Remembering Autumn: The Crash
When we came home from the hospital with empty arms, the wind was blowing fiercely. But Aaron leaned over to me and said, “See, Autumn is telling us she’s ok.” I wasn’t really worried about Autumn myself. She was dead. I was worried about us being ok. But as Aaron held my hand and helped me into the house, I knew the sound of the wind through the trees, the crunch of leaves beneath our feet- these are the sounds that link us to her always. The leaves, which even a month later I spotted in brightly colored piles on the sidewalk, are the colors that remind us of her. Even though we cannot be together the way we want to, love still holds us fast to one another. And the wind, the leaves, the love- they have held us fast to one of her brothers too.
I had actually named our second miscarried baby Autumn before genetic testing told us he had xy chromosomes. I knew he didn’t care about having a name that was not gender normative- he was dead after all, and I am not married to rules of gender normativity myself, but still the name didn’t feel right for me after that. Eventually, I changed his name to Leif.
When I was pregnant with Leif, I wanted to love him with abandon, even though I feared another miscarriage. I wasn’t going to hold my breath through the pregnancy- I was going to live and will him to live too. (My will does not affect nature at all; I have learned that over and over again.) Each week, I thought of a new adventure to take him on, and one week, his dad and I went on a leaf peeking flight.
I have told this story in sermons before: We borrowed a friend’s airplane, started to take off, but something was wrong, so we stopped taking off and started checking things. I know, I am being so specific here, but honestly it isn’t that I don’t remember what was wrong, it was that I was so unworried that I didn’t bother to register it. I was taking selfies, much to Aaron’s annoyance, and trying to get cool shots of the plane, it’s shadow, and the leaves bursting with color. When we were back on the runway, I was trying to see if we got any good shots- especially pictures of my belly, which at seven weeks showed nothing of the life inside it. We started taking off again, and this time I could feel the sluggishness of the plane as we ascended. I knew that was not right, so I looked over at Aaron. I could see the concern on his face too, but that didn’t scare me. In fact, I felt more comfortable and resumed taking my pictures. Why worry? I trusted my pilot. I was confident in his abilities, even though I knew that there are plenty of things that can happen when flying that would cause even the most perfect pilot to crash. My faith in Aaron wasn’t a belief that we would never crash. It was just that I knew Aaron would do all that he could to get us back to the ground if it were possible. And if we did crash, then I was with the person I loved doing what we loved.
In sermons, I usually talk about God and faith here. But in this story, I’m going to skip to the part where we did crash. Not in the plane that day. We landed safely then. I mean metaphorically. When we found out two weeks later that Leif’s heart had stopped beating, we were devastated, but that wasn’t the crash. The crash came later when the results of genetic testing from Leif’s death diagnosed me with Balanced Translocated Chromosomes. We didn’t know the percent chance of miscarriage then, but we knew it was not good. I found out the results at church after a Longest Night Service days before Christmas. I had actually begun to hope again, to believe that even with two miscarriages maybe we weren’t doomed. When I read the results, though, that hope crashed. Almost exactly five years later, we have a beautiful living child but also another dead one, and I feel similarly that hope has been sucked out of my life. It was like our engine had failed and we were falling forever.
Aaron would have me remind you here that the majority of plane crashes are survivable. And we did survive. We started IVF, moved to a new place, had new adventures and new struggles, and after two years of treatment, finally welcomed a living child into the world, giving us at least one day in November that we celebrate life instead of remembering death dates.
When we were in the hospital with Autumn, listening to the doctor tell us that chances of my water not breaking at that point were slim, and that even if my water didn’t break there was already a strong possibility of infection, Aaron and I just looked at each other. We had absolutely no control. Why worry? The plane was going down, but we were with the person we loved.
My mom told me that one of the times she sat with a parishioner who had a stillbirth, a nurse told them that this baby spent their life in utero knowing nothing but love. Leif and Autumn knew nothing but love. We might not have memories of their personalities or what they looked like or how they smelled, but we watch our living child play beneath the trees with a leaf in his hands jumping into piles he’s made and we remember loving them like we love our living child. And so even though we have crashed yet again, that love remains and maybe will guide us as we sort through the wreckage.
