Content note: miscarriage

 

I leave things behind.

My favorite peacoat in a hotel closet, the Süskind novel Perfume in a bathroom stall at Heathrow, my keys in the refrigerator, and so on.

“I leave things” sounds purposeful—as though my coat were a clue, a breadcrumb, deliberately planted for a stranger to stumble upon. This is never the case.

I forget things.

That’s not it either, though. Not the entirety of it. I haven’t forgotten. On the contrary, I recall each of these losses, oversights, mistakes, in actuarial detail. I do the math.

My dreams often center around the keeping track of things, literal baggage—

I’ve lost things or
I have too many things or
my things are improperly packed.

A bit on the nose, don’t you think?

I did once dream I’d left a backpack in a previous night’s adventure though, and I needed to traverse temporal planes to retrieve it, which was a decent stylistic choice.

I don’t recall if I found that bag or
what was in it or
why I needed that thing.

The absence of narrative resolution sits heavy in my belly, like a cake I ate without tasting and now regret. My dreams are answers to the wrong questions, wishes granted by tricksters as punishment for having had wishes at all.

We bought our first home together in Kansas City, Matt and I. Campbell Street, like the soup. Classic. I don’t know how long we lived there. Five years, probably? Years lasted longer when we had more of them to spend.

Before we left Campbell, I checked drawers and cupboards for I-don’t-know-what.

Peacoats or
paperbacks or
backpacks that belonged in tomorrow night’s dream.

In the kitchen, at the freezer, I lingered. I knew what was in there. I hadn’t forgotten, just put it on ice.

Too literal. Artless, really.

My miscarriage was tucked under an old bag of peas; a cold case, an unexplored story, packaged neatly in a zip-top plastic sandwich bag and labeled “Stinky.”

It’s okay to laugh. It’s okay not to, too.

We don’t talk about our miscarriages much—we as a culture or we as a me. They exist at the intersection of grief and the female body, and both are mysterious and moist and messy and as such not appropriate for public discourse. So, it’s funny.

If you are moved to laugh and then tempted to feel bad for having done so, please know that I checked my ledger and your amusement cost me nothing, and honestly, I think it’s funny too. I want to say that it wasn’t funny at the time, but I don’t think that’s true.

This miscarriage—there were several—happened maybe 2005-ish. We were away, in North Carolina, visiting my in-laws and attending a comic convention. The event—the miscarriage, not the convention—hurt in all the ways that it could.

I want to say it took a couple of hours but that’s probably not true either. A clock cannot adjust itself to reflect how long an hour is when you’re eight and it’s summer, or how short when you’ve got to get to Brooklyn to give insulin to a diabetic cat. The hour is a device, a useful fiction.

Twenty minutes, if I had to guess—the miscarriage. The miscarrying? I don’t even know how to say it. “The process of expelling the dead thing that was never alive exactly.”

Oof.

William H. Gass described writing as the alchemy of turning the world into words and the physics of that phrasing have always made sense to me. There’s a math to it, a specificity. To formulate the output, one must strive to understand the box(es) of time on the left side of the equation as well as

the actions and
the objects and
the feelings contained therein.

It isn’t necessary to understand the meaning, thank god.

That miscarriage was bagged up and put on ice and I didn’t forget but nor did I think on it, and so I write this like an architect building from a blueprint she only saw once.

Twenty minutes sounds right. I know it finished just as we were about to leave for the airport. I recall thinking the universe was polite in that regard.

Travel is stressful enough, best not to have to rush.

We called our doctor’s office and they asked us to bring

the thing
the tissue
the clot we called Stinky

back home with us for genetic testing. So we put it in a washcloth, put the washcloth in a sandwich bag and fit the whole mess inside my backpack before heading out.

That was funny then too, I’m sure of it.

We whispered to each other in the airport security line, Matt and I, stifling giggles and trying to guess what Stinky would look like to the x-ray attendant. Like a ham sandwich, we decided. Ham sandwiches are funny.

We named our cat Ham. The coyotes got him.

My friend Maggie’s cat came to visit me in a dream once. He thanked me for giving him his insulin at exactly eight a.m. and exactly eight p.m. for the whole week that Maggie was away. I was newly sober at the time, which is a messy, pink, and naked state of being, and a twice-daily commitment was quite the thing, so Maggie’s cat was proud of me.

Ham has never visited me and I’m glad because he would not have kind things to say. Ham the cat was gray and furry and very, very mean, whereas ham the lunchmeat is pink and wet and kind of naked somehow and thus the name is incongruous, and everybody knows that tragedy plus time equals comedy, but fewer people know the corollary that all comedy stems from a thwarting of expectations.

Plus Ham is just a funny word to say. I don’t know the formula behind that part.

If TSA asked, we decided I would look them in the eye and say, “It’s my miscarriage.” And I wouldn’t blink.

I wanted the TSA agents to know that the world had changed that day. I wanted them to feel the strangeness of it too.

But they didn’t ask.

And I didn’t want them to, in equal degree. I didn’t want to share this thing that was ours alone.

We were a secret family, Matt and I and our ham sandwich. There was an intimacy to it. We were an inside joke, a made-up word, a conversation never had, but laid like a stone at the base of the fortress of our us.

In Minneapolis, the layover concourse offered bookstores and sundries and foods you’ll only eat in airports, as well as a scratch lotto vending machine.

“We have to play,” Matt insisted. “It’s our lucky day.”

His phrasing implied a balancing force. The universe had taken from us, and thus we were owed. Neither of us believed that, but we bought a ticket anyway.

We won $150.

Back in Kansas City we went straight from the airport to the doctor’s office, where we waited in an exam room and the grief crept up from the laminate floor, tickling my feet as they dangled off the end of the table. It might have pulled me all the way down right then had the nurse not interrupted.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t need the tissue after all. Whomever took your call miscalculated. Testing is at the fourth miscarriage. Would you like us to dispose of that for you?” She extended her gloved hand.

No.

On the way home I apologized to Matt, ostensibly for wanting to keep the thing, or at least for not wanting it to be “disposed of,” bought back for a mere $150 and called even.

What I meant was that I was sorry for being who I was, a mother to dead things, things wanted and unwanted, things lost, things forgotten, things scattered across continents and dreamscapes and eaten by coyotes. Sorry for being moist and messy and unsolvable.

“Don’t be,” he said. The catch in his throat landed like a stone.

Back at Campbell, I took a Sharpie from the junk drawer and labeled the baggie Stinky, after Maggie’s cat.

Several long and short years later, we moved Stinky from the freezer into the fire. We burned the thing, the washcloth, the child that never was but might have been, in a flowerpot.

I was mother to a living boy then, and I held him on my hip as Stinky’s ashes scattered across

Campbell Street and
decades and
dreamscapes.

The universe, I thought, had settled its debt and the whole gross and sad and funny thing could be left behind, and eventually forgotten.

But that’s not the way the math works.

© 2025 Kelly Sue DeConnick