I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

by Maggie O'Farrell

We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.

I have to concentrate everything on freeing myself and nothing can get in my way. I cannot bear for anything or anyone to slow me down, distract me, fetter me. I should also have said: thank you. Thank you, thank you.

The world was suddenly still; nothing was being required of me; I could stand in the quiet of my own skin.

That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not always the easy way.

I have always been someone who leans towards solitude—but my overwhelming sensation had been, until that moment, loneliness, isolation, bafflement. I was slipping away, alone, surrounded by people.

When he took my hand he taught me something about the value of touch, the communicative power of the human hand.

Because losing a baby, a foetus, an embryo, a child, a life, even at a very early stage, is a shock like no other.

It will be hard, every time, not to listen to the internal accusations of incompetency. Your body has failed at this most natural of functions; you can’t even keep a foetus alive; you are useless; you are deficient as a mother, before you even were a mother.

There is a school of thought out there that expects women to get over a miscarriage as if nothing has happened, to metabolise it quickly and get on with life. It’s just like a bad period, a friend of mine was told, briskly, by her mother-in-law.

miscarriage is still a taboo subject, one women will rarely broach, share or discuss.

The truth is that my life is nothing like this. The truth is that I am not doing so well.

She takes vitamins; she does yoga; she goes to a practitioner who sticks very fine needles into her flesh; she waits and waits. Each month, every twenty-eight days, feels like another failure, another baffling loss.

You’re not getting her, not today, not any time soon. She is, she is, she is.