Losing my religion
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Nori’s first child, Olivia, was born at full-term and died a week later, from injury during labor. “Since she died, I find myself wanting to write as much as I can so that I don't forget the feeling of knowing her,” she writes. “Reading others' stories at Glow in the Woods has been one of the few comforts for me as I grieve…”
Despite dutifully attending Catholic services every Sunday as a child, I’ve never put much stock in religion. As soon as I moved out of my childhood home, I stopped attending church, and ever since then I’ve considered myself a rational atheist. I held onto that view of myself until my baby died, and I was forced to reckon with all the magical thinking I had ascribed to during pregnancy and before. When my baby died, all of the little talismans that I clung to with the hope of warding off bad luck were revealed for what they were—false idols and useless superstition.
There was the obvious, Christianity, which I no longer believed in, though I told myself it couldn’t hurt to accept the blessing that my friend offered to me at nine months pregnant. She laid her hands on me and asked God for safe passage for the baby and me; prayed that parenthood would bring me joy and lightness. And though it didn’t square with my atheist sensibilities, I felt that receiving her blessing was a kind of good luck, an extra dose of protection. I was hedging my bets in case God really did exist.
There was the friend who gifted me a crystal—a piece of obsidian rock, really—which she claimed would protect me, the mother, during childbirth. She had held it during her own labor a year earlier, which resulted in a healthy mom and baby. And though I knew, intellectually, that a rock couldn’t prevent maternal mortality, I slept with it beside my bed and packed it in my birth bag.
There was the recording I listened to almost every night before bed, that promised a calm and pain-free birth experience if only one practiced meditation and breathing exercises according to this exact regimen.
There’s the religion of wellness, with the organic prenatal vitamins and prenatal yoga and prenatal massage and kale salads and holistic birthing classes. I was a devout follower.
Then there was my one true religion, the worship of science and statistics. Medical research was my profession, and the cold, hard numbers published in a peer-reviewed medical journal article provided the truest comfort to me. Pushing on your hands and knees is proven in randomized controlled trials to result in less perineal tearing during birth. Taking DHA fish oil in your prenatal vitamin raises your baby’s IQ by three points. Intermittent fetal heartbeat monitoring during labor has the same outcomes for infant wellbeing as continuous fetal heartbeat monitoring, but lower rates of c-section for the mother.
And then my daughter, Olivia, was born not breathing and soon her heart stopped beating and she died in my arms. And I hemorrhaged and my heart literally broke and I almost died myself. And statistics lost all ability to comfort, as my entire life became a worst-case scenario statistical anomaly. That damn rock in my birth bag sure didn’t help. The blessing and the positive intentions, the careful attention to my health at every stage of pregnancy—these were my religions, and I had faith that following their rituals would protect me. I was utterly shocked when they didn’t. Turns out I wasn’t quite the rational skeptic I believed myself to be.
I’ve lost my religion for real this time. Now I know it’s all in vain, that nature does what it wants and takes what it wants and we’re all tempting death every day we’re alive—even babies. And yeah, technically I’ve always known that we’re all going to die and that there’s no reason tragedy can’t strike me—once, twice, three times. But now I really know. No talisman can comfort me; gone is the smug belief that if one eats right and exercises and follows the doctor’s orders and maybe throws in a little woo-woo voodoo for good measure, things will go how we’ve planned.
It’s terrifying to live this way, to have your faith and naiveté crushed in one violent instant. To be truly certain, deep in your bones, that nothing can protect you. That tragedy can strike any one of us at any second. But maybe it’s liberating, too. Because if you believe that you can ensure you own good luck by praying, or eating salads, or surrounding yourself with the right crystals, then it holds that people make their own bad luck, too. That by failing to follow these superstitions, people are setting themselves up for the tragedies that befall them. And once you become one of those poor, tragedy-ridden souls, it is simply too cruel to believe that you could have changed your own outcome if you had just prayed a little harder or gotten more acupuncture. There is a release of guilt and shame that comes with letting go of all that magical thinking. It’s scary here on the other side.
Most people don’t want to join me, and I don’t blame them. I miss that feeling of comfort and certainty about the future that I used to have. But I can’t go back.
What is the state of your spiritual reckoning post-loss? How does it make you feel—released, or unmoored?