The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  * * *

  —

  In the dreadful silence afterward—with no baby crying—the doctor who had delivered her carried her body away, without showing her to me. Johanna followed them out.

  What seemed like a long, long time later, Johanna came back to the room without her.

  “Anne, they did an examination. There is nothing wrong with her,” she said, as if that would make me feel better. Nothing wrong. Except she is not alive. “She is a beautiful little girl. Shall I bring her to you?”

  I shook my head. I was afraid it would hurt too much to bear. “Would you like us to take a picture of her for your baby book?” asked a nurse.

  I shook my head again. I wanted to remember her as she was—a joyful dolphin, kicking and surfing the waves inside me.

  They waited, and eventually I agreed. Johanna brought Sierra to our room. She put a sign on the door: Do Not Disturb Under Any Circumstances. My husband took our baby in his arms and placed her in my lap.

  She was dressed in a baby-blue onesie and a little blue cap—not the clothes we had picked out for her. She had a round, round face, bruised from her passage through the birth canal. She had a delicate rosebud of a mouth. She had dark hair like mine and hands with long, long fingers like her dad’s. She had perfect shells of ears. She looked like she was asleep.

  I couldn’t believe that this was the baby who had been kicking inside me. I couldn’t believe that I was not still pregnant, waiting for her to arrive.

  I don’t remember if I stroked her hair. I don’t remember if I kissed her forehead. I do remember that I said, “I love you.” At least, I hope I said that.

  After a few more minutes, her dad put her back in the bassinet in the corner. He tucked a little blanket up over her, as if to keep her warm.

  I lay on my bed in stunned silence for a long, long time while my husband fell asleep on the chair beside me.

  An hour or so later, a nurse arrived to take Sierra’s body away for the autopsy. She picked her up quietly, not wanting to wake me up.

  But through half-open eyes I watched her walk out the door. I turned over to watch my baby daughter being carried away.

  I called out softly, “Goodbye.”

  * * *

  —

  We came home from the hospital without Sierra, leaving her body behind in the hospital morgue. In the middle of all the grief and rage and horror and disbelief—that persistent feeling that the universe had made a terrible error, that I’d somehow been sent somebody else’s life and that my own wonderful life was actually waiting for me somewhere, if only I knew who to call—in the midst of all that, I was stunned at how viscerally, physically I missed her. My belly was shriveled and empty, like a deflated balloon. I was bleeding as if I had had a baby, but there was no baby, and my body did not understand where she was.

  They forgot to remind me in the hospital that my milk would come in. My breasts were swollen with milk. I was stunned when I looked in the mirror and saw them, immense and blindly eager. To stop the milk, Johanna came to the house and bound them tightly to my chest.

  She told me to sip sage tea, a bitter brew that tasted like an evergreen forest, but I wasn’t allowed to drink more than two cups of liquid a day. I lay on the couch with icepacks piled on my chest, thirsty and cold and heartbroken.

  I asked my best friend to call the hospital to find out if I could hold Sierra again before the cremation. But they told her that the autopsy had been very thorough and that Sierra was “not viewable.”

  That night I dreamed that her body had been brought to me in a cardboard box, all in pieces, and I was trying to put her back together again.

  A friend who is a woodworker built us a tiny redwood casket, held together with wooden pegs instead of nails, so it would burn completely. He carved three intersecting circles on the lid, a traditional Japanese symbol of Buddhism’s Three Treasures: the Buddha, the awakened heart; the Dharma, the path of truth; and the Sangha, the loving community. My husband took the casket into his workroom and slowly, painstakingly outlined the carving with black paint, so it stood out like a brand.

  The crematorium was a huge, industrial hangar: unpainted cinderblock walls, gritty cement floor, a row of steel ovens the size of garages. The oven we’d been assigned was already roaring because they have to be preheated; it was like standing next to a jet about to take off. The huge rolling steel doors were plastered with orange signs: “Danger! Hot!”

  We were met there by Wendy and Fu, the two women Zen priests who had performed our wedding at Green Gulch Zen Center. They set up a small altar outside the mouth of the oven, with flowers and a redwood seed and a statue of the Jizo Bodhisattva, the guardian of children who have died. They lit incense and chanted while my husband and I wept.

  Then he and I put our hands on Sierra’s casket and told her how much we loved her and how much joy she had brought us.

  “You have been such a happy, bright spirit,” I said. “I’ll see you in everything happy and bright for the rest of my life.” My husband traced the entwined spirals on the casket lid.

  “This is me,” he said. “This is your mommy. And this is you. And this”—tracing the big circle around the outside—“is love. You will always be part of our family.”

  Then my husband and I stepped inside the railing, up to a panel of lights and buttons and dials next to the oven door. I pushed the green button labeled “Door Open.” The steel door rolled up to a blast of heat and an orange glow. A man in a plexiglass safety mask and heat-blocking mittens picked up the casket and placed it in the oven.

  We all began to chant the Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness not other than form.” It’s Buddhism’s fundamental creed, a statement of impermanence and interdependence: All forms are temporary, and nothing is separate from anything else. Clouds become rain, water is sucked up by plants, plants are eaten by people, people disintegrate back into water and dirt. Things that seem separate dissolve into one another and disappear.

  The chant is a somber, slow, monotone drone: “Therefore in emptiness there is neither form, nor feelings, nor perceptions, nor mental formations, nor consciousness. No eyes, or ears, or nose, or tongue, or body, or mind. No form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch.” I had forgotten to close the oven door. The attendant touched a button, and the great steel doors rolled down.

  The end of the chant is a mantra in Pali, the vernacular language of India at the time of the Buddha: “Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha…Gone, gone, all gone beyond, gone beyond the beyond; hail the goer.”

  We chanted the Heart Sutra over and over as Sierra burned. Then, at my request, we changed to a different kind of chant. “You are my sunshine,” we sang, “my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray…”

  She was just a baby, after all; I couldn’t bear the thought of sending her off into the great beyond with only monastic texts to sing her to sleep. We sang “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and “Yellow Submarine,” and “Frére Jacques,” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

  This is an image I will never forget: the Zen priest, Fu, in her black robes and shaved head, with one hand on her hip and the other arm arced like a spout, singing “I’m a Little Teapot”—“just tip me over and pour me out”—as the crematorium oven roared behind her.

  * * *

  —

  There’s a Zen story about an enlightened master weeping at the death of his baby son. His disciples came to him, bewildered. “Master,” they said, “why do you weep? I thought you told us that this world was an illusion.”

  “Yes,” the teacher replied. “And the death of a child is the saddest illusion of all.”

  I used to think that spiritual practice would be a way of lessening the pain of grief—that I could escape into some Self, some detached witness consciousnes
s that is beyond the world, from which I would watch my life dispassionately, like a movie I could turn off at any moment.

  But, in fact, we are attached to life by a tie as primal as the umbilical cord, thick and dark and coiled and throbbing with blood. Now I know that I would never want to be so detached, so cut off from that primal pulse, that I did not mourn my daughter’s death.

  And I no longer even believe that’s what the yogis meant—that we should use practice as a kind of spiritual epidural to anesthetize us from the pain of our lives.

  For me, as it turned out, practice was not a way of stepping out of the pain but a way of walking right straight into it, of feeling it fully, of letting it rip through my body and heart. And this is how I want my practice to be. This is where I want to practice: not just on a cushion in a temple smelling of sandalwood, not just on a synthetic mat in a mirror-walled studio, but in every moment of this animal body, oozing blood, tears, and mother’s milk.

  “Are you doing your yoga?” my friends would ask, in the weeks after Sierra died. “Are you doing your meditation?”

  I didn’t know whether to answer “No, not at all” or “Yes, all the time.”

  The truth is that I was spending very little time on the mat. There’s nothing like death to put an asana practice in perspective. In the face of unimaginable loss, I could derive little comfort from the perfection of my Triangle Pose.

  But my years of practice had given me one simple gift: the power of the intention to rest in the moment with what is happening, breath by breath. For years I’ve asked myself, through meditation and yoga, to rest in sensation: to hold an intense pose and feel the burn of the muscles without moving away from it, to sit without moving in the meditation hall as waves of anger or fear or boredom crashed over me. Now I could use this training to receive the grief welling up inside me—and let it tear on through me.

  For me, grief wasn’t a constant pain; it came in vast, convulsing contractions, like labor. A florist’s truck would arrive with another bouquet of flowers, the delivery man averting his eyes as he handed them over, escaping as fast as he could because he knew by now that they didn’t mean good news. I’d look at that bunch of roses or amaryllis or orchids, exquisite, sweet-scented. I’d look at my whole house filling up with flowers in glass vases, already starting to die, instead of with smelly diapers and the sound of a baby crying. I’d remember the unbearable beauty of Sierra’s face and her tiny curled hands. And I’d want to smash the vase of flowers against the wall.

  So I’d let in that wave of pain—even though it was so intense I thought it would split me in two—because I learned that, like vomiting, it was better to let it happen than to try to avoid it. I found that I could feel that, breath by breath—one breath at a time—it was bearable. Then the wave would pass, and I’d be lying on the beach, gasping and exhausted, but more alive than before.

  “Look deeply, and you will see that you are weeping for that which has been your delight,” writes the poet Kahlil Gibran. In those wrenching moments I’d see that grief and joy are inextricably intertwined. My sorrow was a way of touching a truth: that the world is both fleeting and infinitely precious. The Zen master Issa wrote this poem after the death of his child: “Dew evaporates, and all the world is dew; so dear, so refreshing, so fleeting.”

  I once heard Thich Nhat Hanh say, “I would not want to live in a place where there is no suffering, because suffering breeds compassion.” Yes, our grief is magnified by the way we cling to things that are impermanent by nature. But grief also reveals the glorious truth that we are woven into the fabric of the world, that we are linked to everything that is.

  In the wake of Sierra’s death, I discovered this: I don’t believe my true Self is outside the world. I believe it is part of it. I believe my true Self shines in the apple trees, in the hummingbirds, in my baby’s body, in the blood and sweat of childbirth, in the tears that come when I lose someone I love. It shines in the compassion that springs forth in a human heart in the presence of pain, as naturally as a mother’s milk lets down when a baby cries.

  For my spiritual practice, I don’t want to step away from the world. I want to step closer, take it in my arms, cradle it close to my heart, like a mother holding her child. My loss is one little drop in a world full of pain. Around the world the week that Sierra died, human beings were facing unimaginable suffering. Bombs were falling on Kosovo. Mothers and fathers were mourning their lost children in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Littleton, Colorado. They were mourning their children blown apart by bombs, drowned in flooded rivers, shot in gang warfare, wasted away on drugs.

  In the weeks and years after Sierra’s death, I heard the stories of countless grieving parents. I heard of babies who lived a few hours and died in their mother’s arms. I heard of babies who stopped breathing in their cribs, and no one ever knew why. I heard of children taken by cancer, by car wrecks, by murder.

  Every one of us has faced or will face terrible losses in our lives. Our dreams will shatter, our loved ones will die, our bodies will slowly fall apart. The question for me is this: Can I allow my practice to take me right into the heart of this sorrow, to feel the pain and the grief, and by going through it open into something larger?

  * * *

  —

  My first time out in the world after Sierra’s delivery, I pushed my cart numbly through Whole Foods, shopping for dinner: salad greens, avocados, tomatoes.

  I couldn’t imagine cooking. I pushed the cart to the deli counter, figuring I’d pick up something premade: some poached salmon, maybe. A pasta salad.

  Aurelio, the young man behind the counter, greeted me cheerfully. Throughout my pregnancy he’d been scooping me up mountains of pasta salad, piles of orzo, buckets of teriyaki chicken wings, never commenting on my voracious appetite and ever-changing cravings.

  He glanced down at my now-flat belly, then at the empty top basket of my shopping cart. “How’s your baby?” he asked with a big grin.

  I stared at him. This was the first time I’d gotten this question, which I would get countless times again. I couldn’t think of anything polite to say. “She’s dead.”

  We stared at each other for a moment.

  “She died,” I said again, and burst into tears. I walked away, leaving the cart where it was, the groceries still in it. I drove home, crying.

  My husband ordered Chinese takeout for dinner.

  Two days later, I went back to the store. I went to the counter. Aurelio eyed me warily.

  “I’m so sorry for walking away like that,” I told him. “It was just too much for me.”

  “I know.” He looked at me over the glass case. “It happened to my wife too. Just a year ago. Our baby died when she was a week old.”

  “Oh—I’m so sorry.”

  “My wife didn’t get out of bed for a month. She didn’t leave the house for three months. I know exactly how you feel. It’s the worst thing in the world.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again. Then, “What was your baby’s name?”

  His eyes lit up. “Angelo.” I could tell how good it felt to say the name, to have his son alive in the space between us, just for a moment.

  “Angelo,” I repeated. “It’s a beautiful name. I’m sure he was a beautiful baby.”

  “Yes.” He looked down at the deli case. “What can I get you today?”

  A new baby, one for each of us. A mended heart. Hope for the future. “A pint of caprese salad.”

  He gave me the salad with a sad smile. “I hope your day goes okay. Hang in there.”

  “You too,” I told him. “You too.”

  * * *

  —

  Everywhere I went I saw babies. But everywhere I went, too, I heard stories of death, of loss. On the news, refugee children starved by the hundreds, the thousands. As I drove over the winding road from my house to Muir Beach, I passed a roadside altar, c
overed with flowers, where some mother’s teenage girl drove her car off the edge of a cliff.

  I looked at the eyes of the people I met—the checkout clerk at CVS. The bank teller. What tragedies had they lived through? What stories of loss, of heartbreak, did they carry with them?

  How did we human beings get up every morning, put on our shoes, and head out the door, when the world was in flames all around us?

  Six weeks after Sierra died, we met with the doctor to discuss the results of her autopsy.

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have any answers for you,” she told us. “The baby was completely normal. The cord was normal. The placenta was normal as well. In these cases, all we can assume is that there might have been what we call a cord accident. Somehow, she got into a position where her body cut off the flow of circulation through the umbilical cord.”

  There’s a classic meditation in Buddhism where you’re instructed to meditate on the thirty-seven parts of the body: head hair, body hair, nails, skin, teeth…It’s supposed to bring about detachment. I looked down at the sheaf of papers she had handed me and flipped through it, wincing at the intimate, graphic account of my baby’s body: her brain, her lungs, her liver, her colon, her genitals, her spine. All laid bare by the coroner’s knife. All of them normal—or, in the words of the autopsy report, “grossly unremarkable.”

  We asked our doctor about our chances for another pregnancy.

  “Having a stillbirth once does not increase your likelihood of having one again.” She laid out all the things the doctors could do next time around to support a healthy pregnancy and delivery. The words flowed by me: “triple screen,” “quadruple screen,” “stress testing…”

  “With an amniocentesis we can test for over fifteen hundred genetic and chromosomal disorders,” she told me brightly.

  If this was supposed to reassure me, it didn’t work. On the screen of my mind were playing thousands of things that I hadn’t known could go wrong. Things that hadn’t gone wrong with Sierra—but might with a future baby.