Even After Everything

Even After Everything

1 

Searching for Steadiness


Peace is the centre of the atom, the core
Of quiet within the storm. . . .
The primal image: God within the heart.

Madeleine L’Engle, The Weather of the Heart

When I first plugged the dates into the due date estimator online, I let out a gasp of surprise when I saw the date it gave me: December 25. Not just because it was Christmas Day, but also because it meant this baby would be born a year nearly to the day that we lost our first.

That gasp held the predicament that has haunted all of humankind from the beginning: Ultimately, if this—if anything—is a love story, it is also a risk story. To open ourselves to love is to expose ourselves to the Great Asterisk that renders every love—large or small, person or passion—vulnerable to the terrible risks of loss. Love and loss are always closer than we’d care to confess. The line between the two is thin as the rim of a coin, and, as if tossed into the air, ever shimmering.

And I felt more exposed than ever. Just months after losing our first pregnancy and in the first trimester of this new pregnancy, I found myself sitting half naked and alone in an exam room waiting for an ultrasound after the handheld Doppler couldn’t find the heartbeat.

I had heard those words before—“we can’t find the heartbeat”—and my panic swelled now like the high tide as my body remembered. Being told that death has happened inside of you while you are still alive is not something the body ever forgets. A shock like that gets locked inside muscle memory for a lifetime, and it was coming roaring back for me now.

“It’s still early,” the nurse, Maggie, had told me as she left the room. “The Doppler doesn’t pick up everything this early along. We’ll get you in there, hon.” Maggie was the one I often talked to when I called with my many questions. She always called me hon, in the Middle Tennessee accent we would come to know so well during the years we spent in Knoxville for my husband’s doctoral program.

It was early summer, the first summer after the pandemic had been declared. Just months before, in March, two biological events in microscopic scale began in parallel, and they would change my life forever in dramatically different ways. Particles. Cells. The smallest measurable matter began gathering force. One would culminate, or so we hoped, in the birth of our child, a person we had not yet met but to whom we would belong forever. The other would result in a pandemic causing six million worldwide deaths and untold tragedies, all brought about by something so small we couldn’t see, forever splicing the lives of survivors into the kind of before-and-after no one ever asked for.

It was astonishing to consider how something so small, smaller than the period at the end of a sentence, could loom so large in consequence for our lives. And the very same could be said about this new life growing inside of me. After my pregnancy was confirmed, my husband, Zach, and I moved through each week with conflicting emotions: hope that my body’s hormones and this baby’s cells would keep multiplying toward life, and paralyzing fear as we watched case counts and deaths in their exponential climb.

We were keenly aware that this pregnancy right on the heels of our first loss was still early, still intensely vulnerable. So when the pink parallel lines revealed themselves, I had known this could be the beginning, or the beginning of the end. There was joy, but it was joy of the brittle sort, if only because I didn’t know if I could trust it yet.

And so my pregnancy became the experience of clashing polarities: How can you possibly hold in tension the hope that radical love inspires against life’s terrible risks? How can you live every day facing down the probability factors of life or death? Every day, I screened for symptoms—was that a tickle in my throat? Was I breathing okay? Every cough, a question I dared not answer. Every time I went to the bathroom, I feared blood, even as I looked for signs of life—cravings for Pink Lady apples and Earl Grey, gagging every time I brushed my teeth. Every day I hoped, and I feared my hope.

For some women pregnancy is a state of wonder. I was one of them, for a time. For others it is a state of fight, flight, or freeze, except you can’t fight what you can’t control. Not really. And you can’t fly from your own body. So mostly you freeze, in a suspension of fear, powerlessness, anxious unknown. The possibility of loss was a constant presence, quietly shadowing my every move.

The physical markers of threat didn’t help, either. When I arrived at the clinic that morning for what was a routine firsttrimester checkup, I was wearing a mask that I had affixed in the car before entering. Medical staff in their N95s intercepted me at the door for a temperature check and screening questions. I pumped hand sanitizer on my way to the elevators, even though I had gloves on, and let another woman go first since we couldn’t stay six feet apart in the elevator. These were the days the mere sight of nostrils could send me into an anxiety attack. I had hardly left my house in two months, working from home, getting groceries delivered. Doing so now felt precarious, like walking headlong into a minefield.

The angel told Mary, “Do not fear.” But now—as I pressed oily palm prints into the exam table paper—my system was flooded with it. It became an unholy baptism, my every nerve ending immersed in sweat-beaded cortisol and held under.

Minutes bled into tens, twenty, more. I could feel myself spiraling. I scanned the room for a still point, something I could focus on to hold me steady, the way focusing on a doorknob or light switch helps me keep my balance in a yoga pose. Not the clock. Not my phone. This was no time for scrolling.

But even as I scrambled for steadiness, the tensions within charged and sparked like signal fires on some forgotten shore. And the silence only fanned their flames. How was I to make sense of the wonder of moving through my first trimester during Advent, as I had just months earlier, only to lose my pregnancy the week before the world would celebrate its most historic birth?

Was it brave or simply reckless to try for life while the deadliest global health crisis in modern memory rapidly gathered force? Was it love or a radical failure of care to bring a child into such a world? In a global moment in which a “positive” test result could mean either the best news or the worst scenario, were Zach and I supposed to feel thrilled or terrified in the face of two pink lines?

And how, in the tension familiar to all who love, could a love so full, so fierce, render us so vulnerable, so afraid, so helpless to protect this little one from harm?

These were the variables. Where was the constant?

I closed my eyes in a desperate search for center. There was nothing for me to do except keep breathing, so that’s what I did there on the exam table, and the rhythm slowly took the shape of an improvised breath prayer I have kept with me ever since:

Deep inhale: I AM

Long exhale: With Us

Again, again, again. “I AM,” the name God revealed of Godself. “With Us,” the name of God-born-human, a promise of presence in every moment. This one, too. The “us” was important to me. Because even now, as I sat alone on the exam table, I prayed to God there were still two of us.

If ever I was in a liminal space, it was now.

Liminality is derived from the Latin word limen, meaning “threshold,” and anthropologists have coded liminal spaces as the transition between the before and after of a defining rite of passage. For the rest of us, it may be defined more simply as living in the ellipses—the unsettled in-between where there are no maps. Liminality is a place where contingencies and counterfactuals haunt every hope. On such a quaking threshold, our illusions of control are shaken loose. The certainties of centuries are shattered, as poet Janet Kalven writes. Liminality can be a profoundly disempowering place to find oneself