My belly is big. And as I write this and gaze down at my rotund mid-section, I realize it is, in fact, huge. Sometimes when I’m going about my day, my brain actually forgets that I am pregnant, and I walk around like “a normal person,” thinking non-pregnancy thoughts and doing non-pregnancy related things. That is, until I pass someone who nods at me in support, or with anticipatory awareness, or with admiration.
The one place I never forget that I am pregnant is Cedars-Sinai, the hospital where I’ve spent 400 hours working toward my Clinical Pastoral Education for rabbinical school. At first, when being pregnant was a secret known only to my partner and my body, it was easy to hide being pregnant from the ailing patients I served. But as I grew conspicuously rounder, it became impossible for my pregnancy not to take center stage as I entered a patient’s room. I quickly mastered the art of acknowledging my baby bump and then gently maneuvering the conversation back to focus on the patient and their life. Sometimes it worked. But many times, it didn’t.
Those interactions often would begin with my asking the patient a question such as “how is your spirit today?” And when the patient rerouted the conversation to pregnancy and parenting, I hesitated to steer the ship back toward my original question. Not because I wanted to avoid talking to patients about their troubles — because that’s part of chaplaincy. And not because I’d rather discuss childbirth or conception or reproduction or virility. Instead, it was because of another reason entirely.
It has been nothing short of miraculous to see patients who are recovering from major surgeries or illnesses, or who are in the throes of pain — and sometimes even confronting imminent death — uplifted at the sight of my pregnant belly.
It has been nothing short of miraculous to see patients who are recovering from major surgeries or illnesses, or who are in the throes of pain — and sometimes even confronting imminent death — uplifted at the sight of my pregnant belly. It somehow serves for them as a momentary respite from their suffering.
“I loved my pregnancies,” one chemo patient told me, and then proceeded to detail the births of all five of her children.
“Becoming a father was the best thing that ever happened to me,” whispered an 89-year-old man struggling with pain. His face momentarily relaxed as he recalled his treasured parenting experiences.
“Oh, it was such a hard time in my life,” explained a middle-aged man who hadn’t been able to keep food down for four days. “So many things I would have done differently as a parent.” He talked to me for an hour about how he would’ve spent more time with his children. Not once in that hour did he dwell on his illness and impending surgery.
I quickly learned that my baby and my ever-growing bump offered a sort of reflective mirror to my patients. They could gaze into that mirror and immediately be reminded of their own life experiences of birth (be it the birth of a child or an idea or a business). That mirror offered a portal for ruminating on parenting, family dynamics, triumphs, mistakes made, and lessons learned. These conversations were intoxicating and soulfully nourishing for both the patient and myself. The conversations also were holy, with each word creating a new world for both the patient and me, as our morning liturgy reminds us, “Baruch She’amar V’hayah Ha’Olam, Blessed is the one who spoke and the world came to be.”
I am told that when the time comes to birth my baby, I will also be giving birth to myself, that is, a new version of me: a mother. Like my baby, the future me is someone I have not yet met. I can’t help but notice that with each belly-focused conversation my patients and I share together, they too birth themselves again — meeting alternate versions of themselves and revisiting meaningful and sometimes difficult moments in their lives. They explore new understandings of who they were, who they are, and who they may become.
But my pregnancy didn’t always make my Clinical Pastoral Education experiences easily manageable. On the contrary: Cedars-Sinai, like all hospitals, helps restore health and life, but it is also a place where life sometimes ends. The moments I found myself most wanting to conceal my pregnant body were during times of death. The feeling of comforting a crying family member of the departed, of reciting the final viduy prayer, or of acting as a temporary shomeret for a body were made more overwhelming by the little one who seemed to be constantly dancing and celebrating inside me. My baby clearly wasn’t getting the memo. It made me feel as if I weren’t honoring the dead.
“Shhhh, little one,” I’d mentally implore. Didn’t he feel the heaviness in the hospital room? Didn’t he sense the airlessness in the space? Didn’t he perceive the aura of sorrow and grief that engulfed the room and clung to the bedsheets of the departed soul?
But the baby’s dancing didn’t stop. I remember hoping no one would notice the life-filled ripples flowing across my belly as a white sheet was drawn over the body of a 45-year-old man who had just closed his eyes for the last time. This uncomfortable dichotomy, with its juxtaposition of death and life, deeply pained me.
Little did I realize, in such discordant moments, just how much my brilliant baby was teaching me, as he continued growing, dancing, and swimming in the primordial waters of the womb.
This semester, I took a class called “Illness and Healing in Hebrew Literature” taught by Rabbi Wendy Zierler at Hebrew Union College. As if living through two + years of a pandemic wasn’t enough, my slightly sadistic self thought that it might be enlightening to dive into the study of other health blights that rocked our histories: Black Plague, Tuberculosis, Cholera … I was thirsty to learn about it all and study the ancient relationship between people, highly contagious diseases, and the impact it has on communities. One of the novels we read in this class was “The Year of Wonders” by Geraldine Brooks. The book tells the story of the small Derbyshire village of Eyam in England that, when beset by the plague in 1666, quarantines itself in an attempt to prevent the disease from infecting the village. It didn’t work. The village is quickly consumed by death and the village’s priest struggles to keep up with the spiritual needs of the dying and the community at large. Perhaps most striking in this sorrowful story was the recurring theme of life comingling with death and destruction.
I empathized with the main character, Anna Frith. Like Job, she had lost everything to the plague: her husband, her almost-fiancé, her young children, her neighbors, and her friends. Yet somehow, she found herself in the position of continually bringing life into the world as she became a midwife — with some births occurring a mere arm’s length from a plagued body. The quarantined town needed a midwife (and nurse), and Frith answered the call despite her lack of prior midwifery and health care experience. Time and time again, Frith muddies the waters between life and death, showing us that they need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, Frith teaches us that simply by virtue of the fact that life continues, even in the darkest of circumstances, it is a testament to the powerful, resilient human condition, declaring “and in that season of death, we celebrated life.”
Through exploring Cholera, Tuberculosis, Polio, AIDS, and other pandemics, I continued returning to this same theme. It seemed that no matter the strife, the disease, the communal grief, life continued to be celebrated in unique ways. Death and disease could not extinguish the basic human need for joy and celebrating life. And as people who are now living through the COVID-19 pandemic, we can relate to this firsthand. Even in the depths of the heartache of the pandemic, with millions of lives lost, many of us still sought to celebrate life. We found creative ways, in large part through technology, to hold birthday parties, weddings, brit milah ceremonies, B’nai Mitzvahs, graduations, and more. But even during our celebrating, many of us couldn’t help but ask ourselves: Is it really appropriate to celebrate amidst all this pain and death in our world? Shouldn’t life be put “on hold” under such circumstances?
Life and death seem diametrically opposed, in concept and in fact. Yet, they have more in common than we at first may admit. Ecclesiastes 11:5 reads, “As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.” Both birth and death are passages to an unknown world, for which all the preparations in the world cannot fully ready us. In both spheres, we may try to latch onto whatever seems within our control, but we know in our hearts that control is simply an illusion.
Throughout my service as a chaplain intern, I felt I needed to control the boundary between life and death. I felt I needed to conceal my pregnancy in cases of illness or death because, in a room filled with dire illness or impending death, the life growing within me seemed irreconcilable with the anguish unfolding in the room. My pregnancy might cause the patient’s discomfort or even make them feel unheard or unseen by me. But then, I am reminded of a famous teaching from Masechet Ketubot that was discussed in my Illness and Literature class in the context of a depiction of a plague wedding: “If a funeral procession and a wedding procession meet at an intersection, the wedding procession goes first.”
Why does Jewish law insist that the wedding celebration takes priority over the funeral at an intersection? What does this teach us about the benefit of seeing and appreciating life during mourning and vice versa? Judaism reminds us not to conceal the celebration of life amidst death. Allowing joy to collide with our mourning might offer us a meaningful way to understand that the grief of death must give way to life. And as we soon gather to usher in 5783, we are reminded of this intermingling through our Days of Awe. Even as we celebrate something as sweet as the start to a new year, we know that Rosh Hashanah is inextricably linked to Yom Kippur. The elation of one holiday is tied to the solemnity and weight of the next. We know that new beginnings and “Who Shall Live,” the opening of the gates, must connect to “and Who Shall Die” the closing of the gates. Life and death exist together in dissonant harmony within the same breath of Unetaneh Tokef in our high holiday liturgy, making the chaggim and our collective experience all the more powerful.
Similarly, Masechet Ketubot teaches us that both processions hold value, and perhaps by allowing the wedding processional to advance through the intersection first, the mourners might be reminded of the love and hope that still exists in their future. That when sorrow and disconsolation seem to pervade and color everything the darkest hues, we must not forget that life continues and still can offer us blessings. Life and death need not be separated or hidden away from each other. Rather, they can and must take notice of and ennoble the other.
I often felt I was standing at that very intersection during my time as a chaplain intern. These two processionals came to a head when I entered the room of one particular hospice patient. The patient was in a coma. The family, knowing their loved one only had hours left, was already mourning. The room felt dark and heavy. And right on cue, my baby began moving: I felt the need to conceal my dancing, bulging belly. The visit contained all the normal components of a regular chaplaincy visit: there was comforting, validating, acknowledging, and tender moments where the family reflected on the patient’s life. But just as I stood up to make my way toward the door and thought the intersection traffic light was about to change, the patient’s adult daughter tapped me on the shoulder.
“May I?” she asked, hovering her hand over my belly.
I nodded.
And as we stood there in silence, she placed one hand on my dancing belly and the other on the hand of her dying mother. In my entire pregnancy, I never had felt so connected to life as in that very moment of death. The daughter then removed her hand from my belly, and squeezed her mother’s hand even more tightly.
“I think she knows,” the daughter said of her mother.
I did not need to ask what it was that the daughter thought her mother knew. The answer was clear as the light of dawn.
“Thank you for coming to us,” the daughter continued. “You brought life into this room.”
And as I walked out of the room, across the intersection of life and death, I stood a little taller. Allowing my belly to fully expand in all its discordant, defiant joy, I whispered a prayer of gratitude for my unborn son: “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam, shekacha lo be’olamo, We praise You, Eternal God, Sovereign of the universe, that such wonders as these are in Your world.” My unborn son had taught me my first lesson in chaplaincy and motherhood. He taught me the importance of carrying life in the shadow of death.
Anna Calamaro is a 5th year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles who currently serves as the Rabbinic Intern for Congregation Hakafa in the Chicago suburbs.
