A Dark Interstellar Ghost

on loss and grief...

Egon Schiele Feminae Gravidae

In January of this year, I became pregnant. On the second cycle of trying to create life, at 38, my body had easily conceived. We had succeeded. I had nervously started to test before I had even missed my period. By around 8 or 9 days past ovulation, I had already felt a shift. I had woken up several nights in a row from a deep sleep with a sudden gasp, butterflies, and my brain saying “you’re pregnant.” With shaking hands we finally saw a clear positive, after several days of “is that a second line?” holding it under the light, and my husband saying, “I don’t see anything, I’m throwing it away before you drive yourself crazy.” I wrote in my journal,

“please stay.

please stay.

please stay.”

The month before, our first cycle trying, I dreamt I was swimming underwater with blue whales. Their slow, gentle-giant bodies, calling out to each other in the blue womb of the ocean. Whales had become a guiding presence for me in the process of trying to conceive, and they were only ever present before in a dream I had years ago, only a few days before finding out I was pregnant in New Orleans (another story of loss in a previous post).

I had some trepidation and anxiety from the beginning. Was this real? How did I know what was going on in there? Was my body playing some kind of joke on me, and would I show up for the first ultrasound, and they’d say, “there’s nothing in there”?

I can’t bring myself to ruminate too much about the experience of being pregnant for 8 weeks. It’s still too tender to touch, and somehow, it’s easier to talk about the process of the loss itself than it is to talk about when I thought everything was ok. When there was joy and anticipation. I do know that it felt so surreal, that I had already felt myself stepping through a portal, and that I felt simultaneously that my entire being was going to be something new and incredible, and also terrified. My body suddenly didn’t belong to me, I had to completely surrender to this tiny being, and I didn’t know which way it would go, but I had to accept any and all outcomes.

Day after day, I told myself my chances of miscarrying got lower and lower each day I stayed pregnant. I did all the things I was supposed to. I slept on my left side, even in those early weeks when it doesn’t really matter, I took the vitamins, I meticulously planned each meal for optimal nutrition and looked up everything to make sure it was pregnancy safe. I was afraid to move too quickly, strain myself, or even walk around too much. I reluctantly ordered a pregnancy book online, afraid it was too soon. We told close family and friends, and I had a hard time matching their excitement. I wanted to be, but I was nervous, afraid it was some prank I was playing on myself. Every morning I put my hands on my womb and said things like, “you are safe to grow!” and “you are doing so great in there”. I had started making a baby playlist, with Vashti Bunyan’s “Here Before”, a song that sounded like a lullaby about a child who had come back from another life. I looked at my pregnancy app every day and each week proudly announced things like “this week they are the size of a blueberry!” I checked for blood every time I used the bathroom. One day, there was blood.

It was a faint, light brown. “Old blood”, the midwife had told me on the phone. I didn’t have my first ultrasound until the 8 week mark, which felt like a slow torture to trust all was ok until I could see for myself. I tried not to panic. I wasn’t in any pain, and I was still testing strongly positive. The spotting would happen maybe twice a day, and then it would disappear for a few days to a week, then come back. Everything I read told me it was normal, or could be normal. In my last miscarriage, I remembered things happening very quickly, within hours, so I figured if it wasn’t progressing, and I felt no pain, I was ok. I could wait until the appointment. They wouldn’t see me before then anyway. I told myself I would know if I was miscarrying, and that a “missed miscarriage” (when the pregnancy stops, but there are no signs of loss) was even more rare, although it became my biggest worry. Some women do go into their appointments to find it was a cruel joke all along and their body didn’t catch the memo?

Around week 6, I started to feel my symptoms plateau. I searched for nausea that wasn’t there, fatigue that wasn’t that bad anymore. I kept waiting for the morning (or, all day) sickness to start, all the pregnancy forums said “just wait!” to my inquiring and worried posts.

The first midwife appointment. That morning I woke up feeling strangely, “normal.” I had gotten a few excited and encouraging texts from family about our first ultrasound appointment, but I felt more like I was about to go to the doctor to be told I have an illness, or a diagnoses I was dreading. As we checked in, I glanced at the wall in the lobby and noticed a large Matisse print, a woman’s form holding a baby. I felt a sense of sadness and dread, although at that time I had no reason to think anything was wrong at all.

We walked into the ultrasound room, dark and quiet. I felt my stomach drop and the dread creeped up again. I reluctantly undressed from the waist down. My husband sat next to me and we stared at the large screen in front of us, with nowhere else to look. An image came up. A small, glowing circle, and a small form that looked like a kidney bean. The tech didn’t speak. “Can you tell me anything?” I asked, already knowing that what I was looking at was too small for 8 weeks. “I’m not seeing a heartbeat…” she said.

I only measured 6 weeks and 3 days, and no heartbeat found. I covered my face with my hands. I fucking knew it.

I told my husband I was sorry. I don’t know why I apologized, I think it was more of a “I’m sorry for your loss” kind of apology.

They drew my blood and the nurse stroked my hand.

The midwife gently explained what I already knew, and explained my three options. Wait to miscarry, medically assisted, or surgery.

I decided to wait. If my body had come this far and decided to deceive me, it could very fucking well go through the pain and trauma that I had been worried about anyway. I was grief stricken, and angry.

“Sometimes women start to miscarry right after these kinds of appointments. The body knows to let go”, the midwife said. Then I would let go, and let’s get it fucking over with. I thought back to my previous miscarriage, and the conversation I had with my body just before I had started to bleed. The body does know, and it does, in fact, keep the score. She prescribed me the medication anyway, in case I didn’t want to wait.

We sat in the car afterwards, my husband sending the obligatory texts with the news. I sat there clutching the ultrasound photos they printed out. I almost didn’t take them. I couldn’t look at them. My sister offered to come right over. I couldn’t talk to her or see her, I didn’t want to talk to or see anyone. My best friend left me voice messages, she was crying. “I can’t believe you have to go through this again.”

The days of waiting. The spotting increasing. I felt my hormones dropping, like I was about to get the worst period of my life. It’s a cruel torture when your body still believes it’s supporting a life, but that life is no longer. “Please just let go” I begged.

One day the cramps started to increase. I had been in the shower, passing clots, and frantically searching through the blood and tissue, looking for something recognizable. It was an instinct I could not stop. Thankfully, I did not see anything. Later, I had the urge to walk around, to help things move along. My husband took my arm and walked me up and down the hall, I felt like a woman in labor, and technically I was, but without the outcome of life. Pain ripped through my body. Contractions, over and over. I finally curled up on the bed, unable to move, unable to breathe. I finally had the urge to sit on the toilet, my husband kneeling in front of me, holding my hands. “Am I going to die?” I asked him. I genuinely thought I would. I felt like an animal, my eyes wide, seeing but not seeing, blind in my pain, surrendering to death. As soon as I passed tissue and clots, the pain subsided. I couldn’t bring myself to flush the toilet. I couldn’t do it. He did it for me.

A few days later, I had one more bout of excruciating pain, passing one more large clot, then the pain went away. I continued to bleed for days. The pregnancy tests became lighter and lighter. I started to feel “normal” again, and empty. I thought it would feel like relief, to feel like myself again, to not feel a false sense of pregnancy any longer, but it made me feel further and further away from the pregnancy, and closer to my grief. It felt so final. I felt so alone within my body.

Grief is like a wide open door to vast nothingness. An open wound. It surges and retreats, and it’s depths are endless. I spent days exhausted. Why did my body fail? I was supposed to be a safe place for this baby to grow. I had trusted my body to do what it should have, and my body had betrayed me. The possibility of everything suddenly torn away.

We had a small memorial of our own. We made an altar for the spirit of our baby, and we sent their energy back into the Great Universal Everything. At least, that’s what I like to think.

I wrote in my journal, under the haze of residual pain medication for the cramps I would continue to have for days,

The territory of my body

stretched between life and death

the screaming pulse of my womb

the raw remains

the animal wildness of my eyes

as I birth

an explosion of a dead star

death in a toilet bowl

angry & red

like shards of glass in my deep down belly

Miscarriage is a horrible, raw, humiliating, excruciating and primal experience. It’s shattering and shaking and incredibly lonely. Despite the loving, undying support I had from my husband during the entire process, even through the fog of his own grief, the thing is happening in your own body. Rendering you helpless, with an awful gnawing of shame and guilt as part of you touches both life and death at the exact same time. It’s otherwordly and surreal and exhausting. The backwards portal to motherhood that you didn’t mean to go through.

Three months later, now, as I write, this grief still has sharp teeth. I realized that sharing this untangles the barbs wrapped around me. The grief no longer feels like dark secret to hold. I can start to undo, and let it go.

A few weeks ago, scrolling through Instagram, I came across a reel in which a woman was saying that she had recently lost her beloved cat. A friend told her to look on Nasa’s website, at their “photo of the day”, where there is a photo taken each day of something happening in the cosmos. On the day her cat passed away, there was a glowing, cosmic form in the shape of a heart. Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the date of the day we found out our baby had stopped growing. February 20th, 2026.

A Dark Interstellar Ghost

A ghost in the Milky Way…” says Christian Bertincourt, the astrophotographer behind this striking image of Barnard 93 (B93). The 93rd entry in Barnard’s Catalogue of Dark Nebulae, B93 lies within the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud (Messier 24), where its darkness stands in stark contrast to bright stars and gas in the background. In some ways, B93 is really like a ghost, because it contains gas and dust that was dispersed by the deaths of stars, like supernovas. B93 appears as a dark void not because it is empty, but because its dust blocks the light emitted by more distant stars and glowing gas. Like other dark nebulas, some gas from B93, if dense and massive enough, will eventually gravitationally condense to form new stars. If so, then once these stars ignite, B93 will transform from a dark ghost into a brilliant cradle of newborn stars.

I read it again.

“….will transform from a dark ghost into a brilliant cradle of newborn stars.”

I thought about the line of the poem I had written during the miscarriage…

“…the explosion of a dead star…”

It had to have been more than coincidence that I had intuitively described the loss that way.

I don’t know what any of this means for the future. I don’t know if this is a sign of new things to come again.

I do know what where we come from and where we go in the end is the same place, made of the same things. We come into being, however briefly, and then we return. Our dark ghosts becoming brilliant and glowing again. Newly born.