Who tends the brokenhearted?

An unknown woman, a whale, a bear and a forest enter my life exactly when I needed them

The nurse just left. Another pill is dissolving under my tongue as others are slowly melting in my cervix. 

This isn’t what I picked this hospital for. I didn’t pick this room. I didn’t pick this life. 

I should be giving birth, not saying goodbye.

My mind and body are tingling, like tiny pieces of popcorn bursting from head to toe. Each footstep feels like lifting the weight of a wrecking ball. I see floorboards shattering as I shuffle from the bed to the bathroom. I might trip and fall, but also, would collapsing onto the floor be so bad? 

The whale. Remember the whale? The whale from that news story. The one who wouldn’t let her cub go, even after it had died. The whale whose friends helped nudge the beloved creature when their friend needed rest. She kept swimming, carrying its limp body on her nose so it wouldn’t sink to the ocean floor. This is where I am.

Someone just came into the room. 

She is a beautiful woman with long silvery hair. Her shoulders are wrapped in a shawl of bright colors that remind me of robes I’ve seen in sacred Native American ceremonies. 

She sits beside me and says, I am part of this story now, and a gust of prairie-like wind moves through her hair.

I look at my husband on the edge of the hospital bed who is wiping tears off his cheeks. I tell him I’m not scared.

The door to our hospital room just flung open and now a group of nurses and attendants are looking at me, as if I’m supposed to know what comes next. I keep thinking to myself, Everyone knows why I’m here. That’s why their faces are so sad. Despite this, the coordinated dance of experts feels so precise, like they knew I was coming.

Yes, yes, I know that bed on wheels is for me. I look back at the woman with silvery hair, hoping she will follow along—and she does. 

She is there as I climb into the surgical bed, which takes us down a long series of halls, turns and bumps. She is there as my contractions increase and my eyes blur. She is with me as the anesthesiologist asks about my pain level and he grabs my hand, saying, “You’ve suffered enough, my dear.” I watch him grab a surgical needle, insert it into the IV, and almost instantly the muscles in my body start uncurling. 

This woman is with me as the chief resident begins shouting orders outside my room. 

And she comes with me as I am wheeled away from my husband and brought into a surgical room with eight watermelon-sized lights hanging from the ceiling. 

She is with me as my body is lifted onto an even smaller bed and my legs are spread out into the shape of a diamond. She watches as a mask is put on my face. I look back at her and as my eyes flutter and close, I tell her, “You may lead the way.”

***

Anyone who’s ever lost a beloved—a spouse, a parent, a child, a darling pet—knows that the moment they are gone, really gone, your mind, body and spirit get to work. While everything is suspended all at once, nothing is the same and everything starts moving forward at the speed of light while the slow work of piecing yourself together sludges forward. I began trying to make sense of things in terms of identity, of befores and afters. 

How it felt to be pregnant before and how it felt now after. 

I began telling the story of my life to myself, tracing who I was B.C. and who I am A.D. 

My mind was trying to recover from surgery and make sense of the weeks of complications that led to us losing our daughter at 21 weeks gestation. I also felt the impulse to be a dutiful writer and document everything in the moment. Even in life-shattering grief, I still wanted a project to drag along with me. For a few days, I wrote in the Notes app on my phone. Sometimes I wrote with my dog Georgia curled beneath my arms as I lay in bed. Others I wrote as my cheek rested on the floor where I’d planned to put the baby’s crib. Here’s what I said on March 29, the day after we lost her:

Today, grief was very quiet again. There is a stillness in my body, a hush like the sound the tide makes as it is being called back into the ocean. Sometimes it feels as if I have this immense spaciousness to roam and feel and float. Other moments it feels dark and empty and hard like concrete. 

I had many people tell me that my body was made to do this. To make a baby. That it may be hard and tiring but that my body knows the way. In grief, I’m sensing that my body is also equipped to hold me as well. My body is my guide. My heart is my home. I’m trying to help them stay connected and not turn on each other.

I place my hands on my belly and tell myself, “She’s not here anymore.”

I place my hands on my heart and say, “She’s here for always.” 

What I didn’t admit to myself is that my body also felt light, free and energized. I was the most buoyant I’d been in months. My legs, arms and mind filled with electrifying currents of forward motion—as if I could run a marathon, had I not been on careful recovery protocols. There was a medical reason for this burst of energy, I would learn later. In the mix of complications and ER visits while I was pregnant, I was also fighting a placental infection, which was removed that day in the hospital. Your body is feeling better because it’s not fighting to survive anymore. 

As much as I worked to help my body and mind not turn on each other, I didn’t know how to reconcile this world of contrasts. One moment I was trying to organize a writing project and the next I was crying on the carpet and yet in still another, I was trying to rock myself to sleep, begging for rest to let me leave this life. 

During these months, I was trying to get back to normalcy and to feel useful again. I was a freelance writer at the time and had pushed everything off my plate before being admitted to the hospital. My husband was able to work for two to three weeks part-time before his clients needed him to return. 

I, too, wanted to return to things that felt normal, although doing the dishes felt like an insurmountable task. I tried to take grief and harness it into recording meditation videos for other grieving mothers, but that didn’t last long. Looking back at them now, I can see a vacancy in my eyes. My voice and posture feel so hollow five years later—it had been two months since my life shattered and there I was trying to bypass the grief and skip along as a productive little helper.

Eventually this pretending started to catch up with me. Five months into the grieving process, we moved out of our rental house in Denver and bought our first home—a small mountain cabin tucked at the end of a quiet drive surrounded by tall pine trees. Certainly this perfect, idyllic, quiet life would help me get back on track … to productivity, to the regular Amanda. 

In the first few weeks of setting up the house, I hired an electrician to get some lights moved around. His wife Jan manages the business calendar, so they said they’d both come to quote the job in a few days. 

When the day came, Jan and her husband started looking at the small electrical projects we had outside and then, eventually they came inside our house. As she walked into our bedroom, she turned to me and said, “Oh do you meditate? I felt some people here.”

My body shivered.

“People?” I said.

Jan looked over at her husband who was fiddling with wires dangling from the ceiling and said, “Yes, it’s a grandmother and a little girl … a small baby?”

I froze. I scanned the room for any signs, any pictures, anything that could have tipped this lady off.

“They want me to tell you that they’re together,” she said. 

At this point, tears began filling my eyes and dotting my cheeks. 

The closest I’d ever come to trying to hear from the “other side” was a casual Reiki ceremony a friend organized for her birthday once. I was raised to resist anything that contradicted or pulled centrality away from Christianity. And even though I had stopped trying to reconcile my childhood faith during those weeks after being in the hospital, I wasn’t exactly sure if or where my spiritual beliefs were going to land. 

In moments where I could tell someone about losing my baby, I often felt stuck—hanging on the rules I followed about social etiquette and also the nagging sense that even if I told someone, they wouldn’t believe me anyways. But I told Jan that day, however briefly. She was kind and sympathetic, just as anyone would expect. Before it was time for her to leave, she looked around the room and back to my meditation table once more and said, “Your grandmother would like her jewelry to get some air.”

***

In October 2019 I wrote a Note that said I felt like my body was now a waterfall—rushing to nowhere. 

In the middle of my days, my mind would replay any number of scenarios, all asking how I could have protected my baby better or tried something different. I questioned my body, my instincts, the choices I’d made, my hesitance to be excited about being pregnant (and sick/dizzy all the time), my faith in God (could magic thoughts have at least helped a little?). I immersed myself in every knowledge-based route of seeking I could find. I researched matrescence, through the work of Aurélie Athan, a clinical psychologist. I began piecing motherhood into a much broader scope than I had originally understood it to be: as not just a one-time crossing over or a simple name change, but also as a biological, spiritual and physical metamorphosis that transforms anyone who has given birth over a series of months and years. So much about matrescence made sense for people who brought their babies home, but my experience felt both familiar and also out of reach. Like my body couldn’t quite figure out that our pregnancy had ended — like she was still putting up a fight all these months later.

I was also feeling spiritually homeless. Nothing about Christian theology or teachings about the afterlife were comforting to me. Most of the Christians around me seemed quite eager to bypass the discomfort of death and instead urged me to think of the afterlife my baby now enjoyed. I told my best friend on the phone once, “The best place for my baby isn’t heaven — it’s in my arms. That’s where she belongs.” 

Everything about spirituality that ought to be comforting in a time of loss fell hollow, and I turned more deeply to my meditation practice than ever before. I began reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, learning about the bordo and creating a more expansive not-knowing participatory knowingness about where my baby had gone. The visualizations that I created helped bring some comfort and shape to my feeling of loss, but I knew that I was still avoiding something.

I knew I had to surrender to this pain, to listen to these voices or I would be consumed. I knew I had to call my baby by name, describe her and admit that our parting was real. And nothing about my ordinary, rational thinking was going to get me all the way there.

Of course, as I was diligently researching and trying to wrap my mind around the loss of my baby, other curious things were happening. I started relating much differently to animals. I could step outside into the peaceful hush of our mountain land and the pitter patter of far off squirrels, foxes and deer, the soft tapping of pine needles, were all telling me something. One day I heard a whale sound on TV and my ears perked up as if I was hearing a friend tell me something important on the phone. I instinctively understood what the whale was communicating. The sounds of animals now created a sort of pulsating, circular movement in my chest. Their rhythms were a language I now understood. 

One particularly difficult afternoon, with a swirling mind and swollen eyes, I sat down, looked toward the sea of pine trees outside our house and I asked, “Is there another animal?”

I was praying, but not to the God who wanted me to brush everything under the rug. I was praying into the not-knowingness of death, the expansive meadow I now sensed was waiting for all my beloveds beyond this Earth here. I was praying to the thousands of tree roots tucked up the side of the mountain and around our home. I was praying to my grandmothers, the open sky, the silvery moon, the ocean, anything that had ever brought me comfort, I was reaching out in faith that they, too, might be listening.

“Can you help me understand where I am?”

I closed my eyes, unclenched my shoulders and let my legs relax. Soon I saw a picture being painted in my mind. A bear is ravaging through a thick forest. She is wild and crazed. Her claws are long and sharp; her breath panting heavily through a dark fog. As I watched her in my mind’s eye I noticed that she stopped every few feet, almost gasping for air, before stretching open her mouth and roaring in every direction. Soon I felt like I was somehow with her, too. And I knew what she was saying. 

She stood on her hind legs and yelled through the echoing forest, I’ve lost my baby. My baby is dead. Then she kicked up some dirt and collapsed into the trunk of a thick redwood. 

This is who I am. Do you see me? Her paws would swipe through large thickets just moments before her shoulders and head would dive into them. 

Can you see what I’ve become? I have lost my baby!

The bear was swaying her body side to side. She kept pushing past forest brush, while other animals walked on and silently watched her. 

Soon the picture in my head dissolved. 

The voice of the bear was quiet. 

And I began saying these words out loud: “This is who I am now. My baby is dead.”

***

tonight i laid in bed
closed my eyes
and felt the trees 
make a canopy around our 
cabin in the woods. 

their branches bent from all sides
as if their ears were trying to hear me
while i prayed 
and explained
and admitted
i really only pray about things
that i can eventually scrape together myself

there’s no real leap in my prayers
or requests that require creativity. 
the trees began chattering outside my window, their branches hanging heavily
as they acknowledged my hesitation. 
we only speak when the wind 
whispers through us, they said. 
to remind you that everything about faith is a collaboration. 
there’s nothing here to believe. 
there’s only following. 
that’s all any of us can do, really. 
follow the trail.

sometimes it feels like my trail is made of bread crumbs, 
but if i’m following
with my eyes and heart 
i look above and see that
i’ve been in the company of trees 
who are just waiting
to bend their branches,
lend their ears
and listen to a brokenhearted woman
as she learns how to pray.