Above: By HIROSHI SUGIMOTO (b.1948)
Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, 1980
It's been about a month of grieving since my last post. Thank you all so much for your kind and supportive words. I've been far far away mentally and there was no breathable air for words. It's been like those dreams where you are trying to scream but nothing comes out. But the image above is the closest thing to describe where I am right now. I saw this piece at the Guggenheim's exhibit "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989" and it stayed with me. At first glance it just seems like a simple splicing between black and white. When you move closer you see the subtle movement of gray to black - lapping waves of the ocean. My eyes get drawn into it's simplicity and I travel far into that horizon line.
The image all at once can seem peaceful and contemplative and at the same time lost and lonely. This is where I have been banished to, but by my own choosing. When you have reached a new level of defeat, it takes a certain cocooning to come back to life. You need to live in that space between lightness and darkness. You are all at once blown out of your system to just black and white. It's good. It's bad. That starkness of failure, loss, heartbreak can be so crushing that you are numb. It's so painful you don't feel anymore. I don't mean to be so yin and yang about it all, but there is this weird duplicity. I feel nothing and everything.
As much as I want to still hold on to hope that my eggs can bring life to this world, I can't. It's been too long of a relentlessly painful road that everyone seems to be in agreement that donor egg is our next step. In order to give life, I have to kill the dream of a genetic child. That child can no longer exist in my heart and that, as we all know, is the biggest defeat, the biggest tragedy. It's what I've been fighting for. But I've raised the white flag. I've said "uncle." And now I must travel to lonely horizons.
In most ways the healing process is like grieving any death. I've done it before. I have grieved loved ones who died tragically and too early. I've cried in disbelief that their lives where taken away and that I would never see them again. Now I am in disbelief that someone I never got to meet is gone. It feels like the end of "me" on so many levels. Even though there was no flesh and blood to bury, it's a loss that is indescribable. It remains invisible to the world and yet is ever present with every blink of my eyes. Imagined or not, it cuts right through you. So unlike my tears of grieving over real people, my cries right now are mythical. I've howled endlessly at the moon, like an animal crying for its children that were stolen by the sun and stars.
Though this horizon looks stark - bleak almost - I do manage to see that there is a chance to make it to safe waters. The start being that we have found an egg donor who is getting medically screened in a few weeks and if approved, she will cycle with A. sometime hopefully in May. Before anyone gets their pom-poms out to cheer, I am afraid reaching rock bottom has left me quite skeptical of anything working - even something that seems so ridiculously guaranteed like using a perfect uterus with 26 year old eggs. I am still transfixed by the line between black and white and prefer to stay there even through this donor egg cycle. I am not sure when the cruelty of what has happened to me will ever stop bleeding. I know a piece of my heart has died with every loss and now the biggest piece has died with this genetic child I can't have. But the resiliency test lies ahead of me. Whatever is left of my beaten up heart, with all it's scars, holes, missing parts, is being asked what seems impossible right now- be big, be whole, be wise enough to grow.
