On Guilt

and grief.

I wonder if memory is not simply a question
of following things through to the end.

Yoko Tsushima

As much as I have been working on healing the self, living in the present, and learning to respect myself, I have also been dealing with guilt. Guilt, an expression, an entirety of emotions in itself, yet a singular word that strikes through in phases of insurmountable pain. All at once, and never enough. I wake up and go about routine like I have my life all laid out in perfection (with minor detailing errors), and then there’s guilt. Goosebumps on my skin, and I am reminded of “an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” (Happening, Annie Ernaux)

Guilt and grief accompany something I don’t fully understand myself at this point: 5 months and 11 days since I miscarried. I remember curling up in my bed, hands on my belly, holding onto save whatever I could and couldn’t. I lay there for hours, realising what was happening but unable to utter a word. I texted someone for help; they replied, saying, “Hoping the hot water bag helps.”

Sidenote: I do pick people in my life like cherries splattered on the ground, hoping not to let them go to waste because why bother the tree?

I wasn’t even consciously expecting anything until it happened. I am aware I am too young to even consider the possibility of having had anything, but there I was, bleeding the life out of myself..of me, and remnants of something that would never be. A hope I wasn’t even sure could exist, survive, or witness life. Hours that felt longer than months and the residual pain in my belly..maybe after some days, the pain existed only in my head, as did the memory of everything else. What had I survived, and what didn’t?

There was nobody willing to have a conversation about it with me. Well, there were people, but I don’t think anybody could fathom it…nobody around me at that point, to say the least. My mother was barely wrapping her head around what had happened, and then to have her daughter sit down and talk about it would be beyond rustling through her mental pain at the time. Maternal instincts, they say. You wear your daughter’s pain like your own because that’s all that has ever been. I, an extension of her and my grandmother and those before, grafted through such labour and precision that somehow escaped me at that time. Escaped, like blobs of red, speckled around my memory in time that I hope I eventually let go, but such is human error; I know I can’t let go.

A few months later, I was helping an acquaintance with their 2-month-old. I have always been great with kids; I guess they just rattle the kid in me, and I just love it. The aunt and cousin who almost always readily babysit. So I was there, holding onto the baby as its mother finally found the time to have her lunch, and then she stopped to say how good I was with babies. And there it was again, guilt, striking like time unknown, ever-ringing, kicking against my gut, yelling silence in my head. She was the only person to date I have had a conversation with about the miscarriage, and felt like I was understood. Some breathing relief, or so I hope.

But it comes and goes in waves, and the cocktail surprise of grief and guilt is quite unpleasant. I was watching And just like that and Lisa had a miscarriage in the middle of the night. Mother of 3, unexpecting at her age, and yet she’s riddled with guilt, and seeing her announce it, I blacked out, goosebumps on my legs, long breaths, time ticking in my ears; I was back on the bed, holding onto my belly.

A professor recommended reading Happening by Annie Ernaux. A fairly small text about Annie getting an abortion and taking twenty years to process it..to finally being able to write about what had happened. Twenty fucking years, how much can I carry? I used to say, “Who has the space to carry other people’s choices?” and yet, here, when I didn’t even have a conscious choice, I carry mine forward each day, subconsciously lurking what could have been, even though I did not consciously desire it at the time.

Imagining and remembering are the very essence of writing. Here, however, it’s different. “I can picture” helps to convery that precise moment when I feel I have bonded with my former life, the one that has gone for ever, a feeling admirably rendered by the expression, “it feels like only yesterday.”

Happening, Annie Ernaux

Yesterday, 17th March, 2023.

Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can’t forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.

The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.

If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn’t
have happened in the world?

I’m everything you lost. You won’t forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive.You can’t forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

There is everything to forgive. You can’t forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world?

Farewell, Agha Shahid Ali