Authors: Ginny Gilder
I didn't realize that my fear had hijacked sound judgment and taken her life in the bargain. It took an unimaginable tragedy to jolt me awake: I was listening to the wrong voice.
A week after her stillbirth, I received the call from the funeral home that Liala's cremation was complete: I could pick up her ashes. Then I went to the doctor: she should have been weighing my newborn and cooing over her good looks, but she only had my recovery to monitor. My blood pressure had returned to normal; my breasts were swollen with useless milk. My body was behaving on schedule in a world thrown off kilter.
And I could no longer keep the truth to myself. I began to sob, “It's all my fault.”
“No, it is not your fault,” Dr. Lardy said, her stern expression turning even more serious.
“It is.” I regaled her with my litany of evidence; how many times I defied her advice, what a spectacular failure I was when it came to bed rest.
She defended me. “Normal stillbirth means they don't know what happened. The autopsy didn't reveal a specific cause of fetal death.”
I shook my head and continued to sob.
“It's most likely that her cord got kinked. You had nothing to do with her death. Ginny, I mean it.”
I knew better. I nodded: “Yes, I hear you.” I certainly did not mean “Yes, thank you, I believe you.”
Nothing I had lived through prepared me for this grief. I lay in bed every morning under the quilt my mother had sewn for me, wondering if I had any reason to drag myself up. Was this what my
mother had experienced when her life changed overnight, when her marriage died without any apparent warning? The profound sense of dislocation from the life she regarded as normal, of being in freefall from what she knew, clueless about where she would land, or how; the surreal experience of walking through a world where everything looked ordinary, business as usual, while internally she felt ravaged, empty, and useless, with nothing to live for?
Every time the phone rang, a wild hope surged through me. It was the hospital! They had made a terrible mistake. They'd found my baby. She was fine. Please come get her, right away.
They told me healing would take time: two years was normal. There was nothing normal about losing my baby.
Life ground to a halt. I doubted my survival. I saw myself sliding toward my mother's escape hatch, the lure of a soft bed with pillows to burrow into, covers to crawl under. Impenetrable darkness surrounded me, as if I'd entered a bleak forest, the trees so thickly entwined that no sunlight could break through. I couldn't see a path forward, and I didn't care.
Lose your parents, lose your past. Lose your child, lose your future. I wandered through my days, crying constantly. I passed a church and realized I would never see my baby get married. A child running down the street reminded me that Liala would never graduate from preschool, much less college. Overhearing a daughter arguing with her mother, I understood I would miss every argument with my girl, who would never scowl and stomp out of a room muttering, “You've ruined my life.” I would miss watching her grow, learn to read, kick a ball, do a cartwheel, pick up an oar. I would never hear her dreams whispered into my ear as we snuggled together. I would never, ever get to cheer her on from the sidelines and stand by her, win or lose. Everything. I would miss everything.
As for rowing, what was that? Who cared? The Olympics? Training? Tell me why propelling a flimsy manmade hull faster than anyone else mattered. Not to me. Not anymore.
Ten years of caring, gone. A decade of wanting, vanished. All those lessons learned of toughness and self-confidence were no match for my grief. A carefully constructed life, focused and purposed, was dead in the water.
PART IV
Recovery
17
The trait most commonly associated with rowing is that of extreme exertion, yet that's only half the story. Muscled might cannot alone create the beauty of a well-rowed shell. The drive and the recovery together make up a complete stroke, linked to each other by the catch and the release, the markers that signal the transition from one state to the other.
The recovery follows the blade's release from the water, a span of effortlessness when the boat flows forward on its own momentum. The quality of the recovery determines the fluidity of that forward motion. Imprecise synchronicity or rushing the return to effort can ruin the promise of these breaks in effort.
If the drive provides the boat's power, the recovery gifts its grace. The perfection of yin and yang gliding across the water, a pair of opposite yet equal, precisely balanced qualities gives birth to elegant boat speed.
Exhale, inhale, but keep moving. Gather yourself for the next effort, the start of another cycle, connected to its predecessor by this time to breathe.
The oar handle rolls along your palm to your fingertips, the oar turns in the lock, and the blade feathers flat, parallel to the water. Reverse the motions of the drive, starting with your hands moving away from your body. Your arms straighten as your hands pass over your knees. Swing your torso forward to claim your full reach. Only when
your body is set does your seat move, allowing your legs to compress snugly against your chest, ready for their next explosion of energy. Not a rest, but a change of pace.
Without recovery, there is no progress. Extreme effort cannot be accomplished without respite, nor is propulsion possible without a gathering of energy. Arms, back, legs: that's the sequence of motion, a fluid, controlled process to get back into position from which you can explode with effort yet again. Recoil yourself into concentrated energy, step by step. Follow the established cadence. Exhale, create space for the next jolt of oxygen that's desperately needed. It's not anarchy, and it's not desperate, no matter how desperate you feel. Every movement is orchestrated, deliberate, and necessary.
Recovery takes time. Don't rush it.
I had to learn the hard way to slow down and breathe. Life gave me no choice.
My dreams of further Olympic glory died with my daughter. I leaned into the heaviness of Liala's loss and slowly learned to accept her absence. I grew accustomed to the pain, relentless and ever present. My capacity to swallow hard ebbed away. I could no longer buck up and shut up when it came to my grief. If only I could have coped in that old way, perhaps I wouldn't have felt so raw, but my well-honed muscles of denial had shriveled.
I tried to stay close to Josh. After all, he had lost his daughter too, but not only was I hurting, I was in the dark about myself. I wasn't just haunted by my daughter's death, but by the specter of my mother's long-ago psychological dissolution. I didn't know enough to confess that I was fighting off the past. All I knew was that I needed a partner in sorrow. I didn't trust Josh enough to allow him to fill that role, and Josh didn't know me well enough to figure out that he needed to fill that role. It was no surprise that our attempts to console each other fell short.
My mother tried to come to the rescue, but she could only travel so far, and I would only allow her to come so close. I met her at the airport following her flight to Seattle, six weeks after her first granddaughter's death, the trip planned when all was on track and left unchanged when everything went to hell.
We had spoken on the phone briefly a few times since Liala's stillbirth, and she had groped for the right tone and the right words. I tried not to blame her for keeping her distance. I wanted to understand her fear of grief. I had to understand it, so that the same monster would not swallow me up as it had done her. I had long believed that I was destined to be my mother's daughter, that her impulses would be mine one day. She had viewed suicide as a viable option when life handed her seemingly overwhelming obstacles. I always assumed that I would respond the same way.
But now I wanted to chart a different course for myself. Rowing had provided me with a perfect training ground. On the water I learned to ignore my inner pleadings, perfected toughness, and became a champion at self-discipline. Now, all those races won and medals earned fell away. I faced the ultimate challenge, where my life was at stake, as surely as my mother's had been all those years before when she slumped over the dining room table, clutching her pill bottle, consumed by her pain.
I still longed for my mother's warmth, for a sense of connection. If she would only lead with her heart, I would abandon my reticence and my deliberate distance. This was a precious chance to erase our past, to redefine our relationship, and to reforge our connection.
But that wasn't to be. Her initial words were, “I almost didn't come,” and when she hugged me, it was with her arms only, no full-body connection attempted or allowed, no place for us to sway together in our shared loss. As if distance could keep despair at bay.
She couldn't do it. I should not have blamed her for protecting herself, but I did. She gave me so little when I needed so much. It was the last time I would seek her out.
Oddly, I found myself calling my father, not once or twice, but regularly and often. He was the first parent to reach Seattle after Liala's stillbirth, the last one I would have bet on jumping on a plane and making the cross-country trek to confront grief eye to eye. He arrived with my stepmother two days after Liala's delivery. They spent a long weekend walking beside me as I took my first steps into the dark forest of deep sadness. They showed up at the worst of times. A priceless gift.
Long after that visit, when my sadness overwhelmed me to the
point of near-total disconnection, I would dial Dad's office number and retain my composure long enough to identify myself to the receptionist.
“Hello?” At the sound of my father's voice, my throat would close up and my voice turn into a croak.
“It's Ginny.” I could only whisper. Then I would cry. The minutes would flow by, my father on the other end of the phone, quiet, bobbing along in my flood of tears. He didn't know what to say, so said little, except “Hello. Goodbye. I love you.” Sometimes he told me short stories about other people's losses. No lectures or put-downs, egging on or teasing, just searching for words that would help when there was nothing to say. He kept my head above water.
Was this the same father who had sounded so brusque when I called him from the delivery room, who acted so coolly professional? He apologized, unprompted, on one of those first hopeless, helpless calls. “Ginny, that day, when you called me from the hospital, I had someone in my office. Someone I was firing.” He understood after all. His heart had broken, too. He would not run away.
Slowly, I began to understand my daughter's gift to me. I could learn to live with my sadness, even if it blocked out everything else: I did not have to poison myself by swallowing it. I could breathe by acknowledging its presence. I could survive feeling it. No more denial, no more pretending.
My mother buried her pain, only to have it detonate inside her; that didn't have to happen to me. In my quest for the Olympic podium, I honed my toughness and developed remarkable internal resolve, but only now did I learn I was my own person. I was not my mother. I didn't have her psyche, hadn't lived her life, and wasn't doomed to repeat her mistakes.
Instead of killing me, losing Liala released me.
Inhale. Exhale. Cry. Release. Repeat.
My days of pulling hard on and off the water were over. I sold my single in the spring of 1988, another Olympic year. I stored my last set of blades, painted in USA red, white, and blue, in the garage, wondering if anything could ever fill the emptiness.
The experts predicted it would take two years to work through my grief, and they were right. But finally I found myself at the edge of that
pitch-black forest on a faint path, streaks of sunshine pointing my way forward. I learned that even sadness would run its course eventually and leave me standing bowed but not broken. And then I discovered I was pregnant again, this time with a son who would live to tell his own story.
She taught me so much, that first child of mine, who was too impatient to wait for life to begin and had to rush on to her next engagement. She left me heartbroken, but on a corrected course, guided by a new internal voice, confident, steadied by hope, and not driven by fear.
I may have set a new course, but I hadn't fully learned to row my own boat. I had conquered my fears of becoming my mother, but I remained my father's goody-goody daughter, still trying to please him. Still trying hard to please the world despite the high price of doing so.
How many thousands of strokes had I taken? How many countless hours had I spent on the water practicing hard strokes, perfecting technique, learning balance? Nonetheless, I had not yet mastered the most important lesson.
Ten years after Liala's death, I remained locked in a marriage that looked good on the outside but stank on the inside. Living the standard idea of happily ever after, I felt desiccated and desolate.
Not that life was all bad, by any means.
My dreams of motherhood came true not once or twice, but three times, each occasion filled with its own mystery and magic. Our first son, Gilder, made his appearance nearly three years after his older sister's fetal demise, a few days ahead of his due date, late in the evening, so quickly that I missed my chance for an epidural. To manage the pain, I pretended I was racing in the Head of the Charles and kept counting out ten-stroke pieces to stay focused and calm. Because I didn't know how long the delivery would take, I kept my imaginary racecourse progress measured, never allowing myself to travel beyond the first big turn by Magazine Beach. His live birth was a better reward than any medal.
Although fear of losing him plagued my entire pregnancy, Gilder's arrival more than compensated for the ups and downs of those nine months. He was alive and well, small but healthy. His blue eyes turned hazel within his first month and he grew off the charts quickly. His
light birth weight doomed him to a protracted period of late-night feedings, so I became intimate with the peaceful hours of deep night. Rocking him in a quiet house swathed in a silent world, while he slurped milk in little gulps, I discovered what I missed with Liala. The joy of holding my little boy intensified while crystallizing and salving my grief for my lost baby girl.