It had been two weeks since the surgery. Two weeks since our short-lived joy had disappeared in a haze of blood and pain. I had been a father. Now I wasn’t anymore. The feeling was surreal and vacating, like movers had come in the night and relocated all of my emotions and my perceptions, and had left me with nothing instead.
It was how I felt after Millie’s death, but on steroids. Times a thousand. In fact, the only other time I remember feeling this gutted was after Lizzy’s death. And this time it came pre-loaded with something else. Something extra.
Guilt.
Because this was my punishment. How could it not be? How could I have ever thought that a wife, a family, would be things I could have after what I’d done? After the calling I’d abandoned?
No. God was punishing me. Like Bathsheba and David’s infant after David had Uriah murdered, God had taken my child as payment for my sins. I deserved this pain, I supposed. I’d earned it with every sigh and moan and rustle of the sheets, and since I’d been so resolutely unrepentant, God had exacted his pound of flesh another way. With ounces of blood and a blighted joy. With just one black and white glimpse of the gummy bear baby that would never be part of our lives.
But why did Poppy have to suffer too? My prayers swung wildly from anger to bargaining to pleading and back to angry again.
Please.
Please not this.
Why this?
How fucking dare You?
How fucking could You?
My wife had become a woman I barely recognized. She took time away from work. She stopped reading, she stopped listening to Christmas music, and she sat by the window staring at the graveyard for hours. I could barely coax her to bed at night and into the shower in the mornings. Even though the semester was finished and I could stay home with her all day, it wasn’t at all like we were in the same house together. Her mind—her soul—was somewhere else, wandering through the snowy cemetery maybe or reliving the same terrible memories in that linoleum-floored hospital room.
Please.
Please not this.
Please don’t take my lamb’s sparkle and spirit too.
I can’t lose her. I can’t.
I realized that in Kansas City, I had washed her and cradled her in order to win her trust. Now I had to do all of those same things simply to connect her to reality.
That spiral again. The same steps but with different meanings. The same actions but with different consequences. Maybe it was my penance, my duty, but I didn’t care for her out of guilt—although the guilt hovered elsewhere. I cared for her because I loved her.
Poppy was depressed. Her doctor prescribed her medicine, and for once, the way she was raised helped—she had no stigmas about psychotropic drugs after growing up around rich women swilling Xanax and Ambien with their chardonnay.
A few more days passed. I made her move from the chair to the couch, which was closer to the fireplace, and I began reading books to her, finishing the Galbraith mystery and moving on to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while I snuggled her on the couch. I heard her laughing at a couple parts, small little jerks of her ribs, and I kept reading as if I hadn’t heard, feeling like a man who’s encountered a wild animal in the woods. I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that she’d laughed, but oh my fucking God, she’d laughed. I hadn’t realized how much I craved that sound until it had been gone from my life, and now here it was, creeping slowly around the edges of our home, crouching low by the fire to see if it was safe to come back.
At night, I crooned hymns low in her ears as she laid in my arms, the poor lamb shivering constantly even though we had quilts upon quilts piled upon us. I showered us together, washing her hair like a man might handle the world’s finest painting. I got really good at making lobster bisque and not burning dinner rolls. I plied her with whiskey, which she rarely drank but liked to hold. I turned on Christmas music. I started reading the Harry Potter novels when Hitchhiker’s Guide was finished.
And then, the Sunday before Christmas, something happened. She walked into the kitchen wearing a skirt and blouse, makeup freshly applied.
I, being used to our new hermit-like existence, was wearing a pair of boxer briefs and nothing else.
“I want to go to Mass,” she said simply.
It was the first time she’d volunteered to leave the house of her own free will and for something other than a doctor’s appointment.
I felt the wild animal wariness again. I didn’t want to spook her with my open relief, my naked joy at seeing even this small stirring of life.
“Okay,” I said evenly. “I’ll get dressed.”
Midnight Mass.
It started as a tradition in the Holy Land, where believers would gather in Bethlehem during the night and then, torches in hand, walk towards Jerusalem, making it to the city at dawn. A ritual that could fuse narrative into real life, where followers of Christ could stand in the same place He was born before making a pilgrimage to the Holy City.
It’s changed over the millennia, morphed and warped into something different, but at its heart, it’s the same. A re-enactment. A retelling. A redoing.
A liturgical creation of a new reality where Christ walks among us. At least, that’s what Scholar Tyler would say about it.
In the few days since Poppy had left the house under her own steam, she’d gradually come more and more back to life. Singing along with Christmas carols. Yanking the book out of my hands when she felt like I was doing the voices badly. Even playfully pinching my butt in the kitchen.
Our own liturgy was slowly unfolding between the two of us. Glimpses of happiness and easiness and the divine. And like a Mass, I knew it couldn’t be rushed, couldn’t be pushed along. It had to unfold at its own pace, take its own time. So I held space for my lamb. And at the same time, I learned to hold space for my own grief and my own guilt. The idea that I’d earned our miscarriage as punishment haunted me, tormented me.
I read the annotations in my bible explaining that David and Bathsheba’s son probably died of natural causes, the act simply being ascribed to God’s will as so many deaths were in those days. And I read David’s own words in the Psalms:
As far as the east is from the west,
So far does he remove our transgressions from us.
But nothing helped.
I told you I was addicted to guilt. And like any addict, I needed to hit rock bottom. Which wasn’t, as I thought, our miscarriage. It was the few minutes after midnight Mass, when I looked over and saw Poppy staring at the Nativity scene in front of us, the life-sized mannequins of the wise men and the Holy Family.
The life-sized baby Christ in the manger.
And then the Poppy-shaped shell she’d built around herself cracked, the raw emotion of the last month punching through her cocoon of numb self-control, and she started crying. No, not just crying.
Weeping.
The church was mostly empty now, which was good, because Poppy wept loudly, her hands over her face and her body hunched over so that her face was above her knees.
It cut at me to see my lamb like this, cut at me and also filled me with relief because I’d known this had to happen, I’d known that she needed to truly mourn. I wrapped an arm around her. “I’m here,” I whispered quietly. “I’m here.”
She said something into her hands, something so choked and teary that I couldn’t make it out, and so I leaned closer and she said it again. “It’s all my fault.”
Four little words. Four dangerous, gangrenous, little words. Four words that—if you let them take root—would rot you away from the inside, would eat your soul and set decay festering in your heart.
I—Tyler Bell, former priest—should know.
“No, no, no,” I begged her. “Don’t say that. Tell me you don’t believe that.”
She raised her face to mine, her eyes wet and her cheeks splotchy. “It is my fault, Tyler. I didn’t know if I wanted the baby! I said all of those terrible things about the baby changing my life, and what if God took the baby away because I didn’t love it right away? Or what if God was saving the baby from me being a horrible mother?”
Jesus Christ, I thought, and the thought was half instinctive swearing and also half prayer. Is this what my own thoughts sounded like? Is this how dark and lost I was as well? When it came from my beautiful lamb, I could see how poisonous the guilt and shame were. How pointless.
And suddenly I took a step forward on my path, advanced along my spiral several paces. Quitting my addiction to guilt wouldn’t be easy. It would probably be an emotional project for the next few years…maybe for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t help Poppy leave her guilt behind if I didn’t do the same with my own.
So I took a deep breath, held my crying wife close, and…let it go. Loosened my hold and dropped it to the ground. No more guilt for me. And no more for her.
“This isn’t punishment, Poppy,” I told her, with every ounce of certainty and love I could muster. “It’s a tragedy and it’s hard and it’s sad, but God doesn’t send pain to punish us or test us. Pain happens. Death happens. How we grieve and cope—that’s up to us. Of course you were nervous about having a baby. Of course you were ambivalent. We would never punish a bride for feeling ambivalent before her wedding, or a man for feeling uncertain on the first day of a new job, so you can’t punish yourself for how you felt about a child.”
“But it took me so long to be happy about the pregnancy.”
“Being unhappy or doubtful isn’t a sin.”
No more than leaving the priesthood. The thought came from somewhere outside of me, a beam of light illuminating the darkest corners of my soul. And for the first time in a year, I felt it. The shimmering, air-crackling feeling of God nearby. I only wished I could take that feeling and wrap it around Poppy like a blanket.
“I chose this religion,” she said, hugging herself. “I chose this religion where everyone has these huge families, where it feels like having a baby is the most important thing a woman can do. And what does it mean for me as a woman if I can’t do this one thing? What does it mean for me as a Catholic woman?”
I winced. “Poppy, no one would ever think you were ‘less than’ because you—”
“Because I had a miscarriage? Because I may not be able to carry a child? Look at the Bible, Tyler. Where are the godly infertile women in there?”
“Well, Sarah—”
“Ends up having a baby,” Poppy interrupted. “Same with Rebecca and Rachel and Hannah. Every infertile woman in the Bible is eventually able to give birth. What does it mean if I never can? Does it mean that I’m not blessed or righteous? That there’s something wrong with my soul as well as my body?” Her voice cracked on the last word.
I took a minute to answer, because I was near tears myself seeing her so devastated and also because I was still working through my new understanding of my guilt and how it had colored the way I’d read the scriptures for so long.
“The Bible was written in a very specific time and place, for a very specific culture,” I explained. “I think that in the biblical environment having a child was the ultimate sign of God’s grace and blessing. That Sarah ends up having a baby is the Bible’s way of showing God’s love and care for her—not God redeeming her through her womb, but through his love. That love can take any form. For the ancient Canaanites, it was children, but for us, it could be something completely different.”
I gestured around the church, at the altar and at the crucifix and at the tabernacle. “All of this—the lengthy bible readings and the liturgical rigmarole and the Eucharist—what do you think it’s here for, lamb?”
She blinked, shaking her head. “I don’t know.”
“It’s to remind us of our shared humanity. Of our quest to do better. And most importantly, of the fact that God loves us and helps us during that quest. Let Him love and help you now. Let Him give you grace.”
The shimmering God-feeling intensified, and Poppy lifted her face to the crucifix. She tilted her head, as if listening to something only she could hear.
The bright overhead lights came on and a vacuum started running somewhere in the distance. The smell of smoke indicated the snuffing of candles in preparation for closing the church for the night, and still we didn’t move.
Finally Poppy turned to me and said, “Okay. I will.”
And then, holding hands and with tears still drying on our faces, we walked out into the biting cold of early, early, early Christmas morning. Up ahead the stars winked, like the Star of Bethlehem, and somewhere a baby was being born.
Maybe one day it would be ours.
But one hour into Christmas morning, a new beginning was being born for Poppy and me, and for now, that was enough.