and that last point just feels like a fact. If Circumstantial Despair was a term, and, better, a diagnosis, then states could help people who suffer from it.