Lioness Lost
On a winter afternoon in late December of 2013, I was leaving work at Gentiva Hospice in Jasper, Indiana, where I was the Manager of Volunteer Services. One of my coworkers, a hospice home health nurse, was rushing towards the door from the parking lot after her late lunch break, and I stopped to hold the door for her. As she walked past me, the smell of her perfume mixed with the slight aroma of her recently smoked cigarette hit my nose, and I felt a lurch at the top of my stomach. Without any warning at all, I barely suppressed a reflexive urge to vomit right there where I stood. I had only experienced that sensation one other time in my life, and it was when I was pregnant with my daughter Taylor in 2001.
Store bought tests were about to affirm what I already knew--I was pregnant. This was not a planned pregnancy. My husband and I had only been married six months, and we didn’t *think* we wanted any more kids, but neither one of us was really committed to making a permanent move that would keep us from having kids either.
So when he got home from work a little while later, I asked him to come sit down at the table. He said, “Jesus, what’s going on? Are you pregnant?” I fell silent. He looked up, his smile fading. “Meg, oh my god, is that it? Are you pregnant?”
I forced a smile. “Surprise?” I said, more like a question.
His face went white. He was sitting at the table, one hand gripping either side of it, as if he was afraid of falling. “This can be okay,” he said, staring down at the table, talking mostly to himself. “This can be okay,” he repeated, looking up at me. Then a realization came over his face. “Oh no,” he said. “Honey, I’m so sorry. I blew it. Start over. Say it again.”
“What?” I asked.
“Tell me again,” he repeated.
“Uhhh. Surprise! I’m pregnant!” I said.
“CONGRATULATIONS! Congratulations to us,” he said. And he stood from his chair and threw his arms around me in a bear hug. We both laughed. We both knew we were terrified. But we were terrified together, and deep down, having been through an unexpected pregnancy in far more trying circumstances, I knew this would, in fact, be okay.
Telling Taylor she was going to finally get to be a big sister was one of the greatest moments of my life. I told her in the car when we had an hour drive ahead of us from Vincennes to Jasper after a weekend she spent with her dad. We laughed and planned, making guesses about what the baby would look like. Would he look like me, with blonde hair and blue eyes? Would he look like his dad, with dark hair and dark eyes? Would he surprise us all, like his sister and his aunt, and come out with red hair?
She agreed that she thought he was a boy. I already knew this. I can’t tell you how, but I knew as soon as I knew I was pregnant, just like I had known twelve years previously that his sister was a girl. I knew it in every cell of my body.
A few weeks later I was with Jamin in Bloomington, Indiana, waiting to meet our brand-new baby doctor. When the nurse came in to take my blood pressure, I saw the look of concern on her face. “How high is it?” I asked.
“It’s high. I’m going to go get Dr. Laurent,” she said. I tried to stay calm. Jamin and I exchanged a quick glance. She seemed worried.
Dr. Laurent came in and took the blood pressure cuff into his own hands as if he didn’t believe the first set of numbers. “How high is it?” I asked again.
“192 over 140,” he said. “Do you have a history of high blood pressure?” I did, and I had pre-eclampsia with my first daughter and battled complications for some time afterwards. But for the last few years my blood pressure had been controlled with diet and exercise and hadn’t given me any trouble.
I was admitted for an overnight stay, and Dr. Laurent promised that he would get to the bottom of whatever was going on. He seemed hopeful that this would be behind us soon enough.
Once at the hospital, we had our first ultrasound. The baby’s heart rate was nice and fast and steady. He looked strong. Jamin and I spent the evening talking and shooting the breeze with the nurses. We watched TV and chatted late into the night.
The following afternoon, Dr. Laurent came in with news — just not the news for which we had hoped. My lab work showed early signs of trouble. My HCG levels, which should be doubling every day, hadn’t.
Everything stopped moving. All I could hear was my own heart pounding in my ears. But I had to think; I had options. I could choose to take hormones in an attempt to boost my hormone levels and secure the pregnancy or let nature take its course.
Either way, the doctor explained, it likely would anyway.
I sat, stunned, trying to understand the full breadth of what he was saying. He was talking so fast. Why did he have to talk so fast? He had said that word--miscarriage. No one in my family ever had miscarriages. They had pregnancies and then babies.
What was happening?
I opted to take the hormones. Dr. Laurent left the room. Jamin sat in the chair across from me. I looked down at my hands, twisting around each other on top of the blanket in my lap. The room felt cold suddenly, and much too small. I wanted to get out of it. I wanted fresh air. Then I felt a hand on mine.
I looked over, and our nurse Sarah’s eyes met mine, as she sat down on my bed. She held my hands in hers, and we sat there, eyes locked in a moment of understanding, and I saw a tear roll down her cheek. Her heart was breaking for me in only the way a fellow mother’s heart can break in that moment. I finally looked back down, my own tears streaming down my cheeks, and without another word, she just wrapped her arms around me, and we cried together in silence, this stranger and me.
This has been one of those moments in my life, one of those powerful, incredible moments of unspoken solidarity and understanding between two women, two mothers. She didn’t say a word, and in that silence, she said everything my heart needed to hear. I was afraid to leave her and return home. No one at my house knew what I was feeling. How could they?
The day after I received the news, I called a friend and former co-worker who I knew was a cranio-sacral therapist, one who works with mothers and babies. I told her what was happening. I wanted to move forward and be positive, but my mind kept turning to sad and scary thoughts of loss and heartbreak.
She suggested I make a kind of Baby Bucket List.
“There isn’t any reason you can’t start celebrating and spending time with this baby right now, in the time that you KNOW you have with him,” she told me.
And so that’s exactly what I did.
We went shopping with his sister and her friends. We watched the snow fall on the Christmas lights and walked around the West Baden Dome. We spent Christmas with our families. We went on date nights with his dad. We got lost for hours in a bookstore, walking around and reading. We exercised, attended candle lite nighttime yoga downtown. We danced with his sister in the kitchen and cooked and ate meals together as a family. On an unusually warm and sunny winter day, we had a picnic, just him and me. We sat at the local River Walk park, swinging and watching ducks eat on the riverbank. I talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him, meditated with him, and became present with that baby.
I began to hope.
Things improved. My hormone numbers went up, and weekly tests and ultrasounds showed a healthy, growing baby. Then one afternoon, I was at work standing at the copy machine talking to a co-worker, and I felt it. It was a shift. Something inside me sighed deeply, a primal exhalation of the life in my womb, an internal whisper of a life ending, and I knew.
Later that day, as Kendra, the ultrasound tech, placed the ultrasound wand over my lower abdomen, I saw her begin shifting in her chair, blocking my view ever so slightly.
“Tell me what is happening. Please,” I said, beginning to cry. She let out a sigh and moved out of the way. The screen was dark. Where my lively baby had been just days earlier was now a static gray mist, a solemn shapeless stillness. A dark womb with an ashen wisp of gray at the edge. I lay back on the pillow. Kendra left me alone and politely pretended not to hear my sobs as I got dressed in the bathroom nearby.
Dr. Laurent would later tell me how sorry he was, how he would be thinking of me, how this happens sometimes, that there was nothing I could have done to stop it, that it wasn’t my fault.
He said I could wait and try to miscarry naturally, but that I needed to stay in close touch during the process. I could hear how sorry he was in his voice, but he still talked so fast. I needed this to slow down.
I needed all of it to slow down.
I drove home that night alone, watching the sun set and crying so hard I had trouble seeing the road. The sunset was beautiful and felt like a personal insult. How did life just keep going? How did a sunset dare to be so colorful and beautiful on such a horrible day?
I walked in the front door of the house and collapsed onto the couch. Jamin held me in silence while I cried. And then we told Taylor. She cooked me dinner. We tried to eat and have a normal night, but there is no way to have a normal night after that. We sat at the table together. I wanted them to talk, just talk, about anything else. They didn’t feel like they should. And so we all just sat, eating, knowing.
That night, we went to bed, and Jamin wrapped his arms around me and our unborn, lifeless baby inside of me. I tried to fall asleep, but it was no use. My mind was racing. I went downstairs, turned on the television, and proceeded to play Minesweeper on the laptop computer for hours, over and over and over again. Click, wait, click, wait, click, wait. Lose. Start over. Reaching for anything that made sense, anything that felt mindless and normal.
Life, for me, was put on pause. None of it seemed real. Or fair.
I slept on the couch that week. Waiting. Scared. I cried — a lot.
My daughter stayed home from school a couple of days. Jamin stayed home from work.
I wanted to be left alone.
I didn’t want to be alone.
I wanted to feel normal.
I never wanted normal again.
I wanted to miscarry my baby.
I wanted to be pregnant forever.
My feelings didn’t make sense. Sleep was intermittent. The nightmares were torture. At least once each night, I had a vivid recurring dream and would wake up drenched in sweat, a heavy weight bearing down on my chest.
In the dream, I was in the corner of a black room--black ceiling, black floor, black walls. In the middle of that room, illuminated in bright light was a little lion cub asleep on the ground. The mother lion was pacing around the cub in circles, the hair along her spine standing straight up; she was roaring and spitting into the dark. She couldn’t see me and didn’t know I was there, but she was on high alert, protecting that cub from an invisible intruder. She was vicious and ferocious, and I dared not move a muscle for fear she would see me. Then I would wake up, sweat literally dripping from every inch of my body, clothes clinging to me, gasping for air.
After nearly a week of this kind of grief and exhaustion, I cried all day and called Dr. Laurent. I told him I was going to take the Cytotec pill he had prescribed me, also known as the “abortion pill.” I couldn't take another moment of being suspended in this limbo of being pregnant but not pregnant. He agreed that would be best, if I wanted to avoid surgery.
I took the pill. I took a shower. I went to the gym. I walked three miles on the treadmill, stoically, sure not to make eye contact with anyone else in the gym for fear they would see the entire tragic story written on my face.
I began to feel early signs of “labor,” so I went home, posted up on the couch, and started a jigsaw puzzle — reaching for normal, reaching for order.
I waited. The contractions came, fairly regularly, but pretty far apart, too. I knew this part. I had done this before. My uterus was taking its time, opening, slowly, slowly.
Jamin slept downstairs on the sectional couch with me. I got on my knees before bed, and my prayer that night was a simple one --“God, please help. This is too much. Carry me.” And I gave my baby permission to let go. I promised him I would be okay. I promised him we would meet again someday. I promised him he was loved.
I sat in the dark and listened to the winter wind howling through our glass windowpanes. I watched the snow falling in the quiet nighttime stillness.
Two hours later, at 5:07 a.m. on a cold and snowy winter morning in 2014, I woke to sharp stabbing pains in my uterus, and I knew it was time. I walked slowly and quietly down the hall to the bathroom. I undressed and crouched over a bowl on the floor. And there, alone and naked in our bathroom, I gave birth to our tiny, tiny, baby. He fit on a cotton swab. I sat on the floor and held him in my hands. I talked to him. I told him he was beautiful and loved. I kissed the end of my index finger and touched him so carefully and so slightly. He was so light, ethereal, fragile, otherworldly almost, like a baby jellyfish, his head, his arms, his legs. I could see his heart and spine through his translucent skin. His tiny life gone. His fragile teeny form done with this world. I wrapped him in cotton, and I put him in a baby food jar I had washed and saved, because I could not bear the thought of throwing him away. I wanted to bury him.
There are no instructions for this part. What do you do with a jar with a twelve-week fetus inside of it, MY twelve-week fetus inside of it? I put the jar in the medicine cabinet. I cleaned up the mess. After passing the placenta and the rest of the fetal sac, which came out in pieces, I put on a special diaper I had been instructed to buy for the occasion. Then I washed my hands, turned off the lights, and walked back to the living room. I woke up Jamin. “Honey, it happened. I passed the baby. That part is over now.” He sat bolt upright, eyes wild. He threw his arms around me, and I cried like the world was ending. I don’t know how long we sat there like that, but eventually I told him to go back to bed.
I lay there awake, listening to Jamin slip back into sleep, listening to the wind howl. And I felt emptier than I had ever felt, metaphorically, but also physically. I had spent the last few months with a life, another human growing inside of me, and now I was empty. My baby was supposed to still be in there, protected, supported, growing, safe. My body had failed him. I thought I would feel relief. I thought I would feel closure. I didn’t. I felt alone. I got up off of the couch and tip-toed down the hall to the bathroom. I gently lifted the jar out of the medicine cabinet, and I walked back to the couch. I curled up under my blanket, tucked the jar in the front abdomen pocket of my hooded sweatshirt, and I fell asleep holding my baby.
I had the nightmare about the lion that night again, but this time it was different. I was there, in the corner of the black room. The lion cub was nowhere to be found. And the mama lion was frantically and maniacally racing around the room, slashing with her claws extended into nothingness and screaming a guttural roar as old as time itself. She was looking for her cub, and she was out of her mind with fury and fear. I woke drenched in sweat again, gasping for air again. The sun was shining. The jar was in my sweatshirt pocket. My hands were clutching it through my shirt so tightly, instinctively, that I thought I might break it. And suddenly, I knew I was the lion. I wanted to scream and slash at the air and roar. I wanted the world to stop, and everyone to listen while I demanded to the world, “GIVE ME BACK MY BABY!”
I had lost people I loved before, to old age, to cancer, to suicide, to tragic accidents. This grief felt so much deeper and more primal, older, in the core of my person. It was a grief rising up from the center of life inside of me, the spot that is supposed to be life-giving, life-nurturing, life-affirming. My sacred holy place had turned into a tomb.
I spent the next week hovering over a toilet convinced that no human could safely lose so much blood and tissue. I was pale and weak. The doctor told me it was normal, that all of the same blood and tissue lost during a full-term birth is there for the duration of the pregnancy, so the same amount must come out in a miscarriage.
That miscarriage took three weeks; this was not a one and done event. My body slipped into false labor for the next four days. I was drenched in sweat. The pain was intense and exhausting. I was having regular contractions about four minutes apart. Doctors could not make it stop. Ultrasounds were done to check for material that was stuck in my uterus; they found none. Blood was drawn to check for infection; there wasn’t one. Finally, four days later, I felt a great heave in my uterus, went to the bathroom, and passed four enormous clots, one the size of a baseball. Then I went to my bedroom and lay down. My uterus was finally empty and quiet. It was done.
When a lioness is ready to give birth, she leaves her pride to be alone. She knows what to do, and she excuses herself and slips away to do her job. Eventually, she returns to the pride when she and her baby are ready. So what does a lioness do when she must return to her pride without a baby?
The first time I left the house to go back to work was difficult. The first time I left my house to go to the bank was difficult. The first time I left my house to go to the gym was difficult. I was relieved the people I saw didn’t know what I had just gone through, and I was angry the people I saw didn’t know what I had just gone through. I remember a woman at the grocery store snapped at me for taking too long to unload my groceries, and I shocked everyone by bursting into tears right there in line at the IGA.
A couple of weeks after the miscarriage, I went to a dinner party. It was too soon. Nothing felt normal. I had no clue how to return to everyday life. After the party was over, I tried to escape quickly, but a couple we knew stopped me to congratulate me on the pregnancy. Word travels fast in small towns — but sometimes not fast enough. I managed to hold it together while I explained that I was no longer pregnant, that we had lost the baby, that I was doing okay, that I appreciated their condolences. I had to make THEM feel better for congratulating me. I hugged THEM and assured THEM that I was not upset with THEM for not knowing this had happened, and I felt like my insides were bursting into a million glass-shattering screams, but I knew I just had to hold it together until I got to the car. When I was almost to my car, I got stopped in the parking lot by another acquaintance who congratulated me. I felt the tears sting my eyes. I opened my mouth, and all that came out was “Thank you. Yes, we are excited.” Then I hurried to my car, drove home, and told Jamin that I needed him to call our friend’s husband because I had lied to her, let her believe I was still pregnant, because I just couldn’t tell the story again.
Bone-crushing depression and overwhelming senses of fear and doom and rage nagged at me constantly. I felt betrayed by my body. And the grief nearly destroyed my marriage.
I spent months working through all of this with my therapist.
We buried my baby by the lake where I grew up — carefully, gently. Then we planted a small willow tree over the top of him. That tree flowers each spring, and today it finally makes me smile when I visit.
Because like that tiny tree, I had also been buried in darkness. The grief was under me, beside me, above me, in me; the vast blackness was all around, seeping into every crevice of my life, of my existence. It was grief at a cellular level.
Little did I know it was also feeding me, changing me, allowing me to grow.
This grief evolved and morphed and moved along with me. It softened my heart. It deepened my love for my daughter and my husband. It taught me about vulnerability and showed me that I can walk around in the world feeling naked and defeated and afraid and still survive. I can break and be put back together. It inspired me to get healthy and live more fully.
The grief still travels with me, sneaking up from time to time to tear me open again. But the frequency with which it happens — and the depth of the grief — are not the same. The edges are softer and don’t cut like they used to.
The recurring dream changed with time. I saw that lioness in my dreams, stalking around angry and scared and looking for her baby for a long time. But she, too, softened and transformed. I remember dreaming about her the same week that we planted the baby’s willow tree. In that dream she was sleeping soundly, still there, in the black room, with a single blooming daisy illuminated nearby. The following summer, after spending a beautiful day on the lake with Taylor, I dreamed about the lioness again. In that dream she was playfully chasing a butterfly in the sunshine. The room was still black, but the light was different, brighter, and so was the lioness. She looked…okay.
Today, almost seven years later, I still dream about her every now and again. I think of her every time I see a photo of a lion in the wild. I remember the way she looked in those early nightmares, and I think of the primitive, fundamental nature of motherhood, of loss, of recovering. And I love her for helping me see it all more clearly as we moved forward in our grief together, she and I.
