Song Series #2: To Whom It May Concern

Song Series #2: To Whom It May Concern

 

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My three-year-old had been pleading for “a girl baby” for months, and shortly after we rang in the New Year, my husband and I consented to try.  On Valentine’s Day, I learned I was pregnant. Around the first day of spring, we went for our first ultrasound.

I waited for the ultrasound technician to say, See that flicker? That’s the heartbeat. She didn’t say it.

They scheduled another ultrasound for nine days later. And in those nine days, we waited to find out whether we’d return to a heartbeat or darkness.

In the end, it was darkness.

One of the comforts of making art, I think, is turning suffering to a useful purpose. Those nine days of waiting yielded an essay called “Chrysalis, Catacomb, Cloud.” (You can read it here at Good Letters, the blog presence of Image Journal.)

The waiting also yielded some music: My husband and I began to learn a song by the Civil Wars called “To Whom It May Concern.” In the Civil Wars version, a man and a woman, by turns, each sing to the lover they long for but have never met. In our version, my husband plays guitar, and I sing, to the baby we wondered if we’d ever meet.

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