Jizo Comforts

The other day I remembered this chapter from Peggy Orenstein's book Waiting For Daisy about the Buddhist bodhisattva, Jizo, who watches over miscarried and aborted fetuses. She realizes that there is no ritual in Western culture acknowledging miscarriage or even a word for a miscarried or aborted fetus in English. In Japanese the word is mizuko. The chapter describes Jizo rituals, shrines and the statues that many women acquire or offer after a miscarriage or abortion.

I don't know if the term mizuko encompasses the state of pregnancy before 8 weeks, before the embryo becomes a fetus. My cousin asked, "Did your RE call it a chemical pregnancy or a miscarriage?" Does it really matter? Yes, I was only pregnant for a few days, we could count it as 5weeks. Yes, I would have mourned the loss of a growing fetus with a heartbeat very differently than I mourned the loss of an early pregnancy that didn't stick. Whenever or whatever the loss, another cycle that didn't work, embryos that didn't implant, I find comfort in the notion of mizuko, and the possibility of ritual or small action that will memorialize what didn't survive.

I wonder what rituals other women, or couples, have performed after a loss. I have a printed image of my antral follicles taken on cd3 and I have the positive hpt from the lost cycle. But this didn't seem to be enough to acknowledge that something did happen. Is it that I need more acknowledgement? Is it that all miscarriages, at whatever marker of time we assign to loss, as well as the pain of continued infertility and failed cycles, need more acknowledgement? I think the answer is yes.

Today I painted the image of Jizo on a rock I found at the beach and offered it to the ocean on a sunny day. My offering to Jizo, my memorial, my action, my mizuko, was washed away by the waves. Mizuko translates to 'water child.' In the absence of a shrine or temple geographically close to me, I thought the ocean would be appropriate.