Mourning My Miscarriage
April 21, 2002 (New York Times article)
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

I heard the bells before I saw them, following the sound
across the courtyard of Zozo-ji, a Buddhist temple in
Tokyo. There they were, lining a shady path: dozens of
small statues of infants, each wearing a red crocheted cap
and a red cloth bib, each with a bright-colored pinwheel
spinning merrily in the breeze. Some had stone vases beside
them filled with flowers or smoking sticks of incense. A
few were surrounded by juice boxes or sweets. A cap had
slipped off one tiny head. Before replacing it, I stroked
the bald stone skull, which felt surprisingly like a
newborn's.

The statues were offerings to Jizo, a bodhisattva, or
enlightened being, who (among other tasks) watches over
miscarried and aborted fetuses. With their hands clasped in
prayer, their closed eyes and serene faces, they are both
child and monk, both human and deity. I had seen Jizo
shrines many times before. They're all over Japan, festive
and not a little creepy. But this was different. I hadn't
come as a tourist. I was here as a supplicant, my purse
filled with toys, ready to make an offering on behalf of my
own lost dream.

I was in Tokyo for three months reporting on Japan's
rapidly declining birth rate. I hadn't expected to be
pregnant, though I had long hoped to be (and appreciated
the coincidence, not to mention the humiliation, of
succumbing to morning sickness midway through an interview
on the new childlessness). I called my husband, Steven,
across the Pacific, eager to share the news. We agreed that
I would stay and find an English-speaking doctor. After
all, we reasoned, Japanese women have babies, too. He would
come in about a month to visit as planned. I imagined a
sweet reunion.

Steven's response, however, was more guarded. I'd already
had one miscarriage, more than a year earlier, and he was
wary of giving way to excitement before that first,
tentative trimester had passed. I knew he was right, but
couldn't share that cautiousness -- nor, I suppose, did I
really try. I found myself engaged in a running conversa-tion with the growing embryo, narrating the details of daily life in Tokyo, telling it stories of our home back
in California. The connection I felt was unanticipated,
electric: as if a frail, silvery thread ran between us.
That link was the first thing I checked for when I woke up,
the last thing I focused on when drifting to sleep.

Then, in my eighth week, walking to the subway, I felt it
snap. Just like that. It's over, I thought. Is that
possible? Could I have truly known? Of course there are
concrete indicators that things have gone amiss -- nausea
abates, breast pain dwindles -- but those had not yet
occurred. It could have been my imagination, a momentary
blip that in a viable pregnancy would have been forgotten.
Or maybe the bond itself was a product of wishful thinking.
I can't say.

Either way, I could never conjure the connection again. I
tried not to think about it. I tried to convince myself
that I was being superstitious and absurd. But I was not
surprised at my next prenatal exam when the doctor looked
at the wavy lines of the ultrasound and intoned, ''Egg sac
is empty.'' I just slipped further into the numbness of
medical emergency. Steven caught a plane to Tokyo, and we
faced the D. and C. procedure together, grimly, with little
incident. A week later, I decided to stay and finish my
work. Steven flew home. And it was over.

Or at least it was supposed to be. There's little
acknowledgment in Western culture of miscarriage, no ritual
to cleanse the grief. My own religion, Judaism, despite its
meticulous attention to the details of daily life, has
traditionally been silent on pregnancy loss -- on most
matters of pregnancy and childbirth, in fact. (At the
urging of female rabbis, the Conservative movement in which
I grew up has, for the first time, included prayers to mark
miscarriage and some abortions in its most recent rabbis'
manual.) Christianity, too, has largely overlooked
miscarriage.

Without form, there is no content. So even in this era of
compulsive confession, women don't speak publicly of their
loss. It is only if your pregnancy is among the unlucky
ones that fail that you begin to hear the stories, spoken
in confidence, almost whispered. Your aunt. Your
grandmother. Your friends. Your colleagues. Women you have
known for years -- sometimes your whole life -- who have
had this happen, sometimes over and over and over again.
They tell only if you become one of them.

Women today may feel the disappointment of early
miscarriage especially acutely. In my mother's generation,
for instance, a woman waited until she had skipped two
periods before visiting the doctor to see if she was
pregnant. If she didn't make it that long, she was simply
''late.'' It was less tempting, then, to inflate early
suspicions into full-blown fantasies -- women often didn't
even tell their husbands until the proverbial rabbit died.

Now, according to Linda Layne, an anthropologist who is
the author of the coming book ''Motherhood Lost,'' new
technologies and better medical care encourage us to confer
''social personhood'' on the fetus with greater intensity,
and at an ever-earlier stage. Prenatal care -- including
watching every milligram of caffeine, every glass of wine,
every morsel of food, as well as choking down that daily
horse pill of a prenatal vitamin -- begins before we have
even conceived. Meanwhile, drugstore kits can detect a rise
in key hormones three days prior to a missed period,
increasing our knowledge but also the possibility of dashed
hopes. Web sites ply the newly pregnant with due-date
calculators, ''expecting clubs'' and photographs of ''your
baby's'' development. Ultrasounds reveal a nearly
imperceptible heartbeat at six weeks of gestation. Women
confide in family and friends and begin to sort through
names. In an era of vastly reduced infant mortality, they
assume all will go well. When it doesn't, Layne says, ''the
very people participating with us in the construction of
this new social person -- your mother-in-law or your friend
or whoever was saying, 'Everything you do is important to
the health of the baby, and every cup of coffee matters' --
they suddenly revoke that personhood. It's like nothing
ever happened.''

There are so many reasons that discussion of miscarriage is
squelched. Americans don't like unhappy endings. We recoil
from death. Some women also may be reacting against a newly
punitive atmosphere toward older mothers. Miscarriage rates
increase with maternal age, and those of us who have pushed
our attempts at childbearing to the furthest frontiers of
time worry that we'll be blamed for our losses, that we'll
be harshly judged for ''waiting too long.'' Sometimes we
feel that judgment toward ourselves.

But for me, there is another uncomfortable truth: my own
pro-abortion-rights politics defy me. Social personhood may
be distinct from biological and legal personhood, yet the
zing of connection between me and my embryo felt
startlingly real, and at direct odds with everything I
believe about when life begins. Nor have those beliefs -- a
complicated calculus of science, politics and ethics --
changed. I tell myself that this wasn't a person. It wasn't
a child. At the same time, I can't deny that it was some-thing. How can I mourn what I don't believe existed? The debate over abortion has become so polarized that exploring such contradictions feels too risky. In the political discussion, there has been no vocabulary of nuance.

For days after the miscarriage, I walked around in a gray
haze, not knowing what to do with my sadness. I did my
work, I went out with friends, but my movements felt
mechanical, my voice muffled. Then I remembered Jizo. I
phoned the mother of a Japanese friend to ask where I might
make an offering.'I can't tell you,' she responded.'You'll have to find the temple that is your en -- your destiny.'
Eventually, a Japanese-American friend back home told me
that Zozo-ji, a 14th-century temple where the Tokugawa clan
once worshiped, was a common spot to make offerings to Jizo. As it happened, the temple was a few blocks from
Tokyo Tower, just a short walk from where I was living. On
my way, I stopped at a toy store to buy an offering. What
do you get for a child who will never be? I considered a
plush Hello Kitty ball, then a rattle shaped like a
tambourine, then a squeaky rubber An-pan Man -- a popular
superhero whose head is made of a sweet bean-filled pastry.
This was no time to skimp, I decided, and scooped up all
three.

''Presen-to?'' the sales clerk asked, reaching for some
wrapping paper. I hesitated. Was it a gift? Not exactly.
'Is it for you?' she asked. I didn't know what to say.'It's O.K.,' I finally said. 'I'll just take them like that.'

There are few street names in Tokyo, which makes navigating
a continual challenge, so I kept my eye on Tokyo Tower, a
red-and-white copy of the Eiffel Tower, as I triangulated
the winding side streets. The neighborhood was unusually
quiet, full of low-slung old-fashioned buildings. I caught
glimpses of dark interiors: an elderly woman selling bamboo
shoots, something that looked like a homemade still, a
motorbike parked inside a murky restaurant.

Finally, I came across a temple gate and, assuming I'd
arrived, stepped into a courtyard. Down a garden path I
could see a contemporary marble statue holding a baby in
one arm, a staff in the other. Two naked infants, their
tushes lovingly carved, clutched the robes at its feet,
glancing over their shoulders. At the base of the statue,
someone had left a Kewpie doll.

''Is this Zozo-ji?'' I asked an old woman who was sweeping
up leaves. My Japanese is good enough to ask a question but
not to understand the response. She motioned for me to
wait, then fetched a monk, gray-haired in black robes. I
was in the wrong place, he explained politely in reasonably
good English, then offered directions. For a moment I
thought, Why not just do it here? But I had my mind set on
Zozo-ji. As I left, I felt the tug of missed opportunity.

I had never previously considered that there is no word in
English for a miscarried or aborted fetus. In Japanese it
is mizuko, which is typically translated as 'water child.' Historically, Japanese Buddhists believed that existence flowed into a being slowly, like liquid. Children solidified only gradually over time and weren't considered
to be fully in our world until they reached the age of 7.
Similarly, leaving this world--returning to the primordial waters -- was seen as a process that began at 60 with the celebration of a symbolic second birth. According to Paula K.R. Arai, author of Women Living Zen and one of several authorities I later turned to for help in understanding the ritual, the mizuko lies somewhere along the continuum, in that liminal space between life and death but belonging to neither. True to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, it was expected (and still is today) that Jizo would eventually help the mizuko find another pathway into being. 'You're trying to send the mizuko off, wishing it well in the life that it will have to come,' Arai says. 'Because there's always a sense that it will live at another time.'

Jizo rituals were originally developed and practiced by
women. According to William R. LaFleur, author of Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan, there is evidence of
centuries-old roadside shrines marking miscarriages,
abortions, stillbirths and the deaths of young children
(particularly by infanticide, which was once widespread in
Japan). But it wasn't until the late 1970's, when abortion
rates peaked, that mizuko kuyo, the ritual of apology and
remembrance, with its rows of Jizo statues, became
commonplace. Abortion was legalized in Japan after World
War II; it is viewed, in that country, as a regrettable
necessity. Rates remain high -- perhaps twice as high as
the officially reported figure of 22 per 1,000 women, which
is the same as the rate in the United States. The high
incidence of abortion is partly a result of the fact that
access to the pill was restricted until 1999 because of
fears about its safety and its impact on the environment,
concerns that it would encourage promiscuity and disease
and, not incidentally, because of pressure from doctors for
whom abortion is lucrative.

Even so, the procedure itself has been neither particularly
controversial nor politicized. There is no real equivalent
in Japan to our 'pro-life' movement. The Japanese tend to
accept both the existence of abortion and the idea that the
mizuko is a form of life. I wondered how they could reconcile what seem to me such mutually exclusive
viewpoints. But maybe that's the wrong question: maybe I
should wonder why we can't.

LaFleur estimates that about half of Japanese women perform
mizuko kuyo after aborting. They may participate in a
formal service, with a priest officiating, or make an
informal offering. A woman may light a candle and say a
prayer at a local temple. She may leave a handwritten
message of apology on a wooden tablet. She may make an
offering of food, drink, flowers, incense or toys. The
ritual may be a one-time act or it may be repeated monthly
or annually. She may purchase her own Jizo statue (costing
an average of about $500) or toss a few hundred yen into a
coin box at a roadside shrine. Sometimes couples perform
mizuko kuyo together. If they already have children,
LaFleur says, they may bring them along to honor what is
considered, in some sense, a departed sibling: the occasion
becomes as much a reunion as a time to grieve. Mizuko kuyo
contains elements that would both satisfy and disturb
Westerners on either side of the abortion debate: there is
public recognition and spiritual acknowledgment that a
potential life has been lost, remorse is expressed, yet
there is no shame over having performed the act.

There was no mistaking Zozo-ji. It was a huge complex of
epic buildings with a football-field-size courtyard. I
walked among the rows of mizuko Jizos searching for a spot
to place my toys. Some of the babies' caps, which women
crochet by hand, had rotted with age to just a few
discolored strands. It was dank and gloomy under the trees.
A black cat eyed me from a ledge. It seemed a bad omen.

I wouldn't find out until months later, when I returned to
America, that there is another, darker side to mizuko kuyo.
Over the past few decades, temples dedicated solely to the
ritual have sprung up all over Japan, luring disciples by
stressing the malevolent potential of the fetus: whether
miscarried or aborted, it could become angry over being
sent back. If not properly placated, it could seek revenge.
In the mid-80's, when mizuko kuyo was at its peak, some
entrepreneurial temples placed ominous advertisements in
magazines: Are your existing children doing poorly in
school? Are you falling ill more easily than before? Has
your family suffered a financial setback? That's because
you've neglected your mizuko.

Given the price tag on a Jizo statue, preying on women's
fears is big business. At the Purple Cloud Temple, for
instance, Japan's most famous modern mizuko kuyo site,
thousands of Jizos dot the hillside. Such extortion was
troubling. Could something so coercive still offer
consolation? ''One way of looking at this is that all these
women are duped or manipulated into doing this,'' Elizabeth
G. Harrison, a professor at the University of Arizona who
studies mizuko kuyo, would tell me. ''But what is that
saying about women in Japan? So you have to look at the
other side: there are women who get something out of
this.'' Perhaps like the practice itself, in which
conflicting realities exist without contradiction, both
readings are true.

Standing amid the scores of Jizos at Zozo-ji that
afternoon, I considered: maybe I had found that little
temple earlier for a reason. In retrospect, the garden had
been cozy, the monk had been kind. There were no rows of
statues, no decomposing bonnets. It promised hope as well
as comfort. I wanted to return but suddenly feared that the
temple had been some kind of chimera, a Brigadoon that had
already receded into the mists. More practically, I wasn't
sure, without street names, how to find my way back.

Somehow I did, through a vague hunch and a good deal of
blundering. The monk was dusting off a late-model Mercedes
with two ostrich feather dusters. So much for the
mendicant's life, I thought. For certain Buddhists,
cleaning is enlightenment. Paula Arai writes that polishing
a wooden temple floor is like polishing the heart. I
wondered if spiffing up a Mercedes counted.

He saw me and smiled. 'Did you find it?' 'Yes,' I said, 'but I liked it here better. Is it O.K. if I stay awhile?'
'Do as you wish,' he said. And I thought, I'm trying.

As it turned out, the statue at the temple was not Jizo; it
was Kannon, goddess of compassion, to whom mizuko kuyo
offerings are also sometimes made. Her androgynous face was
tranquil but not warm. The expressions of the chubby stone
babies at her feet were difficult to read. Had I surprised
them? Distracted them? Was their backward glance a reminder
that even as they played happily with the mother goddess,
they would never forget the women whose bodies had been
their hosts? Were they sad? Or was I projecting my own
sorrow, now a gnawing presence in my stomach, onto them? I
focused on the reassuring image of the Kewpie doll that had
been placed there, the happy and dimpled Western baby. It
seemed less ambivalent.

As I arranged my offering at Kannon's feet, a distant bell
tinkled, similar to the sound of the pinwheels. I looked
up, startled. It stopped a second later and didn't start
again. I am a cynic by nature with a journalist's skeptical
heart. But increasingly, I was in the mood to believe.

My toys looked right surrounding Kewpie, the whole place a
little cheerier. I liked them there. I liked the delicate
lavender bushes surrounding me in the garden, the wild
irises with their ruffled edges, the azaleas, the fleabane
and camellias. They were the same plants as in my garden
back home. Crows cawed -- the constant soundtrack of Tokyo
-- and traffic passed in a steady hum. Still, for that city
it was a meditative spot. I relaxed, at last. Maybe my en
was finally back on track.

Twilight was falling, and the garden turned cold, but I
wasn't yet ready to go. I prayed for a moment for things
that are too tender to tell. Then I clapped my hands three
times as I'd seen done at other shrines and backed away,
gazing once more at the impassive marble face. Was there
compassion there?

The temple grounds were empty. The monk in his Mercedes,
the lady sweeping leaves were both gone. I rummaged in my
purse for an envelope and 5,000 yen -- about $40. ''To the
monk I met at 5 p.m. from the foreign woman looking for
Zozo-ji,'' I wrote. ''Could you please chant a lotus sutra
for me and my miscarried fetus? Thank you.''

I slipped it under the door. I don't know whether it was
appropriate or whether he even did it. But there were so
many things I couldn't know. Maybe learning to live with
the question marks -- recognizing that ''closure'' does not
always occur -- is all I really needed to do. I hadn't
expected, coming from a world that fights to see life's
beginnings in black and white, to be so comforted by a
shade of gray. Yet the notion of the water child made sense
to me. What I'd experienced had not been a full life, nor
was it a full death, but it was a real loss. Maybe my
mizuko will come back to me more fully another time, or
maybe it will find someone else. Surprisingly, even that
thought was solace.

I wasn't exactly at peace as I left the temple -- grief is
not so simply dispensed with -- but I felt a little easier.
I had done something to commemorate this event; I'd said
goodbye. I'm grateful to have had that opportunity. As I
was walking home, the sky deepened from peach to salmon to
lavender, and motorists flipped on their headlights. The
bittersweet smell of fish grilled with soy sauce permeated
the air. I breathed it in deeply and felt a little lighter.
I decided to try a new route through the unnamed back
streets, not sure of the direction, but trusting that
eventually I would find a way home.



Peggy Orenstein is a contributing writer for the magazine
and a Japan Society Media Fellow. She is the author of
''Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a
Half-Changed World.''