One Year Update

Dear Friends and Pedro and Archer lovers new and old,

Well, if you can believe it, today marks the one year anniversary of the birth and death of Pedro and Archer. We, frankly, are stunned that a whole year has gone by. In most ways, we feel the time has slipped past at an alarming pace, and we don't feel quite ready to have reached this day. And in a few ways, the year has been agonizingly, painfully slow.

We wanted, one year later, to thank you all for all your love and support in helping us honor our sons while finding our way through this grief. Each one of you has played a tremendous role in helping us stay afloat, and for that we are profoundly, eternally grateful. Thank you. And I thought that, on this Archer and Pedro's birthday/memorial, I would take a moment to recap our journey thus far.

As most of you know, after we left the hospital in Portland, we continued down to the San Francisco Bay Area and forged a life here. We rented a house in San Mateo, a suburb about 15 miles south of San Francisco, a lovely place with lots of green coming through all the windows and a gloriously tacky Tiki Room outside that has been a wonderful place to host people. Bruno found a great job despite the horrible economy and works very hard as the VP of Product Management and Strategy for a data warehousing start up, Sensage. I reached out to schools here and clients past and drummed up a bit of a tutoring business, tutoring everything from GMAT to SAT to 8th grade Astronomy. My business is still in development, so I'd be grateful if you could think through your Bay Area friends and pass my name along! And in January, I began to act again, and had fabulous luck in that area: I did a 6 week Equity contract in San Francisco performing in 4 wonderful plays with fantastic directors and castmates: a truly joyful time. I also booked an agent, had lots of auditions, and have been included in numerous new play readings, each one a complete blessing. I have never been more grateful for being an artist: art has truly been reviving my soul these last 6 months, and I am fully re-committed to making sure there is good art in the world.

We've biked and hiked and kayaked all over the Bay Area, and taken trips to Tahoe and Mammoth. Bruno hit a very bad spell through the winter where he hemorrhaged a disk in his back (stress?!), a very bad period for us, but countless physically therapy sessions later, he is feeling on the mend, thank goodness. His work has taken him all over, including several trips to Japan and Europe, and is threatening to take him to Brazil next. We still find it hard to be away from each other for long.

We attended HAND (our grief group for neo-natal death) religiously for about 6 months, and now attend sporadically for touch ups, or to lend our experience to others just starting on the grieving path. We have made many friendships there that I think will be lifelong and we are so so grateful that the nurses in Portland steered us HAND's way. Our recovery would have been impossible without HAND.

Emotionally, this year has been a roller coaster. Grief, despite the "stages" is not linear: you don't complete one stage and leave it forever to start battling the next. They all mix together, they come back at surprising moments, leaving you stripped naked vulnerable again just one week after you thought you were finally firmly standing on the ground. Holidays are outrageously hard: letting go of visions of what we thought our Thanksgiving, Hannukah, even Valentine's Day would look like with two boisterous boys. Every time we travel in a car, we are brought back to our cross-country trip and riddled with guilt: no matter how many doctors tell us we did not cause this, that is the hardest thing to let go of. The desire to know what caused this loss so we can avoid it is so strong, as is the feeling that, as parents, we failed to protect our sons. We are still working these feelings through, and I suspect we will be for years. Maybe the guilt will lessen once we have a child who survives and we can raise.

We have not wavered in our desire to start a family, although we have been sorely tested at this point. After losing the boys, we have been pregnant twice, and we have lost both pregnancies. It is pain on top of pain. I have known women who have had trouble starting or maintaining pregnancies, but I have never full understood how debilitating and all consuming it is. Feelings of being broken, of failing to do what comes so easily to others, of being an outside to a club to which it seems the rest of the world belongs: it is awful and soul-ripping. We are doing everything we can to have another child, and I fight daily to retain my sanity and goodwill toward others, especially those with enormous baby bellies who work out next to me at the gym!

But along with all the pain, sorrow, anger, grief and guilt, we have also found our way to laughter again, to joy again. We have reconnected with old friends and made many many new friends and we cherish our friendships with new eyes and hearts. We have held on, at least in moments, to some of that perspective we were so keenly aware of when our grief was fresh. We try to retain the lessons of never knowing what someone else is going through, of practicing empathy and forgiveness toward all. We try. We fail often. But we know a different side of the world now, and so we continue to try.

This blog, which I started when we left the hospital, is still going strong. It has been a great source of comfort to me to have a place to organize my feelings, to share our experience, even to find my funny again, and I'm very grateful for my readers and their comments.

With love and gratitude to all, and wishing Happy Birthday to Pedro and Archer,
Lisa and Bruno