Eulogy to Hannah Kathleen
Eulogy for Hannah Kathleen
Inside the manilla envelope,
a chromosomal report and
a lined, blue notecard:
It’s a boy.
Twelve weeks pregnant,
sure my lemon-sized baby
was a girl, I wept.
I had longed for her,
made an altar to her,
named her.
Her nursery: butterflies.
Her energy: ethereal, free, spirited.
Her presence: resurrection.
How to grieve a story?
Idealized, fancied, projected
self-identity, unrealized.
REFLECTION: On Grieving the Girl; Gender Disappointment as “Spiritual Miscarriage”
This summer—at eleven weeks pregnant with my third baby—I went to the OBGYN for a genetic test. In addition to flagging genetic abnormalities, such as down syndrome, this chromosomal profile would tell us the baby’s gender.
“The results will take a week or so.” The nurse said after drawing my blood. “Do you want to know if it’s a boy or girl?”
“Yes,” I said, but meant, I don’t need the results to tell me what I already know: it’s a girl.
I was convinced. I was so certain I was having a girl, in fact, that I told people about her. I named her, bought her a flower-embroidered clothes hamper, butterfly stool, pink lithograph for her nursery. I wrote her a letter and addressed it to “Hannah Kathleen,” telling her of her strong feminine energy – how she came to me in yellow butterflies. How she was ethereal, like a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How she flitted in and out of my consciousness like dragonfly in the breeze.
When people asked how I was so certain I’d say, “I just know.”
It believed it was intuition. I had been right that my first child was a girl and my second, a boy. I had a good track record.
Plus, my body felt the same as my pregnancy with my daughter, almost 5 years ago: natural, enmeshed, conjoined, almost—quite the opposite of my experience carrying my son. There had been something different about my pregnancy with him from the beginning: our bodies did not take to each other, exactly. I had morning sickness, severe back pain, shingles and carpal tunnel syndrome. He always felt separate from me, like he was a planet within my solar system—part of, but independent. It was like we were of different ecosystems, constantly trying to assimilate to each other, whereas my pregnancy with my daughter – and this baby – felt like we were extensions of each other. Coexisting. Perhaps even symbiotically.
Every part of my body told me I was pregnant with a girl.
*
A week after my blood draw, I got a call from the nurse. “Your results are in! Do you want to pick them up?”
I was so far into the story that I was having a girl, I almost didn’t need to read the report inside the manilla envelope.
But I did, of course. My husband and I sat in our living room, surrounded by candles, a statue of Mother Mary, a rosary, and the printed-out results. I readied myself with expectation, knowing.
“All set?” My husband asked.
We said a prayer together – asked that whatever was in the envelope be what it was meant to be. My husband opened the envelope. He pulled out a white paper with the word NORMAL. The genetic profile was normal. We both sighed.
“There should be a notecard, too – a blue or pink one,” I said.
He put his hand in the envelope again.
“And it’s a ….”
I closed my eyes, picturing Hannah’s long blonde, curly hair. Her sky-blue eyes.
My husband cleared his throat. “We’re having … “
I took a deep breath.
“A boy.”
*
I grieved for months. But in the few minutes after my husband opened the envelope, I only felt numb. A single tear fell from my cheeks. I turned the notecard around and around in my hands, as if the motion would erase the reality. My arms shook with disbelief, shock, disappointment – and then guilt for not being able to see past the baby’s gender: that inside me there was a very healthy little boy.
My husband put his arm around me. “I know you thought it was a girl.”
“I even told Aunt Kathy we’d name her after her…” I said, cradling my head in my hands. Just last summer, during my last visit with my beloved Aunt Kathy before she died, I shared this intention. Her breathing was shallow, her head propped up by a pillow.
“When we have a third baby, I am going to name her after you,” I had told Aunt Kathy from beside her hospital bed, just 12 months earlier. “She’ll be Hannah Kathleen.”
Aunt Kathy had smiled and squeezed my hand. In that exchange, a contract was signed in my mind: the deal was done. Hannah Kathleen – Aunt Kathy’s namesake – was coming. This little girl caboose would be the final woman in the Donohue lineage – the poetic, bow-on-top little girl who would take on both my mother’s and Aunt Kathy’s energy and bring their feminine spirits into the world again.
This little girl would be the last one in a strong line of deceased women. She would balance the scales. I believed that the universe had agreed to give me what I grieved: women.
A family of women.
*
In her article about grieving the idealized child – “Gender Disappointment” – Dr. Renee Miller talks about how we create narratives around the “hoped-for” child and how, when we find out the baby’s gender, “this intricate web of preconceived ideas springs to the surface.”
This happened for me in layers. My body told the story first. In the weeks after reading the report, I would wake in the middle of the night, shaking. I was jumpy and irritable. My skin felt too small. I had no sense of connection to the being inside me and cried uncontrollably. The grief felt inexplicably bottomless, out of proportion.
It was like a wound I did not know would stop weeping.
I kept telling myself that this loss wasn’t even “real.” I could not reconcile it. No real baby had even been lost. In fact, quite the opposite: a healthy baby was growing inside me. It was a sort of torment, feeling so out of control.
Early one morning when I could not sleep, a couple weeks after reading the blue notecard, I put on my boots and took to the woods. It was drizzling, but I was desperate to both understand and transform the pain.
As I plowed through brush and fallen leaves, tears fell down my cheeks. I started to run but tripped over a dead tree. “DAMN it!” I yelled, falling closer to the ground. And then, from somewhere deeply buried, “I didn’t choose this.” I put my head on the soil and I beat my fists in the ground. “I didn’t CHOOSE this!” I wailed, my voice echoing in darkness. It started to rain harder. I crumbled and let myself be rained on: I felt hollowed out, short of breath, and deeply, deeply sad.
*
“When the sex of one’s child is opposite to that of the wished-for child, and the family composition differs from the imagined picture, there is a loss of a strongly held ideal,” Dr. Miller writes in her article. “The depth of grief may be intense.”
And intense, it was. As my body grew a new, spiritually unconceived being, it was pushing out the old, idealized fantasy child I’d created.
“You can think of this like a spiritual miscarriage,” my therapist said when I told him about my morning in the woods. In that moment, everything gelled for me. I began to give myself permission to feel all the feelings associated with what he had validated as real. I felt seen – held in this complicated and complex reaction to both a life and a loss, one growing, one going.
A spiritual miscarriage.
It was as though my body had known how deep the layers went before I did; it held the pre-conscious understanding that this loss was all my female losses: that the story of Hannah Kathleen was the story of my mother. My aunt. Myself as a mother without a second daughter. Myself as a motherless daughter. Myself as motherless mother.
It was cumulative grief bubbling to the surface.
“If this is a spiritual miscarriage,” my therapist went on to say, “I suggest you treat it as just that: a miscarriage. You’ll have to grieve it. While you didn’t experience the physical loss, thank goodness, you spent a lot of time creating a contextual work of connection.”
I began this work in my journal. I wrote pages of disclaimers: how lucky I was to be pregnant, how fortunate that the baby was healthy, how much I honored the women who have gone through physical miscarriages, whose bodies had to the bear the burden of bodily loss—those women who must grieve actual children.
But after I let my guilt run its course, I excavated my ideas and beliefs about having a second daughter. I listed them and studied them like bones on a dig-site: turned them, bleached them, bled them of any life so they could alchemize into artifacts.
I wanted, too, to write the story of Hannah Kathleen’s life, much like one writes a biography after a death. To start, I meditated about her origins. Two memories surfaced:
For my eleventh birthday, my mother takes me to a palm reader in New York City. The gypsy-looking woman wears a black and purple turban, has crystals in the windows. I feel like she knows everything, like she is God. She turns my right hand over, traces the lifeline that splits like a Y below my pointer finger. “Long life,” she says and rubs the edge of my palm, below my pinky. “And you will have three children,” she says.
“Three kids,” I tell my mother after the session.
She squeals. She cannot wait to have grandchildren, she tells me, and hopes the girls, plural, will have curly blonde hair, just like me.
Perhaps this is the beginning of my carefully curated dream life. Then, around the time my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, when I was 13, it took on more intensity – this promise of security in my future children. I started picturing two of these three children being daughters: little me’s, little mothers, little women who would, in some way, replace the maternal love I knew I was losing with every round of my mother’s chemo.
The other memory:
I am 22 and in my junior year of college. It is a year before my mother dies. I’ve come to see a psychic in hopes she can tell me anything certain about my uncertain life. She has long gray hair. She closes her eyes and tells me that I will have two daughters and a son.
“Are you sure?” I ask the psychic.
“Yes,” she says. “I am sure.”
Her answer concretizes my “knowing” – my desire, and birthright, for female lineage. She cannot tell me when my mother will die, but takes my hand and says, “It won’t be long.” So, while I might be losing a mother, I am deeply relieved to know that I will, eventually, gain two daughters.
In these memories, I believed that I was safeguarded, buffered, kept afloat provided one simple fact: that in the family I would raise, the women outnumbered the men. Me, a husband, a son, and two daughters. There was comfort in being sandwiched by girls—a female-dominated house almost like a shrine to the Divine Feminine.
It was karma, this imagined generation of little women reborn from those who raised me.
In my script, I’d made the arc of my character development contingent on what the future female gender and generation meant to me—emotional safety, purpose, legacy.
*
“The narratives we hold are formed by our past, and by the meaning we derived from the relationships we’ve experienced and observed,” Dr. Miller writes in her article. “We unconsciously amass information and draw conclusions about … the meaning of gender within these relationships.”
She explains gender disappointment as being linked to the desire for replication (duplicating what we have experienced or witnessed because it is positive) and/or repair (the desire to repair what we have experienced because it was negative). I could see my relationship to these projections: my desire to replicate my relationship with my mother and aunt and to repair the cut-too-short experiences I’d had with them, to extend their lives in birthing girls.
But Dr. Miller poses a third rationale for gender disappointment that caught me off-guard: the reflection of self is disrupted. Meaning, the wished-for child reflects the mother’s perceptions of self, such as identify, fears, dreams.
This made so much sense to me. Not only do we grieve the things we once had, but also the things we wanted but did not get.
I set out to learn what Hannah Kathleen represented to me about my future that I imagined I was losing.
Outside of the link to comfort and legacy and patching a mother-loss hole that can never be filled, she was also a beacon. I imagined her ethereal, not-of-this-earth energy to be of God, of some divine ordinance. A guide. The imagined Hannah Kathleen, that little blonde-haired girl, was a way-shower to the land of the Divine Feminine. Her lithe and flit said, “follow me.” She symbolized life direction and assurance that my recent call toward the sacred feminine is real.
In my insecurity, I had made Hannah Kathleen the manifest acknowledgement that not only am I heading in the right direction, but I am also bushwhacking for my daughters. Her presence infused me with a purpose outside myself—almost as if the resistance that questioning patriarchy brings would be “worth it” because it was also for my “girls.”
But this desire for certainty—and the inability to tolerate uncertainty—bypasses the very idea that I am enough on my own. That what I hear, and experience, and feel is real without substantiation. That doing my future Divine Feminine work is not dependent on how many daughters I birth. That I, in myself, am worthy of this call. Am being called.
One day recently, it occurred to me: perhaps Hannah Kathleen was actually a new version of myself—more a totem than a life. Perhaps she was never meant to replace lost female energy, but to create it in a world outside of genetics, outside my family.
This thought, the sheer idea that Hannah Kathleen’s spiritual presence had meaning gave me the courage to let go of her.
*
Two months after reading the blue notecard, I took my therapist’s idea of having had a spiritual miscarriage literally: I created a funeral of sorts. I wrote Hannah Kathleen a poem – the one that appears at the beginning of this post. It is a eulogy. A goodbye.
Writing it as though she were a real entity honored the loss for me, making it more than a perceived loss. Just as my body alerted me to what she represented, I took my body through the motions of mourning her.
I wrote her a poem.
I read it to her in the woods, at my altar.
I placed it on the stump, surrounded by butterflies and flowers.
I buried the poem and the letter I wrote her when I found out I was pregnant.
I cried. Prayed to Mother Mary. Took a deep breath. Said goodbye.
I touched the growing life inside my belly.
And then, I walked away.
