Nadia

I've not been feeling very "wordy" lately. But I want to mark this all down, in case I want to remember someday, and today is not a heavy day so far, so perhaps this is a good day.

I've been thinking a lot about loss. I've been lucky so far in my life. All my grandparents are alive. My parents, sibling, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends are alive. I've not suffered any sort of loss that would require this sort of grief process. So I'm finding it surprising. It's very weird how I can go days and be fine, fine, fine, and then suddenly ka-wham I'm not fine. And sometimes the not-fine sticks, and sometimes it just keeps rolling by.

I'm looking at this experience and I'm glad I chose to go this route. The medically induced otherwise natural miscarriage route. I'm still glad I didn't have a D&C, even if I'm still bleeding and cramping 8 days later. I'm proud of myself last weekend. I drove for over an hour through one nearly constant contraction. My mom said to me the day after, "I don't know, but that sounded a lot like labor to me. If you ask me, if you can drive through that, you'll be fine when there's a baby at the other end." Hwah. Yeahhhh. *flexing biceps* (although the biceps were the most unaffected set of muscles, haha)

An hour of hellish driving. 7 more hours of Vicodin-relieved cramping, heavy bleeding, and sleeping. 7 more days of bleeding. That's the losing.

That's the easy part.

It's the loss that presses in at unexpected moments, keeps rolling, keeps emphasizing its own finality that's hard to carry. The losing was over quickly. The loss is a road that disappears over the next hill.

(Thankfully, though, my body doesn't seem to be about to drag it out ad infinitum. I went in for bloodwork on Friday, and while my hcg was over 70,000 last week, it had dropped down to 10,000 a week after the miscarriage started. 1000 would have been awesome, but 10,000 is OK. It's a good indication that I'm looking at weeks, rather than months, before my hormones drop back to 0. Yay.)

But I'll say this. I have a friend at work who lost a baby 3 years ago under very similar circumstances. She named what she imagined was a daughter. I've thought about this and I don't see there ever being a time when I refer to this lost child by name. I don't think I'll ever hear myself saying, "Back before (name) died." Or any such thing. I talked to J and he wasn't keen on the idea. He said, "What if you give it a girl name and you meet it someday and it's a boy?" Men. :)

But this child gave its mother something in the short time it was here with us. It gave me hope. And hope is a virtue traditionally depicted in the feminine form. So in the deep places of this mother's heart, I have named her a slavic name (I studied Russian in high school and have always loved the language) which means hope. It's a small whisper of thanks, a nod as I aquiesce to the dictates of biology, and a reminder, always, to hope.

(And if it was a son, I hope he forgives me the sissy girl name. (Haha. Makes me think of that song, "My name is Sue. How do you do?!"))