On Not Knowing

Here’s to forgetting and remembering and creating anew

“She doesn’t know how she knows them: she just does.”

~Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

Dear Friends,

Some time ago, I had the strongest sensation of connecting with my daughter’s baby-in-waiting, a mental quickening. Let’s call it a dream. (It was not). She was then 36 weeks-in-utero. I kept expecting the phone to ring to let me know my daughter was in labor.

But no, not yet.

I had a brief mental picture of the world into which this baby is being born: Chaotic. Breaking. On fire.

I asked her if she knew what she was getting into.

“I know,” she told me. “Here, there is mystery. And reckonings. Forgetting and remembering.”

On the verge of giving birth, her second pregnancy, Anne Hathaway (Agnes Shakespeare) could see it—at her deathbed her two children would be by her side.

And yet, even with this knowing, life would unspool in unexpected ways.

There is not much on the record about Agnes: birth, marriage, children, death. The usual church records of account for a seventeenth-century Englishwoman.

Hamnet brings us her spirit. Shakespeare’s wife had uncanny abilities, the gifts of a healer. A seer. A life lived off the Globe stage. But very much on a stage of her own.

It is her story that demands our attention in this time.

Maggie O’Farrell’s tale is fiction, of course, since women’s lives were not considered worthy of documenting, unless they were royals. Even Shakespeare’s women were played by men on stage.

As Hamnet writes Agnes into life, the author imagines a spirited woman who lives in a fully-realized world beyond what mere records hold. She shows us what was true for many women in everyday Elizabethan England, creating a tale of birth and death, marriage and home, love and tragedy, poverty and pestilence.

Like Agnes, I don’t know how I know things. I just do.

You see, I have just found, in the weeds of one of my many journals, a long-forgotten 2010 entry that reads like this:

I believe I can see into the future—I glimpsed what seemed to be a short time from now where I had grandchildren (three, or four)—I don’t know if these were my sons’ or my daughter’s kids, or whose, but they definitely were/are/exist/will be.

I breathe into the mystery, even as my thinking brain seeks out answers.

Eastern philosophers speak of the Akashic records—a vast library that contains all possibilities, past-present-future. It can be understood as an invisible web of all of time—every record. Every detail. A Book of Life.

Modern physics offers its own mysteries: a universe in which information appears woven into reality in ways we do not yet fully understand.

At the time of that journal entry, sixteen years ago, my children were 24, 21, and 16, respectively. None of them had serious partners at that stage—it would be another nine years before my older son would marry.

And yet. . .now, I am about to become a grandmother for the third time.

I have been forgetting and remembering.

In O’Farrell’s tellings, Agnes Hathaway is an odd one. She tames hawks. Raises herbs and flowers. Whispers to trees. And feels in to people’s bodies, their ailments, to create just the right healing compounds.

In public, town’s folk count her a witch. In private, they seek her cures.

After they marry, Will himself erupts in exasperation at Agnes’s uncanny insights, saying it is both a blessing and a curse to be married to, “Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself.”

Uncannily, she possesses that same sense into herself.

After finishing the film, the play, the book, I came away with a foretelling of my own. Because, in truth, witnessing how Agnes’s intuition plays out, it is the tale of the children that sticks in me.

Through Agnes, we get this:

“She is with child, she feels. There will be another baby in the house by the end of winter. [Agnes] has always known how many children she will have. She has foreknowledge of this: she knows there will be two children of hers standing at the bed when she dies. And here is the second child now, its first sign, its very beginning.”

Shaped by this foresight, when her second pregnancy delivers her twins, she feels a new foreboding:

“She remembers with ice-cold clarity the image she had of two figures at the foot of the bed where she will meet her end. She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible that one of her children will die... But she will not have it. She will not. She will fill this child, these children, with life. She will place herself between them and the door leading out...”

In O’Farrell’s retelling, her uncanny insight—and trust of her intuition—reveals a possibility that Agnes could not see for the shadows that hid her future: a child taken too soon—the plague sparing two young lives, Susannah and Judith, but not the boy, Judith’s twin.

Not Hamnet.

At the time of giving birth, she understood none of this.

Her knowingness was not all-knowing.

In a world narrowed by fear, ignorance and punishment, this woman, Agnes, lived fiercely into her gifts of knowing, of seeing—and even so, she was forced to grapple with the consequences of all she could not foresee.

In the end, Agnes’s knowing is embodied. She concocts remedies from herbs and plants. She listens to trees. Her hands feel for disease, and reach for cures.

In her day, healers trusted what they could read from nature. Sometimes, they would feel it in their bones.

Sometimes, it would punch them in the gut.

Our bodies often register information before conscious thought catches up.

The information, when it reaches our brain, must be interpreted. It may reflect past circumstances. Discernment is necessary.

And the filtering process that sorts gut intuition with what our brains know to be true often requires tapping into our hearts to respond in kind.

There may be lag times.

Even with this, I recall an earlier, darker impression. A pregnancy that ended in miscarriage at sixteen weeks. A baby, Belle. About whom I received this, in another knowing:

I’m very sorry.
This was not her time.
Tell your daughter to have heart.
All will be well.
Belle is looking out for her and them.

When this new soul came to me that night, I had to ask: What of that other baby?

I knew her in passing. Belle is busy elsewhere.

I felt her quickening.

She said no more but kept nudging my knowing with her spirit. “Indomitable” is the word I heard, but I don’t know if that came from her, or from an ancestor I have been researching.

I woke up with the feeling of finding a new family connection. A new part of our family constellation.

A great tragedy cannot be undone by the birth of more children.

And perhaps it is better that we don’t know what we cannot know. Seeing everything the future holds for us would stop us from living.

Agnes tried mightily to save her Judith from death. She applied all her healing arts and none more so than the mightiest act of all. Love.

And something more: free will.

In Hamnet, had Judith’s twin not vowed to switch places with his sister, to save her from death, what then? In the echo of a game they played as children, he hid himself in her place and bade Fate to choose him.

This was something Agnes could never foresee.

Out of such loss could yet come an act of re-creation. In O’Farrell’s telling, the death of Hamnet, and the depth of grief, of grieving—not just his mother’s, but his father’s as well—led to the creation of one of the greatest stage tragedies of all time, William Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet.

Love created new life. Not perfectly. Not a replacement.

But enough to go on.

Baby-to-be indeed has a big sister, P. who, though she came five weeks early, came out strong. Healthy. And now, she is a very engaging, busy, soon-to-be big sister, almost 20 months old.

P. doesn’t know what’s in store. How her life is about to change.

In fact, what the story of Hamnet shows is none of us do.

Here, there is forgetting. And remembering.

A quiet coda

On the birth of new granddaughter V.

Welcome, sweet baby girl, who’s arrived in her own good time. To a family awaiting you with open arms and love—whatever comes. And to your dear mama and daddy, and big sister P.

If there is one thing Hamnet understands, it is this: knowing is never the opposite of uncertainty.

We may glimpse possibilities. We may feel into the energy of all possibility before it arrives. Always, life asks us to meet it as it comes—holding open our hands, minds, and hearts.

In this way, there is a certain comfort in not knowing, that we know we can welcome whatever may come. To continue to create. And to wonder into becoming.

The future remains a mystery. It requires our being prepared to meet whatever comes our way. And our willingness to love our way into it.