Here goes. I hope people can identify with it on some level. (Long!)
Miscarriage. Language is treacherous at the best of times, and sometimes downright rotten; especially, it seems, when it is inventing words for things which used to have no words. To miscarry: if we turn literal, to carry something wrongly. As if the women, the wombs were at fault; the term is almost more loaded still than the other, ugly one, abortion, dropped careless and often mercifully illegible onto doctors? notes. The German term is even worse: Fehlgeburt, wrong-birth; that it is all wrong, is no argument; that is part of the many-reason why it is so gutting, it seems almost, once over, as if there had never been anything there: it ends in ignominity, in messiness and pain and bleeding, in buying Feminine Hygiene again, for weeks on end, and there is a woefully flat stomach to show for it, and the only trace is the two strips, still, on the plastic wand we wave in vain and desperation, a cruel echo of initial joy, literally taking the piss. And a howling loss that speaks its name, if it dares, into a volley of shaking heads: it was for the best, it probably wasn?t healthy, nature knows what it?s doing, be thankful. Some of us might accept this in more or less the spirit in which it was meant, one or two of us might think, towards these comforters: I didn?t want perfect, I didn?t need healthy, whatever that means in your language; I wanted alive. The loss circles, in the time to come, around points in time, due dates, anniversaries; around the little failures every month that we fall into wholesale, despite ourselves; around a parallel path where there is not this loss, that opens in our minds (and there only) when we come up from the D&C, or down from the gas and air. An idea, a dream, a throwing of caution to the winds, a setting going of the uncontrollable machinery of life (Sylvia, you had a short, unhappy life, but: Love set you going like a fat gold watch ? for this, you lucky, lucky thing), from its mother?s womb untimely ripped.
In Hamburg, the third time, in the hospital, they all used my title, kept referring to me as Dr. X. Although we were all at pains to establish and reassure that I was not a medical doctor, it was fitting, somehow, due to my hard-won expertise in the field, so that that third time I knew sooner than the actual doctor what was up: sooner, even, almost, than the human chorionic gonadotrophin, which at that point was still rising, more gently, but still unknowingly, multiplying in my blood, wasting itself. Later it would begin to dissolve, fizzing as pain into the recesses of my tired mind and my heavied limbs. I saw the sac, coffee-bean-shaped and completely black in a fuzz of white, and said immediately: there?s nothing in there. The dulled light of the scanning room, the dark ceiling seemed to fall featherlike on me, gently, swinging: to meet it rose the sour certainty that it was taking its course again, life was forming in me with a dead space in its centre, and I fought to drag together my bits of dignity: to take it with head held high. She said: I just want to be sure, and directed the soundwaves at every possible angle onto the dead space, forcing it to form and reform its failing image: torture. I said, again: no, no, there?s nothing there. Not long, and she had to turn to me and admit me to be right. How I wish I were innocent of this expertise.
While she was filling in the forms, I laid my hand on the place where it was happening, and, quite the mother, spoke to myself: it?s all right, poor body, it?s not your fault, I promise we will do it again, and it will work. Overwhelming the rush of compassion for the poor empty space my body had formed in good faith. Compassion for myself, in synecdoche.
They did all they could for me in there, considering there was nothing left to do, in the sense of saving: they took me and put my body back on its feet; they were efficient and kind, and their kindness meant all the more to me as someone motherless, struggling to be mother. I thanked every one of them, almost humbly. I think some of them were not used to being thanked, not like this. Many, maybe, were too used to being savaged for bringing bad news. Their routine in kindness was the saddest indicator that I am not alone.
D&C: oh, how nice it is to come up out of a light anaesthetic, and how soul-destroying to realise that the white bed and the after-wooziness is not forever, but that there is life and grieving and wading uphill through invisible mud on to-everyone-else dry, flat, sunlit land to be faced: marsh covering the promised land. They were reluctant to let me get up: the first time, I had been more or less straight from my bed on waking, as if on a spring, Jack-in-a-bed, a matter of honour; this time I was floppier, less elastic, more tired and resigned, prepared to read crap magazines and be grateful for water. I refused the later offer of food, looking forward to the promised, impending release and stuffing my face at an American diner. My mind was not on what I had lost; already, I was making that fatal mistake: the desperation to be up and on, to beat life at its own sick game. In me, the dignity of survival, of the stiff upper lip, fought a quiet and dirty battle with the dignity of collapse, of grief.