Earth and sun
Late July 2011 found me in Queensland for a conference. After all the molar pregnancy drama, the tests had come back negative, and I could happily put the 4-litre urine containers in the recycling and move on with IVF. Two unsuccessful frozen embryo transfers later, the grinding greys had returned. There was no date to look forward to in the calendar—we were already throwing everything at Project Bump, and getting nothing back. After refusing to miscarry a ‘blighted ovum’ in March, my body seemed to have gone into a sulk or lost interest. In May and June, there hadn’t been even a whiff of a pregnancy symptom.
Saturday, 23 July 2011
There’s a special art to running through crowded city streets. Speed up, sideways step, watch for a gap. My heart expands to knock at my ribs and nearly bowl over the people in my path, until I’m all heart—messy, beating, puffing and suddenly seeing all these messy human hearts around me. A woman sees me running towards her and fear blanks across her face briefly—she looks wildly behind me, her own steps a little quicker. I have a good reason to run—I don’t want to be late for my osteo appointment, but I feel like I’ve just woken, as though my blood is reaching cells that have been slowly greying.
Things have been really grey lately. Everything is a big effort. I’m kind of embarrassed to write about it because this kind of sadness is dull. I bore myself. It’s as though I’m stuck at the bottom of a big hole in the ground. Poem by poem, I’m digging myself out, and I know from the voices of loved ones which way is up, but I can’t really pretend to be anywhere else at the moment. I have to make reluctant friends with this situation.
So what are you trying to tell me, deep dark hole? To stop dreaming of the stars (and one particularly bright little star)? That my slow-crafted words will come to nothing? That I am one and the same as the slippery grey-black clay on every side of me? Come on, hole, teach me your lesson and then we can be done. I’m not going to be bullied into silence and self-pity. Enough of that.
I’m not at all prejudiced against holes in the ground—in fact, my daughter lives in one, as do many of my favourite trees, earthworms and root vegetables. If dirt is my destiny, then bring it on, dirt. Show me your microbes, let me remember what dirt smells like, let me feel the grit of it between my fingers.
Time moves slowly under the earth. Things are hidden, processes work slowly but powerfully. Minerals are crushed, underground rivers carved, liquids percolate drip by drip, continental plates grind past one another millimetre by millimetre—all monumental changes occurring at a pace measured in centuries rather than minutes. What else is down here? Things unwanted or forgotten, buried and mourned—so many things lost and wasted which are slowly being turned back into the earth itself. Nothing goes away down here, but is slowly transformed, releasing water and nutrients to feed patient tree roots, or our lawn. This is where rivers are born. Nothing flashy or spectacular, just cold humble earth.
Dear hole in the ground, that’s what I’d like—some of that persistence, slow elemental momentum. The ability to slowly work through this sad stuff with earthworms and use it to grow something good.
•
After tears and long conversations with friends who were IVF veterans, we went back to our doctor with a proposal—to stop the frozen transfers of two-day embryos and start again on a new protocol, of growing the embryos to blastocyst stage (about five days), so that if they made it that far, they’d have a stronger prospect of success. Our doctor was willing, and so we were all set to start a stimulation cycle in July, until I realised that the egg pick-up dates would have conflicted with a conference I’d agreed to speak at. A few months before, frustrated from all the waiting and delays, it would have been unimaginable to put fertility treatment on hold. But now, it felt like a small assertion of control over the process. I was more than just a pincushion; or, at least, I was a pincushion with things in her life other than the IVF process. And as wonderful as it would be to become pregnant again, to try our hand at parenting a living child, I didn’t feel the same desperate grasping for it as I had before.
Rima didn’t join me on the conference trip, so I was alone in what turned out to be an enormous apartment—and the biggest chunk of solitude I’d had since those weeks in hospital and rehab. The unfamiliar Queensland sun streamed loudly into the bedroom and woke me; a revelation after becoming accustomed to dark Melbourne mornings. I laid a towel on the floor and began a sun salute, relishing the uncluttered space and lifting my face to the morning light.
Even with eyes closed, the light made everything glow. And I missed it when I folded at the hips for Uttanasana, to bend my knees and lay my hands flat on the floor on either side of my feet. I felt the sun again when I stepped my right leg back into a lunge, then brought the other leg back and dropped my hips for cobra pose, indulging my face in the sun’s warmth; only to miss it again, when I lifted my hips and dropped my head for adho mukha shavasana (downward-facing dog). And it occurred to me that this was exactly the pattern of things—alternating between time with your face to the sun, feeling exalted; and time facing the darkness, feeling humbled. Day and night, life and death, love and loss. And my job was not to chase one or the other but to move freely between the two, to honour both and to keep breathing all the while.
•
I had been waiting for a happy ending for this book. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my story here, in what I’d thought of as the ‘waiting place’ between one (silent) baby and the next, hopefully more noisy, one. But this ‘waiting place’ is all I have right now—it’s all anyone has when they’ve lost one baby and are hoping for another. There’s no fast-forward button we can push to speed through to the ‘good bits’. And even if there were, I’m less and less sure I would have wanted to push it. As painful as this grieving has been, it is mine, and it connects me to my daughter, as well as to everyone else who has suffered loss.
In that dark year after our accident, the thing that made me choke with fear and sadness was the idea of no more Z. I thought, ‘That’s it. My whole relationship with my daughter was over and done with before it had hardly started.’ Thirty-six photos, some inky footprints and handprints, a tiny amount of ashes, and a drop of her blood on a blanket my mum had made; the countable, finite remains of my child. It wasn’t enough, it would never be enough. It was such a sad, awful, unfillable hole of ‘no more’ that, to live in this world, I had to close that drawer, to look elsewhere for the ‘more’ I needed.
What I hadn’t imagined was the feeling of my soul tearing in two as I tried to hurtle away from her. It was an impossible choice: to go back and sit at that point in the road where she disappeared, or to move on. In that linear frame, it was either backwards, towards death and sorrow; or forwards into life and good things, but away from my child.
Specifically, the ‘more’ that I was looking for was to get pregnant again. I was so sure it would happen. I don’t think I had really let go of feeling pregnant. This was my pregnancy and I would finish it, even if I had to mourn a daughter along the way. As I had danced uphill, waving my mardi gras pompoms, tenaciously pregnant, it had felt like forward motion. In spite of everything, I would move on. Now that we were moving, I could feel gracious about the pauses along the road the IVF process had imposed, even though I’d been impatient at the time.
But when I’d unwrapped the parcel from the Women’s Hospital, with its generic ‘you’re diagnosed’ letter, something broke in me. I thought, initially, that it was my sanity, that I’d finally popped a crucial cog and I’d be completely broken. But what was broken was my idea of a future without her—a future where that empty space was filled by another, living, baby. A molar pregnancy meant having to wait at least six months to a year before I could try to conceive again. And maybe this wasn’t just the pause button; maybe this would mean Z was my only child. Just having to think about that question made me stare very hard at the train tracks while I waited to cross at the level crossing.
The molar pregnancy diagnosis also gave me plenty of time to think. I was scared that if I really looked hard at my grief for Z, if I opened that drawer, the big, sad black hole of ‘no more’ would suck me in and swallow me whole. Because there was no solution to it. There was no way my logical brain could think a way around the big, stark reality of no more Z.
I had been holding my breath for so long waiting for another baby that I wanted to vehemently push each babyless minute past me and away from me—just throw it away. As long as there was some prospect of another pregnancy to look forward to, I could mark a date in the calendar and set my eyes on it, hold on for that date, even if it were shifting away from me cycle after cycle. But now I no longer had that option; at least until I got the all clear on the molar pregnancy front.
I was furious with myself for being tricked by my own body, with that duplicitous bundle of non-baby cells, and with everyone and everything. I came closer to psychiatric-hospital madness than I ever wanted to come. This was not the quiet, weary disinclination to continue existing that I’d seen in my mum and had glimpses of myself. Instead it was a crackling-hot rage, to smash up myself, my situation and anything in my path. Most of all, what broke was the hoped-for Hannah, who I’d been preparing my life for, who had everything in order but who never seemed to arrive, despite my best efforts. Hoped-for Hannah’s baby didn’t die, she didn’t need IVF, and she could choose when she got pregnant, while managing a glittering career. No wonder she was so infuriating. I had hoped so hard and for so long that to smash up those hopes felt like it would break me. But, in breaking, I also exhaled, and felt what it might be like to live without hope dragging me forwards into an imaginary future moment. Exhausted with my own drama, I lay on the floor with all that sadness, and we breathed and looked at one another. And I breathed in all the scary things that a molar pregnancy might mean: not knowing whether I could get pregnant again for six months, a year or ever; chemo; having to do stupid 24-hour urine tests and carry 4-litre plastic containers of my own wee into the Women’s Hospital every week. And I breathed out, because I wasn’t there yet, and every second standing between me and a 4-litre urine container was a precious, precious thing.
Breathing in an uncomfortable spot like that can be hard, but I’d had lots of practice at it by then. I take great pride in the fact that when my brother and sister-in-law (both dive instructors) took me for my first-ever ocean scuba dive that January, I used less oxygen than either of them, despite freaking out underwater about how to clear my mask. It’s not a remarkable talent—breathing—but it is a useful one.
It surprised me to find that if I didn’t run away from the awfulness of my situation, I could breathe into it, explore it, feel exactly what it was like to be mother to a child who has died. This was different from being mother to a hypothetical Z, who would have been this-many months old by now, or to a hoped-for new baby, who I might conceive sometime in the future. Like it or not, neither of those babies was in my life now. All I had was Z. In that space, I thought to her, ‘Well, my love. I wish you hadn’t gone and died. But there’s not much you can do about it now.’ And in the spirit of parents whose kids have been conscripted to the army, I thought, ‘I wish you didn’t have this job (being dead/being “one with the universe” or whatever it is that baby souls do after they die) but I still love you and I wish you’d send me a postcard or call me sometimes.’ Then I felt silly, because there was her star, which was always there twinkling at us, and the camellia tree, which burst into bloom just when my heart was breaking, and her pomegranate tree, and her roses, and the leaves in the river in Cairns, and slow-moving clouds, and the sea at Somers, and the bird noises in the bush chapel where her ashes were, and I realised I was being a pretty demanding mama.
It dawned on me that I actually know Z better now than when she was born. And if somehow my knowledge of her, and love for her, has expanded, then there is more Z. She is still growing, she is finding her feet in the world, even if I don’t (in the way of all parents) really understand what her job entails. It isn’t how I wanted my daughter to be in the world, but I know now that whatever she is doing is important, because it is important to her, and therefore to me. If I just keep demanding that she fit in with what I need (which I know she can’t do anymore) then we will both feel awful, and maybe I’ll miss seeing what she can do. I wish we’d had more time together in the conventional sense, but I can’t be churlish about it, because it isn’t her fault. And if I want to love her exactly as she is, then I have to be open to receiving her little hippy-style postcards of brightly coloured leaves and odd cloud formations.
I have a better sense now that part of my job in parenting Z is to trace where she went when she died—to resolve for myself where her little soul went, so that I can keep loving her and learning about her. When you prepare for parenthood, they don’t tell you that you may need some existential philosophy. But I think that is one of my main tasks for Z. And, as far as I can tell, she is here in this world. In fact, she is in the process of reconnecting me with the world I felt so lost in after the accident.
For so long after the accident, everything felt wobbly, groundless, precarious. I was terrified about setting up rituals, in case I made promises to her that I couldn’t keep: a grave neglected over the years, a name unspoken. But that was back when I thought of time as a line, and of our grief as a spot fading in the distance.
In those months after the miscarriage, something big shifted, so that I felt more settled with my grief. Where before, when I had heard people say that Z would ‘always be with us’, I would nod and vaguely agree; now I genuinely feel as though she is always with me. She is not stuck in the past, not defined by the trauma of the accident or the delicacy of her newborn form; nor trapped elsewhere in a ‘heaven’ that I don’t believe in, or a far-off future moment of reunion. Instead, I carry her and my grief for her in my heart, in my cells, and I find her everywhere I go. She is woven into things right here—in the clothes and jewellery I choose each morning, the leaves of her pomegranate tree, the starry night, the little words I say quietly to myself and to her. I no longer have to choose between embracing her and being here in this life because I can exist now as her mother; as someone partially constituted by her and the love we still feel for her. I don’t have to choose between life and death either, because they too are intertwined. She skips between both, playing on and around them, as though on a giant Möbius strip.
There’s still sadness that she’s not here in the fleshy, noisy way of other children, but I recognise that as my own small sense of not getting what I want, rather than as any failing on her part. The sadness at losing her and the joy at having her as my daughter have become stitched together, so that I can hardly tell which is which. It’s specific to her, and my love for her, rather than being measurable as happy or sad. So, I’m still a bit of a weepy mess, but in an alive way rather than a broken or depressed way. This is what it means to love a dead child. You can expect nothing back in return. Yet, in accepting this, I feel like she has schooled me on living and dying.
It sounds trite to say, ‘I feel more grounded now,’ but I mean it literally. My child, flesh of my flesh, is buried in the ground, and so that ground is part of me too. When the soles of my feet touch the earth, I say hello to her, I tell her where I’m going. At first she was localised to that particular spot, but the rain has leached her essence and the worms have exchanged her particles, so that now I’m not sure exactly where she is—which means she exists everywhere, in a state of possibility.
Slowly, my sadness for having no more Z in my arms—and in our house, in her fleshy realness—is mingling with wonder that I can still get little peeks of her. I was walking to the shops the other day and it hit me that she might have been walking with me by now. I suddenly thought, ‘Here; this is where her little hand would be, tight in my hand. Walking together.’ And I could just about feel her chubby fingers, the softness of her skin, and could suddenly feel both the no more and the more at the same time. I love you exactly as you are, my darling girl.
•
I feel surprisingly sane, for all that has happened. I think it helped to give myself permission to go insane with grief when I needed to. Just small bits of mundane madness: smelling roses and muttering, I love you, my little one, into their centres, naming our new car and bestowing her with magical protective powers. And is that really insanity? Or just permission to feel the full range of human emotion—to refuse to pack certain emotions off to the loony bin?
As for my desperate searching for a solution to my grief, here is my answer: there is no answer (sharp intake of breath) but you are infinitely more capable of surviving and, indeed, flourishing in this groundless state than you give yourself credit for (exhale). This groundlessness, this suffering, this feeling that your heart will explode and that this is unbearable, is about as normal as it gets, and you are, in fact, able to bear it, even when it doesn’t feel that way. If you can stop trying to escape long enough to pay attention, you’ll notice that not only are you bearing the unbearable, but what feels monumental and unchangeable nonetheless does change moment to moment; sometime subtly, sometimes radically. Even the mountains are not static. The shifting ground beneath us will take away everyone we love, but it will also (eventually) end all suffering. This suffering doesn’t mean that something is broken or wrong with you—this is the state of being human, of being a fragile living thing. This is what it feels like to be stretched between being born and dying.