In her poem Kindness, poet Naomi Shihab Nye shares that before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside yourself, you must first hold your sorrow as the deepest thing. To do this, she says, you must wake up and speak to all the threads of your sorrow until you can understand its size and the texture of its fabric.
Perhaps kindness is an unexpected emotion to find after walking the well-worn paths, figuring how to hold and birth and carry death. And yet, if you’ve traversed this unexpected, unwanted journey you might know that perhaps it isn’t at all. I was walking with my neighbor through the forest one afternoon and she shared that it is only humans who place such significance around death. Everyone else in the animal kingdom merely recognizes it as a necessary and inevitable experience in this journey of living. We talked quietly on the somber subject spoken so little of in our culture while standing above two pink pouches of newborn possums that appeared in our path, wishing there was something our human hands could do, yet knowing it best not to interfere.
Being just one year out from a miscariage of 13 weeks the summer before, I spent the walk home in a warm July rain considering the stories I’d read about mother elephants actively mourning the loss of their little ones. After their passing, the mothers huddle around the young ones. With trunks elongated, they touch the bones and the soft of the little ones’ bodies and cover them with leaves and twigs ceremoniously, returning to stand in quiet reverence again and again. I thought of my childhood pet husky, Reba, who carried around a stillborn from her puppy litter for days, licking and pawing its small body before ceremoniously ingesting it as she had the placenta, claiming it as hers and hers alone in the divine order of things.
I remember the day Reba decided to leave this world herself. Snow fell in soft white sheaths—a rare occurrence for coastal North Carolina—blanketing the cotton field and creek around the home where we ran with her. Reba, covered in thick tufts of black and white fur, chose Christmas Day for her final rest as the snow fell around her in soft celebration. I remember hovering over her, my brothers and me, tears filling our eyes, cheeks flushed in confusion, hands touching in to feel the weight of her still-warm body. It was the same body that had run laps around our small feet and bicycle wheels and basketball hoops and bed posts our entire short lives. It wasn’t real. She couldn’t be dead.
We kept imagining her paws lifting, her eyes flickering awake. Time hovered, frozen perhaps, suspended with us, small and sobbing over her limp body, held together within thick layers of fuzzy white for what felt like days. Yet it was likely only a few hours before we were called from our unexpected front yard funeral and into bed.
The next day, we dug a small hole and gathered around, sharing our memories, allowing the empty room of sadness to breathe. Before we’d retreat into our internal unpacking of whys with this world, with the space she’d left us. Now there was a void created in her absence. We’d experienced years of gentle paws clicking and eager eyes awaiting ours after school; that flirty way she pranced about lifting her paws as we played; those afternoon excursions she’d take tromping through the creek, returning home with her hunt (and our supper she imagined) clenched proudly between her teeth; that deep howl she bellowed in response to the afternoon train to which we’d all join in unison ow ow owoooooo. A similar howling our spirits made, it turns out, in response to her soft body’s departure from this physical plane.
When I lost my baby Tully I was alone in a sterile hospital room. I had not yet shared the news of her conception as I waited for this notion of “the right time.” Lying there during a procedure to remove an enlarged cyst from my ovaries before further damage could be done, the doctor placed her hand on mine to tell me that the cyst had been removed, yet I’d lost my baby. Rather than remove her through a D&C, she said, “I’m going to give you something to soften your cervix and when you’re ready, we’ll induce labor to safely remove the fetus. Is there anyone you’d like for us to get in touch with?”
I cried quietly, shaking my head no and meaning yes, for what felt like months yet was surely only hours of that same suspended silent time around me, hovering, holding my tired body. I watched the drip of the saline bag and listened to the small beeps filling the room. I curled my toes over and back again, hoping to get a good handle on it all through methodical movement, somehow snap myself back into the world I knew before this moment where I was having an out-patient procedure. Soon, I thought, I’ll be home sharing the news of my little girl with him, with family, with everyone I could possibly breathe it aloud to, bringing her out of me and closer to the living.
My dream body’s plans of the perfect scenario in speaking her alive were soon gone as I gave birth to a delicate pink pouch with deep blue eyes and feet so small they could have only been formed in as tender a process as butterfly wings. Laced in a delicate white, as if snow had fallen on the soft fur of her small body, I watched as they placed her on a silver tray next to me. We lay there frozen in this stagnant time with the world moving and people talking. My eyes shifted to check the curl of my toes, the weight of breath in my chest, the color of my hands to ensure I myself wasn’t also encased in layers of white. I studied the details of this cocoon holding her, my little girl--a little girl I’d been talking to for months since I learned of her presence in my womb, a little girl I’d been collecting ribbons and onesies and childhood relics of Strawberry Shortcake dolls in quiet celebration, a wooden rattle I had made with her name already inscribed. This was the little girl I’d been singing lullabies and hymnals to as my mother had to me, a little girl whose heartbeat I’d just heard days before sound like an ethereal drum beat thump-thump-thump-thumping through the small machine placed to my pelvis. And yet there she lay so easily in her frosted pink pouch, so quietly with no cries or curling of tiny toes, wanting nothing except to continue her journey through time in this silent slumber, never to awaken into this Earth world with me. My spirit howled in a fierce, caged quiet.
I decided in the days that followed to place it all away, return to work and let this experience fade like a soft snow in the delicate warmth of daylight. No one needed to know this mistake that was made, witness this deep failing outside of me. Yet, as stubbornly as I powered through the months that followed, my silence in keeping my quiet death couldn’t be contained. Everything in my body yearned for her, for him, for what felt like the very blood in my veins drained out and away from me into a small pool separate from this physical shell I’d been left with. My body ached in their absence and yet the world continued on fast and wanting, unaware of her, of us.
I was ashamed, of my body, and of my silence. I was ashamed of my soft-born yet unborn cocoon, labeled a simple miscarriage, which one in four women will experience. Don’t be dramatic, I could hear him say.
I wanted to be left alone and held without asking. I wanted to beg for grace, yet didn’t know to whom. I wanted to know why a world so full of living would allow the death of something so delicate. Was it the inevitable karma from something I’d done before I understood better? Or was it the silence I allowed her to live in those 13 weeks? Was it the prescription they gave to me before determining my pregnancy, or the inevitable wreckage left in love’s loss? Was this science or fate?
I joined a support group, where I listened for months as women circled to ask these questions alongside me, sharing their stories, holding and releasing their small deaths, describing the details of their soft bodies. It took awhile for me to place words to her death, to mine, to describe out loud the heavy weight of it, and allow myself to be seen, messy and naked, swimming in the deep pool where I’d been unexpectedly thrown.
I continued pacing these laps for what felt like years yet was surely only months, opening spaces to create ritual around death in ways I never had before. I germinated vegetables from seed to watch their delicate tendrils root to life; I proudly created altar space for her in my yard where I’d sing and chant and play her wooden rattle; I placed ribbons and toys at her altar and feel her fleeting presence as I grappled with my presence going on seemingly so effortlessly. During a poetry circle one evening, a woman I admire told me that I was on a journey into the depths of my womanhood, and like all of the characters I’d read about in the great myths, I was being called down to claim my medallion. I’d know when I resurfaced with it. I would carry forward the gifts that my arduous, unexpected journey bestowed upon me as only I could in this world. It wasn’t a journey that could be rushed or rescheduled. I was already there. It was up to me however, to decide how I’d continue to feel the weight of the water on my skin, study the details of the ripples my body created as it slipped through the water. There, I would explore and shape-shift, navigating how I’d manage to hold the wreckage.
When I was ready to resurface, I would. I would know I’d laid her to rest in my own time, her tender body covered carefully with layers of prayer and song, her spirit knowing the riverbanks from which she was born, and the lighthouse from which to send signal-fire Earthside as needed. I did not allow her powerful little presence to become trapped within walls of shame, yet celebrated her like the soft, unexpected snow whose gentle presence we are graced with for mere moments at best.
However short my little girl’s life, it summoned me off the map I’d been carrying and flung me into a deep sea, where evidence of other women’s fins and nails had clawed and swam the shores I lapped long before. They encouraged me to find my way, emerge when I was ready with this hard-won medallion. Such a strange honor for the abrupt marathon you find yourself flailing through with your list of why’s and unshakable discomfort that you’ll never return to the home you once knew. When at last you touch toes to surface, you do feel this internal inscription, this unwavering knowing one cannot find without enduring such tender torment. It carries an infinite honor in case one were to ever forget—that they held life, that they swam the deep seas, that they touched the soft body of an intangible grace, that they have woken with sorrow and spoken with it til’ their voice caught the thread of all sorrows, and now hold a humbled kindness for this tenuous business of living, which they’ll forever carry as the child of experience.
Tiffany Narron is a poet and freelance writer based in western North Carolina. Her forthcoming book of poems, Letters to Tully, will be released in 2021. You can find more of her work at tiffanynarron.com.