Hello Blood: The Dance of Miscarriage
Photo: Kimi Eisele. When the small body stopped forming and came out of me, I put it into a yogurt container and drove out to the desert. We placed it on the ground between a saguaro, an ocotillo, and a barrel cactus, and made a circle around the form with small stones. I intentionally left an opening to allow its spirit—if such a thing existed—to get out.
The blood had started at 5 a.m. I went to the bathroom and there it was, just like a period. Just like the end of a sentence. Only it hadn’t been a sentence, it had been a joy, and now, I was pretty certain, it was ending. I crawled back into bed. “I’m bleeding,” I told my partner.
We got pregnant easily, on the second try, in June. By August it was real. At the end of a cross-country drive from Pennsylvania, where we’d been visiting my parents, we took a pregnancy test in a South Dakota motel. We went to Mount Rushmore and looked at the white men’s heads, but all I could think about was the beautiful creature inside me. I already had a name picked out.
In September I went on a six-day backpacking trip in Yosemite with a friend. Because of the nausea, I couldn’t eat much of what we’d packed. But somehow we hiked at high altitudes and lounged aside glacial lakes. On an external hard drive somewhere there exists a digital photograph of me in an alpine meadow wearing shorts and a maroon t-shirt with my hand on my belly. I can still conjure the anticipatory bliss of that moment.
When I got home, I felt tired and unproductive. Friends assured me I was working hard—my body was creating complex systems, capillaries, a heart—and that made me feel better about the malaise. I looked forward to feeling fantastic in the next two trimesters. I looked forward to the belly. To the glow. To ushering a being into life.
Instead, after eleven weeks, no heartbeat, and that bright-red blood at dawn, I ushered the being into the desert, food for a coyote or a hawk or a javelina.
The man standing across from me that evening in the desert, the man who would have been
