I had a miscarriage in the summer of 2012 after twelve weeks of pregnancy. I was 39 years old, and honestly, still on the fence about wanting to be a mother. But parenthood was a possibility for the first time in my life, and I was strongly leaning toward embracing and protecting it.
My partner and I named the fetus “Jasper.” A few days prior to the beginning of the miscarriage, I experienced the most vivid hypnagogic hallucination I’d ever had, likely due to increased progesterone levels. Or crashing ones.
I’ve had night terrors as well as hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations all my life. Some of my earliest memories involve being frozen in place in bed, waking to paralysis and strange creatures peering into my room or leering at me from the floor or the next pillow. I thank Carl Sagan for his essay on these natural occurrences every day—for at points, it seemed the only explanation was budding madness or sinister supernatural forces at work.
In this case, it was an insect. A black insect. The blackest insect I’ve ever seen. There is a sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago by Katharina Frisch, called Monk—and it is the blackest black, the kind of black that sucks light into its event horizon and draws it into another dimension altogether. The blackest insect I’d ever seen was launching itself at me from my bedside table like a tiny Frisch monk.
Where I had previously been paralyzed, suddenly I screamed and launched myself backwards out of the bed, over my sleeping partner, now startled awake and scared out of his mind. I was screaming incoherently about the creature, “Do you see it? Can you see it? It’s coming at me! Can’t you see it?” I was the apotheosis of abject terror and fear. We did not return to the bed or the bedroom for the remainder of the night.
A few days later I began bleeding heavily. We went to the obstetrician’s office for an emergency examination, and were able to see Jasper’s beating “heart” for the first time. The tech glibly and irresponsibly reassured me that Jasper was in fact alive and to have hope, and although I did return home as instructed, I knew not to trust her judgment. Later, around 3:00 a.m., alone in our bathroom, the last of Jasper was pushed from my body.
If it is true that we die alone, then it is also true that we birth alone. I’ve never been so alone as I was that night.
A year and a half later, I carried a pregnancy to full term. My son is the light where Jasper was the dark. Today, I heard Norman Westberg’s (SWANS) album Jasper Sits Out for the first time. The cover art evokes Frisch’s monk in the shape of a pregnant belly. The image is spiritually terrifying to me, and yet it is one of the most beautiful ambient albums I’ve ever heard.
This music helps me acknowledge the beauty, terror, joy, and tragedy of that darkness—of Jasper and my first experience giving birth.
Crabaghast! 