Arms wide open

My niece, Elizabeth, died today. She was only a few months old--and still inside my sister--and so the emotions we're all feeling about her death run counter to our strongly held feelings about abortion and the right for a woman to choose it. I'd stupidly sent my sister a teddy bear, and of course it arrived today, along with a heartfelt letter about what a great mom I knew she'd be. I'm so sad for her. She's not picking up her phone.

She is my third sister who has had trouble staying pregnant; my elder sister miscarried several times, got spooked by adoption, and has reached the point in her life where it's virtually certain she'll be childless. My youngest sister miscarried twice before the doctors figured out some hormonal cocktail to feed her, and she was ultimately able to give birth twice. And now my other sister, ten years younger than I--the responsible one, of all of us--who planned it out, and prepared herself properly, and made space in her life and her heart to become a mother...she was pregnant, and now she's not.

I don't know what to make of it all; my mother had five kids, and her mother had five kids, and her mother's mother had six kids--nobody ever had a problem. But I am the only one of my sisters who got pregnant and stayed pregnant, and along with everything else I feel a little guilty about how easy it was. (I offered to get pregnant and carry the baby for my elder sister, but it was too much for her husband, who has pretty decisive boundaries and couldn't begin to think through the interpersonal delicacies such a thing would require.)

When does a soul enter a body, I wonder--because I believe in such things. Maybe the pregnancy comes first, and the body floats in that dark vessel, waiting for a rider--an animator. Maybe Elizabeth never entered that body--maybe she's waiting for the next one--so there's nothing at all to mourn, except the fact that there are too many floating bodies and not enough souls to fill them all, and so the overpopulation of the planet hits here, too, in our sweetest, fullest moments of hope. And it hurts.