Scrumptiously Existential

A reflection on loving Ash Wednesday

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:3

A reflection from my spiritual memoir writing class, in response to the prompt “dark night of the soul.” Content warning: pregnancy loss

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I love Ash Wednesday service. There’s just something about a bunch of people gathering together to be ritually told, “don’t forget, you’re gonna die one day,” that is so scrumptiously existential. I hold a sort of paradoxical giddiness about the solemnity of it all. Afterwards, I make a point of running an errand so everyone can see my weird death cult affiliation. Nothing has ever felt more true to me in all of Christianity, that we are dust. Or better yet, as Saint Joni croons, we are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden.

In February 2015, I found myself with an even deeper than usual longing for the return of Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season. "Giddiness" wasn't it this time; excitement wasn't an emotion I was capable of mustering. Rather, the prospect of being told I was going to die eventually was a great comfort to me.

I'd had a miscarriage a few days prior. That's perhaps the simplest explanation for the depths of despair I was experiencing. But the thing is, on the spectrum of tragedy surrounding pregnancy losses, mine wasn’t the variety you should really even be allowed to get all that sad about.

“It’s a clump of cells!” I’d shouted countless times in advocating for reproductive justice. And that really was all it was to me; I didn't think anything differently about what had happened biologically. Besides that, I’d only just gone off birth control after forgetting to refill my prescription. The entirety of our conversation about the possibility of bringing new life into this world together went something like, “oh heads up, I didn’t get to the pharmacy this month.” It was a far cry from the heartache of infertility struggles and years of trying to conceive that so many toil through.

Because I’d gone off the pill though, I thought to test a few days before my period was due. “Pregnant,” it read. I couldn't believe it. The next day, I tried 3 different brands’ tests. Pregnant by all accounts.

It lasted a grand total of five days. That was it. I wouldn’t have even known it but for sensitive tests and my general anxiety about unknown variables affecting my future. I went on to get a perfectly normal-seeming period, within a normal margin of error for a start date. What I'd experienced is sometimes called a "chemical pregnancy," I learned. They’re remarkably common. Most people never know it happened.

So why did I find myself despondent?

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I was three years into my so-called "dream job" as a prosecutor in a major metropolitan city. I was excelling at it, even. And it was all-consuming. I got to work by 7 am most days, as a courtesy to the night shift cops I needed to interview, and I rarely left the office before 7 pm. I spent my days bouncing back and forth from my daily court appearances, depositions, and witness interviews, all while trying to find time to write and respond to motions, conduct investigations, and prepare for trials in the pockets of time in between. More often than not, the substantive work had to wait until after business hours or on the weekend, when I wasn't constantly interrupted by phone calls and appointments.

I always got physically sick with nerves on the night before trials, never ate during, and rode a euphoric wave of adrenaline through my closing argument before crashing after. Then, I’d return to a whole new hell of cases that needed to be resolved or tried by the next trial calendar call in 2 weeks.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It was a constant barrage of trauma, too. The greatest defense mechanism against it was to never stop. If you stopped to think about the young woman kidnapped, carjacked, robbed, and gang-raped at gun point by three juvenile boys, or the 3-year-old who caught a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting, or even just your “run-of-the-mill” armed robberies that scared the shit out of your otherwise unharmed victims… if you stopped to think about it, you couldn't function.

If you stopped to think about handing out prison sentences longer than you've been alive yourself or the unfairness of the minimum mandatory sentencing structures that worked so well to your own advantage in plea negotiations, you might go "soft" and lose your respectability within the office and among the defense bar. "Soft" prosecutors got sent to manage cases in mental health or drug court; they didn't get to try murders.

To do the job well, you simply could not stop and think. About any of it.

So being pregnant, conceptually, in that environment wasn't really about having a baby, to me. It was about maternity leave. It was the opportunity to finally stop, even just for a little bit. For three years, I’d never thought further ahead into the future than the three week trial docket cycle. When I was pregnant for five days, suddenly there was a break in sight. Nine months away, too short, unpaid, and loaded with plenty of hard work of a whole new variety, to be sure. But a break. And during that break, I would be something different. I’d be a mother. I’d have more to my identity than this job I'd wanted so badly. I didn't realize how much I craved it–the escape valve that parenthood promised.

Even if I couldn’t quite name it at the time, it was starting to dawn on me that I desperately wanted to stop, altogether, this thing I had invested so much time, education, and money into becoming.

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At the evening Ash Wednesday service that followed it all, I found a seat in a pew by myself. The sanctuary at my church was good for that—spacious, never forcing you to get too close to anyone else if you didn't want to. The dimmed lighting for that particular service promised to cloak me into obscurity. This was my time to wallow privately, get my ashes, then go back home in solitude.

Right as I was settling into my comfortable isolation, though, Marcia caught my eye from across the aisle. Marcia was, in a word, eccentric. The first time I'd met her, she'd gazed astonishedly at me before telling me how “remarkably red” my aura was. (As it turns out, that can mean a tendency to act without thinking.) She was older, a bona fide aura reader, chakra artist, and spoke with a British accent, all of which contributed to her quirky New Age great aunt vibe. From my buttoned-up professional world, she was something of an amusing novelty, but after a few minutes of conversation, I usually wanted to smile and nod my way out of getting stuck there with her for all too long. I had a low tolerance for the woo woo back then.

Say what you will about aura colors, Marcia at the very least had astounding emotional intelligence. It wasn’t like I was crying in the pews that evening or anything;I would never. I was just sitting there, stoically. Yet she looked concerned as she held my eye. She started to turn around to face the pulpit, then did a double-take back my direction, unable to let whatever she saw in me go. The service was starting. She didn’t look away. Instead, she darted across the aisle and plopped herself down right next to me.

I had no words. Not for her, not even for myself. I didn’t know why I was so horribly depressed over a lost pregnancy I hadn’t even particularly wanted. I hadn’t yet made comprehensible sense of all the truths that it had shed light on. Those would come later. But she never asked for any words from me nor offered any back. She just sat there with me and gently placed her hand on my thigh, staying with me silently for the entirety of the service. She was not going to let me be alone.

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I suppose I like Ash Wednesday so much because “ashes to ashes” is such an actually believable tenet of the faith. The rest of the liturgical year? I’m not always so sure about it. My Ecclesiastical (as in capital E, “book of,” Ecclesiastical) angst is supposed to just anticipate the Good News of Easter. But I find Easter itself often comes up hollow, a bit far-fetched. In the popular consciousness, it’s too tidy. The smiling photos of families flooding my social media timeline seem a little too happy that the state executed a man so that White Jesus could be their personal savior. "He is risen! Alleluia!" I mean, really? Why do I do I even keep coming for this nonsense?

But then I find myself in a pew pondering the meaninglessness of my rote day-to-day, and the body of Christ is indeed resurrected, sitting next to me, and named Marcia. Whether I really believe in the story of Jesus most days, I can believe in the community of people gathered together to try to understand that story. And in these little, often unexpected, glimpses of beloved community, of the love that will not let you go as it refuses to let you be alone in your sorrow, I see that story continue to play out. In those moments, the story is so very real. I believe it. And there is genuine trust in the Easter-to-come on the darkest of Ash Wednesdays.