MAYBE IT’S BEAUTIFUL | Alexis Rehrmann
I used to be funny. I used to be sure. I think that’s right. I think I was sure.
And then, and then, what then?
In a three-year tumult, I birthed a child and lost four pregnancies. The succession was rapid, bloody and grim. I am physically recovered but somehow not healed. I am very nearly upended. I used to daydream of a future still ahead and now, I fear it’s past. I can hardly stand to be here.
My body feels—my insides feel—like I left a baby at the mall, drove home, and have only just now realized it. I feel this way almost all of the time. I am in a panic. I startle easily. I can’t eat, rarely sleep. Some mornings, I wake already crying.
And then, and then, what then?
I need guidance and I can’t find any: not a book, not a method, not a meditation app. I can’t find anyone—not a doctor not a partner not a friend—who can say the words that I need to hear.
I don’t know what words I need to hear, only that I haven’t heard them yet.
Slowly, slowly, I start asking around. The stories on these pages hold both early miscarriages and later week losses when the language starts to blur between miscarriage, stillbirth, and pre-term birth. It is possible—probable, even—that you, reader, would add your own losses to this collection.
These are the stories of how we move toward healing. I listen closely. These are the words I need to hear.
What I love most about these stories is how brightly they shine when placed close together. Each individual facet illuminates the others. What I love most about these stories is the homespun ritual inside of each. We find ways to represent these losses in the world. What I love most about these stories is receiving them with care. What if we gathered these stories close, warmed them with our own bodies, supported their tender bits and breathed them in?
This writing is a practice of narrative medicine. These three acts: listening closely, representing something unseen, and being in authentic connection—this is narrative medicine. You, reader, are invited to join.
And then, and then, what then? Maybe we are made beautiful in this practice together. Maybe, I think, this is healing.
1. At the beach
You’d chosen to release their ashes at Hug Point. It was where you’d gone after you learned you were pregnant. You scattered their ashes just a few days after you picked them up, less than a month after their birth and death.
The ritual of releasing their ashes didn't quite go to plan.
It was wet. Matches wouldn't light. The tide was uncooperative and the wind—it was just a tiny little handful of ashes—a lot of it, like, it mostly blew back on your pants.
Then you had to walk into the ocean.
It was like if you were at the beach with a toddler, with a baby. It would be messy. There would be some amount of stickiness.
2. In the Mountains
You felt very strange. Very strange.
And then, and so then, they called you, when her—you had her cremated—and they called you to come and get her ashes.
It was the strangest car ride ever. It was really important to your husband to go and pick her up. He’s her dad. Well, he said, I will never get to pick her up from school. So, I want to pick her up now.
You start to cry.
-I’m sorry, you say.
I listen and wonder: Why are we all so sorry, so much of the time, for loving each other?
You came home. It was a beautiful day. It was sunny and blue skies. It didn't feel right to keep a little jar of ashes. You both sensed that if they just sat there, it was gonna feel incomplete and wrong, almost disrespectful.
You don't really know why, but that just didn't feel natural. You didn't talk about it. You both agreed on it. It was this unspoken thing. You just, you wanted to let her be free.
It felt, it just felt natural.
You thought of a place in the mountains near you. You live right by a mountain and there is this beautiful spot where you can see Mount Adams, you can see Mount Rainier, you can see Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood. This beautiful spot.
It was just you two and you took your dogs. It was your little family, your little family trip.
You took flowers and you went and spread her ashes. You left the flowers. It was kind of a breezy day and when you released her ashes they kind of blew. It felt like she was like dancing.
It felt very natural to let her go back to where she came from, just a part of the world. It felt complete.
❖
Listen, reader, to how both of these stories put loss in place.
Both stories place loss into the vast world, into the sweep, the scale, the eternity of ocean and sky, making these stories part of our natural world.
These losses are mapped. They are known and named. Ashes are released under a watchful litany of peaks: the gentle swell of Mount St. Helens, the jaunty point of Mount Hood, the regal grandeur of Mount Rainier, the promise of Mount Adams on a blue-sky day. Ashes are released not simply to the ocean, but at Hug Point, a narrow strip of sandy Oregon coast that fringes a dark rise of craggy rock cliffs.
Hug Point isn’t named for love, but for the way one must traverse it: to stay close to the rocks or risk being swept out to sea. It’s an embrace of the hard stuff. It’s a recognition of stark choice.
I think of the pregnancies that were lost, the families who lost them. I am grateful to know these people in this place, to hold them in the map of my world.
❖
3. A lot of baskets
How did you heal? I ask.
Slowly, you say, slowly.
You don’t. You don't know. It's a wound and it doesn't go away. It becomes something you live with. It's a scar.
But it's hard. Rituals become important. You have to develop your own mechanism for when it gets to be more than you can handle. One of the things that was told to you is a Native American tradition. You can put some closure to it by getting a beautiful pottery bowl and smashing the hell out of it.
-Did you smash a bowl? I ask.
-I couldn’t, you say. I found the bowl, but I loved it too much.
Instead, you found a basket. The basket had a lid. When it got to be too much you poured your anger into it, your sorrow. You know, I know, we know that pain. You can bring it up. You can put it in the basket. Put the lid on it. You feel like you can hold it and you can just put it away.
You have a lot of baskets. You like baskets.
❖
Reader, if you were to ask: How did you heal? I would say slowly, slowly. I only recognize this, though, when I have these words to borrow.
It took a long time, over many months of mornings, for my body to become my basket, my lid the sheltering curve of my spine to the sky. Child’s Pose is my mechanism: a dance of stillness and supplication.
4. Child’s Pose
Every morning, I fold into Child’s Pose. I do this three times slowly, one for each loss to honor the children who never arrived.
I kneel feet tucked under, seat on my heels and bend forward deeply, head touching the floor, My palms are flat. My arms are straight. The wool carpet is lightly scratchy on my forehead. Child’s pose is a shape of supplication. It could be taken for prayer.
The gentle compression at my center retraces a womb no longer rounded with a new life, but still here, still round with my life, with my own living. My body remembers the deep bend at my hips from birthing but today, there is no labor coming. The shape reminds me to rest. My head is bowed the back of my tender neck exposed.
Words swirl in my head: Accept. Submit. Accept. Submit. A command. Accept. Submit. Not to a person, or even a divine, but simply to what has already happened.
Child’s Pose brings my mind and body together. For five minutes, maybe three—between coffee and caregiving and the daily detritus of living—I accept. Yes, this body carried pregnancies. Those pregnancies are ended. Those brief beings have passed through. They are not here now.
But I remember, we remember, you remember.
5. A Birthday Cake
There's not a ton of stuff that you do.
-Oh! You say, brightening. On her birthday, we buy a cake.
You call the cake place and say, you want to purchase a birthday cake. If there’s a cake that's been ordered that hasn't been paid for, you pay for it. Or you pay for one in advance, for someone that's going to come in. You buy a cake for a kid that is having a birthday. A random birthday cake for a random kid.
It’s a way to spread kindness that's going to brighten somebody's birthday. You honor your daughter, even though they have no idea who your daughter is. It's a way for you to say her name.
5. A Little Toy Horse
Last year, well two, two years ago now, you received a gift for their birthday. It was a little toy, it's like a horse. It’s Swedish. A little toy, little toy horse. A wooden horse, the kind you would give to a child.
You kept it. You took a picture with it every day that year.
It was just a sweet way of thinking about where they might be playing, or what might catch their eye, how they might be a part of the day. It’s like picturing where they would be in time, like a how a two-year-old might play with their little toy.
It allowed you to see through your child’s eyes. It gives you a chance to experience the wonder that littles can access—and to get to expect that experience—with them, even without them physically here.
Although they are gone, your child is quite present many days. Most days, you say, probably every day.
❖
I love these two stories together: cake and toys and time to mark loss.
Both stories delight in celebration and offer a way to seek joy alongside, not in spite of loss, but with it. Joy with the memories of those who have passed through. In both stories, randomness is repurposed as kindness, playfulness and luck. Who will get the cake? Where will the little toy horse go today? This is play. It’s brilliant. It’s bright. It’s an invitation to devote time to a joy of our own making.
7. A collective like little spirits
You have a tattoo, but otherwise… nothing, really.
You push up your sleeve, turning up the tender skin of your inner arm for me to see: two birds are inked in a circle, one descending and one flying. They are deep denim blue swallows and they are flying together connected by the finest thread of dots—permanent and fragile.
Seven dots for the seven, you say. Two living children and five you lost. It's for surviving postpartum. It’s for the journey to get here.
You were grieving not, not so much babies, as more like the loss—if that makes sense. The lost hope and the dream and all of that grief. You wanted something for yourself, to not totally let go.
Yours were all really early. You never got to the point where you were really thinking of them, as a person, if that makes sense.
It feels like a collective, like little spirits.
Right after your first loss, you found this cheap locket with a quote on the inside. The tattoo came from the locket. It was you understanding: you were going to try again. It was you understanding: you wouldn’t be able to have kids if you don't take the risk.
❖
In Child’s Pose I can sense, often and just over my left shoulder, a collective of little spirits like yours. I can almost feel them floating somewhere between imagination and sense, always just out of sight, immaterial and close enough to touch.
The quote, I find later, is from a poem by Erin Hanson:
“There is freedom waiting for you,
On the breezes of the sky,
And you ask “What if I fall?”
Oh but my darling, “What if you fly?”
It never once crossed my mind, never flitted across my consciousness, that I might find freedom after these losses. What could I do on the breezes of the sky? What could you?
But oh! Dear reader, what if we flew?
My little collection of sparks stayed close for a long time. After a while, a year maybe, many months, I let them go. I released them to the sky. I wish for all children, even those who never arrived, that they be loved and free in this world. That they be given all they need to stretch their wings. That they be allowed to dance in the wind.
I found a way to bestow this wish that was halfway between made up and true. It mostly happened on a carpet in my bedroom that needed a good vacuuming. It was the ritual I needed.
8. Maybe that’s beautiful
Maybe it has the potential to bring out a new, beautiful version of yourself.
You are a doula. You work particularly with women living with pregnancy loss. You have had your own, a stillbirth and miscarriage both, and you sit with many stories, with many ways of grieving. You still stutter bringing these truths it into words.
You think we get, we feel like, our life is over in a bad way, you say. Like we're never going to be the same. Like this loss taints us, but now—
You now feel almost like a superhero. You have this experience and you get to see the world from a different perspective, a better perspective.
So maybe, maybe that's it.
-I don't know, you say, maybe that's beautiful.
-Maybe, it is.
Alexis Rehrmann is a writer, editor and narrative medicine practitioner who has pursued the connection between story and healing throughout much of her creative and professional life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Portland Monthly, PDX Parent, Intima ("Your Little Heart Still Stands," Non-Fiction, Spring 2022), the Journal of Medical Humanities OHSU Digital Collections, and Anastomosis. She is program manager at the Lewis & Clark College Center for community and global health and an affiliate of the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative. She holds a CPA in narrative medicine from Columbia University and a BFA in theater from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
NOTE: The stories in this work were gathered with the support of Brief Encounters, a non-profit community pregnancy and infant loss support group in Portland, Oregon. Stories are included with permission from the story teller. This essay is part of a larger work, Conception: A Miscarriage Journal, forthcoming in 2027 from University of West Virginia Press as part of the Connective Tissue, a health humanities and narrative medicine series.