The Brahmic Egg

Every particle in this body is continually changing; no one has the same body for many minutes together, and yet we think of it as the same body.

— Swami Vivekananda

For eleven weeks I threw up in the late afternoons. I shivered and broke out in sweats, grew bloated and round in the cheeks. My breasts felt tender. My tongue swam in my mouth. I ate grapefruit and soft-boiled eggs, loosened my waistband, fell asleep on the floor under my desk. Inside my womb, cells collided and combined, broke apart and formed again. I pressed my cheek to the carpet and shut my eyes against the light. I listened to my blood. What secrets does the body hold? I was oblivious, dumb, a dupe. We moved through space, my body and I, but I knew nothing.

I slept on my left side, knees curled to chest. I had orgasms in my dreams. Outside my bedroom window, the mountains stretched out their flanks in the spring light. At night the moon slid past the edge of the skylight above my bed, a watchful eye. I felt a pulling inside my abdomen, like loose skin stretching tight. I sat cross-legged on the floor with my hands resting palms-up on my knees. I pressed the tip of my tongue against my teeth, closed my eyes, and focused on my brow’s center point, the third eye. A black planet pulsed and radiated behind my lids. I tried to sense the vibration of the universe, to hear the sound of Om.

When you see the unborn, uncreated, unconditioned, you are liberated from everything.

— Siddhartha Gautama

Sometimes there is blood, but not always. Sometimes there is no sign at all. Sometimes there is just a brown smudge, like a trace of mud, which is what happened to me. It might have been nothing, but when I saw it, I knew. It came to me that the flooding queasiness, the heavy fatigue, the metallic taste in my mouth had all disappeared, as if they had seeped through a pinhole too small to perceive, leaving behind the familiar self I’d been longing for all those weeks. I didn’t wake my husband. I lay there next to him in the dark, listening to him breathe.

In the morning I lay back on the crinkling paper of an examination table and stared up at the fluorescent lights. The nurse-midwife squirted jelly on my stomach and slid her heartbeat monitor in a slow circle over my pelvic bones. We waited for the rapid woof-woof-woof of a seed-size heart, but heard only the slower thunking of my own. “Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “It’s probably just too soon for us to hear a heartbeat.
Maybe you’ve miscalculated the due date. Been feeling sick?” She wiped the goo off my belly with a paper towel. “Then probably everything is fine.”

She sent me down to the ultrasound department, where I waited for an hour as a succession of couples emerged from the examination room smiling and clutching videotapes. “Congratulations,” I heard the doctor tell them. “Everything looks fine.” In a small office across from where I sat, a technician prepared syringes for drawing blood. To amuse a fussy child, she took a latex glove out of a box and blew it into a balloon, a bloodless hand.

The radiologist called me in. “I’m sure everything is fine,” he said cheerfully. In the grainy darkness, I tried to breathe evenly. Gray shapes formed and re-formed on the monitor screen. “Here’s your uterus,” he said, pressing down hard with the probe. A pear-shaped outline shaded gray slid onto the screen like a misshapen moon. There was only gray. The radiologist moved the probe up and around, then set it down.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

I’d imagined a dead baby shaped like a seahorse, knees curled to chin, like the photographs in biology books. But there was nothing but darkness, blank and black as outer space.

This body, formed out of the five elements by the Creator, is known as brahma-anda (the brahmic egg). It is created for the experience of pleasure and pain.

— The Shiva Samhita

“One in every four pregnancies spontaneously aborts,” my doctor told me. This was something I had not known. I stood in her office, my wet umbrella in hand, and cried. She gave me a hug. It was a “blighted ovum,” she explained, which sounded like a biblical plague. “The fetus just doesn’t develop. Something goes wrong for reasons we don’t understand. It is not your fault.” I nodded like a child and took the tissue she offered. Then she said, “The bleeding should start soon.”

I called my husband from my cellphone in the car. He said we could try again. I called my mother when I got home. She said, “Honey, you know that these things happen for the best.” My mother endured six miscarriages after she had me, one a girl born alive at nineteen weeks whom they didn’t even try to save. My mother spent months on bed rest after each one. I remember coming home from school to find her propped on pillows, knitting, or supine on the couch, reading. I remember her crying a lot. Eventually she had my brother, nearly nine years after she’d had me.

My girlfriend took me shopping at the mall. When I told her the news, I didn’t know what tense to use: “I’ve had a miscarriage,” or “I’m having one,” or “I’ll have one soon.” She simply said, “I’m sorry,” which I was grateful for. I didn’t fit into any clothes in my regular size, so I just watched her try on shoes and tried not to think of the stunted amniotic sac inside me, its useless placenta still obliviously pumping out hormones.

I walked through the cemetery near our house, the tombstones stained gray in the spring rain. Magpies chattered and wheeled around the pines. I looked at the engraved names: German, Swedish, Irish, an Italian, a Slav, a small section that were all Chinese. Husbands and wives and children lay side by side beneath the ground. Under a sycamore I saw a half-size marble headstone for a child.

Can you mourn a death when there’s no body? When there never was a heartbeat? The Talmud says life begins at twenty weeks, when the child quickens in the womb. You can’t light a yahrzeit candle in mourning or recite the kaddish prayer for a fetus. You can’t leave a pebble on a grave.

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