secret deaths

This is an old bit of writing, from last year. I never shared it because it was too fresh, and I thought I’d share it now.

I felt a lot of shame about being pregnant again at 41, after a loss. I did not want to tell anyone - ever. I thought, we will just show up w a baby in our family pictures and people will think, “oh they had a baby? I must’ve known and forgotten - they have six? When did they have six?” Years ago when my children were very young, we were in a homeschooling group where I recall many of the long-skirted older moms announcing pregnancies and then grieving miscarriages. I remember their children, too, grieving these miscarriages with them and I thought, these old Catholic women should be more careful. I thought they seemed silly. 

Shame on me. I had no idea. 

I didn’t tell anyone this time - thought we’d wait at least til the 12-week mark, make it past the timing of last year’s loss. This time around, I was thinking of all of the wonderful things about adding a bonus baby to the family - precious baby clothes, Santa again, how this smallest one would keep the teenagers tightly tied to home. At the OB, the desk girl, who I figured looked about my age, called me Ma’am. The nurse taking vitals did the same. My birth year got a long look. Stephen and I were excited to see the little bean on ultrasound. The pretty young tech quietly clicked measurements, long faced and silent, and I saw baby, 11 weeks, so still and measuring only nine. Then the screen was full of the flat lines of a silent heartbeat, and then back, as if to spare me,  to a too-small, too-still grey circle.  An insect in amber. 

I’m ashamed that I was shocked. I should not have been shocked. I’d thought perhaps the ultrasound would reveal twins. Imagine! I would call my sisters and laugh at the ridiculousness of it! I had googled “advanced maternal age congenital issues” and  “chromosomal disorders mother age 41”  so many times that my Facebook ads began to suggest nursing degree programs. I felt sure we’d have a new baby with Down Syndrome. Or some difficult but manageable heart issue. Or gastrochesis. But I didn’t imagine a second lighting strike in just the same place with just the same timing. 

Having not told the children was a relief as I sat in the small room waiting for the doctor, and also a misery. I’ve had what is called a “missed miscarriage”. It’s rare, google tells me. 1% of pregnancies end in this terrible way - had I not seen the silent ultrasound, I would believe myself, more than a week and a half later, still pregnant. My body has not recognized the loss. I am currently pregnant with a dead baby. It’s macabre and unnerving. I am anxious and praying each day for a miscarriage I don’t desire to go ahead and happen. I don’t wonder about this in the daylight, but at night I wonder if perhaps the ultrasound machine was broken, or the tech was new. Maybe it was too early for the belly ultrasound. Maybe the young tech did things wrong. Maybe things are fine. 

I can wait a short bit longer, or I can go in for a small surgery to remove the baby. I can take a pill with scary side effects that will induce things. If I wait I wait too long for a natural resolution, I’m at risk for infection. I have not been told how long this actually is. If I have the surgery, what will I tell my always-home children, who still do not know? Will I lie? If I tell them, will my littlest children say embarrassing things to our family and friends, whom I have not told? “Mommy’s baby died in her belly.”? Can I tell just the eldest two? They’ll be so sad. Even the teens are too young to understand all of the nuanced difficulties of a baby. They will only think of the joy of a baby sibling. It’s been a sad year. We’ve had a hurricane of griefs, and we are in the midst of some very frightening health issues unrelated to this pregnancy, issues that lay heavily on the children already. How can I add to this? I am ashamed. I should have thought ahead - I should have thought of the fragility of the children in this ground-is-lava kind of year. I should have remembered how tenuous are the roots of a new life, how easily the roots can fail. 

This pregnancy was high risk, bc I am so old and for some other more boring reasons. Dealing with this through COVID has been especially frightening. I wanted to do all I could to protect this little one, who through no fault of her own had to implant in an ancient, low functioning, worn out uterus. No one really knows about the impact of Covid in early pregnancy yet. We live in a rural southern town like Flannery might write about, where we are considered flaming liberals by people at the grocery because we wear masks. We haven’t been to church since March (they don’t appear to be as careful as we’d hope) and some of the few church friends that have called to check on us (a kindness, even so) have said things along the lines of, “you’re so fearful of death, you lack faith. You need to be at church.” Death. Ha. Of course I fear death, but less my own than that of my child. Does anyone sane not fear death?

Our health situations embarrass both Stephen and I. We feel old and fragile for the first time, when we have always felt, mostly, young and healthy. We are blades of grass, sprung up in the morning and gone by evening. Of course we knew we could not last forever, but we never believed it until this year. We tell nearly no one. We drive to strange doctors offices in far-away towns and we do not ask people to pray. After a year of two job losses, a deeply sorrowful situation with our church, and a slew of other troubles, I do not want to be the person who constantly has a problem and always talks about themselves. So now we are trudging through a terrifying time with an unfortunate and unnatural isolation. Our church wasn’t much for meal trains and flowers anyhow, but being inside of a secret, silent grief Is making all of our other grievings pile up. We’ve always leaned hard on our church community and this is an unwelcome change. There is something corrective in it, I believe, something that was out of alignment and needed to be brought to center. But I don’t know what yet. 

As soon as I knew I was pregnant, I emailed a women’s ministry to request a relic of St. Gianna Molla - a modern saint who was a mother and a pediatrician. She died after choosing to carry a risky pregnancy to term. I asked her prayers for every day for this baby, pressing the prayer card to my growing belly. The relic is tucked inside of a business envelope now on my bedside table, where it makes me angry. A relic is something a good Catholic would usually be quite careful with, but this morning I found myself, deliberate and un-cautious, dripping saline solution on the envelope as I put in my contacts. 

This year, everything regular about our lives became flipped upside down, and I begin to feel God as more of a god of chance than I ever felt before. I am offered no special protection from failing babies, failing bodies, failing brains, than anyone who knows Him or who does not. God doesn’t offer his friends a special insurance deal. 

In the grocery, a maskless man passes too near for comfort, pouts and points at my mask, raises his eyebrows at me. I think of myself, looking so normal, carrying a secret death right within, and I think of him, carrying secret deaths of his own.