For the Not-Yet-Born: Reflections on Miscarriage, Ritual, and Healing

By Levita D. Mondie-Sapp
Web Exclusive

For me
You are life
So I asked for your remains
Despite their policy to keep and examine
After all, youwere sent through me
And for at least sixty-three days I knew you were coming
And only the day before yesterday
I imagined you sitting
in a high chair
at the dinner table
with me, daddy,and your sisters
making slobbery faces
But this morning theysucked out all the traces
And planned to discard the“material”
But I asked for you
For ceremony and ritual:
Libation at dawn
Names called from Great Grandma Willie
To Grandpa Tom
Seeds of my favorite fruit tree
forall those who have come
Planted with water in fertile ground
Accompanied by sacred sounds
of jimbe
played by gifted hands
that will pick and eat from you again and again and again. . .

The day after Mother’s Day I suffered my second miscarriage. On Mother’s Day, I actually imagined his face sitting at the table smiling with his big sisters. Or were we going to have another beautiful daughter? I was excited and joyous at the thought of bearing a third child. I had begun to tell almost every other person whom I met “we’re expecting another one.”

“Congratulations,” was the most common response. On Sunday night I finally told my mother-in-law. We talked for almost two hours that night about all kinds of stuff. The last thirty minutes of our conversation were about my being pregnant. We talked about the possibility of me taking time off from my job to be with this baby.“I can’t see myself going back to work after three months,” I had declared to several people. I had even begun writing a proposal for my school on how to better accommodate those faculty members who have children--plans around my baby.

The smell of fresh blood. . .my baby seeping out of me red drop by red drop.. .

“There is a but no heart motion,” the ultra sound technician informs me.

“The baby isdead,” the doctor bluntly states in response to my husband’s question about the medical jargon used to explain the result of my testsand ultrasound.

I begin to cry to the point of sobbing. My husband is there to hold my hand, embrace me, and assure me that it is not my fault.

The doctor tells me that at age 33, I’m young, and I can have another one. But I wanted this one and the one before that. . . But there is a baby lifeless inside of me right now. I know that because the red drops continue to seep. While everyone else around me is focused on my future, my thoughts cradle the now demised fetus that is already trying to expel itself from my body. Although I’m almost eleven weeks pregnant, the fetus appears to be at seven weeks of development the doctor says. For over twenty days my body hasbeen a walking tomb housing a body whose heart had long stopped beating.

“I don’t feel pregnant,” I said to my husband just days before the first red drop.

“How far along are you?” asked my little sister Ashley on Mother’s Day, just one day before the blood stained tissue. “Are you past the point where something can go wrong?”

On Saturday I woke up with this strange feeling like I needed to be alone but that I desperately needed to be around my family. Tomorrow was going to be Mother’s Day and I was feeling sadness. I knew it had to do with memories of Diane, my own mother, who died four days after Mother’s Day in 1996. It was like she was holding on just for my two sisters and me. One last Mother’s Day she must have said to herself. Four days later the ambulance brought her home.“You’re at home,” we told her as the paramedics rolled her in.

“I’m home?” she asked.

“You’re home,” we assured her.