©Linda Plaisted, “40 Days and 40 Nights”, Diary entry- October 4, 2006 TWINS!!!!!! Yes indeed. It’s official. I’m 3 people in one! No wonder I’ve been so exhausted these past few weeks- so much more tired than when I was pregnant with Quinn. I am purely exhausted right now and I am SO ecstatic but also overwhelmed with racing thoughts about this unexpected development. SO very much to take in! Suddenly we have a family of FIVE! Suddenly this house is starting to seem too small…suddenly my car is not big enough to carry three kids. Three kids… From one to three, just like that. My official due date is May 10- Mother’s Day, but my doctor expects me to deliver early- around April 15, 2007. I’m over the moon, but still a bit gobsmacked… TWINS! PS- I could see them moving already! Baby A and Baby B! They were kicking and squirming and their little hearts were so strong and healthy! It’s all very encouraging and I am just so happy!

©Linda Plaisted, “December, Tuesday 5. 2006.” Diary Entry- The worst day of my lifetime. After the amnio, one of my babies is gone. No heartbeat. The horror of seeing her on the ultrasound screen- the stillness. The realization. All my amniotic fluid- gone. The other twin is fighting for her life but the prognosis is bleak. A real chance I’m going to die here in the hospital, completely immobilized. Where is hope? –That day I lost one of my twin daughters as a result of amniocentesis at 6 months gestation. The risk of “miscarriage” during amnio is less than 1%- or 1 in 1,000-43,000 procedures. The chances are higher if the mother is carrying twins. Never ever again tell me “the odds.” Never again say to me the word miscarriage. I carried those babies every day for 190 days before that moment with a mother’s fierce love and protection. A needle punctured my child. A needle punctured my entire life. My reason for having amniocentesis was twofold- I was 40 years old with this pregnancy and the risk of birth defects was much higher. More importantly, three years earlier, my son was born with a rare genetic condition called Galactosemia that can be fatal if the newborn ingests breast milk at birth. My husband and I are both carriers for the mutation, so we were advised to test to keep the twins “safe.” I knew as soon as the fateful needle pierced my abdomen, that something was wrong, but my innate mother’s instinct was pushed aside and dismissed by the male doctor. My entire body went cold as ice while I was on the table. There was a plummeting sensation. I got very shaky and nauseated. Everything felt entirely wrong- like my spirit/her spirit literally left my body and I could feel it being wrenched away. I was sent home as if nothing had happened. Later that night, I lost all the amniotic fluid for both babies. An emergency visit to my OB detected only one faint heartbeat. I was in a state of profound shock. The chances of any of the three of us surviving were bleak. My womb was likely to go septic and toxins spread throughout my system. Over the next week I lay in bed, waiting for a return visit from death. I cried until I burst every blood vessel in both of my eyes. My only will to live was to save my remaining daughter. I did nothing but drink gallon upon gallon of water to try and replenish amniotic fluid. I spent the next four months on strict bedrest, leaving the house only to visit a high risk pregnancy specialist. *The diary page image used in this piece is from The Library of Congress, marking the day the wife of President Theodore Roosevelt died during childbirth on Valentines Day, 1884. Alice was only 22 years old. Women’s reproductive lives are fraught with profound peril, which is why bodily autonomy is an inalienable human right.

©Linda Plaisted, “Book of Days,” After the amnio went so horribly wrong in December, I did nothing but fight to keep the two of us alive. The hours and days since her death turned into weeks. Though complete bed rest was ordered, I was simultaneously expected to attend constant doctor visits, exhausting tests and incessant dehumanizing procedures. I did not sleep, I did not eat, I did not speak. I couldn’t even cry anymore. There was no time left for tears. I still had a 2 & 1/2 year old son who needed his mother. Compounding the tragedy, I wasn’t even allowed to pick him up because of the tenuous fragility of the remaining baby, and he wasn’t even allowed to sit on my lap and be held. My heart was broken in a thousand different ways and my soul was a purple bruise. It was Christmas Time, “the most wonderful time of the year,” yet there was no joy to the world.

©Linda Plaisted, “Hanging On”, Wintering By Sylvia Plath They can only carry their dead. The bees are all women, Maids and the long royal lady. They have got rid of the men, The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors. Winter is for women —- The woman, still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think. Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas Succeed in banking their fires To enter another year? What will they taste of- the Christmas roses? The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

©Linda Plaisted, “Threnody,” “Threnody” is a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson in which he mourns the death of his young son. My daughter who lived is named in his honor, since I spent the long days of that endless winter confined to bed reading; searching the pages for hope. This poem is a deeply personal expression of grief, as Emerson grapples with the profound sense of loss and sorrow that comes with the death of a child. Throughout the poem, he reflects on the fragility and impermanence of human life, and offers a powerful meditation on the nature of death and the human spirit. While “Threnody” is a deeply emotional work, it is also a testament to the power of art and language to give shape and meaning to the most profound and difficult aspects of human experience.

©Linda Plaisted, “Last Rite of Passage”, There is no sacred rite for the neverborn. There is no funeral service. No memorial, nor eulogy. No rite of passage from this world to the next. There is no grave. There are no sympathy cards, no flowers, no condolences. There is only the gaping hole in the world love was meant to inhabit.

©Linda Plaisted, “To Save The Only Life That You Could Save”, Every choice has consequences. But they were my choices to make. My decision not to have children when I was younger, my decision to have my son in my mid thirties, and my twins at age 40. I was advised to have an amniocentesis due to my age and as a carrier of a potentially fatal metabolic disorder. There were life or death consequences no matter my choice. I decided not to look upon my daughter’s body after birth, instead to focus on my living baby. I chose to make April 23 a birthday for my daughter, not a funeral for the dead. I chose to go on living after she died to save the life of her sister. In the end, I had to save the only life that I could save — my own. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fi ngers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voice behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life that you could save. -Mary Oliver

©Linda Plaisted, “The Lost Chapters”, I have no pictures of my daughter to show you. I never even got to see her, except on an ultrasound screen. There is no baby book to celebrate her milestones. No footprint, no lock of hair. Only this hole in my heart where she should be. Emerson, too, was born with a hole in her heart. Known medically as a patent ductus arteriosus, her heart did not develop properly due to the trauma of the amniocentesis event and death of her twin, so the tiny hole that should have closed at birth never did. Years went by and she developed other congenital defects from that fateful moment, including countless broken bones, chronic illnesses and developmental delays. The needle and the damage done… My daughter lost a lifetime with her soul companion and I lost all those years expressing the best part of my own soul — my creativity.

©Linda Plaisted, “Visionary”, We told Emerson about her sister when she was old enough to understand. She had many questions and also many times when she told us that Rowan was there with her. Throughout her childhood, it seemed that she was always searching for her other half everywhere she went. In preschool she befriended a little girl who looked almost exactly like her and even had a similar name. For years, she came home with other little substitutes, but no one could ever take the place of her lost twin.

©Linda Plaisted,”The Girl Who Lived”, In the Harry Potter series, Harry is famously known as “The Boy Who Lived” because he was the only one to survive the Killing Curse, an unblockable spell, attempted by Lord Voldemort when Harry was a baby. He lost both parents and was himself visibly scarred for the rest of his life, but what did not kill him made him stronger. My Emerson is The Girl Who Lived. Oddly, it seems that title could apply to me too. Our wounds may not be as obvious as a zigzag scar across the forehead, but we have not escaped untouched by fate; both its curses and its gifts.

©Linda Plaisted, “Lost at Sea”, It took other powerful griefs to break me open from those years of suspended animation. It has only been since embarking on a heroine’s journey of healing that I have allowed myself to confront this long-repressed, ravaging ghost that has haunted us. Catalyzed by society’s overwhelming current zeitgeist of collective grief and despair, I have worked to incorporate the shadow aspect into my artistic practice. Unfelt feelings and ungrieved traumas are responsible for much of the dis-ease and dysfunction in our world. We are so often set adrift to face the world alone. It’s time to turn and face our past hurts so that we are better able to love ourselves and others, and to handle what the future brings; both the sorrows and the joys. In this work, I used photographs of my daughter layered with paper collage elements and newly-photographed image fragments to refl ect the ephemeral nature of our memories and the very fragility of our bodies and souls. Paper is so easily destroyed by fi re, fl ood and the ravages of time, yet ironically the repository of our most treasured holdings- records of birth and death, family photographs, scrapbooks and cherished letters. Like us, these fragile papers can be treasured for future generations or swept away in an instant.

©Linda Plaisted, “The Last Day of Girlhood”, In this series, Lost and Found, I am re-interpreting photographs from my archives because, just as the shoemaker’s children have no shoes, my daughter does not like being photographed- by me or anyone else. This is a shame because she has an innate aesthetic sense for how to embody the moment in front of a camera. She is an old soul who has already experienced more loss and overcome more adversity than many twice her age and that imprint lingers. Sensitive like her mother, and fi erce, she will look you in the eye and demand answers. Her healing journey will be lifelong and I, born 40 years before her, will only be here to hold her hand for a brief part of the way. Emerson turns 18 and graduates from high school next month, so this is a full circle moment for both of us. My goal is to convince her to do a milestone photoshoot with me once again to mark this rite of passage, so that we can move on into the future together, come what may.

©Linda Plaisted, “Underworld”, All those years ago, the trauma of grief came down like a guillotine, completely severing my connection to self expression. Years passed- decades- and I thought that part of me was dead and gone forever. In the Autumn of 2022, when my firstborn son left home for college, I went back to school too. I began working on excavating my lost self, embodying my grief and working through all the years of repressed emotions. The months that followed were intensive dark work; haunting the underworld searching for my lost self. I practiced meditation, journaling, water exercise therapy, reading, research, time spent in nature, meetings, tearful zoom calls, finding my voice through singing, and somatic movement work to root out all the stored pain in my body. Slowly, I started to restore the broken connection to myself. I began taking tentative creative baby steps again, creating a new body of work for the first time in years- a series of images emerged about women standing up and stepping back into their power. At the beginning of 2023, I half-heartedly entered this work in a local show and was accepted. Then I entered a few regional shows- yes and yes. Then I created an unflinching new series about racial injustice and throughout 2023 I heard yes after yes from galleries and publications around the country. That series became a Photolucida Critical Mass fi nalist in my fi rst year back to creating again- a powerful affi rmation that I was back on my path. New series emerged. I sent those out into the world too. Inevitable rejections came along with the affi rmations, but there was momentum. There still is. What once was lost, now is found. After so many years living underground, I now wake up every day thankful to be creating; grateful to have found my way back to myself and into the light.