November 15, 2008

In the months before Gaz and I moved in together, I had a miscarriage in my friend Lisa’s toilet. I remember Lisa was making a lamb pizza at the time. This whole meaty mess.

We had been away for my birthday — Gaz had taken me on a romantic weekend to Philip Island, where we visited the chocolate factory and held hands and watched Cape Barren Geese stab at the ground. When we came back, I was bleeding. A hospital sonographer pointed to where the baby’s heart had stopped.

I called my Mum. I said, ‘Mum, the baby died.’ It was raining and I was sitting on the low cold wall outside the hospital.

She said, ‘You must be relieved.’

I was about twelve weeks along. It was a bit more than a year after I’d left my marriage, and by that time I was working at the Royal Australian Air Force base in Laverton, west of Melbourne. My security clearance hadn’t come through yet. Every day, a man I hardly knew had to escort me to the bathroom and wait outside the door while I checked on the progress of my spontaneous abortion, a paperwork term for an indescribable pain.

In the hours after it finally happened, my grief was exquisite. I sat in the ultrasound room and let my whole body take the force of it, every cell of me that had suddenly become less. My many small accumulated griefs were nothing beside this one milestone grief, this overwhelming and life-altering loss.

I was checked into hospital overnight, after my grieving body tried to prolapse and kill me. I ate limp pasta from a plastic tray and watched television with the speaker right next to my ear so I didn’t wake the nearly-dead. At three in the morning Gaz climbed under the one-person plastic sheets and I felt the magnitude of my acute sadness in the marrow of my bones.

In the days that followed, I cultivated a great depth of sorrow. If I could be this sad forever, I decided, I would remember my dead baby infinitely. It was a pure and profound grief. It was a visceral and whole grief.

No one tells you the weird things a body might do after prematurely evacuating a womb. It bleeds. It cramps. It lactates. I was stripped of every ounce of energy. I felt a hundred years old with lead in my feet. I was so tired I couldn’t even go to the bathroom on my own. My breasts leaked thick colostrum into my bra. An excess of care. Nourishment for no one. It was as though someone had physically removed a vital part of me; and I suppose, in a way, they had.

So I stayed on the couch. At first, other people sat with me. They brought cups of tea and biscuits and my favourite flowers. I was in a capsule of sorrow. A manifestation of how absolutely sad I was managing to be. Boy, was I sad. I sat on the couch and thought about how my son would never sit on couches. I got a glass of orange juice and thought about how my son would never get a glass of orange juice. I poured everything I had into the absoluteness of my dire sadness, a grief so spectacularly large it would be written into the history books.

If this sounds excruciating, that’s because it was. Not only the ethereal misery of it, but the utter boredom.

It was a surprise to realise part of me was bored of the sadness. It had become like a guy I tolerated in the lunchroom. I knew it was necessary, but I dreaded its presence. It wasn’t intolerable, but it was tiresome. It became a droll echo lasting all day and into my sleep. I woke up each morning and saw my grief waiting by the door and thought, Christ, not him again.

I began to feel obligated to it. I got up and put on my sad blanket and sat on my sad couch and tried to focus on making sure I was the right amount of sad. What were some other things my son would never do? What were the other ways I would never be happy again? I wrote letters to my loss, watched baby shows on TV to make sure I was feeling it as completely as possible. The guilt overwhelmed me. I didn’t understand how I could grow tired of feeling bad without forgetting what I had lost. While I had been crying into my blanket, my body had healed. It had happened without me.

The dissonance of grief is like an old cardigan. You can’t throw it out. You love it because you’ve known it so long, and it’s comfortable even though it’s moth-eaten. You know it would lighten your load to chuck it, but at the same time there are days when you desperately need it. There is boredom in the repetition of sadness, but also comfort.

I used to know the exact date I was in hospital as though it were stitched into my aorta but, all these years later, I have to go to Facebook and look it up. On the 15th of November 2008 I wrote:

Anna Spargo-Ryan lost someone very small and special today

(Underneath, someone has commented: Not one of the cats?!)

For a long time afterwards, I drove around with a pair of tiny socks in the centre console of my car. They were not in their original packaging; I had washed and folded them again, giving the illusion they had been worn. When the fists of grief pummelled me, I took them out. I sniffed them. I unrolled them and put them on my fingers to imagine them in action. And when it had passed, I put them back in the console for next time. Eventually they just smelled like my own stale tears and I realised I couldn’t make them become an infant, however strongly I willed it. I don’t know where they are now. In landfill, more than likely.

I took the matter I had from the pregnancy — did the hospital give it to me? did I fish it out of my friend’s toilet? — and buried it in secret under a new tree in the garden I had lost in my divorce. I knew that tree would grow tall. On a low twig I hung a plastic Christmas ornament shaped like an angel. I let myself imagine the organic matter that had been my pregnancy would nourish the tree. I sat next to it and cried. I touched the ornament like it was a baby. When my ex-husband moved out, I took the ornament and put it in a box that’s somewhere in my house but I don’t know precisely where.

I keep a small bag of baby stuff in the wardrobe in my bedroom. There’s a grey knit jacket with big wooden buttons and a taupe two-piece with striped feet. There’s a cheap cotton onesie with I’m one in a million embroidered on the front. It’s all wrapped in an expensive woollen blanket, pink-striped, which I bought from a flashy boutique after I knew I would miscarry. It cost all the money I had — several hundred dollars. An exorbitant amount for a baby blanket. But that felt like the right thing to do, to give this collection of cells everything, since I would never give it anything more.

In the beginning, I took out the blanket every few days and wept into it, but I couldn’t tell you exactly where it is now.

I suppose this is how loss goes.