By Claudia Ellquist
The box was the weight of a baby. When the mortuary had called me to come pick it up, it was three days after I had stood in front of the cremation machinery to say a stumbling goodbye to my husband’s body. I hadn’t thought to ask them what the box of ashes would be like. Somehow, I had thought of it as being either more, or less. If it was not heavy, too heavy to be borne, then it must be, to match my shadow-thin psyche, insubstantial and powdered and gray, like a draft might blow it into the hall, a shivery breeze scattering it about, a drizzle of rain melting it away.
Instead it was this clean cardboard box, neat in its whiteness and compact in my arms, and it weighed just what a sleeping infant might, and was handed over to me with the same solemn and diffident tenderness.
Scotti and I never had a baby. He didn’t want children and I always had. Each of us had married believing the other might change, or perhaps oneself, or, just perhaps, that it would somehow not matter. For fourteen years we gave each other time and the experience of life together, and then, when time began to matter, I told him that I could wait no longer. And I began the rounds of doctors and specialists, to get the baby I wanted. It was the only enterprise I ever pursued in which he did not wish me success, the only prize he ever denied me.
When I found that I was pregnant, two years into the trying, I held off telling him. It is hard to hide morning sickness and dizziness and incredible happiness from someone who lives at your side twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps the calm and constant ecstasy that filled me would simply overflow, at the time of its own choosing, and catch him up in its wonder, and he would know. Washed in its glow, he would see that the expansion of my love for this little life-to-be would not divide his portion from me, but make it fuller still.
So, I waited, and I had not said a word when eight weeks passed, then nine. I knew I must say something soon, and had set myself a deadline. It would be after I went in for the sonogram, to check whether fibroids that had plagued me for years, now swelled by a hormonal wash, were going to present the pregnancy with problems.
But, really, such problems were the trivia of over-worried doctors. My joy made me untouchable by problems. I smiled confidently up at the tech as I chatted happily about my medical history and tried to make sense of the blurry fluctuations of webby white lines on the screen. When she couldn’t find what she looked for there either, and called the doctor in, I wondered if she were as new at this as I.
This doctor was a gray old man, as I remember, although his worried look may have made him older. He was a stranger to me and seemed to be speaking some strange language that sounded like English but made no sense. I set aside my self-absorbed serenity, to help him with whatever he was trying to convey. “No heartbeat? Well, I guess you looked as well as you can. What does that mean? I come back in two weeks for another look, when things are bigger and easier to see?”
“The size of the embryo is about what we’d expect for eight weeks, and it’s been nine. If there was a heartbeat there, we’d see it at five weeks of pregnancy, without any problem.”
I felt my face crumple. I could see it, in my mind’s eye: deflating, without an internal force to keep it solid, cracking and crinkling and shrinking, like a bubblegum bubble shattered to a plastic, unsupported pinkness. The image of my own dissolved face pursued me as my mind fled desperately from the words, from the concerned and reluctant face of the ancient doctor, from the fact that supplanted the wonderful truth I had held as my own.
Tears coursed down my crumpled face, salty and warm, then cold against the heat of my skin. I didn’t faint. I picked myself up, to sit with my useless legs dangling from the examination bed. Without taking a step — indeed, I was frozen where I was — I began the journey called grief.
The doctors were solicitous, and my own doctor had hurried into the room. Were there any questions I had?
No, it wasn’t my fault, they reassured, before my stone-slow mind had formed the question. It was nothing I had done: doctors don’t know what causes the fetus to stop growing like this. Half the time it is an internal genetic defect of the never-to-be born; half the time we just don’t know.
Whatever it was, it had happened a full week ago. But it takes the body time to catch on, and it might be another week or more before the miscarriage would come. If we hadn’t done the sonogram, they explained, it would have taken me by surprise: now I could prepare for it. Wait a day to get used to the idea. When I’m ready, they would remove it.
Or, I could wait. “For nature to take its course.”
It was eight days later that I woke before dawn with a desperate urge to scrub the house from ceiling to floor, clean everything, fix everything, make everything right. I was on my knees, my arms plunged in a soapy bucket, when the pains began, and all I did was shuck my skirt and keep on scrubbing. It was three hours until the doctor’s office opened and what was happening to me was as natural as menstruation or childbirth, but with tragedy that cried out for the privacy and the protective ordinariness of home.
I had told Scotti the day I got back from the sonogram. Instead of the sweet miracle I had been so confident of converting him with, I brought him both the news of what might have been and would not be, all in the same breath. So, I never knew whether he might have found parenthood to be an unexpected fulfillment or a just-as-he-knew burden. I only knew that he saw my grief and took it as his own.
When the doctor’s office opened, Scotti drove me in. It was “okay,” the doctor told us, when he had finished with the examination. “The fact that you did become pregnant means that you can. One miscarriage does not at all affect the odds of a later, successful pregnancy. This is hard, and you will need time to grieve, and for your body to mend. In six months, you’ll be able to try again.”
A month later, to the day and in another doctor’s office, Scotti’s stage IV cancer was diagnosed. As we sat in chairs across from the oncologist’s desk, this doctor explained to us the “metastization of adenocarcinoma with an unknown primary.” My hands were folded in my lap, knuckles tightening in wordless prayer. Scotti sighed and reached across to lay his hand gently on top of them, until they opened and clutched at his. No tears, for either of us, just holding hands and listening.
And fourteen months from the day of the miscarriage, I stood in the mortuary and the owner’s son handed me a box, white and clean and neat in its compactness. Scotti’s name typed on the pasted-on label, and the day of his dying. A box the weight of a baby. I stood alone, cradled it in my arms and cried, rockabye myself, cry softly cry.