Christie Chapman
Editor’s note: To listen while you read, please find the accompanying playlist embedded below.
Miscarriage Mixtape
Description: I say “mixtape,” but of course this is really a playlist, since all music is streaming now. I say “mixtape” because I’m older, or at least, on the older side to be a new biological mom. I’m Gen X—all my teenage love stories had mixtapes to go along with them. Back then I watched sitcoms and assumed that, by my mid-thirties, I’d be a mom of three kids living in a beige suburban house, with a sensible haircut and sweater vests. There would be a doltish but loveable husband, a dorky neighbor kid who popped in unannounced to raid the fridge, possibly a laugh track. But definitely: there would be kids. “One of each” as they say (boy, girl), or enough to fill Brady Bunch squares, or an only child like Punky Brewster. Any number but none. That was the assumption. I never dreamed that I would go to the OB/GYN at 35, after years of trying, and seethis on the form with my name on it: “Geriatric Pregnancy.” Geriatric! Apparently the sitcom my life most resembled at 35 was, instead, “The Golden Girls.” OK, I’m delaying. Let’s move on to your music.
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“Winter Song” by Sara Bareilles
I lost you in November. It was a bright blue day, and I walked in the woods. Your dad and I live near a hiking trail, as you know, and I often joke that walking on this trail every day is my “mental-health regimen.” It’s not actually a joke. That day, at the tops of tall trees, the wind played in yellow leaves. I told myself it was you, even though I don’t believe in such things. And yet I do, when it comes to you. I once heard someone define intelligence as being able to hold two ideas in your mind at the same time. A loss like this requires duality: I have a baby/I don’t have a baby. That baby is here/that baby is gone. When I see wind playing hide-and-seek in tall trees, it’s you. A thing doesn’t have to be a fact for it to be true.
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“Blue Christmas” by Elvis Presley
You can probably figure this one out—that a loss in November is bound to cast its shadow over the holiday season. But there’s more to the story. I was shopping for Christmas ornaments. I wanted a tangible item to commemorate you. I had no baby to hold, not even an ultrasound photo since we lost you too soon, so I gravitated to tchotchkes. A locket from my mom that held dried petals (“Flowers from Nana’s Garden,” she wrote on a slip of paper inside). A palm-sized Jizu statue; in Japan, these chubby-cheeked figures honor babies who died early. And I found this ornament, a crystal angel. I know; I said I don’t believe in that stuff. But it was perfect: a graceful glass marble of a head atop a silver upside-down cone for a body, almost abstract. At the moment I found it, “Blue Christmas” started playing in the store. And my eye fell on an Elvis ornament. I felt like you had directed me to that glittering Elvis, his arms and cape spread like wings. As if you were playing Mommy Voodoo Doll, piloting me. A little joke to cheer me up. I hang the two (angel, Elvis) together on the tree every year. Up high, where they won’t get knocked down.
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“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” by Bob Dylan
After the Elvis incident, I started privately calling you Baby Blue. Blue Christmas, blue sky. There were no clouds in the sky that day, the day I learned I had lost you, the day I walked in the woods. For those of us who lived through September 11, this seems to augur doom. “It was such a beautiful day,” people in New York City said in interviews. “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.” How to reconcile it, that lovely fall day and such loss?
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“Take Me Somewhere Nice” by Mogwai
This was the song I listened to on repeat, on lunch-break walks afterward. I can’t hear it now without going back into that trance, a sort of narcotized pain. An ache at an absence. My bosses were nice about it. I’d been on my way into a training session when I got the call: my blood-test results were back from the lab, and the hCG level was going down. I’ll spare you the longer scientific explanation, but it meant we had lost you. I’d been spotting for a few days. After my doctor’s call, I had to go home. This felt less like a decision and more like an imperative, like when the body is deprived of sleep and crashes out of self-preservation. I made it back to my cubicle and sent an email to my boss. I put on my coat and gathered my purse and tote bag, as if it were some normal trip home. I made it onto my Metro train, riding the Blue Line home. (Yes, the Blue Line, my Baby Blue. It’s also blue lines you see, in a cross shape, on a drugstore pregnancy test when it’s positive. At least, the brand I used.) A few stops from home, my boss—a mother of two—called me. She said she was so sorry; take the rest of the week off if I needed it. It was Tuesday. I took the rest of the week off. I needed it.
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“There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths
The song title I posted, with no explanation, on Facebook when I knew I was losing you. I had to say something, make it real. Leave a time stamp. For me, this song—the title alone—was leaden with all I was feeling. Those who saw my post probably just thought I liked the song.
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“What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?”—hymn, written by Charles Albert Tindley; as performed by Mogwai, on the soundtrack to the French zombie TV show Les Revenants, which means ‘The Returned’
This sounds to me like church. But the kind of church that I, as a non-believer, would like to attend. In the Mogwai cover, there’s this slow-poke piano that does remind me of Sundays at my grandparents’ churches, as if the preacher is about to ask us all to rise and shake hands with the person in the next pew. But it doesn’t sound fire-and-brimstone—during the sermon in my imaginary church, the preacher would utter some offhand, time-worn truth, and I’d gaze out the stained-glass window and feel profundity. It’d be an architectural-induced calm—the cobalt glass, the soaring ceiling—but effective nonetheless. It would be the kind of church where it feels possible to believe in you, even when I know better.
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“Reckoner” by Radiohead, the lullaby instrumental on an album called Twinkle Twinkle Little Rock Star
I once saw this song—the Radiohead original—paired with an image that looked like a bell-sleeved Grim Reaper pointing at his next target. Most depictions I’ve seen of Death, including the goth chick in the “Sandman” comics, are matter-of-fact. “Nothing personal. Just doing my job.”
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“Gold Dust” by Tori Amos
This is it, the crusher. The one I can only listen to on the anniversary of your loss, if at all. Tori Amos had miscarriages. Her lyrics are sometimes cryptic but I can always tell which ones are about that. Sometimes you have to let the sadness take you—a wave that tugs you off land but embraces you. In that unmoored state, wrapped in love and pain, I see that there’s no one to blame. Not even myself. (I was pounding orange juice for the folic acid; I gave up caffeine. I did all I could.) Sometimes nature simply misfires, cellular building blocks don’t stack up the way they should. Sometimes all you can do is say goodbye. The chorus sings of holding gold dust in our hands. We held less than that. No dust, no ashes, no funeral. But you were in me. We proved it with science. It was not nothing.
Listening Stats: And here’s where I have to apologize. Because I had these songs on heavy rotation the months after I lost you, in November 2014. The stats went up again on the anniversary, when, if you can believe it, your dad and I had another early loss. In the way that siblings pass down clothing and toys, these songs now belong to both of you. Two years after that second loss—we had a baby. A baby who made it. “Those are for the babies who didn’t make it,” is how I explain to my daughter when she asks about the secret box under my bed that holds the locket, the Jizu statue, the ornaments. For years I listened to these songs on the anniversary. Then I stopped. Not because I forgot, but because it was too much. The songs dig sharper after some time away from them, when I’m no longer steeping in your loss daily. And at some point—I think you might agree—I have to be a mother to the baby who made it. Not a griever of ghosts. Although you know I do both. I’m not a crier; I have my reasons for this. Sometimes life forces you to develop a carapace, a protective shell. But for you, and your also-lost, one-year-later sibling, when I listen to these songs, when I see the wind in yellow leaves on a blue-sky day, I cry.
Christie Chapman is a writer and mom in Springfield, VA. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in Electric Literature, LEON Literary Review, The Bulb Region, Ghost Parachute, Flash the Court, and elsewhere. She was a Lascaux Prize Finalist for Flash Fiction, and was nominated for the Best Microfiction anthology.
