Remembering Autumn

We lost our fourth baby last week. In fact, my water probably started breaking exactly a week ago right now. This was the latest loss we have had, so I got to birth her and we held her and watched her heart beat a little. I wanted to share some stories of her and our family even though they are rough and unfinished. Like grief more generally. Anyway, this is one of those stories:

I felt flutters early on in pregnancy, but flutters aren’t the same as that good first kick. With our living child, I had fallen asleep reading a book and the kick woke me up. With this child, I thought I would feel her kick earlier since I knew what I was looking for this time. Every time I got a sonogram, the sonographer or doctor commented on (and sometimes complained about) how much she moved around. But I still didn't feel that kick, until I went to see a musical.

Hadestown came to DC, and I love the writer Anaïs Mitchell so a Broadway-loving friend and I brought our masks and vaccination cards and saw the show. Right after intermission, the character Persephone sings the song, “Our Lady of the Underground.” I felt the kicking as she sang her name: Persephone. It was late, so maybe that’s why I felt the baby kick with such force. But in that moment I took it as reassurance, as the younger sister winking at the elder. My last miscarriage, an anembryonic pregnancy back in 2018, was of a little girl who I named Persephone. This moment felt like my two babies connecting, healing this gap in our family.

Now I read it as them reaching toward one another, soon to be reunited.

I first knew I was pregnant with the older sister at Easter; this baby was supposed to be due at Easter. Neither daughter turned out to be a bearer of resurrection. My first two miscarried babies were named for the short seasons we knew them in, but I could not name our third baby anything relating for spring when she was dead. So I named her Persephone, the Greek goddess who abandons her mother for the underworld. Three-and-a-half years after my Persephone’s death, my new baby girl was kicking up a storm hearing her sister’s name. 

Now she’s gone to be with that sister. I'd make myself into Orpheus if I could: sneaking into the underworld and demanding them back.