Where My Eyes Go

"In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go....Simply another way of saying that which you manifest is before you."

--The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

There are days still spent looking too much into the recent past.

I lost my third child, my second son, during Holy Week. Good Friday, in fact. I want to believe there's some meaning in that, but it never makes sense to my broken heart. Did I think it into being? Is my body just too old? If I had gone to church and believed what the church wants me to believe would he still have been taken away?

Time passes. Except for R.M., people around me seem to have forgotten it all and moved on. As if there never was a third child.

Or maybe they just think that it's best not to say a word about it. I hardly ever do.

Sometimes hours and days go by where I don't think of that night. The blood on my running shoes,  my first sight of him and my last sight of him, first his little feet and then the rest of him slipping in to the empty bathtub. No sign of movement or breath when I reached down with a trembling hand and turned him over to have a look. The six-inch body I could have held in the palm of my hand. The long legs shaped like R.M.'s legs and the chin shaped like mine. Sobbing over him with the sirens getting closer outside, saying "You didn't deserve this, baby. Mommy is so sorry."

It all comes back unexpectedly. My niece cries in the background on the phone. A tired new mother pushes a stroller down the sidewalk past me. Then I feel a shooting pain in my heart and wonder how I lost him so easily and so quickly, the third baby who should have been. All we have left of him is a box from the nurse in the emergency room at Stanford containing prints of his tiny frog-like hands and feet on a small paper card.

I still go looking for an answer even though I know it will never make sense. Two healers told me this past week (before learning of the miscarriage) that they sensed blocked energy in the second chakra area. Of course, it's the energy center of the body representing procreation and fertility and sex.

One of them, a shaman in Germany, performed an energetic cleanse while I set down the phone and reclined quietly on the bed. During her shamanic journey, she was told that the baby's death was part of a karmic contract. In another lifetime I died giving birth to him. The contract was now fulfilled.

"You did nothing wrong," she said, even though there are times I still blame myself for what happened. Then she told me that she saw a younger woman with long, dark hair standing in the snow. She was dressed in a white fur coat and sent a message about the importance of nurturing oneself. The shaman also received an animal totem - a polar bear.

I've sat with that all week. I don't quite know what to make of it yet, probably trying to think it through instead of feel it through. Sure, I get the part about self-care. But the bear? Cold and frozen, ecologically isolated and dying out? Or coming out of hibernation? A survivor against all odds in a bleak climate ?

It all depends on where my eyes go, I guess.

Don't grieve for what doesn't come
Some things that don't happen
Keep disasters from happening
--Rumi