Tiny, Hard Little Heart

My uterus has shrunk back to its normal size, but I still feel soft in the middle, as if there is space there, pliant and vacant.  I have been seeing an acupuncturist for over a year now, first to support the pregnancy, then to help me get over the loss, and then again to support the second pregnancy, and then again, the loss.  This week I went because it hurts to take a deep breath.

For the last 10 days have I felt nothing, nothing at all after having lost the pregnancy. People can't believe how strong I am. I seem to be moving on.  I felt strangely fine and report this to my acupuncturist. Sitting in the quiet privacy of the treatment room I tell her the whole story of losing the baby.  I can hear my words enter the air and drop like stones onto sand. It's as if I am reporting facts about someone else. I watch her surprise, how it enters and involves her face, changes just slightly the way she is sitting so that she is leaning forward as if to hear more clearly, as if to comprehend better what I am telling her. Her shock and dismay are curious to me to me and I think, Wasn't this an inevitability? This hard fact? This quiet fate?

There is something about her sincerity that induces a softening, my insides feel like they are beginning to liquify, like I am filling up with water.  I can hear a thickening in my voice as I explain the events. "I can't feel my heart," I say finally. She stills herself almost imperceptibly and nods, leans back. She lets my talking wind down and then takes my pulse. "You're right," she said, "Your heart's pretty disconnected from the rest of your body."  She leaves the room and returns, moments later, with needles. She administers the needles into two points: one in the deep, tender part of my armpit, and the other three ribs down to the left of my heart just far enough so that I can feel the warm pulsation that means she has tapped into my chi, the life-giving force that flows like a matrix of rivers throughout the body. She follows the same procedure on the right side of my body and then leaves me to rest.

The moment the door closes, I begin sobbing.  The sobs came from some dark distant place in my body thundering into the quiet room. Somewhere in the building someone turns on a vacuum cleaner. My body shakes and convulses. Slowly, the sobbing subsides  so that, empty and ragged, I do rest.

When my acupuncturist returns quietly clicking open the door, I explain my wet cheeks, and bloodshot eyes. She nods, "The points we worked on today, connecting the heart and the spleen are often disconnected by shock." So this is not strength I guess. This is denial.

I leave the office feeling as if my joints have been disconnected from my body, like everything has been washed out of me. I don't feel better. In fact, I feel worse.

Days pass. Without the shock, I have only sadness to carry around and it is not elegant or beautiful. It doesn't look strong. It is not impressive. Truthfully I'd rather skip this hurting part because I have already done it once, not so long ago for another baby. I don't want to feel it all again, but I'm afraid I have no choice. I cannot skip the steps of grief and if I try I think that it may infect my life, slowing welling up, hindering my ability to feel other things, like pure joy, like contentment. So I have begun looking at my grief, feeling it, trying to take care of it tenderly as if my sadness were my baby and needed me. Hello sadness, I say to myself. Hello baby. I have even begun to imagine that I might hurt the sadness by denying it, and maybe then I would also be denying the life that was beginning inside of me. So I let the grief live with me for now, for as long as it lasts, hoping that in doing so, I am making room for whatever lies ahead.

Rainier Maria Rilke--10th Elegy

That someday,
at the close of this fierce vision
I may sing praise and jubilation to assenting angels!
That my heart's clear-striking hammers won't fail
to sound from landing on slack, doubtful or broken strings!
That my streaming face might make me more radiant
That my humble weeping might bloom.
Oh, nights that I weeped through, how much you will mean
to me then. Disconsolate sisters, why did I not kneel
more fervently, bending to receive you, and lose myself more
in your loosened hair? 
How we squander our sorrows,
gazing beyond them into the sad wastes of duration
to see if they have an end.
But they are our winter foliage,
our dark evergreens,
one of the seasons of our interior year,
-and not only season,
but place,
settlement,
lair,
soil,
home.