What It's Like to Have a Miscarriage While in Quarantine
Aja Gabel is a former cellist and the author of The Ensemble (2019).
We are lucky. There’s a trend now, in the era of coronavirus, of saying something like that before you’re about to complain about something. For most of us, it’s true, and it’s important to say. We are lucky because we have an apartment and each other, and the ability to get and keep jobs, and money enough for groceries.
Still, that recitation doesn’t really make our fears less scary. A few days after we start self-isolation, my husband’s company carries out a big round of layoffs, and though my husband’s job is fine for now, we are shaken. My own work is financially nebulous: writing a second novel, teaching online courses, and screenwriting. A couple of paying gigs I have in the coming months vanish. We, like so many others, feel the thinness of our economic status.
But I am pregnant. I glance down at my abdomen and think about the blueberry-sized being swishing around in there, and think at least we have that. A growing promise that something better is coming. We make soups and watch old movies. My breasts become ridiculously tender, and a few times I feel so sharply nauseated that I have to stay perfectly still and eat a saltine.
On our second Sunday in self-isolation, I start to spot. Then the spotting turns to bleeding—dark, then bright, an emergency red. On Tuesday, I call my doctor, who happens to be at one of the main hospitals in Los Angeles. She tells me they don’t want anyone to come in unless absolutely necessary, and I say "I think it’s necessary." In order to limit exposure, no visitors are allowed, so my husband can’t come with me. The drive to the hospital that normally takes me 40 minutes takes 20; Beverly Boulevard is bright, open, and empty for miles and miles.
The part of the hospital complex I head to is eerily deserted. After a ride in the elevator with one other person, during which I do not inhale or exhale, I arrive at the door to my doctor’s office. Before I’m allowed in, a nurse takes my temperature, hands me gloves and a mask, and sanitizes her hands no fewer than three times.
I go in for an ultrasound, my first ever. I lay back and the lights go down; immediately, I start to silently cry. The ultrasound image on the screen looks like every ultrasound image I’ve ever seen in movies and television, and I don’t want to see more. I can feel my experience splitting off from those movie scenes. I can feel myself falling out of the narrative. I look away.
“I need you to look,” the ultrasound technician says. “I need to show you.”
Hot tears dampen the nose rim of my mask, so I move it out of the way with my gloved hand. The technician points out the gestational sac, the yolk sac, the baby. There’s the baby, she says. Then she tells me: It’s too small. Too small for eight weeks. She can detect a very faint heartbeat, though, and she’s going to try to record it, but I have to hold my breath when she tells me to. I hold it, and she forgets to tell me to breathe again. I keep holding it.
The lights come on, and she wordlessly hands me a tissue box. Next, I see the doctor, who tells me it’s strange, what’s happening. She doesn’t know why the baby is too small, or why I’m bleeding. She, an OB-GYN, says to me: “Pregnancy is crazy.” She says to wait and see, to call if I start to bleed profusely. She is cheerful and hopeful behind her own mask, and then she leaves.
In the movies, miscarriages happen suddenly, with finality. For me, it is more drawn out. I bleed and cramp more as the week goes on. On Wednesday, I crack an egg for breakfast and there’s blood in the yolk. It’s so on the nose that I almost laugh. On Thursday, the number of COVID-19 cases in the United States surges to become the highest in the world. The cramping intensifies, and the blood thickens.
I want to read a book, or something that would help me feel peaceful, but I feel too agitated and distracted to focus on anything. I page through Norwegian poetry books. I read a mystery. I double over. I read about COVID-19 crawling across the globe. I read an article that posits a few ways this could all end, scenarios about how many months we’ll all be stuck inside. Even the scenario that puts us 12-18 months out from a solution has glimmers of hope in it, a sense that we’ll return to normalcy after all this is over. I think the problem is with the word, “return.” There is no going back, really. This much has become clear.
On Friday morning, I leave a message for my doctor, and then my husband and I attempt to go to the grocery store. We get there before it opens, but there’s already a line of seventy people standing six feet apart, waiting to get in. While I’m in line, my doctor calls me back. I describe the cramps, the blood, and she says gently that she thinks I am having a miscarriage, that I should expect it to happen over the weekend.
After the call, I start to sob in line. The man in front of us is wearing an actual gas mask, open in the back to his bald head. He doesn’t turn around, no matter how loud I cry.
In between bouts of cramps, I prepare to present about an Alice Munro story in an online class over the weekend. The story is “The Albanian Virgin,” one of my favorites. In it, stories within stories are hidden and tucked away, then revealed and contradicted. It’s a thrilling ride. On the last page, though, the story takes a curious turn, and a quintet of sentences are italicized and abstracted from the action of the book.
We have been very happy.
I have often felt completely alone.
There is always in this life something to discover.
The days and the years have gone by in some sort of blur.
On the whole, I am satisfied.
It’s a tricky moment in the story to teach, because it resists a clear explanation. I make a note to ask my students what they think. In the meantime, I read over the five statements, examine their simplicity and the ways they contradict each other. In a way, the story is about how your life can disappear before a new one rushes in to replace it. It seems to say it is possible to feel many things at once: loneliness and gratitude, wonder and boredom.
The cramping and bleeding intensifies. On Friday afternoon, I am confined to bed, shaking, weeping. Each cramp feels like my body desperately grasping at something, but I know it is the opposite. Each shudder is the force of expulsion, an undiscerning act of biology.
The thing about grief is that it tricks you into loneliness. It feels singular, unique to your psyche, special. When my brother died, and then a year later my dad, I felt special in my grief for a full decade. I wrote about it and wrote about it until one day, I realized that the grief wasn’t what made me different from other people, but what bound me to other people. I wasn’t special. Something bad happens to everyone at least once. We all lose things, and we will.
On Saturday morning, I work up the nerve to drink coffee, even though I don’t feel the desire for it. I sit at the table with my husband, who is doing a crossword. We try not to talk about it—and then, suddenly, I run to the bathroom. It happens there; what was inside me is suddenly outside, so simple and final. Immediately afterwards, my body feels mine again, not at war with itself, an ecosystem snapped back into place.
I suddenly think of the way the virus is described. Despite the President’s insistence that COVID-19 came from a country and an ethnicity, the virus has no discernment or agency, and its only drive is to make more of itself. This miscarriage is different but the same: my body doesn’t care what my heart wants, and its reproductive machinery is unsympathetic to the world of desire. We can’t make beauty or justice out of random ravages. I feel devastated, and also connected to an invisible web of pain much larger than me.
Later, a friend texts me to ask what my private grief feels like when the world is grieving. I think back to the bathroom, how I knelt on the cold floor after, how I felt a transient sadness floating in my chest, and how I felt so painfully normal.
That afternoon, I manage to teach the Alice Munro story. I tell the students what I think those final five lines of disembodied prose mean. The story is admitting its multiple truths, I say. A world within the story that can contain both deep sadness and numbing indifference. A student tells me he thinks of it as a confession, the writer’s confession. "Of what?" Of everything that was possible, everything that could have been or was.
After the class is over, I go on a walk around the neighborhood with my husband. I have to walk slow. I ask him if he would be okay if I wrote about the miscarriage.
"Well," he says, "that seems like something you should wait to write."
"Why?" I ask.
"So it can have a happy ending," he replies.
We walk down my favorite block in our area, where several tall fences are curtained with thick bougainvillea and azalea. It’s paintbox bright, fuschia and coral and orange and a shade of purple that feels frothy and indulgent.
I don’t want to write an essay with a grand metaphor and a message about how I got better and we’ll all get better. I don’t know what will happen, with me or with the world. None of us do, no matter how many tweets we read or press conferences we watch. I don’t want to insist there is beauty in the terror, with so many suffering, so many disenfranchised, so many kinds of villains now exposed.
But I do think about how far I’ve come from that day I was newly pregnant and full of hope. How I kept amending that hope, adjusting it as one terror as another took shape before us, whittling it down until one day, the hope just fell out of me.
Nothing is promised. We deserve our hope. Both things are true. There is no happy ending here. There’s the joy there always was, and the possibility of more. The smell of a shock of bougainvillea that will always remind me: I am sad. I am hopeful. I have lost. I have had.
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