A Thousand Tiny Deaths
an essay
Grief is a magnifying glass.
I have spent the last almost eight weeks turning over again and again in my mind the experiences of living life after birthing a baby. Her feet the size of the top pad of my pinky finger; a baby who couldn’t survive outside of the safety of my womb; a baby who died too soon. The drudgery of returning to a bill-paying day job that truthfully means very little to me in comparison to the human life I grew in my belly, the expectations to trade my time for money and healthcare when I would much rather nurture this still aching postpartum body I am living in, is exhausting.
The United States isn’t built for mothers. It isn’t built for women, really. It doesn’t seem to be built for humans, if I am really honest with myself. It’s built for the abled bodied, for the urgency culture, for the money-hoarding folks who think they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and somehow be the next Wealthy Guy™. Why any of our healthcare is tied to a job is beyond me. And gods forbid the Affordable Care Act, a law that truthfully didn’t go far enough. A law that just panders to insurance companies. A law recently gutted in the hallowed halls of Congress. A law built on the back of capitalism and a supposed free market. I’ll tell you what friends, I don’t feel free. Do you?
Grief is a magnifying glass.
The circle of friends and family I clung to in those early days after Brigid’s birth and death has settled into something else. There are the few still reaching out, the few who are blessings and give me hope. The few who humanize me, who see me, who let me gnash my teeth and rip my shirt and wail at the heavens. These are the ones who have always been there, the ones who don’t feed me platitudes but instead show up again and again. They are the soul friends. But the phone calls grow less, replaced by “I’ve been thinking of you” texts. Or worse yet, “I’m praying for you.” Or even worse, the silence from people you never thought would be silent in the first place.
And so, grief is a magnifying glass.
I suppose this is the gift of grief, too: that it’s clarifying. Grief can, if we are brave enough to let it, show us what matters. It invites us to be brave, to consider who to let go of, or what to hold on to. And so it seems grief of this kind is a thousand tiny deaths, over and over again. It is death and life and rebirth creating the fertile soil to grow something new, if only we can be fearless enough to let it.