Below is section two of L. Serene Jones, ‘Hope Deferred: Theological Reflections on Reproductive Loss (Infertility, Miscarriage, Stillbirth). I will ask some questions in the next input. II. A Tale of the Grieving Self
Having made these general comments about reproductive loss, let me now
move to the heart of my project to explore what I believe to be central
features of this grief. 14 Because I am interested in eventually exploring what
this grief looks like within the drama of faith, what I offer in this section is
itself a kind of drama—a drama of reproductive loss. It is an “inside look” at
four images of self that haunt women who struggle with this kind of event.
As Wendy and I dug into the dirt in her yard that morning, Wendy felt for
the first time in several days that she was doing something she had control
over. She felt like an agent whose intentional actions—even the simple
action of turning over mud—were controlled and had measurable con-
sequences. This momentary feeling of control and agency stood in stark
contrast to the radical loss of agency she experienced in the midst of her
miscarriage. As she told it, “A woman like myself is accustomed to viewing
my body and my creative powers as something I control. My body, myself.
I grew up believing that I could choose the conditions of my sexuality and
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my reproductivity. I thought I had a so-called choice. And yet now, I find
myself walking around my kitchen bleeding away a life that I quite inten-
tionally chose to make ... and I am completely powerless to save it. I am
completely helpless in the face of whatever it is nature appears to be doing
here. I cannot stop the blood, Serene. It keeps pouring out of me and then
washing away, lost. I cannot stanch its flow; it seeps out through the pores
of my will which so ardently fights to stop it. I cannot change these things,
even though I desire to do so more than anything else I have ever desired.”
Wendy also explained that stealthily wrapped around this sense of lost
agency was its counterpart: a sense of enormous guilt and responsibility for
this miscarriage she couldn’t stop from happening. I hear this often when
women speak of their grief. Like Wendy, they tell me, again and again, that
their first thought when learning of their loss is that somehow it is their
fault. “What did I do to make this happen?” they ask. “Was it that cigarette
I smoked last Saturday? The glass of wine I had three weeks ago? Did I not
take the right vitamins?” Or even more painfully, “Have I done something
to deserve this? Is God punishing me? Is this fate’s revenge for sins I have
committed in the past? Is it because of the abortion I had ten years ago?
Is it the drugs I used as a youth? Is it the mixed feelings I had about
the pregnancy in the first place?” Although most women are able to
recognize the often irrational quality of their assumed guilt (as well as the
level of responsibility they might rightly assume), this doesn’t lessen the
insidious force of these feelings. This is only exacerbated by a growing
medical rhetoric that holds women singularly responsible for the success or
failure of their pregnancies. In such a context, their sense of culpability
usually grows as they try to figure out what happened medically and, quite
often, their past begins to look like one long tale of bad decisions and lost
chances. 15
Tied up with this first feature of reproductive grief—the paradoxical
intertwining of lost agency and guilt—is a second feature that marks one’s
sense of self: the enormous sense of a future lost, a hope forever deferred.
Regardless of how one medically views the status of tissue produced by the
pregnancy, the woman who wants a pregnancy is going to imagine the
potential life that is at stake in every attempt at pregnancy. Further, she does
not imagine it as just any life; she views it as a particular life, the life of her
potential child. She immediately envisions it as a person with a smile like
her father’s, or thick, black hair like her sister’s. She also begins to measure
her own future in terms of this imagined child’s development. She imagines
where he, her son, will sleep or what she, her daughter, will wear. She
envisions him at school or her learning to drive. She conjures up the many
possible tones of his voice or the shape of her feet, at birth and then at fifty.
The woman’s body begins to anticipate holding the child; she can smell her
daughter’s birthday cake; she can hear her son singing in his high school
years. Her whole being, it seems, stretches itself into this child’s future, and
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this future becomes the space of her own becoming. In the words of Paul
Tillich, “All time is expectation.” For her, this could not be more true, for she
is quite literally expecting this child. And then, her hope dies.
When a desired pregnancy fails—whether it be through a stillbirth or a
failed in vitro fertilization—the woman experiences this known and yet
unknown child not just as “failing” but as “dying”. And with it dies a
passionately imagined future, a future that is both the child’s and the
woman’s. She thus grieves not only an immediate loss, but the loss of an
entire lifetime, a lifetime lived vividly in the drama of her hoping. In many
cases, this works a peculiar and painful twist on a woman’s relation to time
itself. As the future she imagines collapses, so too collapses her capacity to
envision the future with any sense of expectancy. In this sense, the death of
expectation harshly reconfigures her understanding of time. Women have
told me that along with their inability to make a child comes a sense of their
inability to make a future. When this happens, time stretches before them as
a story of parching barrenness or violent bloodiness; in either case, it no
longer stretches before them as a book that they are invited to write. As
Wendy described it, she spent days, perhaps even months—she couldn’t
measure it—wandering in a strange land where time held no promise. Out
of kilter, disoriented, bleeding, her body could not anticipate with joy even
the next second of its existence, to say nothing of the years of future
existence she had previously celebrated. Because the child that dies exists so
completely in the space of hope and imagination, its death produces in the
self its negative mirror image: the death of hope and of the capacity to relate
to time as the space of expectancy, a welcoming space into which the self is
invited to walk.16
This undoing of time finds its spatial counterpart in a woman’s experience
of the loss of bodily integrity. I call this third feature “the rupturing of self”.
It describes the confusion about self that occurs when one experiences the
radical dissolution of the bodily borders that, in ordinary time, give the self
a sense of internal coherence. By “borders”, I refer to those morphological
lines that mark the difference between the outside and the inside of self. In
the throes of reproductive loss, women often describe a feeling of not
knowing where they physically end and where the outside world begins.
This is because their insides are quite literally falling out. A woman may also
find that with the loss of borders comes a loss of one’s ability to contain, both
physically and psychically; her womb will not hold the child because, she
feels, it has lost the ability to keep inside what belongs inside and to keep out
what shouldn’t be in. So, too, she becomes, at a cognitive and emotional
level, more broadly confused about who she is. She cannot even contain
herself. Wendy described this well. She told me how she felt fragmented,
dispersed, like she was leaking into the world. For the woman who is
miscarrying or having a stillbirth, this fragmentation means leaving pieces
of herself and another in rags, in toilets, in medical waste cans; she tries to
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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.
hold this all together but can’t. For the woman who suffers infertility, this
loss of bodily integrity is often the result of the constant invasion of her body
by medical technologies that promise to extend her reproductive powers.
She becomes confused about where she ends and it begins. It becomes
her, and vice versa. This dissolution also happens to her each time she sees
the unwanted blood of her cycle, a blood whose cramping flow once again
announces the advent of a dying, not a living.
This sense of not being able to contain, of being fragmented and rup-
turing, is heightened even further as she begins to experience the fourth and
perhaps most wrenching dimension of her grief: her body becomes to her
“the space of death”. As several women have described it to me: “My womb
is a death bed, my body a grave.” There is no other experience, in the mix
of our many human griefs, that comes close to mirroring this. She carries
death within her body ... but she does not die. Death becomes her. It fills her,
a final death, and yet she lives to remember not a death diverted but a death
accomplished and completed in her loins. The experience of stillbirth shows
this most vividly. She holds in her womb the dead, imagined person whose
future she has conjured. What does it mean to know one’s self as a walking
site of death itself? To have death quite literally inside you? It is hard to
imagine the contours of this self—the self who is meant to produce, be cre-
ative, give life, and make a future, but who rather holds the stench of decay
in the depths of her being—and she lives to tell of it. It is at this point in the
experience of reproductive loss that women describe losing the capacity to
speak. Instead, they wail or sit in aphasiac silence. I believe this is partially
because in Western culture, we have no images for the self who carries death
within her. And because of this, we greet the woman who knows such loss
with silence.
If she is lucky, her imagination stops here, with death inside her. For many
women, however, this imagery runs more deeply and cuts more harshly as
she begins to see herself not only as a grave where death is held, but also as
the active agent of that dying. As Wendy described her grief that morning,
she told me she felt as if she had killed the life within her, that her body had
attacked and destroyed it. She asked me, then, what it meant that her body,
her womb, had killed the tissue and hopes we were burying. Had her body
murdered? Why had her body rejected and killed the “other” whose life she
so passionately desired to nurture? While she knew she was speaking to
me in metaphors—she knew she had not intentionally destroyed life—this
image of killer had a profound grip upon her. Why had she destroyed the
other who lived inside her? she asked. And why was she left alive to
experience its dying? For a woman who has been raised to value maternal
care, the ethical force of this experience of “killing the other” is devastating.
Can one envision a more powerfully anti-maternal image? Not only does she
not give life as a mother should, her body takes life away. Here, our most
treasured conceptions of selfhood crack open and fall apart, unable to bear
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the weight of this brutal possibility. And again, those who suffer it are left
without consoling images.
What I offer here is a series of four very difficult images that I believe
capture something of the crisis this experience produces in the women who
go through it. At many different levels, these images of reproductive grief
run counter to our dominant conceptions of what persons are and do. In
doing so, these images form an aesthetic logic of selfhood that runs counter
to our culture’s more familiar logics of selfhood. Instead of experiencing
herself as an agent, the woman grieving reproductive loss knows herself as
powerless to stop it and yet guilty for her perceived failure. As her hope
dies, she also becomes a self without a future. She is a self whose borders are
as fluid as the blood she cannot stanch, a self undone. And in the space of
this undoing, she is the anti-maternal self who doesn’t give life; she takes it
away. She is the space of total and finalized death, perhaps even an
imagined killer. And in the most uncanny twist of all, she is the one who
lives through this all; she carries death and yet lives. When these four
dimensions of her loss are woven into a single picture of grief, we find a
portrait of suffering that is painfully unique in its form. As such, it is a
suffering that calls out to feminists and theologians: Can your visions of the
self hold me? Can your theory bear my weight? To this call, let us now turn.