Hermit crab
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This guest post is by Annie. Annie is an obstetrician/gynecologist who, despite already knowing the horrible possibilities that come with pregnancy, was still wholly unprepared for the devastation following the loss of her daughter. Her family consists of herself, her husband and a variable number of cats.
Sitting in the discomfort of the unknown and uncontrollable is the worst thing. No, my daughter being dead is the worst thing. Reading other mothers’ words about their lost babies is the hardest and the best thing. I can’t go to support groups, yet. I don’t want to hear about rainbow babies or how their living children are dealing. My husband says “but we’ll have to listen to their sad stories.” We are childless parents. Our sad story feels enough on its own right now. Still, I keep going back to these words, these websites. In the six weeks since we lost our daughter (I should be 27 weeks now, though I’m trying to stop doing the math of pregnancy), I have read two memoirs on stillbirth. Both authors had more babies, after. What if I cannot? The fear is too great, hampers connection before it could start. I want to reach out, I want to touch these others that everyone says will help me survive, but I cannot. So instead, I keep reading.
I started looking into poetry. At first, I found it a little strange how the poetry theme kept cropping up. Your advice to help me through this is to write poetry about my dead baby? I was already a poetry skeptic, before. But maybe poetry would be right for this moment, somehow ease this pain, help me connect in another way. And the poetry quotes in babyloss writing sounded so meaningful. I turned to googling: “Emily Dickinson death poems,” “who is Hafiz,” “poems on grief.” But I found that the complete poems, around the meaningful quotes, made me feel nothing, that religious themes grated or that “poems on grief” were about people who left more memories or objects behind – oh the amazing jealousy of grief. I guessed poetry could not bring me solace, either.
Then I opened Devotions, a collection of poems by Mary Oliver. The only book of poetry I own, which I bought before, when my husband and I were dating. On his fridge he had a Mary Oliver poem displayed, handwritten by one of his sisters, which had me googling “Mary Oliver poems” (secretly of course, I didn’t want to seem obsessed with him or something! And I had never heard of her). I am a little afraid to look at the poems I loved before, during that newly-in-love time – “Don’t Hesitate” and “Wild Geese.” Before, I loved the way they spoke about giving into love and the wildness and joy of life. Now, somehow, the joy does not grate (as many other joys do). Instead, I feel the weight of love and discover new layers in the lines:
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
As I turn pages randomly, I find more and more of Oliver’s poems speak to me. The nature theme resonates in a new way. “Shadows” conveys my newfound understanding of the nonspecific, random viciousness of life: “everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar of the tornado swears there was no mention ever of any person, or reason – I mean the waters rise without any plot…” Just as there was no plot, no reason my placenta decided to detach, telling my uterus to eject my daughter from its safety when she was too young to survive this world.
At first, I think “The Hermit Crab” speaks to me for a similar reason. The way Oliver describes the sea “slashing along as usual, shouting and hissing toward the future, turning its back with every tide on the past, leaving the shore littered every morning with more ornaments of death—” communicates the same severe and timeless aspect of nature I was forced to confront by the loss of my pregnancy and daughter, well before her April due date. But then I reread the poem. And read it again. It is not just the theme of nature/the universe being harsh and small things being fragile that speaks to me. There is something hidden, something hopeful in it. I realize I am the hermit crab in this story. I am in the “darkness of a shell folded like a pastry.” I am turning away “against the light” and the author “looking in.” But I am also choosing a house from the “pearly rubble” the sea has brought me and continuing along the tideline. My hope is my rebellion: to keep living, to keep giving, to want to try to get pregnant again. When I know that maybe I never will or maybe the baby will die again and maybe Adeline will be our only pregnancy and child, maybe we will never have living children. Maybe we will try to adopt and the process will be hard, we will be rejected, that other woman who gets to birth a child who lives will instead decide to keep him or her. Maybe our only parenthood will be that one hour, and this remembrance that follows. My anxiety is wildly imaginative and can vividly illustrate all the ways our future could be incredibly hard and even more damaged by this loss than it already is. And yet:
“and what a rebellion
to leap into it
and hold on,
connecting everything,
the past to the future—
which is of course the miracle—
which is the only argument there is
against the sea.”
My hope is my argument against the sea. I can use my imagination for vivid hopes, too. The sea sees no past or future, it just is. But I have both. I will hold on in this painful present and connect the past to my future, one moment at a time. To the vast ocean, my life may not hold much meaning or significance. But I can either give in to futility, I can refuse to find a new shell now that I have outgrown the old one, or I can find hope by leaping into the “pearly rubble” and making it my new home. In this moment, existence is rebellion enough.
What poetry speak to your grief, your rage, your rebellion, your hope?