“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.”

Six is my favourite number. It is the number of years between my younger sister and me. It looks like the lovechild of zero and “C”. The only single digit that is divisible by two as well as three, it seems to encompass both even and odd with a swirling, round-bottomed equanimity.

This tadpole, half of a yin-yang symbol, is also the number for idealists. Six years ago today, I counted myself among them when our son was born. I was determined to be the ideal father to an ideal son. Three days, eight hours and forty minutes later, when the doctor pronounced him dead, that idealism shattered, not by twos and threes, but into innumerable pieces.

His death certificate reflects that he was never issued a US Social Security number. The boxes for “years of education” and “years in country” each contain a single zero. Other boxes: “white”, “male”, “never married” all increment statistical records somewhere. His occupation was listed as “infant”. I wonder how often that column gets a tick.

Recently, strolling through a nearby Victorian cemetery, I was struck by how many headstones were laid for infants and children. In the developed world, in modern times, losing a child is unexpected. I was told that what happened to my wife and me only affects one-in-one-thousand like us these days.

We are now living approximately 5,500 miles away from the Santa Barbara harbor where we scattered his ashes, and from the community that so lovingly supported us through the long, dark aftermath. (The only constant–change.) I miss them terribly.

In the heart of a London winter, in the middle of my life, I am facing down problems for which the answers are not numbers, but a way of life. Throughout the upheaval of the past six years, a few things have remained invincible in me. Among them: a need to make art, and a desire to give back.

Once again, I take this day to be grateful for my son’s short life, and the ways in which it has taught me about how to more courageously live my own.

“Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.”

I have been previewing Facebook’s upcoming Timeline feature. It turns one’s profile into a scrapbook-style autobiography, arranging multimedia posts in a chronology from birth to present. It is part of a larger strategy to promote information sharing that has been intelligently criticized in general terms. But it was a specific moment in my exploration of Timeline that pulled me up short. Clicking on the small heart icon for “Relationships”, up popped a menu item for marking one’s timeline with “Lost a Loved One.”

Though we have memorialised our son in many ways, the thought of posting his photo on Facebook beneath the small flower icon to make it part of this music-video-all-about-me of a web application struck me as painfully absurd. He is deeply and irrevocably part of my life. But a biography is not a life, much less an online profile. We have become a society obsessed with crafting our image–so much so that we almost believe, and sometimes attempt to inhabit, these spun self-tales.

The antidote to the future we now inhabit, wherein everyone has their own Wikipedia page for fifteen minutes, is art. Mark Twain called biographies “the clothes and buttons of a man,” deciding, “the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But something approaching what it feels like to be a man can come across in the literary arts, and especially poetry. Poetry is the anti-wiki, striving for truths that need no citation, encompassing contradictions rather than devolving into fact-slinging “flame wars.”

And so, when it is released next month, I will use Timeline. But for matters that transcend time, and excavate the inmost reality, I’m sticking with poems.

I have my own relationship with each of these poems. The first poem in this collection tells a lot about the purpose I have found in writing poetry. That is why I put it first. The Scottish poet Andrew Philip, who also lost his first-born son, says near the end of his poem “Lullaby,” “this is the man you fathered.” Indeed, my experience with the birth and death of our son James was an initiation into fatherhood–that I was “fathered” by him, just as one might be “knighted” by a sovereign. I came away with a charge.

But how to fulfill the charge of fatherhood without a child of one’s own? This is a question I have been answering in many ways. One of those ways is poetry. James did not get to experience this world with me. One of the most difficult aspects of grief is not that he is gone, but that he is everywhere. And so, I have decided to go on “speaking” to him–about the beauty and poignance of this world–by speaking to everyone.

What began as a language for processing grief has become a language for processing the mystery and paradox of the world in which I live, and of sharing it. I experience it as a paternal act, an outlet for everything I would have wanted to show to our boy. More than going through the motions, this “speaking” to him by speaking to others, to myself, and to the world around me, is a reason to keep writing poetry. It is a way of fathering the one I am with, even when I am alone. And that is something that I know will go on–as long as I live.

The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly. (Proverbs 20:27, KJV)

Two days ago, our next-door neighbors marked the birthday of the adult son they outlived. Yesterday, my wife’s childhood friend commemorated what would have been her son’s Bar Mitzvah. I feel for them deeply. And tomorrow, had he lived more than three days, our own son would have turned five.

It is a significant age in our culture–the beginning of more than a decade of compulsory education, and also therefore the end of the need for full-time care. It is when most parents place their child at the top of a long chute ending in adulthood, by taking them nervously in hand to their first day of kindergarten.

Late last year, in response to a wave of teenage suicides, the It Gets Better project reached out to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-gender (LGBT) teens with its simple message of encouragement. After five years of complicated grief, I am here to say it can get better for bereaved parents, too. I say “can” because I credit not only time but a number of important activities for bringing me increased solace, including: community service, counseling, meditation, nutrition, exercise, supportive friends, and, of course, writing. While all of this has helped, both in the moment and over time, it has not been some steady upward progression. Far from it. Some days, just getting out of bed in the morning is still my greatest victory.

In March, my debut short book will include several poems about infant loss, subsequent infertility, and the poignancy of so much beauty and sadness that somehow coexists in this world. While many of the poems touch on other topics, it still feels like a “coming out” of sorts about my grief–a way to describe, in the only language I know to do so, some of the emotional landscape I have traveled these past five years.

Like any attempt at art, I can rest assured that some people won’t like it. But like those LGBT teens who will later come to discover thriving communities of support, I, too, have found in fellow poets and poetry-lovers a sense that I am among “my people,” and accepted. It is for them, and for myself, that I go on trying to write, and be, most fully who I am.

I am not looking forward to the next three days–the memories, and the longing. But I do look forward to the rest of my life, and the ways in which our son, by his too-brief visit, has showed me how to live it–embracing more fully the paradox and complexity of being human, located in both an inner and outer landscape all at once. Once again, I say, “thank you” to my much-loved son.

Photo by Randy Graham

I broke away from work to attend the dedication ceremony for my neighbor Mark Benkert’s new memorial sculpture to the Aliso Street Bear (a.k.a “Elliot”). In introducing me to read the poem I wrote dedicated to the bear, Mark also mentioned something remarkable about the process of sculpting the memorial.

For both Mark and I, the loss of the bear resonated deeply with the loss of our sons. As Mark was inscribing the letters “J” and “B”, the initials of his son, Jonah Benkert, the “B” also read much like a “P”–and he mentioned that “J.P.” reminded him of our own son, James Peake. Needless to say that by the time I took the microphone, I was nearly unable to speak.

Yet I managed to read my poem, honoring the bear, our sons, our community. The rest of the dedication meant a lot to me–from written poems and prose pieces, to impromptu verbal tributes, a song, and drumming. It was also a moment of catharsis for our community, coming together once more to honor all that the bear brought to us.

To learn more about how to promote the peaceful coexistence of humans and animals in the Ojai Valley, please visit the Ojai Wildlife League website.

And looking back on the first, second, and third anniversary, I see a clear trajectory toward healing, and toward integrating this profound experience into my life–not as a tragedy–but as a source of strength. I recently found the courage to hold a baby in my arms again, and felt, in that moment, only joy. I have also discovered more of the blessings, strange as it sounds, of the complicated nature of grief.

This experience reaffirmed a few things for me: that art can make life meaningful, that compassion is always the most appropriate response, and that my wife is still the bravest woman I have ever met. Today, I say, once again: godspeed, my son. And thank you.

On one of our bookshelves, I have lit a candle next to a picture of James. Though he never opened his eyes, our baby was beautiful. Yesterday afternoon, I went in for new head shots to post to the company website. As the makeup lady dabbed my lips with flesh-toned gel, I thought back to my goth days in San Francisco, when I would trace my lips with black lipstick before a night out on the town. Then, as I felt her moving along the peaks of my lipline, I thought of James’s lips–a cupid-bow-shaped miniature of my wife’s own lips. Moments later, I was smiling into the flashbulb.

My inner life is my real life. In it, I carry the memory of my son. Over time, he has gotten lighter, as I have come to embrace greater hope, and to acknowledge the blessings he brought. Were it not for James, I might not have started writing poetry again in earnest, let alone completed an MFA. I would not know what I know now about fatherhood, the depth of support that can come from friends and family, or the strength of our marriage to endure. Though I have come a long way in recovering from grief, it still pricks me like the thorn Antonio Machado described in his own poetic heart–influencing all that I experience and express, and reminding me, poignantly, of that heart.

Godspeed, James. Thank you.

Several close friends have had children in the past year. I have been too afraid of breaking down in front of the parents to accept invitations to meet them. Just the other day, however, we were at a restaurant and some friends came in with their nine-month-old twins. I decided I was feeling strong enough to finally meet them.

Before approaching them, I washed my hands in the bathroom, since I have been fighting off a cold. I pumped soap from the dispenser, and ran my hands under the tap. Absentmindedly, I began lathering up my wrists and rubbing furiously. I was back in the hospital, scrubbing up at the sink inside the entrance to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Back then, I washed my hands vigorously, thoroughly, twice in a row–up to the elbows and underneath each fingernail. I shuttled over colostrum and came back with empty bottles, stole away in the night while Val was sleeping off the anesthetic, aware each visit could be the last. Every time, I scrubbed down furiously, as though some miracle of cleanliness could restore the electricity to our son’s brain.

It has not been an easy two years. But James’s death caused me to reevaluate what matters. I rediscovered the young idealist, who left the engineering department at Berkeley during the height of the dot-com era to study poetry instead. I recommitted to my writing, and signed up for an MFA. With such loss has come not only grief, but great compassion. I want to write about what makes us human, because never has it impressed upon me more that this is precious in its entirety–from my flashback in the bathroom to the radiant abandon with which infants squirm in their highchairs. There is so much to life. Sometimes it overwhelms.

I say once again: Godspeed, little James. There is so much more to love than could ever be comprehended.

Foremost, he helped me to rearrange my priorities into something far more human. I have experienced, although briefly, the selfless love of fatherhood. And I know loss. The hustle and buzz of technology, the pleasures of the mind alone–no longer hold so much sway. More and more humanity seems like a single organism to me. More and more, I feel compassion, poignancy–how much everything matters that is done with love.

I came back to poetry after a four year hiatus, and upped the ante by enrolling in an MFA program. It hasn’t been anything like an easy year–even now as I’m writing this, I’m quite sick and somewhat miserable. Yet the effect of such profound love and loss this year is something I would not trade. I can’t be sure I’ll keep feeling this way in the coming three days, or even in the coming years. It’s been pretty rocky at times so far. But when I get down to the heart of this experience, strange as it sounds, I am grateful.

Thank you, James. And Godspeed.

Click to enlarge

Just spent some much needed time away in a truly stunningly beautiful place only six hours drive from home and to which I had actually never been to before: Yosemite. It was magnificent, and perfectly timed: we were “off-season”, away from the crowds, surrounded by incredible views of waterfalls formed by snow melting in crevasses thousands of feet above us. The only hard part was being surrounded by so many happy families, and thinking how much I would have liked James to see it all one day. I picked up a copy of Denise Levertov’s Selected Poems since discovering Talking To Grief was in it, and she is fast becoming one of my favorite poets. We didn’t actually get a chance to sit around and read in Yosemite, though we happened on plenty of people doing it at the beautiful historic Ahwanee hotel in their great lounge beside a roaring fire one rainy afternoon. Well, maybe next time.

Val has been discharged from the hospital and is resting at home. Our experience has been very profound, and we are both feeling very tender. We are really just taking it moment to moment, supported so caringly by family and friends. My worldly ambitions seem very trivial right now, and the last thing on my mind is software design. In time I’m sure other posts may emerge on this site. But for now, we are simply in mourning–for our hopes and dreams as parents, and the great love and loss we felt for our precious son. I feel blessed to have experienced, briefly but profoundly, the essence of parenthood–that pure and selfless love–and know we will never be the same.

Please keep us all in your prayers for the highest good, and also say a prayer of loving for the soul of our beloved son if you feel so moved.