LEARNING TO CROCHET

MARJORIE CORBMAN

I wrap a loop of yarn around my index finger; I pinch the loose end together with the open thread. I pull the yarn again around my finger into a second loop. I pull the first loop over the second and let it fall from my grasp. I pull on the threads: a slipknot appears. I tighten it around the crochet hook. The invisible bands around my chest, around my throat, constricted with dread, loosen slightly, almost imperceptibly. 

I’m glad that you are liking crocheting, a few people have said to me, after I’ve explained what I’ve been doing. They are relieved that, given the experience of the past few weeks, there has been something I can enjoy. I don’t know how to correct them, that I am not exactly liking it. What I know is that I need to do it. 

I was aware when I decided I must learn to crochet a small red cap that this was a skill that would not come naturally to me. Every brain works differently, I say, all the time, at work, to my neurodiverse students, and I am keenly aware of this fact when it comes to myself. Like many of the students with whom I work, my brain has some extraordinary capacities. I can hold what often seems to others to be an unsettling amount of information in my mind at once. I can visualize paragraphs I’ve read on the page years later; I can recall the exact flow, back-and-forth, of long-past conversations. Names, ideas, arguments, authors — all settle firmly and indelibly into my neural pathways. 

And: I could not draw you a street map of a one mile radius around any of the houses or apartments in which I’ve lived throughout my life. I am entirely reliant on Google Maps for all navigation; I simply cannot visualize where I am in relation to anywhere else, even locations I walk past regularly. I am incapable of learning a basic dance routine or figuring out how something will work based on investigating its construction. I once spent a solid ten minutes unsuccessfully laboring to open a back gate at my new workplace because it did not occur to me that the gate might slide open from right to left instead of opening, like a door, forward and back. I frequently pretend I understand conversations, or directions, or instructions, that I do not understand in order to avoid revealing how ill-fitted my brain is to guide me through a physical world of three dimensions. 

I made many mistakes as I taught myself how to crochet. I knew I would need to learn by watching YouTube tutorials because I would not understand instructions written on a page or on a website. I knew I would need to see each step, again and again. I knew I would need, then, to try to do each step on my own, repeatedly, willing the movement of my fingers to match the images on the screen. I knew it would take time, and it did. 

I thought I would be frustrated with myself. I wasn’t: this part was a surprise. How grateful I have been to discover yarn’s forgiving nature. The slipknot slips, just as its name promises, when you need it to — pull, and you can start again. What a relief it was, to make a stitch incorrectly, to make a stitch in the wrong place, to misidentify a gap as a stitch, to realize it, to pull, and to be rewarded with the thread returned, good as new. A second chance, a third, fourth, fifth. Eventually, the yarn starts to fray, but it still works. Yarn, I was delighted to learn, is remarkably understanding of human weakness. Even if you make wrong moves and, even more generously, even if you keep them in your work, you have to really commit to getting it wrong before it fatally dooms your project. A hat with a few extra half double crochet stitches will still look recognizably hat-like. I made mistakes, and undid them, and sometimes I kept them in and moved on, and the hat continued to look like a hat. My heart swelled with thankfulness: yarn, yarn, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, full of lovingkindness and truth, extending lovingkindness to a thousand generations, forgiving transgression, iniquity, and sin.

I was not upset; I was not frustrated. I messed up, I pulled the thread, and I started again. I had all the time in the world to make this little hat. Everything wrong could be undone, not at all like when the doctor, after two minutes of staring silently at the image on the ultrasound screen, said in a tone curiously at odds with the meaning of her words, I am going to get another doctor to confirm, but I am not currently seeing a heartrate. We always hope to be wrong, so I will go get someone else to look too, but I wanted to let you know what I am seeing.

Half-naked, my head in my hands, my wife’s hand on my back, I heard Meg’s words — it’s going to be okay — as we waited for them to return. The first doctor was still smiling, sort of — I’d love nothing more than to be wrong. The second one wasn’t — I hope we can meet at a happier occasion soon. What was happening? Was there a chance? Could she be wrong? The wand back inside me, they looked again at the little body, the drooping limbs, the swollen belly, and told me, at my insistence, that it was 100% certain that our child was dead.

Meg started crying — I don’t want you to have to go through this again — “this” being the months and months of trying? the negative tests? the medication? the injections? the bloodwork? the appointments? the hopes and the fears of those first positive tests? the first trimester nausea and exhaustion? the waiting from ultrasound to ultrasound? What could Meg’s “again,” mean, when it was still there in my womb? I did not cry until we were in the car because I did not believe it, and then, suddenly, I did, and — I wailed. 

Her sad little body, her drooping limbs, her swollen belly, her motionless heart. She was gone, she’d died already, a week before, inside me, in the depths of me, and I had not known it. I had been watching Netflix, or gently kayaking through Lake Champlain in a colleague’s backyard, or I’d been at the dentist, or writing a work email, or sleeping. I might have been drinking a green smoothie, or pushing the recycling bins to the front of our house, or staring at my abdomen in the mirror wondering when I would start to show. I will never know what I was doing when her heart stopped beating.

At the first ultrasound, at six and a half weeks, we’d stared in wonder at the flicker we were told was a newly beating heart. I knew from my frenetic internet research that what we were seeing, technically, was not what we would normally call a heart, but merely the first signs of cardiac activity. Merely? There was no merely. We watched it with the gravity and focus of longing, of amazement. We saw that first spark of life, that it was good, while the nurse practitioner counted it manually, under her breath. We waited for her judgment as we watched it glow, so small, in and out. She told us she had counted 112 beats per minute, an entirely normal rate for that early in the pregnancy. “It only started beating four days ago,” she told us, and I felt a wave of fear and awe at a life so entirely new having been shaped, somehow, out of my own body and my own blood. I was struck with wonder, and with terror: don’t let it go out, don’t let it go out, it is so small, oh, please let it keep beating.

That fear dissipated after the second ultrasound, at eight and a half weeks, at the sight of the Doppler waves — 176 beats per minute! — and oh, what it looked like, its little arms! its forming brain! its bubbled abdomen! the curve of what would become its feet, kicking upwards! I never wanted to stop looking. I loved her, her, though we never truly knew if it was her. I still don’t know, but I only want to say: at that second ultrasound, it was no longer an “it” to me. She was my child, and I loved her with a love so fleshy and full, it was a whole globe, a sea of love. It was a love with continents, with planets, galaxies, asteroid belts, black holes, but no, lovelier and smaller, too: it was a love with caterpillars and poppy seeds and plankton. It had electrons; it had air.

For the next two weeks I carried joy inside me like another pregnancy. I had been so afraid, the whole time, up until that second ultrasound. My friends reassured me: there was no reason to think I would have a miscarriage. Some insisted even more strongly: of course you won’t miscarry! The baby will be healthy, and beautiful. Still, I prefaced every update about my pregnancy to friends and family with, it’s still really early, but… I had not let myself fully believe it, that she was in there, that she was alive. But there she was. I looked, I loved, I believed. At this point, I was told, the chance of miscarriage was less than 5%. 

I was beside myself with happiness. For most of my life, I had assumed I would never be able to be pregnant — I did not have natural periods due to polycystic ovarian syndrome. Maybe if I had been straight, I would have raised the question of fertility sooner, but, being gay, and knowing that I only had periods with the support of hormonal birth control, I assumed that my wife and I would have to take a different path to starting a family. I had accepted this long before. In high school, when I talked with my Health class instructor (the only person at school to whom I had come out at that time) about my PCOS and my absence of natural periods, she asked how that made me feel about my gender. The truth was, I already felt homeless in the identity of “girl,” or “woman.” I knew I didn’t do it right, that I couldn’t fake it convincingly. My sexuality, my gender expression, my PCOS, my hatred of my then-overweight body, it all flowed together into one shapeless mass of loneliness and displacement. I wanted to float above it; I wanted it to go away. For most of my life up until my twenties, I longed to live as if my body didn’t exist — a futile endeavor made superficially easier by the agility of my mind. 

The hesitant rapprochement with my physical self that occurred in my mid-twenties, my discovery of healthy eating and daily exercise, somewhat smoothed over the rough edges of my emotional connection to my body as a woman’s body — whatever that means — but didn’t eliminate them. When people would ask about the possibility of my wife or me carrying a child, I shut down the conversation abruptly, with frustration. It wouldn’t be possible, I told them. I know I’d be infertile. It was only after my periods, to my surprise, returned after my new gynecologist suggested (due to migraines and a family history of blood clots) that I could try going off the birth control pills, that I realized what was behind that insistent, irritable response to others’ questions about potential pregnancy: I wanted it so deeply, so intimately, I could barely let myself think about it. When all of the initial testing at the fertility clinic came back with normal values, great numbers — everything was in range, everything looked good — it felt like being set free. My imagination of myself and my future life had confined itself, like an animal housed in a well-designed zoo, to the clearly delineated boundaries of its habitat. It could survive and even be happy. But suddenly: the whole, wide, open expanse of nature, with all of its unpredictability, with all of its unknowns, with all of its adventures, was laid bare before its eyes. It was an incalculable, unearned gift. 

And then: six intrauterine inseminations, month after month after month. Thousands of dollars each time, blood tests each time, multiple transvaginal ultrasounds each time. It always looked good; everything looked promising. Two weeks of torturous waiting, each time, and I still wasn’t pregnant — until I was. What a miracle, what grace, what total, all-consuming happiness. My body knew how to do what I most desperately wanted it to do.

I could not wait for Meg to return from her work trip to the Olympics in France, to see what I had seen, to know what I, somehow, was capable of making, of holding, for us. Your body was made into a throne, and your womb was made more spacious than the heavens. All of creation rejoices in you, o full of grace. How was it possible that my body was the agent of all this alchemy, and I had no conscious control over it? It knew exactly what to do, to make her, to cradle her, to nourish her, and I could do nothing but say yes. Yes, yes.

On my daily walks, I’d look for the most beautiful flowers, the most striking colors — sunflowers, irises — and show them to her. I’d hold my hand flat, softly, over my lower abdomen. I’d look carefully at the petals. I’d say: baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam oseh maaseh vereishit. Blessed are you, unnameable God, sovereign of the universe, who makes the works of creation. I’d say, too: look, little one. Soon, I thought, I’d show her for real.

Anyone who destroys one soul from Israel, it is as if he destroyed an entire world — so the sages of the Talmud reported that the courts in capital cases must remind witnesses before testifying. Remember Abel’s blood crying from the ground, they warned, and recall that the Torah puts the word “blood” in the plural, demei achicha. Not only Abel, but all Abel’s potential descendents were cut off from the world on the day he died. And remember, too, they added, that his poured-out blood was not a private affair. It touched every part of the earth. It stained the trees; it seeped into the stones.

There was a moment when my child was alive within me, and another moment, discretely and sequentially following it, in which she no longer was. I was not aware. I did not know it. I could not have prevented it. And there would be no undoing it: never, never, never, never, never, in the words of King Lear about his daughter, Cordelia.

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life?

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.

The saddest line in the English language, my Shakespeare professor had said of it in college, written in reverse iambic pentameter.

I tighten the slipknot around my crochet hook. I make a chain of three. I lose count, distracted. I can’t tell how many chain stitches I’ve made. It’s hard for me, at this stage of crochet expertise, to tell the difference. It doesn’t matter: I pull the threads, and start again.

I make three chain stitches, and in the third chain, I make eight half double crochet stitches. I join the final stitch to the first with a slip stitch; I make a ring. 

On the first few tries, in a clear indication of my mind’s current state of obsession, I see in the emerging crescent of the ring the curve of the neural tube that forms in the earliest weeks of pregnancy. Snaking along the smallest arc, the brain, spinal cord, and backbone are already present in their nascent form. If you search for images online, you’ll see sketches of embryos at six weeks’ gestation that are indistinguishable from tiny baby dinosaurs. I see the image in my yarn, and lose count of my half double crochet stitches, more than once. No matter. I pull on the threads and start again.

Later, I learned that I could have started with something much easier to crochet than a hat. The second pattern I learned was for a small scarf, consisting entirely of chain and single crochet stitches in a straight line, back and forth, and after crocheting three hats, it felt laughably easy. 

But the hat was the reason for learning to crochet: I needed to make a red hat for a tiny, granite stone statue. This, improbably, became my main priority in the second week following my miscarriage. Bear with me; I’ll explain.

For the first week, I could do very little except cry. It surprises me every time I remember the fact that, unlike Meg, I did not cry when they first told us. I did not start crying until we were in the car afterwards. Once I started, I was not able to stop. I still haven’t stopped. It was ugly crying, loud, crushing. It’s the sort of crying that if I saw a character on a TV show crying like it I’d think to myself, this is a bit overdone; no one really cries like this. It turns out that this is exactly how someone cries when what they love most has been destroyed. 

I cried constantly, uncontrollably, frighteningly. I looked around at the world through my tears, profoundly embarrassed, mortified at the exposure and at my lack of self-control, and at the same time — like someone who has been suddenly and publicly attacked, looking around for a witness — I wordlessly pleaded with those surrounding me: do you see this? can you believe this? did you know it was possible to hurt like this? I walked home from the pharmacy from which I picked up the Ativan I would take to sedate myself during the procedure to remove my child from my womb, my mouth open, tears flowing down my face, my nose running. I felt the gaze of the people I was passing on the street. I did not bother to wipe away my tears; they were coming too fast, too steadily, to remove effectively. Handel’s arioso played on repeat, with a small edit, in my head: Behold and see, behold and see, if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow. Do you see this? Can you believe this?

I was astounded by how sad I was. I was shocked at how much it hurt. Should I have been? I was most surprised by the absence of my usual psychological coping mechanisms. I have always been uncomfortable with my habitual first response to bad news, to disappointment or grief. Before the news can even land, my mind interrupts: “well, it will be okay, and here are the next steps I can take.” The sadness, the pain, settles in later. That first, automatic response of mine — which has reported eagerly for duty on occasions as varied as learning that a longtime crush had a secret girlfriend, that my sibling was being hospitalized, that I was not being offered a job I was sure I would be, that my grandparents had died, that my father has a neurodegenerative disease — has always repelled me, has always made me feel just slightly less than human. Whatever living, pulsating, raw connection to the world I imagined belonged to others, there was a thin, translucent barrier between me and my heart I could not quite puncture. 

A friend of mine shared language with me she had learned from “parts” therapy to alleviate the guilt and discomfort I felt over this automatic response of mine. That voice, that initial voice, she explained, is the “manager.” Her role is to hold you together and keep you functioning. You’ve relied on her a lot in your life, my friend explained, and she’s good at her job. My friend let me know how she imagined the same psychological experience for herself. I imagine, she said, that I’m on stage — all the parts of me are standing there together, and we are fielding questions. When we are asked for comment about something horrible that has happened to us, the manager takes the microphone first. “I just want to say first off that this is fine, we’ve dealt with similar problems before and I’m not concerned about it. We’ll get through this too, and I have a plan.” It’s what she has to say first to get us all through those first moments — but it’s just the first pass of the mic. When she’s done, the microphone can get passed to someone else. 

This reframing helped me. But how strange it was, that that first voice — so hated, so resented, but so familiar — was nowhere to be found when I was told the news about our child. The manager had left the office. The first internal voice I heard then was unfamiliar: quivering and panicked, it asked me, hesitatingly, but this can’t be real, right? This can’t be what happened. There’s been a mistake. They’re about to tell you that they made a mistake. What is everyone talking about? Why are they saying this? Why are they talking about something that is not true?

When we reached the car, and I sat down, and I took off my glasses — when I started crying — that voice, too, was gone. The voice that replaced it did not have words. I wailed. I sobbed. I hurt. 

Through everything, through childhood hospitalization for suicidal ideation, through my family’s various life-threatening mental health crises, through the joys and pains of coming out, through religious trauma, through encounters with refugees and asylum seekers and war survivors, through being attacked and mugged on the street, through supporting my parents through an unsolveable health crisis, I had never lost words. The physical world has never made sense to me, but words were always mine. I’d summon them and they’d come in droves, in hosts, like phalanxes at the ready. Not now. I was soothed only by the effort of pushing air through my closed vocal cords and hearing the ensuant discordant sound. I found myself, without consciously choosing to do so, rocking back and forth as I cried and hummed with pain that felt far too expansive, far too jagged, for my body to contain. I thought intermittently of my autistic students, how many of them rock back and forth, activating their parasympathetic nervous systems, while they sit in the armchair next to me and I ask them about their homework. I wondered at the wisdom and resourcefulness of their bodies. My body knows what they know, too.

The vehemence, the violence of my grief was terrifying — but, in a way, I was grateful for it. That barely perceptible but ever-present barrier that had always seemed to exist between myself and my raw humanity had been entirely obliterated. The curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And what I saw with that emotional cellophane removed was awful, disturbing, strange. It was chaotic and volatile. I had daily nightmares that were at times violent and grotesquely nonsensical; in one, I had to defend myself from an attacker by beating him with a cast iron pan, but what came out when I hit him looked like the lentil shepherd’s pie my mom had made for me a week prior, when it was one of the few items I could handle eating amid all my pregnancy food aversions. I dreamt of the procedure, when they suctioned her out of me. I dreamt of the ultrasounds. I dreamt of her limp body, floating inside me, so sad, so sad. (Why is it easier to write this in the past tense? These are still my dreams.) I claw my way up into consciousness from this dark shadow world every morning and remember, once again, that it is real, and start crying. 

The first day after, the first day I had to wake up with her death on my mind, she was still inside me. I had barely slept, and had begun cramping. I wasn’t sure if the cramps were the start of my body recognizing the miscarriage, or a psychosomatic reaction to my knowledge of what had occurred, or even just a response to the examination of my cervix the doctor had done before the ultrasound the previous day. Whatever they were, the physical reminder of what was — and was not — inside me was overwhelming. She was dead within me. She was dead within me. How strange it was, the sudden shift from my every thought one day before (how to keep her safe inside me) to my newfound, urgent desperation to rip her out by any means necessary. Even during the procedure itself, I couldn’t reconcile these dual preoccupations. Please don’t leave me, your whole life has been inside of me, I’ll keep you safe, you are mine. And: Get her out immediately, please, anyone, cut me open, cut me open, wrest her out of me.

On that first morning after, I woke up on the Japanese floor mattress we’d placed in the living room so that we both could sleep outside of the bedroom. The circulation of air from the windows in the living room, usually, makes it easier for me to sleep, but of course, it barely made a difference that night. I woke up, I felt the cramping, remembered, and, clenching my teeth and wiping away tears every thirty seconds so I could see my phone screen, I wrote a poem:

Ialemos

Griefwild Orpheus, purple with rage,

lyre striking limply his hip with each stride,

invoked the Maenads:

sought them frantic

sought them frightened

found them dancing

and found them drunk.

He tore his tunic.

He bore his chest.

Strong ladies, cruel ladies 

— an ugly voice cried,

and it was his —

lend me your careless razors 

I beg you

and with every sharpness

tear out this lovely song from in me

my little ode

my heart’s refrain 

it is dead now

and pools like standing water

I cannot bear it

tear out those sweet chords

and every secret name I gave them 

on moondark nights, in musky gardens,

tear out those ringing notes

my wife and I, we sang together,

less like a chorus, more like a hymn,

until he came, 

cold-caverned king,

he came, and carried her away.

Orpheus wailed.

He bore his chest,

laid bare his limbs,

and not one second that they sliced him open

did he not hope 

and hate himself for hoping.

I cried especially hard writing the central line of the poem, its truest line: tear out this lovely song from in me. Later that day, we’d see her on the ultrasound for the last time. Like my poor Orpheus, I hoped desperately, stupidly, up until the last moment, that they’d realize they had made a mistake. No. She hung there lifelessly, my little one, my beloved. When they did a second ultrasound at the end, to confirm the procedure was complete, the doctor said something like, there, that’s what we want to see. I understood what she meant: the goal of the procedure was to empty my uterus. But there it was, my uterus, empty. Oh God. I was empty.

I make two chain stitches. Into each stitch of the ring, I make two half double crochet stitches, then finish the round with a slip stitch. I lose count so easily on this step that I realize I need to keep track of the stitches I am making on a note in my phone, making two little “x”s next to each number, one through eight, until I’m done. This works; I am proud of myself.

I want to describe to you what I feel when I am crocheting. I’ve seen words like “calming” or “relaxing” used to describe the effects of knitting or crocheting, and I understand why, because I sense a familial relationship between these words and what I actually feel as I rhythmically pull a loop of yarn around my crochet hook, dig it into a stitch, yarn over, pull it through the stitch, yarn over again, pull it through the loops. But I would not use those words — I do not feel relaxed, or calm. What I feel is that my pain lessens. I am comforted by the light resistance of the yarn as I pull it through the stitches; I am delighted by the appearance of a new stitch as I pull it through the loops. There it is, a whole new stitch that I made. I made it. My pain lessens.

I have come to think of my grief as a dangerous and untamed predatory animal I can, at times, soothe until it purrs or curls into a posture of sleep at my side. This first occurred to me when we met with the triage nurse, right before the procedure, to go over what was about to occur and for me to take the Ativan, Ibuprofen, and Tylenol I had been asked to bring to the appointment. She sat in front of me; a trainee stood by the door. I wondered if they had asked the trainee to join specifically to see what it’s like to accompany a pregnant person through the management of a missed miscarriage. Probably, I thought, but the realization did not bother me. I am an educator. I always want to teach. 

She went over the procedure, what to expect, the potential side effects. She asked about genetic testing of the fetus. The doctor, the day before, had not recommended it for a first miscarriage. It may also, she confirmed, not be covered by insurance. Let’s come back to that, I said, searching out Meg’s eyes hesitantly. She looked back, deferring to me for the decision. I have a few other questions. I asked about the (small) risks of the procedure: what is uterine perforation, exactly, and what should I look out for? If I see tissue being passed in the next few days, should I be worried? I asked these questions with a gravelly, shaking voice, but at a remove from myself and the real question I wanted to ask, which, finally, I did: if we don’t opt for genetic testing, what happens to the remains?

She answered, it seemed, hesitatingly, noticing a change in the tone of my voice: fuller, lower, sadder. If you would like, we could give them to you in a box. I had wondered aloud, the previous day, about this, at home with Meg. I wondered if we would be able to see it, to see her, after it was over. Oh, I do not want that, Meg replied immediately. I don’t think I could handle that. I nodded, but also, ached. I thought of the second ultrasound. I thought of her little limbs, her beating heart, her forming brain, her bubbled abdomen. I had never wanted to stop looking. All I ever wanted to do was see her.

Would it be allowed — is it legal — if we wanted to bury the remains? I asked. The shift of energy in the room was immediate, and it was my fault. I had started crying again. I had not meant to, but there it was, my broken heart. The nurse answered my question readily — yes, you can do that if you want; sometimes people bury them by a favorite plant — but her demeanor, the way she held her body, had shifted, just barely. She was on alert. It was as if we had been on a hike together and suddenly, mid-conversation, a mountain lion had crossed our path and stared straight at us. The nurse was a professional, trained for encounters with large cats. She had seen mountain lions before and she was aware of what to do when they were there. She knew that it wouldn’t hurt her — that it was very unlikely it would attack. But she was on guard; everyone in the room was.

It gave me a strange satisfaction, to see the power, the fierceness, the wildness of my grief on display, to witness the innate respect others had for it when it entered the room. My grief was an unwelcome, but honored, guest, her limbs taut with muscle and her retracted claws always just threatening to become unsheathed.

When I crochet, the mountain lion rests beside me. She licks her paws and lays her head on the floor. Sometimes, she closes her eyes and breathes in deep.

We did, after it was over, get the remains in a box. My memories of the hours during and after the procedure are imprecise, distorted by the all-too-effective sedative. I asked Meg to walk me through it, to help me retrace my steps: we had the box. We drove home. I sat on the couch and insisted I didn’t want to nap, and then proceeded to nap on the couch for several hours. I woke up; Meg brought me food. I ate some of it. I suggested we bury her, and Meg prepared a space in our backyard, by the trees. She dug the hole, and I leafed through my bilingual edition of poems by my favorite poet, Anna Akhmatova. I opened the box and found, inside, a plastic container filled with a thick layer of blood and a bulbous mound of skin. My child, my only one, my beloved. We would have named her Hannah Joy. 

I took the holy water Meg had sweetly bought me at the gift store at the Basilica of St. Anne de Beaupré the day after we learned I was pregnant. I carried it outside, with the book of Akhmatova’s poems and the container of the remains. In the backyard, I read the poem, in Russian and English, and sobbed. I told her we loved her. I told her we were burying her outside, by the trees, where we would have wanted to play with her. I wanted to say so many things; I don’t remember what I said. I sobbed. I poured her into the earth, then poured holy water into the container, and made sure every drop of her seeped into the dirt. Meg, I think, filled in the hole. Meg took care of everything necessary while I was out of my mind. She placed a small stone over the spot where we had buried her.

I do not know what I would have done if we had not buried her. How could I have just not known where she was? For the two months she existed, I always knew where she was. Now, she’s in the backyard. Your yard is a sacred space now, a friend told me, a friend whose partner had died suddenly four years ago. She keeps him in a box on her mantle, a source, she said, of deep comfort to her. I understood.

I make two chain stitches. In the first stitch immediately under the chain stitches, I make two half double crochet stitches. In the next stitch, I make one half double crochet stitch. I alternate around the circle, two in one stitch, one in the next, all the way around. I keep track, again, on my phone. Two “x”s, one “x,” two “x”s. 

I don’t know about stitch markers yet, so I find myself counting the stitches over and over again, trying to work out the math, making sure it is right. It is still hard for me to tell the difference sometimes between a stitch and a gap. I do my best; the yarn forgives me.

I want to talk about her. I want to tell you about her, but, if I’m honest, I am afraid that you will find it ridiculous. I am imagining all the reasonable, mostly secular, educated, progressive people I know responding to me personifying a fetus who never grew beyond the length of 2.54 centimeters. I am frustrated at the thought of the condescending indulgence with which these listeners might hear the things that touch me most profoundly, just another woman romanticizing her baby. 

Can I tell you about her anyway? 

I was in a hotel bathroom at 4:30am in Québec City when I learned she was there. I’d woken up in the middle of the night, having to pee, and I waited as long as I could to go to the bathroom. This was the day, twelve days past the IUI, that I had decided to test. The first urine of the day has the most concentrated hormone levels, but I wanted to give my body as much time as possible before testing. I knew very well by that point that at twelve days past the IUI, a negative test was almost certainly definitive. I’d become accustomed to the agony of the few minutes’ wait, the desperate longing, the wanting to look and not wanting to look, the squinting and willing oneself to see a second line when, clearly, there was none.

I brought a holy card of St. Anne into the bathroom, one I’d purchased the day before in a little tourist shop staffed by a Carmelite sister on the most charming street of Québec City. St. Anne was the reason I had wanted to make the trip; I had an image in my mind of making a pilgrimage of gratitude to her basilica after learning I was pregnant. But it didn’t happen, we kept trying and it wasn’t happening, and I knew that potential vacation weekends would be limited for both of us later in the summer. We agreed to just plan to go in June, whether or not we had good news. Either way, we’d visit her shrine: St. Anne, who, like her Hebrew Bible namesake, Hannah, struggled through years of infertility, is the patron of women trying to conceive.

I read the prayer in French on the back of the card, then took the test. A couple minutes in, it was very faint, but unmistakable: a second line. A calm and peaceful gratitude, such sweet joy, filled my chest. The worries would come later. At that moment, I was sure. For the first minute, in the bathroom, in the middle of the night, I held the test, I looked at it, and I was the only person in the world who knew that she existed. St. Anne and I welcomed her, thanked her for coming to us. I kissed the holy card, more than once. I placed my hand on where I thought she might be, even though I knew she was as small as a poppy seed. This little light, this tiny life.

I woke Meg to tell her, who was startled and, it seemed, not quite ready for the news. I think she didn’t quite believe it yet. She knew, and I knew, that it was not my first positive test. The first IUI, I had started bleeding thirteen days after the procedure, and realized my period had probably started. Still, just in case, I took a test, and was confused by the very faint positive result. The next morning, there was still the faintest of lines, but lighter. I bled more. I had terrible cramps. The line disappeared. It was, the care nurse told us, most likely a biochemical pregnancy. An egg had been fertilized and had started producing HCG, the pregnancy hormone, but it had not managed to implant. I knew the same thing might happen again this time — Meg, it seemed, had thought of this too. I imagine she felt protective of me, of what it would be like for me if it was another biochemical pregnancy. I let her go back to sleep. I was a bit disappointed. Meg wasn’t there yet, but I was sure. I sensed the second life in me.

We spent that rainy Saturday in churches and museums. I knelt in front of the tomb of St. Marie de l’Incarnation and begged for her protection. Meg and I wandered with unexpected delight through an exhibit on the history of wrestling in Québec at the Musée de la civilisation. We took pictures of the murals on the city overpasses, and I took my time, especially, observing a mural, half in English and half in Farsi, of Mahsa Amini in solidarity with the Woman Life Freedom movement. Our sperm donor was Persian. I thought, not for the first time, about how Meg and I could introduce our child to that part of her story, her history. This time, though, it was more than hypothetical. I was pregnant with a child whose story included my life, and Meg’s, and someone else’s we’d never met. We would have to find a way to honor all of the threads that had woven her into being.

I couldn’t wait to test again the next morning — I forced myself to wait a full 24 hours, 4:30am. There it was: and slightly darker. Again, I woke Meg up. Again, her reaction was more muted than I expected. She told me later that morning: it was becoming real to her, parenthood. She was nervous. My initial feeling of disappointment at being alone in my happiness was replaced by tenderness for my caring, protective, thoughtful Meg, who did not see yet but would see soon how right it was, how ready we were to welcome this small traveler to our earthly port. She would get there — I knew she was there when she ordered the first pair of baby Nikes.

We went to the basilica, all three of us, and when I walked up the aisle of the church and sat down in a pew, I looked up and saw directly above me a mural of an angel announcing to a haloed St. Anne that she was pregnant. Me too, me too, me too, I thought, and my heart, I could hardly bear it. 

Nearly a decade previously, at a very different point in my life, I had visited that same basilica and knelt and prayed to God, promising to accept whatever suffering, whatever sacrifice, whatever kind of life would make my soul more transparent to divine love. Even a life of pain without other people’s admiration, I had thought, back then. Whatever you want: make me a broken person, homeless, wandering, ugly, insane, whatever does not separate me from you. It was a genuine prayer; it came from my heart. But it was also, at the same time, a remnant of the intense spiritual life of my teenage years during which I had assumed that to be close to God must mean, on some level, doing violence to myself. At the very least, I had for some time thought it meant lifelong celibacy. By the time I made the prayer at the basilica, I no longer wanted or believed that, but that association — of love and sacrifice, of intimacy with God and suffering — remained. 

Looking up and seeing the angel announce to St. Anne she would bear a child? It was an unexpected answer to my prayer: you can just be happy. God just wants you to be happy.

The first person to whom I voiced out loud that I was pregnant, after Meg, was a French Canadian priest blessing rosaries and medals outside the basilica gift store. I just learned I am pregnant, I told him. Please bless me too, Father. He smiled, and prayed, May God bless you, may God bless the life within you…

Pregnancy was the strangest place I’ve ever been. I kept asking myself, and others, why don’t we talk about this more? How is it that we don’t talk about what this is like? I had not expected pregnancy to be so much like the sudden onset of disability, or chronic illness. During the first couple weeks, I was exhausted all the time, falling asleep at 7:30pm, sleeping eleven hours, and still needing a nap during the day. I woke up in the middle of nights with constipation pain so intense I broke out into a sweat. As the pregnancy progressed, the nausea emerged: not “morning” sickness, but constant nausea, and food aversions to almost everything. My daily runs became daily walks and I huffed and puffed the entire time. I felt, physically, like garbage all of the time, and I couldn’t have been happier.

For years, one of the great highlights of my day has been my twice daily banana with peanut butter: one in the morning and one before bed. I expected pregnancy to disrupt my normal diet, but I never imagined it would affect this much-cherished daily ritual. It did — even bananas started to sound disgusting to me. What my body mostly wanted while she was still in me was bread, something I generally try to avoid, preferring foods with a low glycemic index due to PCOS. I made an exception, eating small amounts of bread with dried fruit and nuts in it. I spread the peanut butter on the bread instead of bananas.

Peaches, though — fresh peaches — were different. I always could eat a peach. 

It’s been three weeks now since the miscarriage, and bananas, still, are no longer a source of anticipation or enjoyment. She changed my body. How long will I eat peaches and think of her, think about what it was like to feed her and not just myself?

I lied on the couch, almost immobile, wallowing in first trimester exhaustion, and I thought of all of the pregnant people in war zones, refugee camps, shelters, famines. I thought of pregnant people in Gaza, in Sudan, in Congo, in Ukraine. I thought of pregnant people with abusive spouses, pregnant people trafficked for sex. We don’t talk about this enough, I kept thinking, I kept saying. We don’t talk about what it takes to make our existence possible. We don’t talk about how inhospitable the world we’ve made is to life and to the people who bear the burden of carrying it. For a couple months, I had the honor of being one of them.

These were big ideas, but she was small, and real. She made me crave peaches. She made me tired and sick. She made me gentler with myself, kinder, more patient. She made me inexpressibly happy. 

There is so much more I would have liked to have learned about her. Maybe, though, the learning is not quite over. In the first week after the miscarriage, I bought adult coloring books in a frantic attempt to distract myself from human thought. (Crocheting had not yet entered the narrative.) Carefully coloring in a multicolor butterfly, I thought to myself suddenly and without justification, this one — the indigo colored pencil — would have been Hannah’s favorite color. How absurd (I corrected myself) to think that I could know that. She did exist long enough to form eyes — corneas, irises, pupils, lenses, and retinas — but they were closed the entire time she existed. And yet: it felt true. And maybe, beyond the veil, seeing with the eyes of beatific vision, she perceives colors more keenly and truthfully than I ever could. Now, when I am overwhelmed, when I am knocked over by a wave of loss, I look around for some purple, the deeper and more blue-tinged the better. I find a flower, or a painting, or a piece of clothing in my field of sight, and I drink the purple in. Look, little one, I tell her. Even now, I tell her.

I make two chain stitches. In the next three stitches, I make one half double crochet stitch. In the next, I make two, and I repeat the pattern, all the way around. I keep track on my phone, in the longest list yet.

The entire time I have been writing this essay, there has been one recurrent thought I have continually tried to suppress, and I have done my best not to let it affect what I am writing. I am having it now. I have also had this thought, numerous times, as my tears have fallen into the yarn I was crocheting. Every time I think the thought, it makes me, immediately, feel worse, feel alone, feel lost. 

The thought is: I am making too big a deal over this. The world has real problems — war, famine, enslavement, apartheid, natural disasters. I don’t even have to extend my imagination globally: here in charming Burlington, Vermont, there is a sea of human misery I coast by daily. Hundreds of unhoused people sleep outside every night. I walk past people crying and screaming, asking for money, all the time. I politely, truthfully answer, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any change,” and keep walking. I pass by used needles on the ground. I cross the street when I notice that, down a block, someone is behaving erratically. Each of these human beings is made in the image and likeness of God, each just as beloved as my Hannah was and is. One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage; isn’t it too common, too prosaic, to feel like such a disaster?

But none of the world’s very real suffering has ever affected me like the loss of that little being, the inchling that was my child. How lonely and how heartbreaking that we cannot truly feel each other’s misery, and how necessary that we don’t. I feel sad, I feel angry, when I hear or read of the pain of others. When it was me, though, when I lost my child, it was like a knife was being plunged into my brain in regular intervals every second. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, wrote George Eliot, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. I have always loved that quote, but now I read it differently. How desperately I have needed others to feel with me the searing pain of my loss — do you see this? can you believe this? — and how obvious it is that I cannot feel this kind of devastation, not really, not in the same way, for anyone else.

And, still, that first day when we learned about the miscarriage, when Meg and I took a walk together by the river near our house, needing to do something, anything, except sit around and think about it, I looked at the flowing water and — strangely — remembered the mothers in Gaza who cannot protect their children from air strikes. For only a few seconds, maybe, my pain and their pain felt indistinguishable, felt world-destroying, felt like a horrible, carnivorous bird sinking its talons into my heart and theirs. I cannot understand what it is like to be a mother in a war zone with nowhere to flee for safety. I absolutely cannot understand that. And yet, the thought came into my mind that I would never be able to hear again of a child murdered, a child who died, a child suffering, and not ache with this red hot longing, this lacerating grief. 

I am suppressing this recurrent thought — I am making too big a deal over this — because it is not true. Why do we care about the pain of others? Is it just political entertainment, a narrative of good vs. evil, like watching The Lord of the Rings? Evil terrorists vs. freedom lovers? Evil imperialists vs. courageous revolutionaries? Is it a sporting event in which we root for our team? 

Let me tell you why I care about the pain of others. When I lived at a house of hospitality for displaced, Spanish-speaking families, I developed a friendship with two very mischievous six-year-old girls, identical twins, las gemelas. Their mother, like almost all the mothers of the children who lived with us, was an undocumented immigrant applying for a U visa, a visa that would grant her legal status in the United States for cooperating with the investigation of a violent crime: domestic violence. The gemelas came to us incredibly hesitant, shy, but after some time, they became little agents of chaos in the house, running through hallways, screaming, exploring. Once, I encountered one of them at the bottom of the stairs by the kitchen and she stopped dead in her tracks as she saw me, an adult, approaching. She looked at me with an alarmed expression and announced in the unique syntax the twins always used, I am not having anything in my pocket! I laughed, and let her go without further investigation of this mystery. One day — I don’t remember why — their mother had to be out late and asked if we could put the twins to bed. Las gemelas wore themselves out with their rambunctious endeavors, and we had to carry them, eyes already closing, up the stairs to their room and tuck them in. As we placed them in their bed and they let their tired bodies fall limply into the positions of sleep, I looked at them for a few long seconds and felt such incredible tenderness, such a strong wish that their lives would be happy, full, and safe.

Let me tell you again. In a displaced persons’ camp in Puttalam, on the northwestern coast of Sri Lanka, I listened to a man from Mannar, in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, talk about his longing to return home after he and his family, along with the whole Muslim population of the Northern Province, had been expelled by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) eighteen years previously as part of the Sri Lankan civil war. He told me about his children, all born in Puttalam, and how they wanted to return to a place they had never seen. They want to see our motherland, he told me, something I didn’t fully understand until I asked him about his relationship with the host community which had offered shelter to the internally displaced people from the North. He told me how much pain it caused him to be called an akaty, a refugee, by residents of the host city. I saw that he did not want that name, that feeling, for his children.

Years later, in Palestine, walking around a valley outside the village of Deir Istiya, I watched a toddler shake with laughter as he took an empty Coca Cola bottle and kept filling it with water from a stream to pour down the pants of his older brother. We had just heard about how settlers had been regularly dumping sewage in the water, so that, as a result, it was no longer suitable for drinking. And still, his mother watched him rock with his full-body shrieks of laughter, and smiled.

What does caring about the pain of others, ultimately, mean? It means, I think, willing from the depths of our hearts a world in which parents can keep their children safe, in which every beloved human being will be lavished with care, concern, delight, curiosity, wonder. It means, when that cannot or does not happen, when a particular universe is destroyed, that we must be able to remember them, speak of them, honor them, hold their loss with dignity, with the kind of nobility commensurate with the infinite worth of every single life.

But again, these words are too big, too abstract. On a closer, more intimate level: a couple weeks after we lost our child, when I watched a video clip of the funeral of Almog Sarusi — a twenty-seven-year-old Israeli shot by his Hamas-affiliated captors nearly a year after he was taken hostage — the sound of wailing in the background of his mother’s agonized speech was unbearable for me. It was too familiar. I suspect that I will never be able to hear those sounds again, the sounds of raw, immediate, shattering grief, without reliving it, without feeling it, no matter who it is. 

And then, there was this morning, when I stopped for a few seconds on the way to work after seeing a worm writhing on the sidewalk, half dried up, nearing its own solitary death. I felt it differently than I would have felt it a few weeks ago. I longed for it to be otherwise, for that little worm to live, and I could not do anything to help it. It felt like I had accidentally brushed up against an unhealed wound; I watched the worm dying, and I hurt.

I’ve taught the Metta Sutta, a foundational Buddhist text, so many times:

Even as a mother protects with her life

Her child, her only child,

So with a boundless heart

Should one cherish all living beings;

Radiating kindness over the entire world:

Spreading upwards to the skies,

And downwards to the depths;

Outwards and unbounded,

Freed from hatred and ill-will.

Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down

Free from drowsiness,

One should sustain this recollection.

This is said to be the sublime abiding.

Maybe that is all there is to say.

I make two chain stitches, and into each stitch, I make a half double crochet stitch. I finish the round with a slip stitch, make two more chain stitches, and start again. I repeat, round by round, until the hat is three and a half inches long. 

I never imagined Hannah in a little red hat like this one. I imagined her in a yellow hat, a floppy one, one you would put on a baby to protect it from the sun. 

Walking together along the Burlington marina, I told Meg, we should get a boat, when the kid is a little older. Meg smiled and agreed, enthusiastically. Meg’s hometown is on the North Shore of Massachusetts. She grew up sailing; one of my favorite facts about Meg is that her great-grandfather was a sailmaker. Meg is not a natural swimmer — she has no buoyancy — but, like me, she loves the ocean. We looked at each other, beamed, and imagined our little baby on a boat. In my mind’s eye, she wore a floppy yellow hat.

The red hat is for Jizo Bodhisattva, protector of travelers, guardian of children, defender of those who have died before birth. During the first week after the miscarriage, I read a book recommended to me by a faculty member from my doctoral program who compassionately shared that she had experienced a similar loss. I found the book online and soaked it in, hungry for any recognition of my pain. In the epilogue, the author mentioned Japanese mizuko kuyo ceremonies, and I recalled immediately that I had read a book about these rituals for a paper in a Buddhist Ethics course in college. In these ceremonies, offerings are made to Jizo in memory of aborted or miscarried children. The ceremonies are, in their current form, quite recent in origin. They were developed in response to the expression of painful need by the many thousands of women who had had abortions in the years following World War II in Japan. They have been further adapted by Buddhist centers in America, fulfilling a desire to honor the loss of children who have died before birth, or in the first few years of life, in a ritual form.

Jizo Bodhisattva is known as the bodhisattva of the greatest vow: the vow not to enter into enlightenment, into the cessation of all suffering, until all beings have been liberated from the realms of hell. At temples in Japan at which the ceremonies are performed, stone statues of Jizo decorate the yards, and red hats and bibs are placed on the statues as offerings.

I remembered these ceremonies, and immediately searched for a statue of Jizo we could order to put in our backyard, to place him where we buried her, to have him watch over her. Meg helped me choose the right one, found on eBay, real granite stone, shipped from Osaka. We only needed a tiny red hat. 

I just don’t know if we know anyone who can crochet, Meg told me. 

I thought of some acquaintances I might be able to ask, but the thought of it left me feeling disappointed and upset. No, I would have to do it. I would have to learn how to crochet.

I am almost done. I make my way through a final round of single crochet stitches. Then, I pull the open thread through my crochet hook one last time, and cut the string with scissors. I just have to weave in the ends.

One thing stuck with me, for that first week after the miscarriage, one loose thread for which I simply could not find a place. What am I supposed to do, now, with that memory of being in the church, of seeing the mural of St. Anne, of feeling so sure that God was answering my prayer from a decade earlier with the unexpected reply: God just wants you to be happy?

I want to be clear. My concept of God has always veered towards the apophatic. I do not imagine God as a man (or a woman, for that matter) in the sky, fielding requests. I find that grotesque. God is the absolutely unknowable source of being, of which all existent beings are themselves a mirror. God is ultimate mystery, ultimate good, ultimate love — whatever we know as good, as true, as beautiful, points towards that which is the origin and fulfillment of all that is: God. And yet, like all of the great monotheistic traditions, I have always tried to make place for God’s agency, God’s action, God’s communication with human beings. When it comes to saints and prophets, the form is usually unexpected, unanticipated, strange.

I am speaking too abstractly again. There have been times, moments in my life, in which God’s particular care for me has been unmistakeable. There have been instances in which divine presence has felt more real to me than my own self; sudden awareness of the intensity of divine love has literally caused me to collapse to my knees or to the floor. I have never known how to reconcile this — the way God has shown up, palpably, obviously in my life — with what seems philosophically untenable. When it comes to a God who chooses to reveal her presence to some, and not to others, to plant signs and miracles for some, and not for others, who makes the call to keep some alive in response to prayer and lets others die or suffer in agony, the arguments of your garden-variety atheist are unanswerable. That God is not worthy of the name “God.” And yet, divine messengers ascend and descend the ladder of being, in flame and in fire, without our permission and without letting us know their rationale. The divine pattern of the universe can be glimpsed only through the attempt to rearrange its broken shells, the kabbalistic klipot. All we can do is trudge through the debris left behind by the primal contact of creation, when the Spirit Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss / And mad’st it pregnant. And yet, lights flash out without warning; holy breath blows where it wills. You hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

What do I do with the sweet joy, the deep consolation I felt when I believed that God had answered my offer to sacrifice myself with the purest, fullest happiness, with Hannah? For much of the first week after the miscarriage, it felt like a slap in the face. It felt like a sick joke.

There is no tucking in the loose thread. It is cruel, what happened. Her life was too short. She was, and then she wasn’t, in a matter of weeks. I would have given anything to keep her alive — cut off a limb, gouged out my eyes, who cares — and I could do nothing to protect her. One out of four pregnancies ends this way; this world of God’s creation is brutal. 

I weave in the loose ends, in through the front, then back, then to the front, then back, to the front, then back. 

There is no tucking in the loose thread. And yet — it occurred to me, walking alone sometime in the second week afterwards — I was not wrong, sitting in the basilica, looking up at that mural, to be so happy. I was not wrong, when I looked at her on those two ultrasounds, and felt so relieved, so grateful. It was not a sick joke: it was still good, it was exceedingly good, that she existed.

Two months of life, in utero. It was not the life we imagined or wanted for her. She will not wear a yellow hat and be our baby on a boat. But for those few weeks she lived, she was good — like God said of creation in its first days, she was tovah meod, very good. She was taken care of; she was held. She had the opportunity to experience sensing things in some form. She got to have a beating heart. Meg and I were not wrong to look at each other, and then back at her, and then back at each other, with breathless amazement. It is still good — tov meod meod — that we made a human life, and I was, and still am, her mother.

I cut the remaining yarn. The hat is done, my first hat. It is lopsided from the mistaken stitches I made along the way, but absolutely hat-like. It will fit Jizo.

I feel sad, holding the finished hat in my hand. I am sorry it is over. I pull the hat over my fist and feel it, the wool, how good it is. How warm. It would be so nice to have a hat like this for winter. And then: the thought takes me down, all at once, with the force of its weight. I will never put a hat on her head. 

I will never give her a hat. Never, never, never, never, never. Whatever I was able to give her, I have given already. I gave her my body and my blood. It was not enough.

I hold myself as I, once again, sob. The mountain lion is awake, alert, flexing her sharp curved claws. I hold my head in my hands. I miss her: I loved her, I loved her, I love her so much.

The next day, I start to crochet another hat.