Cover illustration by Fumi Mini Nakamura
After our sixth miscarriage, my partner, Louisa, and I, traveled to South Africa, Louisa’s home country, to conduct a funeral ceremony of sorts at the Big Hole in Kimberley, a gaping open-pit and underground diamond mine that was active from 1871 to 1914. In order to contextualize my grief—however inadequately, but essentially—I became obsessed with the history of the Big Hole which was, after all, the
actual context and physical space into which we decided to embed the ashes of our final miscarriage, and, in turn, this phase in our lives. I desperately wanted to know what the Big Hole, and all of the other stories it contained, could tell us about the parameters of our own; to find out, in part, what our grief was made of.