Hemispheres
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We are honoured today to have another guest post from Jess. Mother of one living son and one son who died at 32 gestational weeks. Neuroimmunologist by training. Lover of nature by birthright. Dancer by calling.
I have never seen people this way before. Babies. All of them, babies. Not in the sense that they once were babies. But that they are babies now. Babies forever. Babies grasping their way through the dark universe that created them and loves them unconditionally. I love them too, as if they were all my babies.
I’m back at work, a month and a half after losing my son. I look up from a lunch that won’t feed itself to me and I see each of my colleagues as a baby. My babies. I ride a bus through the city on a sunny spring day and unnamed people, with faces I will forget, reveal themselves to me also as my babies. My friend just had her second baby. She and her daughter are my babies too. I sit down at a restaurant and a waiter with an unironic mullet approaches - also my baby. An old, wind-etched man sits on a bench at the beach, offering bits of bread to vulturous seagulls. He is my baby too.
Miracles, they all are. Babies, they all are. Mine, they all are. I love them and I am grateful for their existence. They didn’t pass through my own body but didn’t we all pass through a cosmic womb? And are we not all part of the very same cosmos that created us? All of us made from the same stuff as each other - mother molecules flung from long-lost stars, molded into human shapes? The universe expressing itself through flesh and thought? I love you, I am you and you are mine. We belong to each other and to the universe that made us and is us.
And yet, all of this cosmic love, gratitude, and bullshit can’t touch the surface of the very real love I have for my one, really mine, baby who isn’t here. The one who did pass through my body but not through the gates of life.
This is what they mean when they say heart-breaking.
On one side of my heart, a deep well of love, admiration, awe, and gratitude for every being that gets to exist. How is it that anyone gets to make it out into the world alive? What an absolute miracle each life is. And then there is the other side of my heart - an ever-tunneling density of love packed into a black hole that will never be fully received. A black hole that is continuously and exponentially imploding to oblivion. Humid, heavy, solid darkness. Grief.
Fourteenth-century Persian poet, Hafez wrote this about totality but maybe also about heartbreak…
“…change rooms in your mind for a day
All of the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
in your heart…”
There is an equatorial fracture across my heart. Hemispheric gratitude and hemispheric grief held together by over-extended sinew. Beating heart cells stretch to capacity across that chasm. Sometimes the halves hold together. Sometimes a tender link finally snaps and the whole thumping mess comes crashing apart, my heart splitting in two. On good days, there is harmony in my heart. Gratitude exists beside grief, not as a consolation or a silver lining, but as a cohabitant, a mis-matched but polite roommate. Good days sometimes last a minute, sometimes an hour, sometimes a few, but rarely whole days. Not yet at least.
I contain other hemispheres too: regret and forgiveness, anger and acceptance, remembering and numbness…
I contain gratitude for every being that gets to live. I contain grief for the life I carried that didn’t get to live. I contain regret that I didn’t hold my son longer while I could, that I didn’t take his picture, and didn’t unwrap the blanket around his body. I contain forgiveness for myself for these things because I did what I needed to do to survive the moment. I contain furious anger at the injustice of a body that can carry and grow a human only to betray him in the final moments and anger at the absence of an explanation. I contain acceptance that mystery is part of biology, we couldn’t have done anything differently, and medicine is an evolving practice. I contain memories of feet kicking my sides, of songs I wrote and sung across an amniotic barrier, of adrenaline shivers in the hospital, and dreaded words piercing my body. I contain numbness, empty thoughts, empty space, blankness.
I suppose this must be the work of a mending heart - bringing hemispheric dualities closer and closer together until the chasm becomes a scar. I wish myself and I wish you all a supported journey from chasm to scar.