Nom de Plume

It’s been a rough week.

Tuesday night, I had really bad cramping, but still not a lot of blood. Wednesday night, I officially miscarried. I had no idea it would be so bad. You read online that a miscarriage usually consists of “cramping worse than your period.” What they don’t say is that you have full-on contractions and that they are probably the worst pain you’ve ever had in your life. So between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., I had contractions that increased in severity and duration, with respites that decreased until they were about a minute apart and I passed the gestational sac and god know what else. I thought it was over, but my cramping all yesterday and all through the night have been almost as bad.

The dreams haven’t helped. Perhaps it’s all the murder mysteries that I’ve been reading, but when I finally fell asleep at 5 in the morning yesterday, I dreamed that I killed someone in the Mafia and was being tortured as a payback. I woke up at the point they were about to gouge my eyes out. This morning, I woke in a cold sweat after having dreamed that my wallet was stolen, and my bank accounts drained and I owed several million dollars. Economic crisis anyone?

I didn’t expect this to be so hard. I thought, when it was first certain that a miscarriage was imminent, that it would happen and I would be sad for a couple of days and that it would be over. Intellectually, one knows that this is for the best–an nonviable fetus, the body’s way of making sure that the kid is healthy, blah blah. I wasn’t prepared that the loss of what is essentially a clump of cells at this point would make me feel so grief-stricken. There runs through all our lives a thread of wanting something, of yearning for something more than we have, of being something more than we are. And in some strange, fundamental way, I think that losing a fetus represents a loss of hope.

My doctor had said that I should think about having some sort of ceremony for closure, whether it’s burying the tissue or writing a letter, or doing something that would be meaningful to me. I didn’t scoff, precisely, but I didn’t think I needed it either. I was wrong. Gross as it sounds, I wish I had saved the tissue to bury, but frankly, at 2, 3, and 4 in the morning, bleary with pain and fatigue, it was the last thing on my mind. So I write this now, not as a bid for sympathy, or a woe-is-me post, but as a public declaration of sorrow. We don’t talk about these things except in clinical terms, even though so many of us go through it. It’s a loss of what might have been, and to you, Steve’s and my what-might-have-been, I say goodbye.