tears before the fire

I've been spending a really beautiful afternoon in front of the fire. I've been reading The Red Tent, which I purposely chose five weeks ago when I was pregnant because I wanted its chronicle of pregnancy to serve as the narrative backdrop for those days. Now that I have lost the baby, the book serves equally well in its detailing of miscarriage, loss, and hardship.
Although the passage I just read in which the narrator gives birth and falls in love with her newborn was a bit much to handle. I didn't put it down in disgust, however, the way I close the posts of women on BabyCenter boards who announce their BFP's. I simply closed the book, stared at the fire, and became conscious again of what has happened. I watched the flames in the grille, and reflected on how twice now I have sat before that fire and convalesced after miscarriage. And I started to cry. (One of the characteristics of this process is that the sadness comes unannounced, in waves, and briefly.)

The histrionic me would call it The Miscarriage Fire, since it has been my comforter now for two miscarriages. Now, to be quite clear, we had been making fires long before our first miscarriage, and we lit fires in the years between the two miscarriages. So it isn't quite right to call it the miscarriage fire, as if we use the fireplace only and exclusively during times of loss. But the fire was an important part of the convalescence after that first miscarriage, when my husband and I spent days over the Thanksgiving break sitting in the living room watching movies. I sat in the big recliner before the fire, laying flat as my body convulsed with the contractions and cramps that had driven me to the emergency room. The hours of those days might have been measured in how many logs my husband put on the fire. And then, too, it was early autumn just as it is now, the late afternoon sun's magic gold a kind of incongruity in this tragic and muted moment. So there is a logic behind my linking this November afternoon before the fire with those afternoons before the fire in November of 2008.

But I think there is more than that. I think the fire is in some ways now part of the ritual and experience of pregnancy loss. I had never been soothed by the fire like I was in the days after my first miscarriage, and I have been supremely soothed all this afternoon as I sat before the fire, reading The Red Tent. There is something about it that is supremely right after a pregnancy loss. It has become symbolic of and a part of the ritual of my emotional convalescence. Maybe it's the burning of the dream.

First, there is the sound. I sit in the silent house (my husband is away), and the only music is the intermittent cracking of the fire accompanied by the gentle sighings of my two faithful and blessed dogs. I count a few seconds of silence-- ten seconds, fifteen-- and suddenly the slight snap from the grate. It's the sound a record makes in the first few moments when the needle hits the blank band across the outer rim: crackles magnified through the speakers through a pause full of expectation before the first notes of music. Then there is the sight of it. I'm looking out the window and, floating like grey powder, a smoke cloud from the chimney makes it way through the branches of the green tree on my back lawn. Carried away on the wind to the neighbor's back lawn, then dissipating int he air. Carrying the silence of this house with it. And finally, the image of the fire itself.  Yes, I understand it now. It's the emblem of the child itself. Its flames strain up, shooting from the lip of the wood and into the blackness of the chimney. Leaping from one inch to seven inches, implacable, vital, fervent. Sparks shoot from the flames, tiny pieces of the human soul. But hours pass and the flames are lower now. They peek over the lip of the wood in a cautious, even sad way: they don't have their former strength or power. THey are, as we say, dying. There are moments when no flames shoot at all: it's just the blackness of the log on the grate, or a tiny strip of orange fighting up from the wood. A foreshadowing, a glimpse of what is inevitably to come. But the whisper of the flame is dying out, sparks fall to the chimney floor like tears. I can put another log on the fire, to be sure: the box beside the chimney piece contains five, six, seven more logs. The plastic igniter lays patiently on the chimney mantle, containing sparks within. But this particular log, this particular set of flames, are close to being extinguished. And when it is, the flames will leave no record or mark or trace outside my memory. There is no one else in this house to watch this fire this afternoon: my dogs won't remember it. It sings for an audience of one. There is a terrible futility to it, a finality to it, an inevitable termination.

But for this moment... burn, little fire. Burn.

I'd also like to tack on here a passage from an e-mail I just wrote to my aunt about this loss. She had experienced infertility for many years and finally conceived her first children through IVF. Writing to her, I found myself articulating an ambivalence I had scarcely registered in my consciousness. For now I must face the issue: am I going to break with the Catholic church?

Something I'm really struggling with now is the ethical dimensions of how to proceed. When we came home from the fertility specialist last month, I went home with a paper laying out the neat but perplexing progression of interventions from Clomid to IUI to IVF. But I found out I was pregnant 2 days later, and mercifully I dodged the bullet of having to wrestle with the religious dimensions of those choices. I mean, I have not been on the best of terms with Jesus these past few years-- fertility problems have just shaken my faith to the core-- but it's amazing how quickly my Catholicism revived when I found out I was pregnant and I started reflexively begging God to let me keep the baby. Now that we're back to square one, I have to weigh leaving the Church in the balance on top of everything else. The boys in Rome just don't give you a whole lot of options. I don't know. I never anticipated any of this.