I’m weeping even now as I post this, though I wrote it days ago. It’s some of the stuff I’m working through (or some days, not being able to work through). It’s quite lengthy, probably depressing, and I still don’t know if I even want to post it or not. Neal and I have been debating how to work through my grief, more praying (probably never a bad idea), maybe another round of therapy (some people don’t know this about me, but that would be round #4 in my adult life), more talking about it, less talking about it. I guess I’ll try this and see what happens and go from there.
***
I remember my first few phone calls with my mom after my roommates and I were in a big car accident in the summer of 2003. Despite surviving what could easily have been a fatal crash, I felt no real fear. I told her, probably too matter-of-factly, look at it this way, no one is in two crazy car accidents in their lifetime. Now I’ve gotten it out of the way, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Statistically speaking, I still think I have some sort of ground to stand on because it is very unlikely that a person would be involved in two cataclysmic accidents (particularly if they are a passenger in both, as I was, meaning it has nothing to do with their driving ability). But the older I’ve gotten the more I understand how unhelpful my “insights” were. Probably first and foremost because this happened less than 3 years later:
(So much for a universe where you could accurately compute probability)
But also because she understood better than I just how uncertain this life is, and how having children intensifies that feeling with these beings that are both part of you and separate from you. You can’t control them, or what happens to them, and the illusion we create that we do have control over this uncertain world vanishes, sometimes over long periods of time and sometimes in these earth-shattering, life-changing moments.
This is actually a post about miscarriage; I just didn’t know how to get it rolling. A couple of months ago, I was sitting in Sacrament Meeting and I felt this intense spiritual prompting that I needed to talk about my miscarriage during a Relief Society lesson I was teaching that day. It was both a dramatic and traumatic experience because I had never spoken publicly about it, and really not very much privately either (at least in comparison to just how much I’ve thought about it). I sobbed through the rest of Sacrament Meeting, and surprisingly (that’s a joke in case anyone doesn’t know that I cry pretty much every. single. day.) I still had tears left in Relief Society. I’m honestly not sure what people heard me say because I felt like I was completely unintelligible through all the weeping.
Afterward a sister asked me about how recent the miscarriage was, thinking that it was in May (this was June). And it struck me how out of proportion my grief must seem since it was quite a few months earlier. I thought that some sisters who didn’t ask probably thought it happened yesterday with the way I could barely speak about it. Since then I’ve been wondering about my grief, wondering if part of its length is just how little I’ve talked about it. All I know for sure is that it is raw; some days I feel like it is still happening. I’ve read a lot about other people’s experiences with miscarriage and I’ve talked to people I know, and I can’t help feeling some difference there. I mean, most of them felt so eager to try to have another baby while for months I felt completely guilty to even consider it (of course, I also felt an opposite pull based on the fact that my body is sometimes not-so-slowly breaking down and the window for bearing children seems brief). I’m ultimately unsure if I wanted to feel like my suffering was like theirs in order to make some sense out of it, or if I wanted it to be uniquely mine.
I remember reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl when I was 18 or 19 and beginning to wrap my mind around the fact that suffering is relative. Thank goodness he understood this better than I do because can you imagine a therapist who survived the Holocaust not being willing to accept the truly subjective nature of the human experience—I have been in many therapy sessions in my life and thank heaven none of them included the phrase, “You think that’s bad, I remember the first day in the concentration camp . . . .” Of course, the ultimately mind-bending part of this concept for me is that even our own suffering is relative. It’s not just that we can’t understand other people’s subjective experience, but that from one minute to the next we can’t really accurately interpret our own.
I’ve had this internal monologue with myself at least once a day for many months now: you’ve suffered much worse than this. This is nothing compared to, say, the whole of 1999 and 2000. And at face value, I agree; at that point I was completely lost mentally and emotionally, and physically I couldn’t really get out of bed most days. But that’s where this whole relativity issue comes in because on many days I feel like the sorrow now is both so acute and so unending that I could never possibly have felt worse. So am I really suffering more now than I ever have before, or do I just feel this now and so it feels worse even though it isn’t? And here’s that uncertainty again because I’ll really never know. It’s entirely possible that even though my life was demonstrably worse back then, my capacity for feeling has grown to such an extent that both joy and sorrow are deeper now.
I suspect that most mothers would agree that our capacity for feeling actually does grow, at least that seems to be what many are trying to articulate when they first have a child and feel internal changes taking place. Of course, that comes back to part of the rub: to the world I am not a mother. This doesn’t really bother me because it is the only rational way to view my current situation, but it does underscore why I think it’s so difficult to communicate what I’ve been feeling and experiencing for many months. The way I’ve sometimes articulated it is that I feel like I’m walking around a totally different person than I was a year ago, but no one can see it.
It’s not as if I have a grand answer about how the world should act differently but I just know that I am often left feeling that there is no place for dealing with miscarriage, particularly early miscarriage. The further along you are the more people acknowledge that you have, in fact, lost a baby. I don’t begrudge people the things they say to try to be helpful because I know it is an impossible situation to be really helpful in, but it is hard to endure the implications that there was barely the seed of a baby, not really a baby at all, almost like a wish that never materialized. Because, at the risk of being too graphic, you are physically passing real things out of your system, and at least for me, it was truly and deeply distressing. And then came the real surprise that those days were the easy days compared to what came after: the trying in vain to figure out how to say goodbye to someone that you just absolutely were not ready to say goodbye to. Someone that was real to you, but didn’t exist for anyone else. Someone that you miss everyday, but no one else will ever remember, save God himself.
It’s been many months now and I’m moving on with life (I can’t adequately express how guilty I feel when I say that. Even though I know that’s how life works—it moves, whether we move with it or not—it still feels like a betrayal to the ones that we have to let go of, even if temporarily, in order to move forward). I’m trying not to lie in bed watching TV and movies or surfing the internet all day long everyday (maybe someday I will try to go a full day without escaping to one of these things, although truthfully that day seems a very long way off). I’m trying not to stay awake all night thinking and grieving (tonight is clearly not a good example of that effort). But I guess I wanted to capture something of how I’ve felt before time passes and I forget how intense and painful it all is/was.
Isn’t she a beauty?!
