I called my fiancé as the ultrasound technician rubbed gel on my belly. He was waiting in his car in the freezing parking lot for me to FaceTime him. This was in February of 2021, before the vaccine was available; the virus raged in Columbus, Ohio, where we lived. We were excited to see our boy, whom we’d just named James Magnus, and hear his heartbeat again. We were nearly halfway through the pregnancy. The other times we’d seen him, James had been big, his placenta healthy, and his heartbeat strong. Earlier that month, he’d fluttered in my belly under my fiancé’s hand a few nights in a row, and my fiancé had described the feeling as the greatest joy of his life.
What did I say on the phone? I have no memory. My fiancé told me later that I was unintelligible but that he’d heard the word heartbeat and my tone and known it was bad.
We sobbed. We told our families and friends. We slept and held each other. We prayed and talked to our boy, now a soul in the sky instead of a collection of growing organs inside me.
After four days of this, we drove to the same health center, where an upbeat, empathetic abortion doctor inserted bamboo into my cervix. The next morning, we reported to the hospital at five a.m. It was one of the coldest days of the year. Insanely, I tried to make the best of it. Commented on how pretty the Christmas lights were, still up. Chatted with the nurses. Joked with the anesthesiologist that he better not kill me!
But really I hoped in an idle, adolescent way that he would kill me. Then I could be reunited with my baby.
What actually happened while I was sleeping and James left my body? Were they able to pull him out intact? Did anyone cradle him? Maybe the footprints they gave my fiancé were printed one at a time, a disembodied leg or foot brought unceremoniously to an ink pad, then to the index card. It is not entirely clear which foot is right, and which one is left. He must have gotten my shitty arches, I thought, stoned out of my mind in recovery. Flat feet. But maybe only one foot was salvageable and they printed it twice.
Maybe as they held him, intact or in pieces, somebody cried.
In my first trimester, I had hyperemesis, the extreme form of morning sickness that Kate Middleton made known. I projectile vomited water at week five. I puked if I so much as shifted in bed. My fiancé’s breath, never an issue before, made me gag. I lost twenty pounds in two months. My pee was yellow, sometimes brown, as I straddled the line of medical dehydration. My esophagus was raw, kidneys sensitive—I’d flinch when my fiancé touched my back.
During this time, I was completely dependent on my fiancé. He had to follow me up the stairs in case I fainted. He cooked me itty-bitty meals in which I could get protein, a carbohydrate, and a vegetable in a single bite, and if I kept that single bite down, it was a good day. He removed my bags of puke, mostly bile by week seven, every few hours. He rubbed my back. He empathized with me while I cried. He is a kind, soft-spoken man who pulls over for injured animals and cries easily. When I expressed my anxiety—“If I can’t even keep a sip of water down, how can I support another life?”—he reassured me.
Both my doctor and the internet surprised me—the disease was actually associated with healthier babies. The more I puked, the healthier James was. During this time, I fantasized about giving birth. About how good it would feel to usher my baby from my body into the world. No pain could hurt me, as long as it meant the nausea would lift and I could see his little face.
I wanted to give birth to James, but instead I gave him death. And he gave it back to me. We co-created it, this liminal life and then traumatic death, the three of us—and I submitted to Western medicine so James’ body could be tested, then cremated, then burned to ashes in a box so small the man at the funeral home had to push it into the fire with his bare hands. Now, the ashes are divided between an urn I can wrap my fist around and a heart pendant that hangs around my neck.
I slept in for weeks. I cried so hard my jaw went slack and my cheek muscles were sore. Salt water left my eyes as if the moon itself were collecting it. My fiancé cried too. We took walks in the ravines near our house. I laid on the couch and watched our neighbor shovel snow off our steps during her workday. We received flowers with notes that said “God Bless Baby James” and texts and emails from flabbergasted friends. Packages of homemade food showed up on our snowy porch—cauliflower soup and homemade bread and cheesecake. We ate it all with an apathy that frightened me.
Losing my baby so far into the pregnancy introduced me to a desperation I never knew—it felt like learning to breathe underwater. At first, I thought, No one can withstand this. Surely, I’ll die. And then I realized I wouldn’t, that I would just feel the unease of a specter. I was already dead, so what was the point of going through the motions of my life? The pain made me translucent, and I feared everyone could see it and feel it.
Losing James was a surprise because he’d had a strong heartbeat every other time we’d heard it.
It felt cruel because everyone told me not to worry—all that puking! At least you know your baby is healthy. It felt brutal because we were so far along, so many weeks into the second trimester, we thought we were out of the woods. But at least we had each other, my fiancé and I. We shared our love, our pain, and now our ghost.
Nine days before our due date, my fiancé left me. It came as such a shock that I actually asked him if he was joking. He was not. In fact, he had been building a case against me for some time: He was depressed and I was the reason. He was anxious and I was the reason. He couldn’t sleep and I was the reason. He didn’t see his family as much as he wanted to, and I was the reason.
When we lost James, I’d lamented to my fiancé how the shock of it made it so much harder. If only I’d had cramps, or if I’d begun bleeding, or if James’ heartbeat had been weak. We would’ve had some time to prepare for the loss.
My fiancé’s departure carried the same sense of shock. One minute, I knew what my life was; in an instant, it was completely different. Instead of the fear of trying to conceive after loss, I was met with an entirely new fear: that of starting from scratch.
Listening to him build a case against me was like watching an infant try to scale a wall, but still: I got on my hands and knees and begged him to stay. I pleaded. I asked for time. I left love notes in his belongings, then watched them slowly disappear from my house. But once someone truly makes up their mind, it’s impossible to change it.
The first hundred layers of me railed against him leaving—how would I live without his love, his affection, him as my life partner? We had been through so much together—how would I ever love another man? All that shared experience was lost now.
But another layer, one deep inside of me, resonated with his leaving. A man who will leave you when you’re postpartum with a dead baby will leave you a million times a day, even if he were to stay through the loss.
I felt myself recoil from him, even as my heart broke.
So I gave up and let him go.
Days I trudged through my copywriting job, watching money in my checking account stack up in a race to buy him out of our house. I would step away from my computer between meetings and curl up in a ball on the floor, trying to hold onto the Earth as it turned.
But nights were scary: My arms, free of my keyboard, felt extraneous; I had nothing to wrap them around, not even hope. Suicidal ideations stalked me like an outside force. Before the sun went down every night, I’d put all the sharp knives in a drawer as if someone else might waltz into my house and slit my wrists. I’d lie in bed waiting for sleep to knock me out of my pain only to dream of him and wake up disoriented.
My fiancé felt strongly that I not labor James out, and the doctor concurred, though labor was an option. The doctor said he thought it was unnecessarily traumatic for women; he presented me with the choices as if he were describing two equally abundant grocery stores.
If you want to labor, you can just come in, go right to labor and delivery, no problem. Or we can put you to sleep and take him out that way. I could barely process, let alone respond.
The doctor went on, delicately: There’s no guarantee that James will be intact.
I agreed to the surgery.
Now: I wish I had labored him out. I wish I had held him. I wish my fiancé had held him. I don’t care how many pieces he was in. I would have pushed him out limb by limb to have our pain be tangible, visible. We may have finally unearthed it, taken it from our veins, where it pulsed and pulses still, dulling the color in my face, chilling my heart, robbing my gait of purpose.
If pain stays inside you for long enough, and no one touches you in such a way that breaks it up or dilutes it, you will eventually need a bogeyman. It is true that my fiancé and I were coming off of some other trauma—dying parents, difficult families, changing careers. And though we tried, neither one of us found a way to hold what was hurting us, separately or together.
If you can’t find a bogeyman, you can construct one. Or just lunge at the person closest to you—the woman who’s been loving you imperfectly for years, the one who carried your son but experienced no intuitive knowing when he passed away between her hips.
For almost five months, my body held not one but two souls. But when James’ soul left me, I didn’t even notice. I danced around the kitchen, hiked up my sweater and posed for goofy pictures I sent to my high school friends and sister-in-law. I babbled on the phone with my aunt, collecting stories of how many times a day the other women in my family threw up when they were pregnant. We decided on a stroller (expensive), on a paint color for James’ nursery (apple green). All while his body lay dead inside me.
After losing everything, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if we’d conceived a different night, with a different fleet of sperm, a different egg? What if James had lived? Right now, I’d be holding him instead of pushing my maternity underwear to the back of the drawer or staring down my engagement ring, wondering how much I can pawn it for.
The real problem with a sudden breakup is not the bad behavior. It’s not the empty house, the years of wasted fertility. It’s not the IG feed full of lovey-dovey photos I had to archive, not the casual shit my friends talk when his name comes up.
It’s all the love I have for both of them that’s stuck in my body and can’t get out, though my body tries to purge them through its own little tides every month.
The night before the surgery, I tried to get out of it. I didn’t want them to take James’ body from me. I was afraid of anesthesia and of going to the hospital during a pandemic.
My fiancé spoke to me as if I were a child. “In order for James to be at peace, his body needs to be buried,” he said. “And in order for you to heal, his body needs to leave yours. James wants you to heal.”
Our breakup was ugly, and we will never speak again in this lifetime. But if we were to, I would remind him of that conversation, because he was right. James wants him to heal, too.
Why else would a soul come to us for so little time if not to catalyze healing?
The next morning, James left my body, and I woke up in recovery from the anesthesia crying, half out of my mind, with no filter. I called out to the anesthesiologist: Did you see my baby?
***
Rumpus original art by Lisa Ragland
