19. Further in Summer
I didn’t listen to Dr. Hussein.
We started trying to get pregnant again almost immediately. Each month I counted the days until a new egg brought fresh hope, until new blood brought fresh grief. I had a series of “false pregnancies” that turned out to be my hormones so whacked out by grief that my periods kept coming two, three, four weeks late. My body was talking to me. I wasn’t listening. Dr. Hussein was right. I was not ready.
Eva’s short life and death had been filled with such otherworldly levels of love and pain that stubbornly I didn’t want to come down from that exalted place. I wanted to keep it going, to surf wave after wave of emotion right through to a new pregnancy and birth. But my body said no. I had to come down. I had to let go. I had to live with the emptiness inside me, the fog. I had to suspend all effort, relinquish all hope, release myself into the endless gray sea.
Slowly, the sense of passionate urgency began to fade, to give way to a kind of grayness, a flattening, a cloud. I put away the cradle Eva had slept in. I put away the photos of her I had framed and put on our dresser. I let the seasons come and go, let the rains fall, let the hills turn green again, flower again, turn golden and then brown again. Every day I woke up, I had coffee, I went to work, I worked, I came home, I had dinner, I went to bed.
And then finally, almost exactly a year after Eva’s birth, further in summer than the birds, I was pregnant again.
By then, of course, it was fire season again. And as it turned out, the fire –– in measures being kindled, and in measures going out — was not done with me.