Empty Platitudes
An essay.
Sitting on the floor, in her bedroom, wearing a black cloth from her head to her toe, and a black veil covering her head, my friend folds her body inward by her loss of an aborted future, her lips mumbling, “NO, NO, NO!”, from time to time touching her flat stomach in circular motion, dark breath huddling in her shoulder like heavy stones. Her beautiful face, which many people take as evidence for the existence of God, looks as if God has created it on a bad day. My friend envisioned a beautiful boy, only to end up with her birthing a lifeless clump a week ago.
My friend’s grief summons the ghost of my grief as I sit on the floor with her, sharing this terrible, intimate grief with her.
On a cold and foggy Saturday morning on April 1st, 2017, a sudden, unbearable pain in my stomach woke me up. Seconds later, I collapsed on the floor of my bedroom. Sobbing with pain and shivering with a coldness that I had never, ever felt in my entire life, I called out to my boyfriend, “Dar…darling! Something is very wrong.”
Taking a shower in the downstairs bathroom (so as not to wake me), he did not hear me. Minutes felt like years. The walls must have heard my wails because, when I thought the pain was going to kill me, he came running to our bedroom upstairs. He drove like a madman to the nearest hospital. When he reached the emergency room, I had lost consciousness.
Hours later, a doctor’s first sentence was, “You would be dead right now if you had arrived at our hospital 30 minutes late.” Running the ultrasound wand over my belly, the doctor continued, with a grim voice, “I’m sorry. It was not a viable pregnancy, Banchiwosen.”
Curled on the hospital bed, feeling like something was crawling under my skin, I doubled over in pain, the pressure of the physical pain went from my lower abdomen to my chest and my back, while my boyfriend’s face shattered.
Instead of implanting in the uterus, a fertilized egg has landed in the wrong place, in my fallopian tube, which is called an ectopic pregnancy, the doctor explained. When I wailed on my bedroom floor, the fertilized egg in the wrong place was rupturing my fallopian tube. My doctor had to do laparoscopic surgery, which involved making a small incision in my abdomen, removing the ectopic pregnancy and the whole fallopian tube, as it had ruptured and I was bleeding heavily. I didn’t know how much I wanted a baby until I heard the doctor’s words that now I had only one fallopian tube.
“Was there something I could have done to avoid the nonviable pregnancy?” I asked. I had ignored light bleeding that stayed for a day a week ago. Then it stopped the next morning. The doctor assured me there was nothing I could have done to prevent what happened, that ectopic pregnancy occurs in about 1 out of every 50 pregnancies (20 out of 1,000).
After the doctor left the room, I was unable to move in the waves of my grief. Then I cried and cried, for a fertilized egg that wanted to grow and be born, but was not fortunate to be planted in the right place, for not even sensing a fertilized egg roamed inside my body even if it was in the wrong place.
The absence of a warm body curling next to me wakes me up hours later. I’m alone in my friend’s bedroom. Rubbing my eyes, I start looking for my friend.
In the nursery room with the light-blue color on the walls, in this room my friend sits on the floor next to the hand-made wooden crib her husband built with his hands, her head bowed, eyes closed, tears falling down her dark face, onto her skirt.
I hug her and walk with her to the living room where some of her colleagues have come to ask how she is. There is tension in the room, a hesitancy to talk about my friend’s loss, her grief.
“Time heals all wounds,” someone from her work friends says.
A cloud settles over my friend’s face. Her hand in mine shakes and she squeezes until I can feel her fingernails press into my soft skin. “Thank you for coming.” She says with a hitch in her voice.
Another work friend enters her living room and asks her, “Are you okay?” People lie. Even when we are grieving. Especially when we are grieving. “I’m okay,” my friend says.
Later on, after her work friends leave, into her grieving heart, barges more despair, more devastation, and more grief.
Three days later, the hospital discharged me.
Even though the doctor warned me I should drink lots of fluids, even though I was light-headed and fainted several times, even a mushroom and vegetable soup, my favorite soup, didn’t taste the same, didn’t give me the same relief.
I tried to talk, thinking I was okay and I was strong, but then with increasing ferocity grief, with its big teeth and claws, and with a pain that staggered me, would interrupt what I was about to say cracking my voice. Then I would walk around in a daze for days.
I found no comfort when people uttered empty platitudes. Friends and family members came to ask how I was coping. They made me bleed. Again and again and again, they asked me, “How are you?”
The question was all pointless: all a cliché: all an obligation: all so far from a real inquiry about how I was really doing.
Worse, it was painful.
Obviously, I was not fine. I was mourning a fertilized egg’s loss – a fertilized egg I didn’t know was growing in the wrong place inside my body. But I nodded my head and said, “I’m fine,” and went to the bathroom to cry.
Some family members even blamed me. In some parts of Ethiopia, nonviable pregnancies like ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage, or stillbirth are surrounded by stigma because some people believe there is something wrong with a woman who loses a baby, that she may have been promiscuous, and so the loss is seen as a punishment from God.
Some made a flippant remark. “It was not even a viable pregnancy. Why are you still crying?” The worst advice we give, as human beings, is telling someone—especially someone who is grieving—what to feel. Like poking a fresh wound with a sharp knife, this horrible advice festers the wound.
A well-meaning colleague told me, “Things happen for a reason.” I didn’t want to hear that things happened for a reason when my grief was raw and overwhelming, when I didn’t know what to do with the immediate, intense pain. I must have looked as devastated as I felt, because my colleague’s voice softened only to tell me, “It’s part of God’s plan.”
Until it happened to me, I didn’t know the realities of mourning a nonviable pregnancy were shrouded behind empty platitudes.
God. Oh, how I despised their empty platitudes. If my mama had not raised me to be a good woman, I would have put both my hands on both my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen as another person uttered another empty platitude, on and on and on, in the name of social conversations.
A few days later, I enter my friend’s home. A shrieking noise is coming from upstairs. I run the stairs to find my friend pounding both her hands on the door of the nursery room.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “Banchi, thank God you came,” my friend gasps and lets out a shaky breath. “Emama has locked this room and she is refusing to give me the key.”
Emama (we call our mothers and mother-in-laws emama in Ethiopia) – that is my friend’s mother-in-law stands a few feet away from the nursery room. There is something about her posture, a turning away from the locked nursery room, like if she looks away, or if she throws the locked nursery room’s key and persuades my friend from sitting with her grief in this room, where the whole family prepared for a baby boy, but there is no baby boy, only an empty crib, that grief will not get to my friend so deep.
“It is not good to sit in this room,” my friend’s mother-in-law says, looking at me, her eyes asking me to convince my friend to get over her grief and get on with life. We have the urge to put on our running shoes and go out into the sunrise and try to run the grief off. Except, grief is merciless. Even if you lock its door, it would crawl out and pounce on you in the dead of the night. Even if you curl like a baby needing to hide from it, even if you have empty conversations pretending everything is alright, you can’t hide from grief. You must face it.
She is sad, I tell my friend’s mother-in-law. It is OK to be sad. My friend’s legs buckle, and she slides straight down onto the floor. Her body folds onto itself as though her collapse is from the inside out.
“I don’t care if I am rude. I’m going to ask people to stop coming to my home.” My friend says the next morning.
She is weary of people, even well-meaning friends, and family members, patting her shoulder and saying empty words that feel hollow, averting their eyes from her, having conversations out of obligation, and calling her and glossing over in discomfort.
I did not ask friends and family members to stop coming to my home.
But I wished, oh how I wished to be allowed to not downplay my emotional reactions to my grief in those days. To sit in my grief, for however long it took. Oh, how I wished for someone to sit with me in the presence of my pain and my sorrow, in silence, without giving me an empty platitude. I wished, even as grief stalked me like my dog that had lost its cub, howling and insistent, even as my whole body stiffened with another empty platitude from a well-meaning friend, people would stop talking in hushed, whispered tones, in front of me, as if talking openly about my ectopic pregnancy was a shameful subject. I wished someone stopped for a minute and thought about what they were saying. I wished someone said the right words. Like, “Sorry about your ectopic pregnancy. Sorry, it happened to you.” These words said things as they really were. They would have been heartfelt. They were million times more honest and more real than words people told me out of obligation.
Late that day, after everyone who came to check on my friend left her home, we are sitting on the U-shaped couch in her living room and suddenly she starts talking about her pain over and over again, sometimes in minute detail. I can’t fix what happened to her and I can’t take her pain away. I can listen, though. I can sit with her in her grief even if she tells the same story with little variation, even if her hand constantly touching her stomach reminds me of the scar beneath my belly button.
I hug my friend and say, “I love you.”
A few minutes later, she puts her head on my knees, her eyes slowly close and she falls asleep. I watch my sleeping friend and wonder: Why does society prefer it when we don’t talk about the loss of a nonviable pregnancy? Why do we turn away from what is not comfortable? Why are we scared to say things as they really are? To dive into some uncharted emotional territory? To reach deep inside ourselves and speak from a place of vulnerability and truth?