This week marks a tough time of year for me, despite the spring beauty unfolding all around us. It’s the week during which my daughter would have been born. In another life, we would have been celebrating Saule Marion’s fourth birthday.
Maybe she would have demanded that we only play the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack for four straight hours. Maybe she would have cried the entire time because her favorite classmate couldn’t make it, or because her big brother tried to play with her gifts before she had a chance. Maybe she would have worn a dress with flowers on it, and twirled around our yard making wishes on dandelion clocks, too impatient to wait for the cake with candles to arrive.
My daughter herself never arrived. In our lives, she will always remain an un-granted wish, a seedling herself, a dream that disappeared when I was halfway through my second pregnancy with her, a soul that never touched down in the topside world and took root. Her ashes sit in a pot outside my doorstep. This year, we’ll add them to our garden. We will wait to see what grows next from the ashes.
I think there are many of us out there who are keeping a quiet vigil over the ashes of our prior lives, waiting this spring to see what surprises arise. In this community are many people who, I know, are riding out pregnancy losses like mine—as well as divorces, scary diagnoses, deaths in the family, and other things that have completely changed the known map of your life, in ways with which you are still reckoning.
I see you. I know you. I am you.
For you, this week, I’m offering back the first post I ever wrote here on Substack, back when I was trying to figure out what my life would look like without Saule.
In this piece, I do not use the world rainbow. Or silver lining. I do not say at least. And I decidedly do not say everything happens for a reason. I no longer believe in a life that’s divided into sad tales and happy endings anymore.
I believe in a life that moves in spirals. A life in which we visit the same stories and themes like this, again and again, experiencing more clarity and compassion as we go. I believe in writing about life the way Nina Simone sang about seasons, low and soft: turn, turn, turn. I believe in a hard-earned wisdom that unfolds its petals slowly, like a lotus—not in spite of the mud from which it grows, but from deep down inside of it.
May this piece be of benefit to you if you too are wondering what will come up out of the mud, in a rainy season. May you know that you are not alone in this wondering. I am here too. I am here because of her. And in some ways, thanks to her, I feel more here than I have ever been.
Starting again, imperfectly
When I was thirteen, I stood above a roaring rapid, a small kayak at my feet. The adults with whom I was traveling, down Utah’s San Juan River in summer, invited me to ride on their larger, sturdier boats, but something called me to try the rapid solo. I wore a lifejacket, just in case. When I emerged from the hungry mouth of the muddy, swirling gauntlet, soaked and smiling, I was different, somehow. Something inside of me had gone forever into the water, and something inside of the water had gone into me.
When I was twenty-six, I climbed aboard a one-way flight headed for Seoul. I had given away all of my paintings, most of my books, and temporarily, my dog. (Only temporarily!) I knew no one in Asia. But I felt compelled to go. Years later, the friends I made there stood around me at my wedding. One of them officiated. Three of us wore fresh tattoos of the Red Thread – from a Korean folk story about the invisible forces of fate, in yeon, reaching out to connect us all.
When I was twenty-seven, I headed home from Seoul in summer, called to my brother’s bedside because he was stricken with brain cancer. By Christmas that year, his tumor was in remission, I had gotten together with the love of my life, and landed what I considered a dream job. Two years later, both the job and my brother were gone. Only the love remained. I flew west again, to release my brother’s ashes into another river in Utah, where we had played as children. I felt empty and hopeless as I climbed up the cliffs, out of that canyon. Once again, something inside of me had gone forever into the water, and I carried its metallic taste of change in my mouth.
When I was twenty-eight, I began a new career as an educator. In my backpack, that first day of graduate school, I carried very little. Pencils, a notebook. A few hairs from the dog I had reclaimed. (As I promised, his abandonment was temporary!) I felt hopeful once again. At thirty-one, I left a particularly disappointing and disastrous teaching job in tears, hugging a globe I’d taken from my now-former classroom. I held the world in my hands, but wondered if I’d ever go back again.
When I was thirty-two, I entered a surgical theatre, my two ovaries heavy as figs. I was there to undergo IVF, to build my family after years of battling endometriosis. The first time, it worked. My son is now six.
At the same time, I found a wonderful new school, where I nurtured almost 200 other kids alongside my infant son as an educator. I read them stories, and taught them how to write, and sent them off to high school. There was no better feeling than to imagine that something of me had gone into them, and something of them had forever gone into me.
The second go-around with IVF, it appeared to work. At Christmastime in 2021, we felt the kicks of our baby girl to be, due in June. In Jan ‘22, our hopes were dashed abruptly, as I experienced a series of life-threatening complications with my second pregnancy that, in another legislative reality, might have been life-ending for me.
Gathering my things from the hospital where the doctors saved my life, I found myself once again carrying ashes in my hands—this time, my daughter’s. We had named her Saule Marion, after the Lithuanian goddess of the sun. As the summer solstice approached, a new darkness settled over my life. I was diagnosed with PTSD. I told my beloved bosses I was taking the next school year off. We buried her ashes under a sunflower.
Something inside of me had gone into those ashes forever. I did not know then if anything else would ever come out.
But something always does, doesn’t it?
Now, I am starting again. Imperfectly. Here in this space, I aim to reclaim for myself, and those reading, a sense that every caregiver’s story matters, including the ones that end in ashes.
While not all of my stories here will center on this most recent loss, I do hope to break the silence around the truth of the late-term pregnancy loss experience, because it is a silence in which misguided and misogynistic American policy has been allowed to metastasize.
I do hope that as readers, we can stop these policies from continuing to oppress a population of birthing people who deserve nothing but compassion. I also hope to show that grieving people do not need to have already reached the mythical and elusive “rainbow” following loss, any loss, before we say a word about the raging storms we’ve seen, or are still surviving.
At the same time, I want to clear a space to tell all kinds of bigger, wilder, wider stories about our lives. There are so many interesting initiations that we caregivers undergo as we age and learn, beyond the narrow confines of the love-marriage-baby-carriage narrative. I want to clear a space for us to witness and be witnessed in those initiations. A space with more room for mysteries, and miracles, that can’t be explained or predicted by five-year-plans.
Where am I taking this? I don’t know. In looking back on every initiation I’ve personally experienced, there were never any guarantees. Only the call to take that one first terrifying step. To come in, come in, to come back in.
Since I began writing essays like this one, I’ve told each of these stories in greater detail. This has allowed me to hear so many other beautiful stories from folks like you.
If something here spoke to you, please feel free to come find me in the comments of one of these related essays. I’d love to hear from you.
Love and relationships
On growing up in Utah — the good, the bad, and the Mormon-ness of it all
On moving to Seoul, quitting smoking, and learning to meditate
On the inspiring notion of in yeon—the red thread of destiny
Navigating tough tending seasons
On coping with infertility and endometriosis, and what it taught me
Grief, trauma and healing
On what trees taught me about grieving after babyloss
On how the love and care of my community, a lot of EMDR, and the practice of tending a grief garden helped me heal
How In Tending grew from the ashes
For those who have been here since this imperfect beginning (you know who you are)—thank you so much for walking alongside me during this difficult journey. For those who are just joining us now—I am so glad you’re here. May the red thread that brought us all together in this moment continue to lead us on—turn, turn, turn—into greater clarity, deeper compassion, and collective liberation.
Sending you a giant hug and lots of love ❤️
I see you. ❤️❤️❤️