Requiem for a Lost Organ

Megan Vered

Opening Movement

“Am I going to notice it’s gone?” I asked the surgeon, once I was upright and out of the stirrups.

“No,” she answered. “The neighboring organs will simply adjust and fill the space.”

I imagined confined organs spreading out, overtaking my abdominal cavity like long-legged teenagers in front of a television screen. I imagined hollowed-out trees. I imagined my womb peeled away from my body, one fiber at a time, like a small piece of fruit.

Before the surgery, my husband asked, “It’s not really doing you that much good anymore, is it?” at which point I began to cry.

After the surgery my husband’s friend, who’d lost two small bones during a recent hand operation, pointed to his wrist and said, “We all lose body parts.” Two small bones? I’d lost my engine, the organ that pulsed inside me with purpose.

That is when I concluded you deserved a formal expression of praise. So that the surgeon, who showed me pictures of her children but who saw my body strictly through clinical eyes, and my husband, also a doctor, as well as his off-the-cuff friend, might come to see you as more than a minor character in my life, much more than two small bones. I’m delivering this farewell to you in the form of a requiem, not because I’m Catholic, but because I think of you as my love machine (yeah baby) just like the song by The Miracles, and a requiem, after all, is not only an act of remembrance but a musical composition. In eight movements, my requiem sings your many dimensions.

Second Movement

You’d been with me all along, but I became aware of you at age thirteen, when, alone in the bathroom of Kip’s hamburger restaurant, I discovered a streak of color in my panties. My mother found me crouched in the stall and later clucked to my father, in front of my older brothers, “Our daughter is a woman!” That evening, my brothers’ friends ragged on me about “being on the rag.” I didn’t feel like a woman, more like a green bean of a girl who loved to dance to Motown in her bedroom. I could not visualize what you looked like then, nestled between my hip bones, propped up by ligaments, nor could I envision the role you would play in my life, the destiny you would sculpt for me. You were a drawing on a piece of paper, a shape without meaning. 

Third Movement

I almost lost you twice. At age twenty-one, during my junior year at UC Berkeley, I was hospitalized for four days with a serious pelvic infection. I’d arrived at the campus hospital with deep abdominal pain. They worked me up for appendicitis, which I didn’t have, and sent me home. By the time I returned the following day, my symptoms were grave. The doctors told me if my fever didn’t break in twelve hours, they would have no choice but to remove you to prevent life-threatening sepsis. My fever dropped just in time. Then, at age twenty-three, when I was working the lunch shift on the fifty-second floor of the Prudential Building in Boston, blood began pouring out of me so fast, I hailed a taxi to Mass General. When I questioned why I was bleeding, the ER doc said, “Hormones are mysterious. They might get out of whack just from changing the color of your socks.” When I balked at the medication he wanted to give me, knowing it could cause me to become sterile, he said, “If you don’t want the drugs to stop the bleeding, all you have to do is sign on the dotted line and we will be glad to perform a hysterectomy.” A shot of Depo-Provera put my house back in order. But still, you remained an enigma.

Fourth Movement

At age twenty-five, in Las Vegas on a business trip, I began to hemorrhage and was rushed to the ER. But this time it was because you were laying a bed of blankets inside me. After the pregnancy test came back positive, I was put on strict bed rest for three months to reduce the risk of miscarriage. From March to September, I watched in wonder as my belly expanded, and finally, I knew you. You made a nest for the steady rhythm of a beating heart. You kept my budding baby safe until my due date and beyond. After seventeen hours of gripping pain, I was in awe of your power.

Fifth Movement

At age thirty, because of the gifts you had bestowed on me—a daughter, and three years later, a son—I became a Lamaze teacher. For eighteen years I taught hundreds of expectant women and their partners, first in Los Angeles, then in San Francisco. I taught group and private classes. Teenagers and women in their forties. Waitresses and movie stars. Babies kicked and tumbled in utero while I, with the help of my two favorite visual aids—a plastic pelvis, and a knitted uterus with an attached umbilical cord—demonstrated the mechanisms of labor and birth. I stood in front of my students and fed them facts: The uterus is ordinarily the size of an orange, but at the end of pregnancy it resembles a watermelon. The uterus is the strongest muscle in the body, capable of powerful contractions. The uterus is the biological empress. She makes it all happen.

Not only were you the warming oven for my babies, but you were also the heart of my career.

Sixth Movement

At age forty-eight, I became a fertility rock star. I was in Tahoe attending a weeklong Spanish intensive with my sister. Wednesday evening, I called my husband at home, three hours south. “I’ve been so sleepy. My breasts are the size of cantaloupes. Ugh, and someone opened a chocolate bar near me. It smelled so terrible I almost threw up.” My husband, a keen diagnostician, told me I had all the signs of pregnancy. “One hundred percent impossible,” I said. The chances of spontaneously becoming pregnant at my age were almost nil, but when the white stick turned pink, I had to admit he was right. By the time I went in for an ultrasound at ten weeks all the cells had been reabsorbed into the sac, due to what the doctor called an anembryonic pregnancy. I had all the symptoms, but there was no baby, just an empty shell, a whisper in a darkened room. Every spring I think about that not-yet-germinated seed who I’m sure was a boy and would now be almost eighteen. I picture a tall, slim hockey player with his father’s jet-black brows. Smart as a book with a dry sense of humor. And great dancing genes, from me. We would have named him Noah.

Seventh Movement

At age fifty-three, you finally retired. Well-earned, I might add. For years, you ebbed and flowed within me, driving my cycles of desire, the way the moon drives the seas, urging me to seek love. . . or sex. . . or both. You filled me up and emptied me out like a barrel of rich red wine. You sped me up and slowed me down depending on the time of month and time of life. You curved me up and carved me down. Sure, there were times I had less-than-fond feelings for you. Let’s be honest: for forty years you cramped my style on the regular. But still, without you I feel diminished.

“What will love be without you?” I ask.

Final Movement

My husband was right, you weren’t doing me much good anymore, but like my mother’s pale pink cameo that sits in my drawer unworn, you were antique, and therefore precious. We’d endured the ups and downs together—you were my for-better-or-for-worse. I never meant to lose you, but cancer changed that. I had to say goodbye. I am cured, but you are gone.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.

Eternal rest grant them, oh Lord.

Megan Vered is an essayist and literary hostess. Her personal essays and interviews have been published in High Country News, Shondaland, Kveller, The Rumpus, the Maine Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Writer's Chronicle among others. “Requiem for a Lost Organ” was longlisted for the Disquiet 2022 Literary Prize, and Megan was a finalist for the Bellingham Review’s 2021 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her Shondaland essay, “How a Bar of Soap Taught Me to Apologize,” went viral on Flipboard's “10 For Today.” Megan lives in Marin County, where she leads local and international writing workshops and participates in literary readings. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, heads the governance committee for Heyday Books, and is the CNF interviewer for the Maine Review. Please visit her at www.meganvered.com.