I can't write right now. There is so much that is coming and going and evolving and devolving in my mind and spirit, nothing stays cohesive; nothing stays static long enough to even make it through a single post. Let me just say God is good. Today he reminded me that in my worst of times, he was there for me in so many ways, through his people and through his provision. I feel stupid and selfish that I have turned my mourning for Christina into some shrine of arrogance and ignorance against my Father.

   I did write the other day, of which I will offer a little excerpt, because I think it is pertinent here.

"It would be wise if I had not moved. I was always one for action.

“I finesse with a hammer,

And tune with a scream.

No, it is not done right,

But it is done.”

This is how I have lived, a marionette of thunder and lead,

Controlled by the whims of the wind and spirits.

Where I stumbled and leaned, there was destruction and abandon. And the Angel of the morning smiled. He smiled. I made his work easy. With a heaviness and the breath of the grave I walked through the door of life and fell about the place.

“Be still; and know that I am the Lord”

Count your breaths, Son. Everyone a blessing. Your knowledge is spent on the empty numbness of wine, and your wisdom diluted in the anarchy of your spirit. Be still, and learn again. Learn why there is God in a green leaf, and why the smile of a child is more precious than gold. Be still. Lest Satan realize his quarry, and hit his mark...

The Lord left me for a bit, and I was not still. I set to my own devices. I took into all the infinite variations of all of time, and space and man and God and all things unknowable and drew my conclusions. I concluded that all there was is madness and malice and I proceeded forth accordingly. I set a feast before me of retch, then engorged mysel

Read CS Lewis' "A grief Observed" last night. It was good to be able to relate to SOMETHING. I don't think he had any main point, but it was reassuring to watch his thoughts crystallize into some kind of cohesion. There was nothing there I hadn't experienced. The only thing I didn't necessarily agree with was when he touched on his beliefs being tempered by his wife's death. Not that I'm sure it's not true, but it seems as if he starts from the position that was the reason FOR it, and then works out from there. On the other hand, he comes back later and confiscates many of his own positions; discarding some altogether and reworking others with more clarity and rationale.

   It is painful to lose a loved one. But I don't think there is any pain like losing a child or a spouse you are completely invested in. I think that pain must be similar on many levels. I feel that one day my in laws and I will share a strong bond. In a sense, we have understood pain on a different plain. You cannot invest love in anyone like you do your child. You can, over years of devoted love and care, and having children of your own together, begin to love another human being on that level.

Post traumatic stress from October

I have been sick.

I have had a head cold, that has been slowly fighting a nightly battle deeper into my body. At the same time, I have been fighting another battle. Ever since the October post, a slow sickness has been creeping into me. Complacent disregard. I am doing it again. Drinking too much, not sleeping, not taking care of things, hardly caring to...This is a bad place.

   I know what it is. It's just sheer depression. No panic. I DID spend a night in the hospital. Again. A 3 am jaunt up to the infirmerie' to have an ER Doctor tell me what I already knew. Shredded nerves, adrenaline coursing and mixing with the caffeine and alcohol and nicotine to create me into a racing engine pressure vessel of emotion. Why did my physiology have to be so strong? Where is the breaking point? I cannot describe how guilty I feel, spending my entire life tearing my body apart, only to be told "You're fine. Go home." One perscription later for a sedative I will NEVER take, and off I go, a clean bill of physical health, to start destroying myself once again. Relieved and yet wracked by absolute pangs of guilt that I, the bad one, the irresponsible one, had to be the healthy one. I begin to hate myself for it. There is no justice in this world. I should be dead. She should have lived.

  I will never take the sedative. I do not even bother to get it filled. There is one thing I hate more than the torturous constant stress, and that is peace, and happiness. It always came naturally to me. Quick to smile, quicker to laugh, and to make others laugh. I learned to be introverted over the years, so as not to downright embarrassing to my family with my goofy and loud nature. Now nothing produces more pain than a good day. If it is all under control and running well, on the inside I feel nauseating mundaneness. I have become addicted to the fractured; the insane. Nothing is done except in an emergency, on the edge of panicked failure. It makes time pass quickly, and keeps me occupied.

   The first two weeks back here at the house were the worst. God, I spent two lifetimes in what had become a museum of past lives lived waiting for something, ANYTHING to happen. That was a new level of insanity. I would check the news daily to see when the world would end. And when it became apparent God and I were on two completely different schedules, I adopted my own for a while. Didn't work.

   I feel like a once proud man o' war that has lost it's main. All of the things that used to be so important, the lines and tackle that held the world in place now tether me to what pulls me under. I am lost with it, and lost without it. What has not snapped from the strain is unraveling. Some of it I hack away at mercilessly; a madman. And what then, when this sea anchor of love and pain and distress and...then, I will be adrift. Crippled, shattered, a rent remnant of what was and what should have been.

   And people want to have a chat. I need more platitudes, I suppose, to clear my head, and adjust my perspective. And the whole world can heap all the drugs and talks and prayers and warm feelings or just stay the Hell away, and what will be the difference? What's done is done. These are the things that shatter lives. Am I too good to go down in history as a destroyed man?

   I find a strange, bitter pride in it, too be honest. Keeping a lone vigil, holding ground on a forgotten field, smelling the smoke of a battle long forgotten. Take that from me, and you have taken everything. I don't have the strength to strike out again. I was not wounded, my frame was warped. Sinew and bone and mind and will were committed and in end the end pitched against the will of God almighty and defeated. I have succumbed. I have prayed and asked to be forgiven and repented. But to what end? I am Jacob's hip. The spirit touched my whole life to remind me daily of my defeat, and Satan gnaws at the bones of my destroyed will, cavalierly tossing aside the carrion of care and resolve.

   I am depressed, and don't even care to fight it. Right now, anyway. All I care to do is to make it through the rest of this life without causing pain for anyone else by my actions or lack thereof. And that really doesn't seem possible. Maybe the obvious thing to do is to shut the Hell up and smile big. Everything is going fine. How is life treating you, Dear Sir?

October.

October.

There has never been a month I have hated or loved so much. October. October, and you KNOW winter is on it's way. You can't deny it anymore. That first chill...that first press of that arctic jet stream falling like silk from Alaska brings the brace of air...Not air. The cold brace of the pressing of space falls on your face and reminds you that outside of this little stone hurtling through nothing there is the lack of energy and breath and it eats up light and it is three degree from absolute zero where movement stops. There is no movement.

No Movement.

   And October....You taste that for the first time in a year. And you know another year; another one of your years, is drawing to a close.

   October. She was 16 weeks along. 16 crazy, stressed out, sleepless weeks of guarded conversations, where every word hangs suspended as if spider webs fall with words; gossamer threads hanging every word in the air with weight and worry.

   What did we talk about, but what would we name this baby? Could it possibly be a boy? We would love just as much if it was a girl; maybe more. But what if? She wanted that so so much. And 16 weeks. She had never gone that far and lost one. She had been to see all the Doctors. The specialist. The high risk. All she wanted was a baby.

   It was October. I was in Barnwell, SC. Funny thing about that place. Every time I was gone for long, I always had a premonition I would die on the road. Lonely nights in boilers and kilns in God forsaken nowhere blips on the map because that's where they put facilities that burn toxic waste and such. Making people that hate you do things they don't want to do and you don't want to do and they are all felons and thieves and drug addicts...Like a prison guard without a gun, with no support, in desolation, in the middle of nowhere. And I did it all for her and my girls and I did it twelve hours a night and day and sometimes 24 and sometimes 36. And no matter how tired I got, no matter how weird I felt, I did it because I did it for her and my girls and our family. And that warm little cocoon was always 400 miles away and I would get done here and just drive there and they would be warm and well fed and happy....But Barnwell. I knew I would die THERE. I always had the worst feeling about Barnwell. I spent six months there between 2009 and 2010. Six months from my wife and my children. 1/8 of the time Naomi has been on the planet. At the time 1/4. It would eat me up inside.

   I went to Barnwell to brick a dam in the kiln. I was on the second to last day. It was October. My phone rang. It was Christina. I had her under my phone as Babydoll (long story, there). I was in the middle of one of the most pivotal projects of my career at my employer, and it was not going well.

"Hello?" I said (all business. Even though I knew who it was)

"Are you busy"

"A little. What's up?"

"I lost the baby"...

...

...

" I can recall the rest of the conversation, but I am not going to. Still too fresh; too raw.

Jesus F CHRIST

16 weeks. I am 400 miles from home. We have paid through the NOSE and seen 2000 FUCKING doctors and we have lost the baby.

I finish the job that day. I drive home.

   We go to the hospital. We have the baby. My blood runs cold. Same old hat. A day at the hospital. A friend is there with her, one of her Doula friends to make her feel better. She delivers and...it's a boy.


    Just now it comes crashing back to me. We have picked out a name, cause she knew it was a boy. She knew it was THE boy we had been waiting, hoping for. Jonathan Christian Hooker, the second. I would have NEVER named a Son that. I just don't have that much ego. But she would. I NEVER figured out why she loved me like that...

   So there is was. This discolored, little wrinkled dead bundle of broken promise laying in a stainless tray over in the corner of the room. The white elephant; the most important thing of our lives, lying there absorbing the cold of space as the heat of my living, beautiful wife left it. And it was my Son. And he was SO beautiful. And October had come in my life.

   We got home that night, and I was supposed to bury him. We didn't HAVE to take him. The hospital would have disposed of the remains. But I have crawled through medical waste incinerators; I have seen a man die at one. No, I would commit my Son to the Earth myself. Like all my little daughters I have buried before.

   Christina was on all kinds of pain medicine. She fell asleep, exhausted, as soon as we got home. I got drunk. I cannot describe that night. For the first time, I lost my mind, entirely. I went out to dig one more tiny grave, and

   I couldn't. I took that little body of my baby Son and put it in the freezer. And in the morning, I left to go back to Barnwell, SC to finish what I started. And I intended to bury my Son where I spent so much time away from my wife and daughters.I was going to bury him where October marked the calendar of my life.

   Every day I would lead my crew in their repairs, and every night I would lay in the hotel room, talking with Christina on the phone, and cradling my dead frozen Son in my arms. Yes. I lost my mind. And every night I would promise myself I would bury him tomorrow, and would place him lovingly back in the freezer, and go to sleep. Drunk and lost and laughing and crying harder than I laughed at the same time...

   And the job ended. I never told a man on my crew, not my closest work friends, what had been going on, or what I had been doing. They had no idea I had just lost a child. They had no idea that when I rushed to my room every night it was to cradle the corpse of an unborn baby. The job ended, and I went home.I was going to stop on the way, and bury the baby. But I didn't. 400 miles to Lafayette, Ga. I rode, with a preemie diaper in my arms; a frozen stillborn baby cradled deep in the bottom of it. I can still see every feature of his face. I can still see those tiny frozen fingers, clutching nothing....

   I got home. I don't remember how, but I brought him back inside, and hid him in the back of the freezer. At this point, I was starting to catch on that perhaps my behavior was a bit odd. From an outside perspective, anyway. I had to go to Decatur Al. My last job. I had turned in my notice while I was gone out of town.

   While I was gone, she found the baby. She called me.

"Where did you bury the baby?"

"Yeah..."

"I found the baby. Why didn't you bury him?"

I told her the whole story. She was the one ONE person on this planet I couldn't lie to. She was the one ONE person I gave a SHIT what she thought of me. When I got done, hot tears streaming down my face, she said

"Only you, Christian. I love you"

Those words are etched into the fabric of my being.

I came back into town on Sunday morning. We had Mimosas for breakfast. I cooked eggs and stuff and we sat outside in the uncomfortably warm October weather, kids scrambling around our necks. She was wearing her handkerchief and her old navy pullover. I have the pictures to prove it, Goddammit. Monday night, we lay in bed. I was still exhausted from the road, and so so tired. I asked her to rub my face (its a Christina and me thing) She sang so softly to me and rubbed my face til I fell asleep.

   Tuesday she died....

It was October the 18th.