the empty due date
I wrote this on the anniversary of the due date that wasn’t.
I wasn’t going to share it here. Then I was reminded that we all carry our handful of hard days each year: the death of a loved one, the anniversary of an accident, the memory of a loss, the date of a tragedy.
If we live long enough, our calendars fill with these days. Empty and full.
How we remember them is what matters.
. . .
There are no rituals for this, what you’re supposed to do with a day that would have been circled in red and bursting with exclamation points and ticking with excited countdown.
An empty due date.
This day came and went last year, and it comes and goes this year. It will always be yours. You wake up in the morning; you know it is here; and there is nothing to do but go forward.
Maybe you are grumpy or maybe you are weepy or maybe you are just plain pissed at the world. Maybe you lose your temper at the kids or maybe you squeeze them extra tight while they squirm away silly or maybe you find yourself looking into their squinty laughing eyes and realizing that someday you will tell them about this. Someday when they are older.
Maybe you pull out some proof that it happened, because your hands need to hold. A picture of an ultrasound or a card from a friend or a bittersweet beautiful thing you bought to remember. Maybe you light a candle or play a song or try to pray even when the words ring hollow because it feels like today’s darkness should be sacred somehow.
Maybe you carry this day silently, not wanting to tell anyone what you’re mourning. Maybe you confide in a friend who understands, who won’t judge your sadness when the world seems stumped that you still think about it. Maybe you let yourself cry into the collar of your husband’s shirt when he walks in the door, because even if he doesn’t hold the memory of loss in flesh and blood like you do every day, it was his baby, too.
And maybe you simply move through the day’s hours with the motions that keep all of us afloat when we do not know what else to do. You wash dishes and sweep floors and cook dinner and switch laundry from washer to dryer. You catch glimpses of the clock out of the corner of your eye, mentally calculating when this date will depart for another year and not a moment too soon.
You don’t know what to do with an empty due date. No one does.
You just do. And you let that be prayer enough.
For more on prayers, resources, and essays on miscarriage: Grieving Together: A Couple’s Journey Through Miscarriage by Laura Kelly Fanucci and Franco Fanucci
On Carrying & Missing: the story of our miscarriage.
The Gossamer Veil: on grief.
The Empty Due Date: on the anniversaries of the heart.
The Trash Tells The Story: my essay on miscarriage featured at Mamalode.
For All Our Children, Tonight and Always: on International Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day (October 15th).
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This is so, so beautiful. I am sorry for your loss, and touched by how you remember it and most of all love what you say about how if we are fortunate, and live long enough our calendars fill with these days. Private and intimate and always, so powerful. xox
Thank you so much for stopping here, Lindsey. Yes, isn’t ironic that most of us hope to live long enough to lose so much, in fact?
Thank you for sharing this. I always remember the due dates of the babies I miscarried, one of which is in two days.
Claire, you have been in my prayers. I know that you understand this loss. Peace to you & yours.
Thank you Laura. I appreciate your prayers.