The Passage
My friend came over and we slowly drank wine and talked—her miscarriage (a couple years earlier), my miscarriage (current), the moments that blindsided each of us in a wash of grief, what the aftermath was like for her and what getting pregnant again was like. I was smack dab in the middle of my experience and found comfort in talking to friends who had been there and who had now had time to assimilate it within a zoomed-out picture of The Rest of Life. It was August 11, two days before I would turn thirty-nine, and the night of that giant moon. The Sturgeon Moon is said to represent the abundance of the harvest, a mocking contrast to a body left bereft. As we sat and talked I felt a stirring of cramps in my belly. Easy enough at first to ignore the sensation and maintain conversation, but the pain was starting to make its presence known. We hugged our goodbyes and I felt grateful for having shared a balmy night on the porch with someone who understood.
Eleven days earlier, shortly after the calendar had ticked off eleven weeks of a much wanted and long-pursued pregnancy, I had seen the dreaded sight: drops of blood in the toilet. Even though I knew spotting during pregnancy could be normal, I feared the worst. An ultrasound later that morning confirmed my fears. I’m so sorry, I don’t see a heartbeat today. In shock, I was presented with my three options and opted for the quickest solution, a D&C. The procedure did not go as planned, however, and resulted in a perforated uterus, a secondary surgery, a hospital overnight and a fat medical bill. I was discharged the next day with the unviable pregnancy still intact.
The night of my girlfriend’s visit, as I walked inside from the porch, the sensations intensified. Struggling to stand upright now, I thought, I just need to do a few things and then I can lie on the couch—go pee, get a big glass of water and get my electric heating pad. I got situated on the couch and turned on the projector to watch a show but instead stared at the random Google photos that scrolled by on the screen. The pain was consuming. I wondered whether it was time to call Jamie home. Since that life-changing I’m so sorry, my husband Jamie had been by my side day and night, exactly as I had needed and without me having to say it. Tonight he had asked if I was okay with him going to have drinks with friends, and I was. That thirty minutes or so after my friend left and when the cramps began was my first time alone in the house since the day we had received the news. I had requested Jamie leave his ringer on that night, and at 11:30 I texted him:
“Actually, I started having really bad cramps in the last twenty minutes. I don’t think it’s an emergency but I’m starting to feel like it would be good if you came home soon. Still not much blood but it’s feeling intense.”
He said he’d come on home now.
The couch wasn’t comfortable anymore so I was rolling around on the floor, trying different positions. Some version of child’s pose felt remotely doable, though I think the shape was more like a crumpled-up leaf. When I started audibly groaning the thought occurred to me, Oh. Maybe this is what childbirth is like. Of course I realize that birthing a full-grown baby is a vastly different experience, but framing it in that way proved valuable for me. Giving birth is something I had honestly fantasized about for a long time, and it presented a challenge to rise
to. Fear came up, but blessedly briefly—a passing flash here and there. Fear of hemorrhaging, of having to go to the emergency room, of somehow further damaging my uterus, which was already in recovery from the D&C gone wrong. But some part of me sensed that fear was the opposite of what I needed now—what I needed was to surrender. My body was doing this. In the way that your body does when you have food poisoning and you are a witness to the body’s work of convulsing and expelling. You have no choice in the matter.
I had revisited trying to find a position on the couch when it happened. An unmistakable POP. In my uterus. The fear rose again, but there wasn’t time for it. I went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and what felt like the full contents of my abdomen released in a whoosh.
I’ve replayed that whoosh in my mind, and I sometimes wish I had taken a second longer to look closely at what had come out. Call it for the sake of science or just pure human curiosity, part of me wonders what I would have seen if I had really taken a good look. Instead, I took a quick glance, saw what I am certain was the raspberry-sized body that had once been my growing baby, and I flushed. I was in too much pain to stop and examine, and I was probably scared to see it. But I felt instinctively sure (as sure as one can be of these things) that my actual baby, the spirit or the soul or whatever you want to call it, was not in that teeny blob in the toilet, and I had no moral misgivings as I flushed it down.
Relief. A fleeting but striking moment of relief. Ever since learning that the baby had ‘left the building’, to put it crassly, I wanted to release it from my body. And now I had. That was certainly the climax of the event, but the pain and contractions were still acute. Jamie got home shortly after that and asked how I was.
“It’s going down,” I said.
“Oh good,” he said, thinking I meant that my pain and cramping was going down.
“No, I mean, it’s going down.”
He sprang into action, asking what I needed, joining me on the couch to see what he could do. All I needed was to lay my head in his lap and for him to rest his hand on my low back. Finally, a position that felt within the sphere of comfort.
We called the midwives, as they had encouraged me to do when the bleeding became heavy. The midwife on call was so kind, as all of them had been, and talked me through what was happening, asking questions to make sure no emergency measures needed to be taken. I was reassured. Everything was apparently happening as it should, even though that was hard to fathom given how uncomfortable and unnerving the whole thing was. At the top of the call she offered a heartfelt apology for what I had been through. I remember now how this caught me
off guard. For the first time since receiving the news I wasn’t in grief, I was just in my body, having a completely crazy physical experience. I had anticipated that this phase of the process—the passing of the pregnancy—would be fraught with feelings of loss. For me, grief and loss abounded both before and after, but not now. I was engaged. I was primal, a wild animal.
We lay there for some time, attempting to mindlessly watch a show, with me taking frequent lengthy trips to the bathroom to let more blood flow. The intensity eventually began to quell and sometime around two in the morning we got in bed, with me still clutching my heating pad to my womb.
Jamie tried to stay awake to keep me company, but I assured him I was okay and wanted him to sleep. Between cycles of pain I was able to doze in strange little naps. When I got up to go to the bathroom around 4 a.m., I instinctively knew it was over. I slept deeply and soundly then, until late in the morning.
That morning felt strangely like the sun coming out after a wild storm. I felt...good? I was taken aback by a sense of exhilaration. What was there to do but go with it and welcome it? I have since learned that during a miscarriage you can get a big flood of oxytocin like you do in childbirth. I felt that. Accompanied by an even more unexpected sense of feeling proud of myself. Almost like being a little kid and being surprised by something your body can do that it’s never done before. I was enamored with my body, and thankful that it had known exactly what to do and how to take care of itself.
I had a follow-up ultrasound scheduled a few days later and was eager to get confirmation that all was well with my war-torn uterus. With a twinge of disappointment I learned that, while the “pregnancy” had passed, there were still some remaining blood clots (how could that be after so much bleeding?). I would need to take the medicine to ensure they came out. I filled my Cytotec prescription that evening, and in the bedroom alone I put on a calming song (Feist’s Cicadas and Gulls), lay down on top of the bedspread and inserted four small tablets into my vagina as instructed. I had to laugh as I recalled the day that Heather the midwife had gently described to me the three options for completing the miscarriage—at-home natural style, the medicine, or the D&C—and imagined myself in an alternate reality saying “yes, yes, all three for me please!”
Fear showed up again with the taking of the medicine. I had thought we were done with all the scary stuff, but here I was taking a drug that would make me bleed all over again. My mind filed through outcomes that could potentially result in a middle-of-the-night trip to the emergency room. But nothing happened. Just discomfort and a fitful sleep. It wasn’t until the following afternoon that the blood showed back up, slowly and surely. No high drama like the other night. This time it was easy and honestly just felt like the dregs.
At one point that afternoon I was reading in the hammock when it started to rain. I stood to go inside but instead found myself walking into the woods behind our house. I had imagined once or twice during this time that it might feel cathartic in some way to leave some of this miscarriage blood in the actual earth. It felt like it belonged there–something akin to a burial. So as I stood barefoot in the rain in the woods that afternoon, I followed that strange urge and squatted over the ground. My body responded, and released. With a stick, I covered the area with leaves and dirt and walked inside.
Not even an hour later, the sun came through the rain and I went back outside, this time donning my rain jacket and boots, and wandered around in the front yard staring at the sky. Sure enough, after a few minutes the beginnings of a rainbow stretched over the roof of our house, progressively brighter and more vibrant and eventually followed by a fainter one just above it. Tears sprang to my eyes, blending with the last drops of rain. I looked around the sky to see if there were other rainbows over other roofs, but no, just the one, perfectly centered over our house. I stared and stared at it until it faded, not wanting to miss any of it or leave before it was over. I thanked it. It felt like a message. Like a “hello.”
-Ali Sperry
Ali Sperry is a singer-songwriter, yoga instructor and essayist based in Nashville, TN. She moved to Nashville in 2009 to join the rich music community there and as a solo artist she has released four studio albums, touring both domestically and in the UK. She grew up in Fairfield, Iowa as part of the Transcendental Meditation community and her meditation and yoga practice continue to be a significant part of her life. Ali received a BFA in Acting from Syracuse University. She lives with her husband Jamie, who is a drummer and music producer, their dog Lonnie and in April of 2024 they welcomed their daughter Hennie to the family.