Diary of a Loss

We were pregnant in 2007. A routine ultrasound at 20 weeks to confirm the gender of our daughter found that her heart was not beating and that she had died sometime in the week before. Instead of choosing to give birth to a stillborn five month old fetus, my husband and I chose a D&C under general anesthesia. This entry is a whole mess of philosophy and parenting and love and grief all rolled in to one. My hope in posting this message is to reach out to those who have experienced similar loss.

12 Jun 07 Tuesday

I think the hardest part of the whole day was walking out of the doctor's office. There you are for the world to see, this most private and internal pain pouring out of you. It felt like people were staring at me when I walked down the hallway. They could see me and they could sense my pain and it seemed to frighten them. My husband and I kind of supported each other as we walked through the building and then the parking lot. We were only holding hands, but the strength coursing between us kept our legs moving. Grief is such a personal thing. Like snowflakes, no two people grieve in the same manner, in the same way. We are all heading toward the same destination, peaceful acceptance, but our journeys always take different paths, like rivers flowing eternally toward the sea.

My husband was angry. He wanted to kill or fight or scream at people. He vacillated between this burning rage and an overwhelming sense of guilt. For some reason he felt like it was his fault. He kept asking me what he did wrong. I was so numb I could barely even respond. I tried to comfort him, but any gesture, physical or verbal, seemed to fall short of easing his pain. He drank so much last night that I thought he was going to kill himself. I even hid his anti-anxiety medication from him. He would tell me that he couldn't handle the pain but I just didn't have the strength to take it from him. I had to let him grieve in his own way.

I was in shock. I was numb, completely and utterly. I've heard people say such things before when something has happened to them, but I don't know if they meant it the way I did. My body was so entirely unresponsive I would stop breathing for moments at a time. Suddenly, it was as if I would wake up and then my breath would come again, deeply and quickly. That's all I thought about for a long time. Taking another breath. I don't remember the car ride home. I know we drove home. I know we stopped at the grocery store to buy wine and then a bookstore to buy a book on grief. I only really remember being angry at this man in front of us. He was sitting in the back of this grey pickup truck. His head was shaved and he wore glasses and a black shirt. He was very sweaty. The skin on his head gleamed like water on marble. It really irritated me for some reason and I just hated him. I absolutely hated him. Nothing would have given more pleasure than for the truck to have hit a bump and that man to fall out in the middle of the highway and be run over repeatedly by cars. I made my husband change lanes so I wouldn't have to look at him anymore.

I didn't want to drink my wine when we got home. I knew, in my mind, my baby was dead inside me and that it wouldn't matter. But, somehow, it just seemed disrespectful. It seemed wrong of me to drink. My baby's heart might no longer be beating, but I was still her mother even so. It was still my priority to keep her safe and comfortable, even if her little spirit was no longer with me. It might seem weird to some women who have never been pregnant to think that I have my dead baby inside of my body right now. They might find it disturbing or gross. I always thought that, before. When I read about other women who are going through, or who have gone through, the same thing, I always found it revolting to think they had to carry their dead children inside of them. It isn't gross. Its peaceful and healing. I get to hold my baby for a little bit longer. I get to keep her with me for awhile and say my goodbyes to her. I never got to hold her in my arms, but I will hold him forever in my heart.

People keep asking me what gender the baby is. After my doctor searched for twenty minutes (a lifetime) and couldn't find the heartbeat, that was a question I never asked. It didn't seem to matter to me anymore. It still doesn't, in a way. Part of me wants the confirmation so that I can grieve for my lost daughter. The other part of me doesn't care, because knowing the gender for sure won't change the fact that she is dead. Other people, who don't ask about the gender, ask me if I'm sure. Some of them ask if the doctors will check again before my procedure tomorrow, just to make sure. I try to explain to them that my doctor searched for what seems like an eternity. There was no heartbeat, there was no movement. My little baby just lay there in my belly as though she was sleeping. There is no doubt in my mind that she is gone. I was upset all weekend because I felt like something was wrong. I tried to tell my husband, but he shrugged it off and said that I was just being emotional, that I had read too many scary things on the internet. I agreed with him, I think out of false hope. When the doctor couldn't find the heartbeat right away, though, I knew the baby was gone. I knew it in my core and I was shaking so badly that I couldn't cry, or talk, or even breathe really.

I'm sure that everyone feels this way in a period of mourning or grief, but I feel particularly isolated. I have so few friends to begin with, people that I consider close and that I have bonded with or who know the deepest parts of my path. And out of those who are my closest friends, the vast majority of them are men. There is no way for a man to understand this kind of grief. There is really no way for a woman, even, to understand this grief unless she has suffered through it. Without really knowing what to do with it, I just opened up notepad and started typing. I guess I think that maybe when I write these things out on paper they might make more sense to me. Or to someone else who's lost a child.

Yesterday, after we found out, in between my numbness I had little bursts of pain, like summer showers. Little explosions of thunder and lightning shattered my peaceful stoicism. I suppose I can't use the word stoic. That implies some sort of intentional numbness or distance. I didn't intentionally feel nothing, my body sort of did it for me, as a survival mechanism. So in between these wonderful moments of unintentional peace, there would be these sharp little pangs of guilt and yearning. Guilt because I had desperately wanted my body back, I was so tired of watching what I ate and drank and being so careful about everything I did to my body. Yearning because I just didn't want this to be true. I wanted it to be some bad television show that I could just change the channel on and watch something nicer. These two little thunderclaps would supercharge my emotions and then that wonderful blanket of emotionless calm would surge over me and I would be safe again, safe from my own mind.

But then last night, in the middle of the night, my blanket of calm was stripped from me. I woke up with this painful yearning in my chest, in my heart, straining to give some of my life energy to the little lost baby inside of me. I kept thinking last night that if I tried hard enough, if I gave enough of myself, my little baby would suddenly wake up. I even felt it kick. I know I felt it kick. But I also know it was a phantom pain, like an amputee's itchy foot long after its been gone from his body. It feels like a part of me is dead, too, like a part of me has left this world. Mostly because this child was a part of me and still is, despite its early death. I nurtured it and I spoke to it and we lived together in our shared body. And we died together, too, in this body of mine.

Many women, so I've read, feel like their bodies failed them in times like these. I don't feel that way, for some reason. I have had healthy children before. I know that my body can sustain life and that I can give birth and mother so very well. This is probably why I feel so lost and confused, because I don't know what happened and I don't know who to blame. I don't think it was my body, but then I can't place my finger on what exactly it was. We may never know. It could have been anything, from an umbilical cord accident to an incompetent placenta. I do, occasionally, blame myself. Instead of it being my body's fault, maybe it was the fault of my soul, of my spirit. There has been so much sorrow and unhappiness in my life, that maybe the weight of that sadness crushed the fluttering spirit of my baby and it could do nothing but escape me. Perhaps the darkness in my soul suffocated that tiny life. I don't know if these thoughts comfort me, but they serve as a place for me to send my grief.

So I try to read this book that my husband bought for me. "Empty Cradle, Broken Heart." I devour it in the hopes that it can give me an answer or that it can dam up this torrent of grief that crashes into me like a tidal wave. It does nothing but put a name to my feelings. I'm not even sure if I'm ready yet to start dealing with my grief. I recognize it as such, but maybe if I try to console myself, that somehow does dishonor to my little lost baby. Maybe if I feel enough sorrow, regret, and pain, that this will never happen to another one of my children. I don't know about that, but I don't know about much of anything right now.