Kidney Love · Wiegenlieder meiner Schmerzen
A pause between movements: grief, belonging, and Brahms, after eight weeks of writing about AI.
A few days ago, a friend, my sister-in-law, Elizabeth Hobson, wrote here: “Another fascinating read Azra. I just hope you’re not shouting into the void.”
I gave birth to my youngest child when I was forty-five, exactly twenty-five years after I became a mom for the first time. I consider the months of my last pregnancy and the first two years of his life the best years of mine.
I was finally able to experience motherhood with a sense of safety, to give myself to its moments: the baby’s movements inside me, the haziness of pregnancy brain, the slowness of movement and thought carried without guilt, the long afternoons of a sunny Florida winter spent traveling through time in the pages of Outlander.
The impossible love story of Claire and Jamie Fraser carried me into eighteenth-century Scotland and colonial America while I was soaked in the tears of pregnancy and filled with anticipation. Like a time traveler myself, I was already immersed in love and tenderness for someone I had yet to meet.
I was in love with my unborn baby and I was finally safe, part of an American family who loved me: my in-laws, my sisters-in-law, my husband. I was part of a circle of love and I was, for the first time in my life, unmistakably belonging. A sturdy, iron-proofed state of belonging: to a person, a family, a country.
I breastfed my youngest son for two plus years. I pumped in my office while writing grants, on a flight to Germany, wherever I needed to. The hum of my rented “Cadillac” Medela breast pump and the bags for freezing breast milk were my companions. Less than two years after I stopped, I was in menopause.
I was alone in my grief, saying goodbye to the part of my womanhood that had made it possible to conceive, to give birth, to nourish a baby with my body. Goodbye to feeling my baby moving inside me, pressing his little feet against my ribs and abdominal wall. Goodbye to the feeling of milk flowing from me: the gentle pull, just at the edge of discomfort, and then the milk flowing, the release, the fulfillment, the feeling of growing someone within and with myself. I had never felt purpose and love so profoundly.
It was an end for me in some ways. Hormone replacement helped me regain enough joy to keep moving forward, still a mom to two young boys.
I still dream of breastfeeding my son or carrying a baby.
Exactly eleven years after I officially entered menopause, I woke up bleeding and panicked, then cried. I had been in a good place with myself. I was here, writing my third chapter and perhaps speaking into the void, but I was doing something towards feeling that purpose and love again.
And here I was again, with the echoes of the part of my womanhood I thought I had said goodbye to.
Yesterday I had a procedure, and the initial findings were reassuring. I am still waiting for the final results. But today, after eight weeks of thinking and talking about what it means to be human in the era of AI, I am taking a break from that conversation.
I needed a pause. A transition. An intermezzo.
In the nineteenth century, Romantic composers used “intermezzo” as a title for short, introspective piano pieces. In 1890, at fifty-seven, Brahms announced his retirement from composition. Yet during the summers that followed at Bad Ischl, he wrote some of his most intimate piano music. He called the three Intermezzi of Op. 117 the “cradle songs of my sufferings,” Wiegenlieder meiner Schmerzen. A year later, in 1893, he wrote the Intermezzo in E-flat minor, Op. 118, No. 6. In it, I hear a farewell: longing, lost friends, and the silence ahead.
One hundred and thirty-three years later, at sixty-one, I am listening. I think about the farewells I have already lived through, and how the body can remember what I thought I had accepted. I am preparing for the road ahead, anticipating the rainfall of farewells, hoping to meet them with some measure of peace.
While I recover, I offer you this intermezzo, my own cradle song of suffering.
Perhaps this, too, is a way of reaching someone.
Johannes Brahms, Intermezzo in E-flat minor, Op. 118, No. 6, played by Seong-Jin Cho:
The book. Outlander, Diana Gabaldon.
Diana Gabaldon’s 1991 novel. Claire Randall, a nurse in 1945, steps through standing stones into Scotland in 1743.
The song. Intermezzo in E-flat minor, Op. 118, No. 6, Johannes Brahms, played by Seong-Jin Cho.
The last of the six pieces of Op. 118, which Brahms dedicated to Clara Schumann. It is marked Andante largo e mesto, slow and sorrowful, and carries an echo of the Dies irae.
This essay first appeared in Kidney Love on Substack, 2 October 2026.