supermassive black hole

The night the doctor gave us the worst news of our lives, we watched a documentary about black holes. The documentary tried, over and over, to describe a thing that people cannot comprehend. They tried explaining it as an equation. They tried enacting it with scientists scratching things out on a chalkboard, working on formulas that will take them years to crack. They tried using a little animation to illustrate just how far away the black hole is from our world. The animation goes on for so long – further than that … now double it … now, exponentially further than that  – it makes your head ache. 

Until this year, I thought I was no stranger to sadness. There have been times of my life when I felt completely defined by my depression, when I was sure that I had been mentally (and dentally) doomed by my genetics. It turns out that grief is something else. For one thing, sadness is only the first room of grief. The house itself goes on and on.

Since February, when my husband and I found out we had lost a profoundly wanted pregnancy, I have pinged back and forth across a vast map of grief. I keep searching for a metaphor. Is it a black hole? A bird? A house? A heartbeat? An ocean? I pick them up and put them down, over and over.

There’s a part in a Lorrie Moore story about a writer whose baby gets cancer where the narrator’s husband turns to her after the diagnosis and says, “You better start taking notes. We’re going to need the money.” The whole story is essentially this writer-mother choking out little observations about this unimaginable thing, about what it’s like to walk around a pediatric oncology ward and wonder if your baby is going to live, and the final lines of the story are just: 

Here are the notes. Where is the money?

A few months after the miscarriage, after a period of acute grief in which I essentially stopped thinking in words, I opened up a Google doc and started typing little pieces into it. It was not an essay. It was not a blog post. It was just notes. And they didn’t help – nothing helps – but they did seem to make something real, to make it something that I could imagine sharing. Every so often I would google “grief after miscarriage” and find a shockingly small number of essays, and the stuff I did find was cheesy or maudlin or Jesus-y or general. It was so hard to find anything about the specifics of grief, the specific thorns that were piercing my side, and specific ideas about how the hell you’re supposed to survive them. 

I don’t have any answers, or ideas, myself. But I am willing, finally, to talk about the specifics. Of grief. Of sadness. Of all the rooms in this house.

In my favorite movie of all time, the unparalleled 1997 classic Contact, Jodie Foster uncovers a message from outer space that contains instructions for constructing a machine that appears to be a spaceship. There’s a series of complications, some involving Matthew McConaghey as a sexy priest, others involving Bill Clinton, but eventually the thing gets built, she climbs inside, and it sends her into a wormhole. There’s a completely unhinged 20-minute scene in which she’s barreling through screensaver-quality tunnels of glowing light, halting every so often to glimpse a collapsing star or a blooming galaxy. Sometimes she’s bowled over by beauty, other times she’s totally terrified. She goes somewhere – or thinks she does – that appears to be outside our conception of space and time. She talks to the ghost of her father, questions the fabric of the universe and what it means to be alive, then wakes up on the cold metal floor of her spaceship, unsure if any of it was real.

That’s sort of how I feel, I guess. It’s sort of what I’d like to write about in this little Livejournal-esque space. Grief has sent me barrelling down a wormhole that has made me see everything differently – sometimes with wonder, sometimes with despair. I say this because I guess if someone is going to subscribe to get my words in their inbox I should give you some idea of what they will be, and I think this is the closest I can get – this isn’t a newsletter about grief, but about the places grief has flung me out into, and what I find there.