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Even the functional will suffer from brain fog some days. I forgot my sister’s marriage anniversary three days ago and I only remembered it when I was sending someone belated anniversary wishes for the same date and she said ” but you never forget “. Oh I do sometimes. The practice of numbing does become a habit. Not numbing to forget but numbing comes to a point when the need to remember no longer exists. I am beginning to forget dates that mattered to her. She herself is no more to remind me. She passed away two years ago and I felt nothing on the day she was married. Ironically it falls three days after her own death anniversary.Her anniversary had become a sore event and point in her life . I didn’t talk about it and she never forgot it. She ended up being divorced four years after her marriage. She never expected it to end so soon and she tried to preserve her marriage to the best of her capability. Added to the social humiliation and shame that follows as constant speculation of imperfect human behavior she was facing those days there was another grief .Grief over loss of her unborn child. The child was a seven month baby with long black lock of hair and congenitally malformed to be sustainable. Doctors had already predicted baby’s fate. Not fit to survive. After two days of an induced labor in an esteemed medical institution, the doctor simply put the female abortus in a translucent plastic bag to be submitted for pathological examination . We were looking for correctable genetic clues should she conceive in future.
The shabby way it was handled labelled as mere specimen was reported as sample too little to arrive at a conclusion a month later. I refuse to even question the callousness in my very own profession and that’s perhaps a debate of another time.My sister stayed confused about which pain affected her the worst ? She dwindled between her physical, mental and emotional pain constantly. She began to lose her health faster than ever , losing her appetite, body reserves, single polycystic kidney that began to deteriorate further along with a lung filled with more mucus plugs along with her choking sorrow and sadness. She was failing herself than the chronic renal failure she accepted as one of the diagnosis that would claim her some day.She fought a mental war of a broken relationship and the seven month old mother in her lamented silently.She never forgot the baby’s hair and often mentioned it to us for that’s all she remembered of her daughter..I named her unborn child ” Goldilocks”.
I sometimes try to feel like her but all I can feel is her loss. She never got over it. It was a silent type of grief. The disenfranchised Grief. It was overlooked by everyone.
The Doctor called it an abortus not fit for survival.For her husband the baby was an accidental yield of lustful unapologetic moments for he never enquired and that hurt her terribly.We as a family sympathised with her but probably didn’t sit enough with her to vent out, plus the fact both me and my mother are doctors too and are habituated to a small amount of professional numbing by default. It is how we maintain boundaries with other people’ grief.But she discussed this image of her daughter to her confidants and it stayed with her the longest.
Perhaps the loss in some way signified her “malformed” marriage which became dysfunctional soon after conception ending up in permanent seperation in a short span of time.Though she survived in her own battered way ending up bitter sweet , moody , bipolar disorder and tried committing suicide multiple times but ended up being saved everytime. She resolved much of it on the surface and inside she lived with agony of failure and betrayal. I do wonder what she lost that day but somewhere I also see in that abortion trauma she missed a miracle of life. A life that may have belonged to her child and may be she would have never told me ” there is not much point in my living “. No body is going miss me much.Witnessing her grief over many things over sixteen years has been my greatest learning and I am beginning to acknowledge this disenfranchised Grief of pregnancy loss far more deeply now. I never stop a woman from crying over a pregnancy loss even if the factual medical labels declare pregnancy as missed abortion/ inevitable/anechoic gestation/congenital malformation/ intrauterine death/ still born.
Death hurts the mother same way and it is irrespective of the fact for how long a mother she has been. She grieves irrespective of the time of her pregnancy termination and most importantly she needs to grieve fully even if she births in the future. Her unborn children live in her and her womb carries those imprints.Coming back to why I couldn’t remember her important date I realise I just felt no need to revisit her anger, sadness, pain for I had got accepted it in my own way. It was her journey and through her I was granted a gift too. To look at life as a Miracle. Whenever the miracle happens a woman is transformed. Some who will be fortunate enough to see these miracles live in front of her eyes and some that will live in her heart when she closes them.
I prefer to keep it simpler for myself …the whole process of life and death and the celebration of it all.Whenever I see an embryo or hold a baby in my arms I celebrate Goldilocks…for the miracle that happened to us just like that one fine day.
