Loon calls

Reflecting on my would-be baby's first birthday

My baby who I never got to meet lives among the pines along a lake in northern Wisconsin.

She cries the laughing call of the loon. His eyes are the clear cerulean of the water in the afternoon. Everything about them that I never got to know is stitched into the ecosystem, soil and soul and heather and heart.

Today should have been his birthday. A celebration of toddling and talking, complete with smash cake and an untrusting side eye that says “could this hunk of chocolate delight really be for me?” Though with two older siblings, maybe I wouldn’t have made it to 12 months without indulging in that kind of sugar.

She would have had all that and more for love.

As it is, I’m celebrating having just paid off the obscene medical bill for a surprise pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage. In the month before we set sail for Europe and affordable healthcare, I ended up exactly where I started, save for the hole in my own heart where his once beat. I am fighting the weight of the world this week, holding myself up, grumpy and grieving but grateful.

It took me a week last year to pinpoint the early March funk that settled over me. Everything just seemed doomed, no matter how many crocuses I spotted. Finally, I put together the date as the one that matched the upper corner of the single sonogram pasted into my journal--the only proof of the floodgates that opened in my heart the moment I saw two blue lines and the hopeful conversations about names and plans. There’s no baby here, but there was lots and lots of love that needed a place to go. Even though my conscious brain didn’t put the pieces together, my body did. My grief came bubbling up regardless of what I knew. I was tense and tired, snippy and quick to cry.

This year, I figured it out earlier--a few days beforehand. But I am still reeling.

I don’t know how long this grief will last. I don’t see an out, but most days I don’t feel it anymore unless I deliberately try. Maybe that’s my cross to bear. I never planned to have a third baby, but once I was pregnant, I never imagined losing them.

The cruelty of the world is that pain like this exists, invisible to everyone else but flowing in my blood. The cruelty of humans is that we look away from it. We bury it in ourselves and for others. We try to pretend it doesn’t hurt, that March 10 or any other day someone marks in their bones is just another day. On paper, it is, but where our stories are truly written--deep in our souls, restructured in and on our DNA--the message is different.

Everyone carries some of this pain. Not a facsimile of mine, but something that is deeply their own. Something that touched their lives like a white-hot brand and changed the plot. We have a choice. We can see it in others, honor their pain and sit with it awhile, or we can pretend it does not exist. We can allow others to criminalize us for our humanity or we can do the harder thing. We can say the date out loud, ask ourselves what we are carrying, stay in the room when the answer is heavy.

I took a walk while my son was at his piano lesson tonight. The sky has started taking on the pale hint of summer evenings around 6:15 pm, casting a spectacular golden glow across everything. I’ve never seen a murmuration of starlings before, and the one I saw was admittedly small--maybe 60 birds--but the wending and winding of their twilight acrobatics above a stretch of pink, yellow, and cream buildings of a Berlin boulevard was mesmerizing. My pain feels a little like that today. Everchanging, part of a world that is infinitely more complex and beautiful than I possibly hope to capture.

I don’t know if I believe in Heaven. I don’t picture my baby sitting atop Jesus’ knee or toddling for some heavenly parent that I could envy or rage against or hold in contempt for my pain. Instead, I believe in Earth. I believe in connections among things living and passed, between the birds in the sky and the sun that sets and rises on me and my Wisconsin lake, every day without fail. I believe that there’s beauty in the pain, and that feeling it, naming it, and sharing it can bring us closer together.

Have a slice of chocolate cake just because you’re alive.