Changing Into Wine

Monday afternoon, I found out that a very sweet couple, friends from the university who are generous, lighthearted and of course, love children, lost their baby at 25 weeks of pregnancy. Her name was Isabella Ann. Her heart stopped beating, so delivery was induced, and she was born the night of March 9th.

Her mother, my friend Barbara, called last night after I'd left a phone message and some flowers. Just 2 weeks earlier, she had called me after we hadn't seen each other for a couple of months. She was saying her husband Robert happened to be in Japan, and recommended a book she'd been reading called Spirit Babies.

When we spoke last night, she related all sorts of meaningful coincidences with Isabella's death: that she'd been reading this book avidly, which talks about connecting with the baby you are trying to conceive, the one you are pregnant with, and even the ones you've lost; that she never quite brought herself to think she was "out of the woods" even when her doctor assured her that she could be more at ease now that she was past the first trimester; that Robert arrived home from weeks in Japan that Friday, and they went to the hospital the next day to find that Isabella's heart was no longer beating.

I'd been struggling with vulnerability again, not wanting to see another friend's new daughter, feeling like every pregnant woman or ones with second babies were in my face. I go into Victoria's Secret on a Wednesday noon, I'm the only customer in the store, a hugely pregnant woman walks in. I wanted to throw the bra and panties I'd been carrying at her and stomp out the door. But today I had a massage with a woman who'd been treating me since Elise died, and she gently told me to let "the story" go, the rational side of me that kept searching for reasons. She didn't say what kind of reasons, but my thought was about the reasons for Elise's death, for Isabella's death, for why we haven't had another baby, why others get to have theirs with them.

When I got up from the massage table, the bitterness had evaporated. This evening I picked up a book of Rilke's prose and poetry and opened it to a random page, only to come across this from The Sonnets to Orpheus:


Silent friend of many distances, feel

how your breath enlarges all of space.

Let your presence ring out like a bell

into the night. What feeds upon your face



grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.

Move through transformation, out and in.

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?

If drinking is bitter, change yourself into wine.



In this immeasurable darkness, be the power

that rounds your senses in their magic ring,

the sense of their mysterious encounter.



And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.

To the flashing water say: I am.