Empty

The five-day wait for the D&C procedure was like a long, gray corridor with death at the end. Though I had already miscarried, this procedure seemed like a barbaric cleansing of all hope from the womb. At some point during this week my husband told me that the doctor had said that he didn't believe there had ever been an embryo. I did not remember hearing that. But then again, an awful lot of what had transpired during my visit was muted for me, as if the whole thing had occurred underwater. This particular idea made me feel like the object of a horrible practical joke. Should I be relieved that there was no person to mourn? Should I feel even more sorrow that there was no child to be reunited with on the other side of this fallen Earth? I didn't know what to think, let alone feel. I finally summoned the courage to call the nurse for more information that might lead to closure. "Your gestational sac was completely empty," she said. Hmmmm. The word "empty" telescoped through the phone and down the miles of roadway connecting my OB's office to my own home and crawled right into my aching heart. My gestational sac, which had housed a yolk sac on that first visit, measured at six weeks. Maybe that was when the pregnancy ended due to what was probably, based on my own internet research and my doctor's guess, a terribly flawed chromosomal brew. What tortured me then and leaves a twenty-story question mark now is the fact that no one but God  knows when that life ended. Was there a collection of cells? If so, would that qualify as a human life? I know that, as a pro-life person, I have always believed that life begins at conception. Conception is the moment that a human history, with all of its ebbs and flows, glories and defeats, birthdays and final passage into eternal life in either heaven or hell has its genesis. What if conception is the beginning AND the endpoint? Is there a person on the other side? I wouldn't have mourned any less had I been given a definitive answer of "no" to this question. Someone said to me recently "If there was no baby, then I could understand a sense of disappointment, but not the continuing sadness that you feel." When a woman is told that she is going to have a baby, a universe of possibilities for love, life and hope open up before her. She is affirmed as a human being, her place and purpose in the world locked in a certain direction for life. Mine was locked onto two beautiful sons. The addition of a third child meant that that purpose widened by one-third. "Disappointment" is a word I would reserve for events such as a flat tire, not getting the job you applied for, a traffic ticket. What I experienced was a wounding. I would grow as a person, come to truly understand the comfort of God, and move on to praise Him for all of the myriad ways He had blessed, protected and favored me and my family for forty-two years, dangers I was aware He had sheltered me from as well as countless threats only He knew about, in the months to come. But I also had to ride the train of grief into the shadows of night before emerging into the sunlight of the future. It was necessary.