Heartbreak and Hope

I sometimes bookmark things that I know I’m going to love and save them to read when I can fully concentrate.  Which is why I only read this essay about miscarriage in Catapult months after it was posted.  It’s a hard read.  I still think you should read it.

It begins with her second loss, back pedaling to frame this second miscarriage through the lens of the first one.  She writes, “How do we begin to hope when hope has wrought crushing disappointment in our lives?”  How do you continue to believe it will happen for you when you’ve received so much evidence to the contrary?  Or, “I thought how unfair it was that that bedspread had outlived our child, and some but not all of my hope died, like depleting power in a video game.”  We have hope until it’s all drained away.  And then it’s game over.

The essay doesn’t have a neat ending.  She is pregnant and the baby is probably here by now, though there is no neat wrap up to her words, no relief that it all worked out.  This is about the actual cost of hope, what it means to hope, why we sometimes protect ourselves from hope.  Like I said, a hard read.  But I still think you should read it.