Preciousness - An Ab*or1ion Story of Loss and Love

Preciousness

“We’re nearly home, through the garden gate and amost at the door - but she is still far away, far above us, the low rocking of my pace lending her dream the beat of the sun, the adventure of her legs, the speed and the spit of tall grasses grazing her calves as she runs, runs, runs. And around her, all around her, my arms’. Tamarin Norwood, The Whole Wide World.

I’ve been thinking a lot about preciousness recently. How it feels in my body as I create a shelter of my body around something precious within. Something deeply held, perhaps too precious even for sharing with others. Something to be deeply cherished. It feels so much a part of myself, a tender, wondrous, part within and yet is something that connects me, intextricably, to the wider world, to the universe, to something far greater than myself.

How as time goes on, as my body ages and as I move deeper into this work I feel a sense of preciousness for all of me - and all of you too.

In Autumn we often think about letting go. The leaves falling from the trees, a deep exhale as we settle into winter. In TCM Autumn is associated with the lungs and this process of taking in and letting go. The emotion is Grief and its element is Metal - a preciousness held and cocooned in the earth. To be held and tended to and housed.

It’s to this preciousness, this year, that I wish to turn my attention towards.

For Runa

A few years ago, when Lucca was about two, I made the decision to end an unexpected pregnancy. I can’t offer reasons here but what I can speak to is the love in which the decision was made. Buckets of it. Deep, tender, swathes of love for my family and for her.. I can speak to the preciousness of this birth, this experience, and to her fleeting existence. How only now, almost 4 years on, I feel like I want to share her story a little And very tenderly let her be in the outside world for a brief moment. Before gathering her up perhaps and placing her inside the folds of my body again.

I don’t acutally know if she was a ‘her’ - I was just a few weeks into the pregnancy. But I had a feeling and I called her Runa. The name swam into my mind and I’ve only looked into the meaning of the word recently - ‘secret lore’ or ‘mystery’. She couldn’t have chosen a better name. I’m terrible at remembering anniversaries or important dates so I find it poignant that her due date would have been my birthday - as though she knew I’d need a little help to remember. I wonder more about this, feeling myself at the edges of what this means in some way.

There is a tenderness to sharing this story, to shairng her, because she is deeply precious to me. She exists both within me and outside of me but so far she has existed almost entirely to me alone. I see her in a little bird that came to tap on my living room window, day after day after she was born and that came back the year after. She comes to me in books, words on a page suddenly thick with meaning, a feeling in my stomach, a rush of constriction around my heart and throat, a sob that comes from nowhere. I wonder about her character, her face I didn’t get to see and I mourn her and lost narratives when Lucca asks for a sibling. When she was buried I sobbed that I couldn’t shelter her from the rain, that she was alone, wrap her up and keep her warm as I do her brother.

She’s deeply precious in wordless, deep, bodily ways that require no explanation or analysis. She’s ancient and new. She’s galactic and far away stars as she is this leaf, this muddied ground, this gust of wind. She has made me more tender, more hopeful, more full of love than I could ever imagine.

I’ve recently read The Whole Wide World by Tamarin Norwood - a book about her son Gabriel who lived for 72 minutes all in her arms. I’ts one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read I think. She writes with great reverence, seems to hold with a raw, immediate, painfully wide eyed and porous utter beauty and awe of this life that is rooted in something so bodily, so visceral. She wrote so beautifully to all of this and I highly recommend reading it.

I have a sense, often, of carrying the precioussness of her within me. But more recently I’ve had a sense also of being carried by her. And that feels….wordless…”a cherishing so deep”.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in
      the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a
      cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm
      speechless:
I am living, I remember you.

From What The Living Do, By Marie Howe