January 31

One year ago today, our son came into the world not alive. After nearly two weeks of wrestling with our insurance company, and standing by as our doctor fought for us with Swedish Hospital in Seattle, who ultimately denied the termination of my pregnancy due to its Catholic affiliation, we spent several days at the University of Washington Medical Center. I heard the word "abortion" more times than I ever care to again, and saw it written in type on documentations with my name on them. I awoke to a hospital bed covered in blood, and was transferred to a hotel bed to sleep for the rest of the day. The next morning we were driving back to Bellingham, and the morning after that was The Superbowl and my Mother's 60th birthday, and the day the world found out that Philip Seymour Hoffman was dead.

The days that followed were full of medication and walks outdoors with my father and hibernation. My milk had come in, and the only relief I found was in cold cabbage leaves on my skin. I took pills and drank wine, and our house was covered in vases full of flowers from people I didn't have the energy to thank. I returned to work shortly thereafter, where it seemed women everywhere were finding out they were pregnant. I was mortified by the awareness that people were uncomfortable around me, that they were looking at me as the girl whose baby had died.

We named our son Clark. When his due date came around in June, we had a small ceremony for him in my parents' backyard and buried his ashes beside a newly planted tree. My mother placed a small clay bird over the place he laid. My father shared some eloquent words, none of which I remember. Someone gave my parents a blue knit diaper cover fit for a baby born at 20 weeks.
I have never been able to look at it.

In October, I went on a writing retreat with a good friend of mine to Arch Cape, Oregon. My grandmother had just passed away, and I wanted to compile some of the essays I'd started over the past year into a manuscript about loss. I was in the midst of writing about some of the darkest days I'd had after losing Clark, when I peed on a stick in a single-stall bathroom in a tavern and found out I was pregnant. My friend and I shared an order of chili cheese fries and a slice of chocolate peanut butter pie, and I borrowed her phone to call Robert. I tried to write during the days that followed about what it felt like to be pregnant again after losing a baby, and then I came home and haven't written a word since.

We have returned to the same doctor, and taken early tests and we have been cautious. We found out early that we're expecting a daughter, and we found out she is developing a functioning brain and has a skull that is covering her entire head. These are all good things, and we are grateful each day for the miracle of growth and the fact that all signs point to health. We will love her wholeheartedly and love every moment we get to share with her on this earth. But the fact that I am pregnant does not mean I am fine, nor does it mean that everything that happened before is behind me. It will always be with me, and the name Clark will not be foreign to our daughter, and his imprint will never leave its mark on my broken heart.

• at 3:17 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

For Grandma

I didn't realize how much of my house is an ode to my grandmother until she died.

Today, after writing her obituary and helping my parents bag her clothes and shoes, I walked through the door to find my china cabinet screaming her name - from the two sets of Lenox china I inherited from her and my grandfather, teacups stacked, to the fawn figurine that looks like something she and my grandfather might have had in their living room on Windsor Drive. In the bedroom, very near the bed, is her embroidered stool. On my refrigerator are black and white photos of my grandparents and my uncles, almost obsessively everywhere. On a shelf in the living room, a gold framed photo of my grandmother holding my father as a baby. By the front door, a framed set of two photos on the wall of my grandparents from the day they got engaged, presumably 1952. I had come across the images as slides while digging through old photo albums at one point in time, and when I lived in Seattle I had taken them to a shop, turned them into prints, and have carted them with me ever since.

My grandmother was a difficult woman to communicate with. She had lost her hearing pretty badly several years ago and used hearing aids, but it was difficult communicating over the telephone when she lived in California. I would call her each year on her birthday. I would write her letters, but now I wish I had written her more. I will never forget calling her on the morning of my wedding, telling her how much I loved her and how my most vivid memory of her and my grandfather had been collecting leaves on the sidewalk on Windsor Drive. I don't know why I decided to thank her for that memory on that particular day, but I did. And I cried, and she could hear me.

When we moved to Washington in 1991, I can remember waving goodbye to my grandparents from the inside of the moving truck. There were many visits, many day trips, restaurants, news on all the ladies my grandmother called "The Club Girls." My grandmother knew how to wear red lipstick. In most photographs, she is not smiling. There was something intimidating about her, yet she, like me, kept up with all the people in her life and forged friendships that lasted for what seemed like multiple lifetimes. There was fierce loyalty. There was love and pride for her family. When I look around my house now, I see her everywhere. There is no possibility that my love for antiques could have come from anywhere but years of shopping with my grandparents, in the longing I have for that house on Windsor Drive. Nothing made my grandmother happier than having everyone together at the house. No celebration was too much. Perhaps I've inherited that from her as well.

You should have seen the look on her face when you were born, my mother said. Last week, when I went to visit my grandmother, her eyes were closed. She was sleeping and appeared to be dreaming. I could see her eyes shift beneath the lids. I held her hand and she would not wake up. I didn't know it then, but she had already suffered a stroke and I would not see her eyes open again. I've got to believe that although she loved her children and grandchildren more than anything else on earth, the look on her face this morning while surveying her eternal home must have knocked it out of the park.

• at 5:40 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

Summer's End

Summer's end, and so much undocumented. Astoria in July was, as always, like returning home. We spotted the maintenance man from the Hotel Elliott in the Desdemona Club playing video poker with his girlfriend. We saw, from a distance, the guy we talked to three years ago who had stumbled upon the town as we did, as so many people do, and never left. I sat and read Salinger's Nine Stories at Street 14 Coffee and looked up occasionally to watch the man we called our friend working on his laptop, not remembering who we were, wearing the same tweed blazer.

Our favorite bartender from the Voodoo Room told us she was moving to Seattle and it was her last week, and I can't describe what it meant for us to get there in time to see her and say goodbye. On my birthday, we went to Mary Todd's Workers Bar for breakfast. I ordered an egg sandwich with ham and Robert drank a beer with breakfast for the first time since he was twenty-something in Arizona. The bartender was a bear of a man named Bjorn, and he was remarkably soft-spoken and kind. A drunk fisherman was sitting at the bar and I talked with him about my problem with seasickness. There was a jukebox in the corner and I played The Beatles Birthday song for myself. When we drove away at the end of the week, past Annie's Tavern where we went with Stephen Weber the year before, past Coffee Girl and the old pier, past the gas station where we stopped on our way home from our honeymoon and I made meat and cheese sandwiches from crackers in the little cooler in the backseat of our rental car, I cried.

Autumn has always felt more like the New Year. Last week, I saw the first hint of tiny red leaves on the sidewalk downtown, Robert has started his new job, and we will soon go to Port Townsend to celebrate our wedding anniversary. In a few days, a friend from Idaho who worked with me at Third Street Market, the boy who will forevermore still be in high school, stocking beer in the afternoons and telling me his girl problems, will get married. The day after that, I will see The Beach Boys at the Silver Reef Casino with my parents, and in October, I will return to the coast with a friend of mine for a week-long writing retreat so I can properly document the past several months of my life. I will look ahead and not behind, I will not think about how old my son would be, or wonder what the two of us would be doing today at a park instead of me sitting here with my coffee mug by the window writing about the things I've lost.

• at 12:07 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

Heat

I've been doing very little but complaining about the heat lately, but this morning as I rose and took an ice cold shower, it suddenly occurred to me that many of my favorite moments in life have happened during hot, hot summers, particularly in regards to Elizabeth. I'm positive (and she can vouch) that as these scenes were unfolding in real time all I could do was complain about how hot it was, but as life often goes, I look over my shoulder and they are only perfection. The peaches and pack of Camels we bought at the grocery store that first summer in Idaho. Reading Lucy Grealy to each other at night in the trundle bed. Sharing a fitting room at the antique mall and trying on every piece of clothing we could find. These are the only things I remember about that August.

And then my trip to Oxford, Mississippi to visit Elizabeth at school. I was afraid of flying, but determined I'd get to her. What I didn't realize then (and how can we, in the moment?) was that my solo Amtrak trip from Spokane, Washington to Memphis, Tennessee would be one of the most blessed experiences of my life. When I got there it was March, but I had never experienced such humidity. The first day, we walked from her house to the Square, and she told me it was okay if somebody pulled over and picked us up, not to worry because everybody was friendly and it wouldn't be like hitchhiking at all. We were wearing embroidered tops and mini skirts.

That week in Oxford, I bought Barry Hannah lunch before I even knew who Barry Hannah was. 

We went to Graceland. We went to a place called "Graceland Too," which was a slightly sketchier version run by a crazy old man who followed us from room to room. We went to Holly Springs, and I marveled at the trees. We found a rope swing. We took photographs of ourselves standing in front of storybook mansions with white columns, we tried on fancy dresses at boutiques and pretended we'd come back for them. We went dancing in Clarksdale at the bar Morgan Freeman owns. We rode in the back of a convertible and screamed. 

There is a chance I will look back at this summer too, and forget all about the heat. In fact, I am certain I will. I have been complaining to Elizabeth over the phone about it, and looking ahead to an Astoria trip at the end of the month to escape it. There is a chance all I will remember about this summer is sitting at the park with Robert during this season of our lives together, when we are still young, picking roses and blueberries from the bushes outside our house, playing Scrabble on picnic tables and drinking coffee and driving around town hitting up the used bookstores in the minivan we bought for three-hundred and fifty dollars.

• at 12:14 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

Untitled

I was born the day Diana married Charles, July 29, 1981. My mother was in the hospital with all the hullabaloo on the televisions, watching the royals and having me.

When Diana died, I was in high school and worked weekends cleaning my father's office building. He was a marriage and family therapist in private practice then. There were magazines stacked in the waiting area with her face on every cover. Diana had the kind of eyes you could look into for days. This must have been the time my obsession with her started, the time around her death, because that's when we want everyone most, that's when people become more than just people. To me, she looked like my mother and my mother always had that same kind of grace, and that must have been another thing that mattered.

My mother recently took me on a weekend trip to La Conner and Snohomish to go shopping and to get away. We ate fish at a pub. We stayed in a house on a bluff that was shaped like the bow of a ship. She brought a picnic basket in the car with scones and strawberries and coffee and cream and orange juice (she said she remembered I always liked orange juice). We walked barefoot and I noticed how our feet look exactly the same. We slept in, and sat out on the balcony in the morning and ate and drank and watched everyone below. We saw a couple with a West Highland White terrier, the kind my Grams always had. My Grams, my mother's mother, always had a dog. I'd known her to live alone ever since I was born, ever since her divorce.While we were shopping in La Conner at a thrift store, I found a string of knotted pearls on a mannequin that looked like the one my Grams always used to wear, and I bought it for two dollars. My mother said she had the original, and that it was stained with makeup that she will never be able to wash clean.

My mother took me to see Dionne Warwick perform at a casino in Anacortes a couple of years ago. Dionne Warwick talked about Sammy Davis, Jr. like he was just another guy to be talked about, and my mother and I both cried when she sang Alfie. I was disappointed to learn much later, while reading Burt Bacharach's autobiography, that Dionne Warwick didn't sing the original version, but it was sung by a woman I had never heard of named Cilla Black. I always thought it was Dionne, only Dionne. I was the youngest person at that casino, fully aware of the legend, fully aware that they just don't make them like that anymore, wearing a big fur coat and singing along to all the songs just like everybody else.

All the while, the legends of my generation seem to be Will and Kate and that mischievous little Harry. I don't remember where I was when the royal wedding part two took place, probably fast asleep in bed. I don't understand what's happening with all the little miniature hats with feathers and bows cocked to the side on every royal family member's head, or what Kate has to offer in the spellbinding department. She doesn't have the kind of eyes you can look into for days, is what I'm saying.

My mother and I talk often about the places we'll go, about how one day we'll end up on the streets of New York together even though I hate flying, because it just seems inevitable that we will. Every place we travel together feels like an adventure. In La Conner, we saw a tugboat coming toward us, slowly chugging along the water, and she started singing Don't Rain on My Parade, which made me laugh because she sang it kooky like Barbra, but also made me feel it seemed like something of my own theme song. This past year, I was just beginning all of it, flushed in early pregnancy, making jokes about eating for two at Thanksgiving dinner, soaring well into the second trimester, to suddenly being told by a doctor, by several doctors, that my baby was without a significant part of skull and brain, to wearing a purple maternity dress with shoulder pads that I had bought at the Salvation Army (while laughing it was "so Diana") as I stretched my hand out to take Communion at church, just two days after waking from the operation.

My mother and I were at the froufrou University Village shopping center in Seattle the night before the scheduled termination of my pregnancy. There were others with us, we had just eaten dinner. I had worn makeup for the first time in weeks. It almost felt like a normal night. We walked and we shopped. My mother bought me a black makeup bag, I'm not sure why I wanted a new makeup bag, and sometime after my water broke. I kept walking, moving forward, looking at all the beautiful racks of clothing until everything was wet through and through. I whispered calmly that we had to go back to the hotel, and she was the only one who existed. I have never been closer to my mother than in that hotel bathroom, when I took off my socks and shoes and everything else and it was all just a pile of wet clothes on the floor, because I suddenly felt like I was dying and everything was coming out of my body, not knowing whether it was water or blood.

• at 9:54 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 1 comments

Read More

June

June has come.

My idea of this season of life, of what was supposed to happen, has been scrapped. I was supposed to be enormously huge at Freddy's wedding, I was supposed to be building an Ikea crib and figuring out when Elizabeth could get here to be with me during the birth.

None of that is happening now. Now, I am gallivanting around town drinking at breweries, enjoying the heat that comes with the change in seasons for the first time since leaving California, hosting good friends from out of town and staying up late into the night giggling like a child. Now, I am reading a fat Salinger biography and eating baked potatoes, listening incessantly to David Bowie, and back to being bad at bowling (I was only any good when I was pregnant). I am cutting off all my hair and feeling better than I have all year. I thought I'd be a wreck about now.

This is what I have learned about myself: I am obsessively appropriate. Thank-you cards, etiquette, bringing flowers to dinner, observing holidays, celebrating when celebrations are called for, surrounding others when they need a friend. This is how I live my life. But today, we sat and looked online at different urns for our baby's ashes. I did this without feeling anything. I did this as if I was looking online at Amazon to order a new book, or Urban Outfitters to find a birthday gift for Robert. We found one. We checked it off the list. And how do you appropriately send an email to your parents and your brother and sister-in-law, asking them to gather on the baby's due date to bury the ashes by the new tree in your parents' yard? I sat and typed the email to my family, and I added additional information about upcoming events. I added that we've planned our Astoria trip for the end of July and how about we all gather to celebrate my birthday before we leave? I composed an email where I invited my family to the burial of my baby and to attend my birthday party in practically the same breath. Please join us. Just another event in our lives. No biggie. And how can I be thinking of gallivanting and my birthday dinner in light of the other thing we have to face? And am I betraying him by not taking this whole thing more seriously? Am I betraying him by not crying or talking about what's actually happening, by sitting here and simply checking him off the list?

The answer is, I can't do it just yet. I have to think about the trip my mother and I will take next weekend to go antiquing, I have to think about my sister-in-law's graduation party, and about Father's Day, and about the birthdays of loved ones that will arrive before the due date. I have to think about work, and I have to go on walks and be outside and read my fat Salinger biography just a little bit longer.

• at 8:26 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 1 comments

Read More

Special Delivery

I received a case of baby formula in the mail today. It was more of a sealed box, like something you'd pick up in the grocery store if you had an actual baby to feed, but to me it might as well have been a case. Something containing a variety of formulas for different seasons of the breast feeding process. It was waiting quietly on the step like an intruder, and I took a good look at it, at the name on the label that wasn't even mine (but a version of my name that got botched along the way by whatever baby website was sending it), and tossed it in the trashcan.

When you lose your baby, you need to remember all the people you told you were pregnant. You need to get rid of things like date books (I had written every week along the way in mine, including important milestones. In case you were wondering, I'd be at week 33 right now), all the books around the house that have photos and illustrations of the pregnant body (it turns out my baby didn't look like the babies in those anyway), and cards of congratulations get mixed with the cards of sympathy when you pile them all in the drawer of your kitchen hutch. In my notebook, there is an entry that reads: "Hid baby books, picture of first ultrasound on the refrigerator, the notebooks on the bedside table that contained letters I'd written to him." In my junk email folder, I have ample correspondence from BabyCenter (whose most recent email reads: "You're in the home stretch!"), Mothers Lounge LLC, Destination Maternity ("Happy Mother's Day! Promo code for a Free Nursing Cover!"), Motherhood, and Huggies Brand. I was getting email from all of the above, and I thought we had taken every action to stop anything baby-related from filtering through, but apparently someone didn't get the memo in the baby formula department.

I'm going to be brutally honest here. All is not well. I was feeling poorly a few months back, and a pelvic exam from the doctor at the end of February resulted in "everything looks fine, you have the stomach flu." No, I did not have the stomach flu then, and I do not have the stomach flu now, and I am still experiencing the cyclical physical reminder that yes, this happened to me (in case I had somehow forgotten), and it is apparently something I have to muscle through, like everything else. Today is one of those days where I have stayed home for this very reason, waiting to hear back from my doctor (feeling like I am somehow bothering her, this needy girl who can't just get on with it, because didn't this happen months ago? Shouldn't I be better by now?), listening to Billie Holiday, and receiving baby formula in the mail.

I have found something else in my notebook that I just can't shake. It makes me feel like grief has messed with my mind, and left me grasping. This, from March 8th: "At work, I reach for a box of old forgotten granola bars, and all I've got is: 'The last time you ate one of those, your baby was still okay.' "

When I was pregnant, I had two dreams about my baby. The doctor asked at one point if I had any inkling about gender, and by that point I had already had two dreams (the only dreams I would have during the pregnancy). In both, he was a boy. In neither, he was a baby. He was a toddler or maybe a bit older, it wasn't entirely clear, and he wasn't entirely in my reach. I was never holding him or feeding him or doing the things mothers do with their children. It was almost as if he wasn't mine at all, more like I was watching him from some distant shore, like a mother watching from across a soccer field or peeking from behind a curtain at a ballet recital. And in my dreams I had nothing to worry about, he was well cared for, strong, a cherub, pale skin, pale hair, looked like Robert not like me, and perfectly whole.

• at 4:18 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 2 comments

Read More