On Fragility and Pity

Do I always think in terms of loss? Why is my response to this story so much more emotional than the reponse expressed by the narrator?

From this week's NY Times Magazine "Lives" essay:

When we saw the specialist, we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone. My doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one. Before the procedure, I was focused on relaxing. But Peter was staring at the sonogram screen thinking: Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can't believe we're about to make two disappear. The doctor came in, and then Peter was asked to leave. I said, ''Can Peter stay?'' The doctor said no. I know Peter was offended by that.

Two days after the procedure, smells no longer set me off and I no longer wanted to eat nothing but sour-apple gum. I went on to have a pretty seamless pregnancy. But I had a recurring feeling that this was going to come back and haunt me. Was I going to have a stillbirth or miscarry late in my pregnancy?

I had a boy, and everything is fine. But thinking about becoming pregnant again is terrifying. Am I going to have quintuplets? I would do the same thing if I had triplets again, but if I had twins, I would probably have twins. Then again, I don't know.

At every "but" in the last two paragraphs ("But I had a recurring feeling that…"; "But thinking about…"), I expected the narrator to express grief over the lost twins.

And, reading the essay, I was haunted by an article I read many years ago which suggested that left-handed people often, in the womb, have a twin — and that if, growing up as a non-multiple, they feel a nagging lack or emptiness, it might be the unconscious memory of a past sibling.

Would the narrator's baby boy have a similar, inexplicable, sense of grief? And what if one of the twins had been chosen? Would the existence of one twin be a continual reminder of the lost twin? How could these answers come easily? Or, maybe the question is why these are the questions I've chosen. Why do I want to mourn, and impose on life, such fragility — permenant dents in a life's texture?

Yesterday, I went to a friend's birthday party, and the party's main event was a "mouse race" — four live mice let loose on an obstacle course with bread crumbs at the finish line. Afterwards, the mice, who were marked by the pet store for snake food, were set free in a bush, and party-goers left slices of birthday cake at the bush's edge. They watched the mice reemerge from the bush and nibble at the cake, and congratulated each other on giving the mice a new and better life. But I watched the mice and wondered if cake was good for them, if they would die from so much refined sugar, if predators might be drawn to the cake and then prey on the mice, and if pet store mice would be able to find food and fend for themselves… But when I was asked why watching the mice made me sad, I couldn't explain myself. I felt crazy, thinking about the dangers sugar posed to mice; I knew my sadness didn't have so much to do with the mice as it did my own propensity for sadness and, more precisely, pity.

In my fiction, I've written a lot about pity. On one hand, I try to remind myself that a person's life is experienced very differently from the inside than it is from the outside, and what can trigger pity in an outside observor may have little correlation to the observed person's internal reality. Someone may pity me for my depression, but I don't feel self-pity. On the other hand, perhaps it's only from the outside that a life is whole enough for its tragedy to be understood. Pity requires a sense of scope that conflicts with the fluidity and (in my opinion) perpetual self-distraction of self-consciousness. And then, I wonder, if pity is always self-pity in denial — what could I be feeling pity for but my sad conception of life's workings?

Posted by nchicha at July 18, 2004 04:47 AM