The Alchemization of Grief

A New Orleans cab driver helps me grieve my daughter

I’m only catching every third or fourth word from my Uber driver. Tucked in the backseat, sweat is forming under my arms and down the backs of my legs. He tells me he moved here with his family from Iran. They built homes there. Now they’re trying to build homes here in Louisiana. In between his earnest storytelling, I look at the car’s dashboard and confirm: the air conditioning is set to MAX and the fan is cranked high. Why did I even come on this trip?

My best friend is visiting New Orleans with her husband and they need someone to care for their young daughter while they attend a work conference. When the invitation came through, I accepted right away, but now that I’m in town and getting closer to holding Alice in my arms, my stomach is churning. I told my friends before I got on the plane today that I might burst into tears when I see them. Or just cry the whole time I’m there. That I don’t know what state I’ll be in from day to day, but that I want this time with Alice. I want to be together with them and also distracted by a city whose lore I’d only ever read about. 

As the driver moves in and out of highway traffic, I look toward the front seat again and notice some religious items—perhaps some prayer beads—hanging from his rear view mirror. Thanks to my religious studies over the years, I piece together that my Uber driver is Muslim. When he catches me looking, he smiles and starts talking about his times of prayer. As I picture this man in prayer, my mind floats off in another direction and an urgency fills my lungs with air. I cut him off to ask, “Where do babies go when they die?”

His eyes squint at me. His smile is unsure. 

“The babies?” he says softly. 

I grab my iphone and search for Google translator. I push the volume as high as I can and lean forward so he can hear my question read aloud by a voice in Arabic.

 “My baby died four months ago.”

مات طفلي منذ أربعة أشهر

The smile drops from his eyes. 

He says, “Oh, I am sorry.”

I keep typing, frantically, shaking, breathless.

“And I don’t know where she went.”

وأنا لا أعرف أين ذهبت.

***

It’s been five years since I sat in a hospital and heard a doctor say, “I can’t let you go home.” I was 21 weeks pregnant and had been grappling with the news that I wasn’t likely to carry to term—or even beyond the end of the week. 

We were devastated as any first-time parents would be. We were also emotionally and physically exhausted by this point after twelve weeks of complications, numerous doctors shrugging their shoulders, sometimes twice-weekly clinic visits and a few trips to the ER. Now, we were in the hospital, responding to sharp, lightning rod pain in my lower back. 

This was the same hospital whose labor and delivery ward I had meticulously researched and chosen for their “family friendly” birthing suites and highly rated staff. But that day I was admitted under completely different circumstances. The doctor suspected I had an infection and recommended a course of action: We would stay and take the morning “emergency” slot that’s kept open in the surgical ward. My husband and I slept in the same bed that night; we held each other close; and at the end of March 2019, we learned how to say goodbye.

There’s still not a whole lot that I know about grief. Or that can be wrapped up tidily into a story. Though I desperately looked for such a guide when we lost our first girl. (In December of the same year we would lose another girl in the second trimester.) I wanted to make it through child loss the same way I made it through everything else as an autistic person. I wanted to read and examine how other people—presumably more put together—made it through the unimaginable. I wanted to see my life spelled out in front of me. I wanted something to make this process tidy. 

Of course that’s not where my stories have taken me. There is no such book. And asking for grief to be tidy is a fool’s errand. So instead of trying to make grief sound like a linear, clinical process, I want to tell you about the times I was able to come up for air. The moments when something beyond my ordinary knowledge showed up—when something otherly intervened on my behalf. 

I want to tell you that when I woke up from that operation and my daughter was gone, my sense of obligation to the world dissolved. Who I was spiritually would never be the same. My attempts to reconcile with my childhood faith ended that day. More nails were put into coffins than I can tally. How I saw the world would never be the same. From that day forward, how I understood myself would start unraveling at lightning speed. 

Something inside me split open that day at the hospital, and in the years that followed I would discover dozens of fractured selves I’ve been hiding from. Looking back, my whole life makes a little more sense: that a single Amanda alone couldn’t hold the totality of pain she weaved in and out of. From a young age I learned that’s the only thing I could do with pain: split it, dissociate and try to become a new, more obedient, more loveable me. But that day in March, all of me went silent. Over time I came to realize that this staggering, shocking, life-bending grief had split me again. And much of the work these past five years has been spent figuring out how to hold and accept pain across a broad spectrum of inner expressions. But how to do this with a system of selves? That’s been the hardest task of all. 

With the gift of years-long trauma and body therapy, my system of selves has come forward one at a time. I’ve heard from my five-year-old self, quietly whispering in a way that I can only describe as “reminding me of what I forgot I knew.” As I learned to listen, I heard from almost every age starting at 3 all the way to the present-day me. It’s painstaking, slow, relationship building that I’ve never seen modeled anywhere else. I’m not sure I would believe it or be able to comprehend it if I hadn’t walked through it, day after day for almost three years. 

The implications on how I process grief couldn’t be more complex. I have woken up more times than I can count with a voice asking why we aren’t pregnant anymore. (Amnesia is a complex component of dissociative identity disorder.) This means that I’ve had to explain one at a time, to each person inside me, the stories of our loss—reminding them of the trip to the hospital, the doctor’s expert advice that saved my life and how our babies live in our heart forever now. Depending on the tone, type of language and the feeling of panic in my chest, I can usually ask how old this Amanda is and use gentler, more vague language to lessen the shock. Of course I’m still there, reliving all the details, too. 

These days in my mind, grief looks like a circle of people—all different ages and sizes of Amanda—sitting around, each passing a parcel from person to person. It seems now that when grief had brought someone closure, they passed it on to the next Amanda who was ready. This is how I learned how to grieve: one person, one perspective, one moment of recognition at a time. I understand now that grief alchemized inside me by having unconditional, welcoming permission to move through me. 

I’m always listening for the voice of grief in my body. She has been my wise guide all these years, and I trust Her Work. I don’t get the sense that anyone else in my system needs to be introduced to the truth, but I do feel that it’s time to take my next step of faith and hand these stories over to you. 

Over the last five years, I have been asking and answering the same question I asked my Uber driver in New Orleans: Where did my baby go? 

I asked this question as a woman whose dreams were visited night after night by a bear, a whale, a water buffalo, scores of deer and more. I asked this as a woman who had no directions for how to make it through life. I asked this question every day to hundreds of trees, whose whispers I learned to distinguish from its roars. In that complete lostness, the world of Spirit came to show me a way forward in the most surprising ways. It seems that the moment my whole self went silent, I was also saying, “I’m ready to listen.”

***

His eyes look ahead into the shifting lanes of traffic on the highway. He is silent, as I’m worrying that I’ve asked a question too dangerous to say aloud.

I look out the window for a moment and swallow back the tears that live most days at the top of my throat. 

He turns toward me in the mirror, raises his hand like an arrow toward the sky and says, “Straight to heaven. Straight to God.”

If you feel inspired to share this story with your friends and family, I’d be honored to know that my girls and I are now being heard in a completely new way.