This particular passage through grief has been a strange journey for me,
quite unlike any I've traveled before.
Usually when I am aching I want company. I want to talk. I want to be
surrounded.
This time I have wanted and needed space and silence.
When I came home after my ultrasound, I sobbed and laid in bed, still and
alone. After a few hours I texted my best friends to let them know. And then I
turned off my phone. I didn't want to see their responses.
When I began to crash, finally coming off my hypomania (oh, glorious,
expansive, joyful hypomania) I didn't want anyone with me. The night it
started, I didn't want anyone there. I began with a descent
into scary drug reactions/interactions as docs tried to bring the hypomania
down to make sure it didn't end up in full-blown mania. I felt emotions
I'd never felt before, had physical reactions from dizziness to tremors
to near out-of-body experiences, had mood swings shifting from terror to
rage to despair all within about an hour. I didn't wake my husband. I
didn't call anyone. Well, I did call my therapist, who missed the call, and
then the hospital. No one else. Instead, I took my sleep meds and curled up on
the floor desperate for something solid underneath me. I went to sleep. The
only person I wanted with me was my daddy. I almost called him. But I most
definitely didn't want my mom, and a midnight call to daddy would have meant
mom too. So I curled up on the floor until the sleep meds took over and
then crawled through the soothing, quiet dark into my bed. The next
morning I had my husband take me to see my therapist and psychiatrist (the
weird reaction I had to the meds meant I could barely walk straight, much less
drive anywhere).
I txted my friends the next day, saying "I'm crashing. I want you
to know, but I don't want to talk about it."
The same has been true for nearly every loss I've gone through this year.
On my birthday, after the second miscarriage, after it became clear my
little girl was struggling with something far greater than I had ever wanted
her to feel, I laid in bed all day and wept. I wanted to be alone and silent.
My dear, sweet husband came in as I cried. He is, to this day, the only
person who can "read" me almost immediately, almost 100% accurately,
and the only person who's ever been able to "read" me before I could
read him. He came in and saw me sobbing. He didn't say a word. Didn't try to
make it better. He sat down next to me and rubbed my back in silence as I
cried for an hour and a half. I moved through a lot in that time. I never
told him about it. He never asked.
Usually words comfort me. Usually they are my love language. But this time
they mostly feel intrusive. And almost dishonest. At least unable to capture
what's going on.
Maybe it's because I've never had an experience that is so totally insular
and personal.
Each of my babies--I was the only one who ever knew them in any tangible
way. In both cases I knew I was pregnant before the test told me because I have
such specific, distinct, and predictable pregnancy symptoms. Every second of my
pregnancies I was aware of these little lives with me as my hormones shifted,
as my whole body reacted to their presence.
With my first baby, I knew I had
lost her well before the doctors could confirm, again because my body responded
to that loss immediately and I could feel it, could feel and and
see my pregnancy slipping away.
With the second, the morning of the ultrasound, I
woke up to a body that was already beginning to respond to my baby's death. The
pregnancy symptoms had shifted ever so slightly, and I thought, "Oh,
God, please, not again."
I'm the only one who ever knew those babies as anything but an abstraction
as I carried them, felt each little growth in them shift my body, my emotions,
my physical and emotional sensations. They altered me, changed and grew me as I
did them.
And when they died, and especially once they finally each left my body
completely, I was the only one who experienced that loss as my body changed
from moment to moment as they moved out of me, born in such a broken, bloody,
incomplete, and torn-to-pieces way. The less pregnant my body felt and
became, the larger their absence grew for me. Not being able to
escape my body and how not-pregnant it now felt and was, I also could never
really be away from the awareness of their not-being anymore, and especially of
their not-being-with-me.
They'd never been with anyone else. No one else had touched them, felt them,
fed and nourished and helped them grow. There is no one else to grieve their
loss as I always will. No one else knew them, carried them, felt them, was a
part of them. And so, in a very real way, there is no one to share this loss
with. No one can carry it with me because I was the only one to ever carry
them.
And it's not quite about people "not understanding." Certainly
there's some of that. I'm not close to anyone who's miscarried before. I know
lots of people, but no one near and dear. Those who have miscarried or
struggled with infertility have shared their stories with me in the last few
months. But more often than not, hearing other people's reactions to my
miscarriages is more of a burden then a relief, whether they've had a
miscarriage and have some sense of what it's like, or are simply
seeking something to say. It's a burden because I then have the weight of their
emotions and reactions and fears and understandings of what a miscarriage
is to hold on to as well. And those reactions don't match mine, ever, no matter
how close they get.
But it's not really that either. It's that I've had two babies no one
else has ever met or known. I have those babies to grieve. I can't go to a
funeral and hear what others remember, others experienced. I didn't get to
share these lives with anyone else, and now there is no one to share their
deaths with either.
And so I don't want words and company, I guess. Any maybe some of that is
unhealthy. But I guess it's just impossible to fully grieve with those who
never knew my babies. And that's everyone. So I keep wanting to have space to
be alone, to be with the parts of me that knew, and know, and still carry those
lives, invisible to the rest of the world. I want to be with people who knew
and loved my babies. And that is me. And only me.
It's not that I don't want community as I struggle. I do. It's not that I
don't want to be loved or known in it. I do. But I almost never want to talk
about the struggle or the pain. It only seems to make it worse to attempt to
share it.
Interestingly, the only people who have seen or heard the depths of my pain
around this have been men: my husband, my boss, my bishop, my dad. I'm sure some of it
is my mommy-issues creeping up, but I think the bigger reason is that in each
case, none of those men ever attempt to relate to my pain, to "get
it." They know they can't possibly relate, incapable as they are of ever
being pregnant, or giving birth, or giving birth to a not-yet-formed
child. So they simply reflect back to me the enormity of what I'm feeling,
and in their faces, their embraces, their words, their total lack of
understanding, I see my own helplessness as they say "I can't even
imagine." They look at me when I am in pain and I see their pain and their helplessness
to make it better. Or sometimes they simply grab me and silently hold me
as I weep, or, if they're not intimate enough with me to do that, I see
their bodies shift toward me and open up as I cry and, in so doing,
silently witness to my loss, to the fact that there is nothing anyone can do, can say to make it less heavy, less of a burden. But they let me know they see it, and as they
move toward me silently in it, with no pretense that they can comfort or understand or get it, I feel honored on my journey. Their silence and caring cluelessness has been a gift.
And right now, between these losses, and seeing my once-full-of-joy-and-life
little girl become so depressed and anxious that she wanted to die even though
I was giving everything I had to give to help her feel ok and safe and
nurtured and loved, I feel so alienated from my own ability to hold life
and nurture life that maybe it's a little hard to share this with women with all
that women represent in that archetypal way: pregnancy, birth-giving, life-bearing.
When I went on retreat, I spent a lot of time with the image of the
Pieta.
Mary has been a pretty central part of my spirituality for years, but
always as the Mother, or the Pregnant One, or the
Theotokos—God-bearer. This time I was relating to her as the mother
holding her dead child in her arms, cradling him, broken and battered as he
was, being for him a final resting place before he moved on to the next part of
his journey, before she had to let go and put him in that tomb.
In a way, I even
miss the two weeks I spent carrying my dead child with me. It was awful, feeling
pregnant—though less so with each passing day—while also knowing my baby was
already gone and I could miscarry at any moment. My body could do nothing to
help this little one grow, heal, bring that heartbeat back. I couldn’t feed
and nurture her (or him). I could do nothing. But at least I was with my baby.
I was holding her until was time for her to really go. And when the miscarriage
never came and I had to have another ultrasound to confirm and then had to
induce so I didn’t end up with an infection, that was far worse.
That final loss was like being an
empty tomb, but not one that had experienced resurrection and so could be the ultimate symbol of life. Instead it was like becoming a tomb that had just lost its last purpose for being: holding and honoring the life that once was, being with it even in death.
That second miscarriage was a terrible journey from being life-giver and holder, to becoming tomb, to finally becoming an empty tomb, one that no longer could even hold the life that once was...
