Life Among the Ashes
I knew something was wrong when I laid back for the sonogram at my 10-week appointment this past January. I began to pray silently as the sonographer began gliding the monitor over my pregnant belly. I could tell the sonographer was delaying something horribly inevitable, and sure enough, when she scanned over my tiny baby, there was only silence. No heartbeat as there had been three weeks earlier. She began to cry.
This was my first miscarriage, and while it broke my heart, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. I am 41 years old. At this stage in my biology, it was just an honor to bear life again, even for those short weeks. But what was entirely unexpected was the strange connection I suddenly felt with billions of other women, several of whom rallied around and cared for me in the aftermath of that terrible day.
My therapist once reminded me that suffering is really the only universal human experience. He shared that in Judaism, there’s a saying when someone encounters suffering: “I’ve fallen from the ranks of the fortunate.” But, he pointed out, until you’ve experienced suffering, you haven’t entered the ranks of the truly human. Suffering, loss, death-it all humble you and breaks you open to others’ humanity, as well as your own.
This miscarriage was not my first experience of deep suffering. But it has been my first experience of deep connection with others who have suffered as well. I found myself hugging the sonographer as she shared that she’d suffered two miscarriages. I found myself being given a delicious home-cooked meal by another woman who’d also suffered two miscarriages. And I suddenly found myself hyper-aware of others’ suffering: the weeping barista outside of my local Starbucks; the terror and then relief of the parents, whose kids were twice locked down in our local high school; the ongoing grief of my son’s teacher, who lost her son in 2020. It gave a new understanding to the verse in the book of Isaiah, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3)
The Christian church is currently in the season of Lent, a time of remembering Jesus’ fasting and temptation for 40 days in the desert. To imitate Christ’s deprivation, many choose to fast from an activity or food during this time. Since I became an Anglican, I’ve loved Ash Wednesday because it’s one of the few times of the year one can experience the universality of the church, identifying with total strangers, linked together by our wearing of ashes. It’s a reminder of our shared humanity that from “dust we came, and to dust we shall return.” All of us are dust.
Beyond fasting, many Christians choose to add a spiritual practice. In light of my recent miscarriage, I’ve decided to be on the lookout for connections with people I might not otherwise engage with now that I am a woman of sorrow and have become more deeply acquainted with grief. Just the other day, my four-year-old son and I attended a megillah reading and Purim spiel at the synagogue at which his preschool is located. It was lovely to sit and “boo” Haman and hang out with some of the teachers from his school as well as his classmates and their families. Beyond Lent, I will also participate in the National Week of Conversation (April 17-23) and plan a coffee date with someone who is different from me. This could be a political difference, a religious difference, an age difference, or even just a lifestyle difference. There’s no agenda in the conversation, just connection.
This Lent, those who observe it will reflect on Jesus, the “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,” who gave up the riches and comforts of heaven to put on the temporality of humanity. He did this to empathize with our weakness–our “dustiness,” so to speak. We could not have been more different than this Word made flesh, but Jesus stooped down to chat with people like a Samaritan woman, a Pharisee, a tax collector, and even the man who would betray him to death. Those conversations changed our understanding of the divine. While my conversations this Lent most likely won’t become scripture, I’m certain they will do their part to help me embrace our shared humanity.