Searching for signs
…in the rubble of our belief systems
Last week, I read Underwing, Jennifer Lane’s new memoir of grieving her daughter Sky after a termination for medical reasons. I found it very moving and thought-provoking – it’s unflinchingly honest and raw at times (writing about grief from quite close-range).
Interspersed with Lane’s account of her first year as a bereaved mother are snippets of stories from old mythologies, interesting detours into nature writing and the lore of animal symbolism in ways that reminded me a little of Wintering, by Katherine May.
I wasn’t sure, at first glance, how I’d get along with this book. As well as a powerful writer, Lane is a Pagan, a practising green witch and a reiki practitioner while I am….perhaps the least woo-woo person you can imagine.
In fact, it turns out that, as a gardener, I can find a lot more common ground with a green witch than with the crystals ’n’ manifestation girlies (of this kind of New Age mysticism, which she says has a ‘blatantly capitalist bent’, Lane writes: ‘Life also encompasses death, dying, sickness and trauma, but there are certain people in the New Age community who only focus on the light…some would put a soft hand on your arm and paint on a pained expression to tell you it’s your own fault when bad things come your way’).
What struck me most about Underwing is how clearly it shows what a seismic experience, like the loss of a baby, can do to a person’s belief system – Lane’s grief seems to send her both deeper inside hers (magpies, curlews, foxes…what are they trying to tell her?) while at the same time cracks appear. She questions herself – as a Pagan, as a witch – constantly, scouring the past for signs and portents from the natural world that she might have missed.
I may not be able to relate entirely to death omens or rituals to ask the goddess Brigid for a baby, but I absolutely related to that fracturing of your identity, while delving deeper into the beliefs essential to it for answers.
To be clear, I don’t have a ‘belief system’ in the sense of any religion or spiritual tradition (and so I hope it’s not disrespectful to draw parallels here) but recurrent pregnancy loss did see me clinging to certain parts of myself tighter than ever – I could work harder, put more effort in, do more research. Science would yield answers, I just had to find the right expert, the right randomised-control trial.
Yet, at the same time, I started to see the limitations of it all. Sometimes the evidence I needed just didn’t exist. Sometimes it did, in a literal sense – but I could pick its reassuring conclusions about the safety of [insert activity/behaviour/food stuff here] in early pregnancy to shreds in minutes. Women with a history of miscarriage would have self-selected out of this study, I’d argue to myself. Or any number of other quibbles with the methodology that could explain why I didn’t feel reassured.
I also flirted with alternative health and healing for the first time. I wore socks inside my slippers to keep my womb ‘warm’. I did a bit of acupuncture and reflexology. Breathwork. Meditation. These things might sound like nothing now, in the age of Big Wellness, but at the time, for a person for whom the average yoga class often skewed too ‘woo’, this was quite a departure.
We have quite cliched ideas, I think, about what profound loss or trauma can do for our beliefs. We imagine dramatic conversions or disavowals – crises of faith. But, as Underwing made me think, perhaps the reality is more often more slippery than that.
It’s more like living in a house while it’s being destroyed and re-built around you. Everything is a test, everything is a challenge. Everything shifting all the time. You see the splintering plaster and shards of wood, but you’re also still sure you can find treasure in the attic if you just look hard enough.
Anyway, Underwing is out today, you can order it here. Jennifer Lane is also on Instagram and writes the Substack The Green Witch.
P.S. I’d love to know your take on this and what profound loss did to your own belief system (in the loosest possible sense), drop me a comment or a DM.
The resonated deeply with me. After six losses, I've felt absolutely forsaken, but by who/what, I don't know. Raised Catholic but not practicing, infertility and loss pushed me to pray, to wear an emblem of St. Colette around my neck, to frantic internal Hail Marys during IVF transfers. It also pushed me to put some degree of hope in crystals, in positive signs from nature, signs from songs, signs everywhere, all ultimately proven false when another baby's heartbeat stopped at the end of the first trimester. Did I not believe enough? Is it because I'm a fair weather Catholic? Is it because, because, because...?
After my last loss, I spent a few weeks thinking that this was the moment my life would change. I'd eat/pray/love or start running or find religion or anything that would help me move past five years of the worst pain of my life. A friend finally gently told me that maybe instead I should find one thing a day that felt good. I never did find religion, but I did find embroidery and walks outside and looking at birds.
This is a perfect analogy, though after so much loss, I also feel a bit ridiculous peeking for the treasure.: It’s more like living in a house while it’s being destroyed and re-built around you. Everything is a test, everything is a challenge. Everything shifting all the time. You see the splintering plaster and shards of wood, but you’re also still sure you can find treasure in the attic if you just look hard enough.
Thank you for your book and for this very comforting substack.
After my first miscarriage, I saw signs everywhere and was convinced the universe was leaving me messages. Rainbows were a particular thing I latched onto. After five miscarriages and no more babies (I am lucky enough to have one), I have stopped believing in the universe and signs. So I guess I've done the opposite to you 😆 I've gone from believing in some sort of benign power to believing that everything is random. It sounds quite bleak but is actually rather comforting. I feel freed from the idea that I can somehow manifest a baby and there is a lightness in that, for me.