Chapter Twenty #6
My room looked hopelessly bland, hopelessly normal.
You would not know anything had changed unless you peeked under the covers, noticed the pool of blood.
But why should my room, the physical realm I resided in, not mirror my internal state?
Why should my room look so orderly, so normal, when inside I did not know what I was feeling, I just knew what I wasn’t: I was not feeling orderly, I was not feeling normal.
I remembered painting the walls with my mom, choosing the colors at Home Depot to match the moods we wished to evoke for each space.
Sky blue, contemplative, for the office.
Lavender, feminine, for the bathroom. Pewter, unthreatening, for the living room.
What about red? Did anyone paint their walls red, or did that evoke the wrong moods, which would be what?
Anger? Sexuality? Bloodthirst? I pushed my face into the pillow and screamed.
—
I woke up the next morning in a pool of my own blood.
I stripped off the clothes from my body and the sheets from my bed.
I called the free clinic, told them I had just had a miscarriage and that I needed to see the doctor as soon as possible.
Fortunately, they told me that Dr. Jordan was available.
There had been a last-minute cancellation, and if I could get myself to the clinic in twenty minutes, she could see me right away.
Dr. Jordan’s office smelled like antiseptic.
Or maybe that was just me, having just used half a container of disinfecting wipes to clean some of the blood off my floor.
I told her about what had happened, and she conducted a short exam to confirm the miscarriage.
Afterward, she said that she was very sorry for my loss.
I told her that I was also sorry for my loss.
She said that each woman reacted to the process differently, but that it was important to have a support system in place.
Did I have a support system in place? she asked.
I nodded. Fortunately, she said, my body was doing a “good job” of taking care of things naturally.
“Is there anything else that I can do for you?” she asked.
There wasn’t, but I found myself racking my brain for reasons to stay in this room with her.
I asked her questions that I already knew the answers to.
Would the miscarriage affect any future pregnancies?
Should I be worried about how much blood I had lost?
It was only then that I realized how attached to Dr. Jordan I had become.
Even though I had only met her a few weeks ago, it felt like we had known each other for much longer.
I would miss her coffee breath, her wrinkled white lab coats, her brown hair that was parted just slightly to the left of the middle of her forehead.
I wondered whether that was intentional, or whether she meant to part it in the middle.
I wanted to ask but held my tongue. That felt out-of-bounds for a doctor-patient relationship.
Wasn’t that strange? You could tell someone your biggest secret, the secret that not even your mom or your best friend knew about, but you could also not feel comfortable asking the same person about how they did their hair.
—
After my appointment with Dr. Jordan I returned to my dorm, searching the building’s storage closets until I found a bucket large enough for my purpose.
I brought it to the bathroom and filled it up with warm water and soap.
It was too heavy to carry, so I scooted it inch by inch along the carpeted hallway until I made it back to my room, careful not to splash too much onto the floor.
I dumped in half a container of stain remover, then gently placed my sheets inside the bucket, watching the soapy water darken the streaks of blood, which had faded to a dull brown overnight.
After a couple of hours, I scooted the bucket back to the bathroom and I dumped out the murky water.
Then I brought the sheets in a garbage bag to the laundry room, washing them on the strongest cycle.
It helped that the sheets were purple to begin with, so when I took them out of the dryer, I couldn’t spot the stains.
But seeing the sheets restored to their prior state brought me a profound sense of loss.
Like most things in my life, the baby to me was just a means to an end.
But I couldn’t bear that I would continue on with my life as though the baby had never existed at all.
I tried to comfort myself with scientific facts.
Dr. Jordan explained that I had miscarried at fourteen weeks, meaning I had just barely passed the first trimester.
The fetus had been barely the size of a nectarine.
I was stupid to even think of the pregnancy as a baby.
But if anything, these numbers and facts, so abstract and sanitized from the individual experiences of real life, just made me feel more alone.
At the end of our appointment, Dr. Jordan told me that it was normal to grieve, and that some of her patients found solace in memorializing the pregnancy.
It wasn’t until I was already on my way home that I realized I had no idea what “memorializing the pregnancy” meant.
I had no ashes to toss in the Hudson River, no artifact to represent the baby’s short existence in my body.
I dug out the ultrasound photo from underneath the stack of papers in my drawers.
There the baby was, in black and white, just a small, barely visible dot.
But dots could be beautiful too. My favorite flowers were never the ones with demurely wrapped petals like roses and tulips or the ones that bloomed invitingly like orchids and chrysanthemums. Instead, I always preferred baby’s breath, each little flower a self-sufficient cluster of white, just like a dot, if I was really thinking about it.
I walked to the nearest florist and asked for one bunch of baby’s breath.
Then I walked along the street until I found an empty bench.
I sat there for a few minutes, gently tearing the petals off each flower and placing them in my pocket.
During move-in freshman year, I overheard a parent saying that the campus reminded them of Paris, not because of the style of the architecture, but because it was beautiful no matter from which angle you looked.
So I decided that I’d sprinkle the petals for the baby in all different areas of campus, so that the baby could enjoy the view from different angles too.
A couple in front of the bushes at Hamilton, a few in between the trees on College Walk.
A piece on top of the lion sculpture on the northwest corner of Low, a few on the sundial for good measure.
A few in the left, uplifted palm of Alma, the hand that was not holding the scepter.
When there were no more petals to discard, I returned to my dorm.
The guilt had lifted; instead, the ache in my chest settled into something both more permanent and more bearable.
Grief. Perhaps that was the real memorialization of the baby.
Perhaps that was the real artifact that the baby would leave.