Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (22 page)

Three months after Oliver died I was sitting at a friend’s house—a very pregnant friend—listening to her talk about her current situation. I sat there listening and I wanted so badly to say, yeah, I know what you mean. I know what that’s like. But I couldn’t. For her sake. Because of my head-heart battle. And because there was a stranger
in the room. By stranger I mean, acquaintance who may or may not know my sad song. It’s hard to start a sentence with, “When I was pregnant…” if you’re petrified of answering the possible and probable follow-up questions.

The thing is, obviously, I don’t mind talking about Oliver. Life without him is my constant existence, so it never feels like a shocking secret to let out. It is what it is. But I fear for the poor unsuspecting folks. I hate to bring them down. (And after having had my first instance of unleashing my truth on an unknowing innocent, I know how it feels, for me and for them. It. Feels. Awful.) I mean, I’d like to think, oh well, it’s the truth, and if I have to live it every day, who cares how they react. But, I also believe people have the right not to be blindsided by dead baby talk over fondue.

Maybe it’s one of those things that will get easier with time. With practice. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe it will always be the battle between wanting to honor my time with Oliver (for the good and the bad) and wanting to protect those around me from my tragedy.

Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this, though. To give myself permission to keep those nine months. I’ve already lost Oliver; I can’t lose the only time I had with him, too. I don’t want to forget what it was like to have him here with me. I want to recount the numerous times I sent Daniel out, demanding macaroni and cheese or Hawaiian pizza. I hope I’ll always remember listening to my students propose names like Shiny and Fruit Bar and Fire Lord. I can’t forget Daniel feeling Oliver move. I refuse to forget what it was like to be that happy. To be that full of joy and laughter and discomfort and expectation. No matter what I’ve lost, I still have that.

And I know it can be done. That kids gone too soon can still be a part of the present life in a way that is joyous and loving and real. And I have to believe it will get easier, that my armor will strengthen and I’ll be able to talk about Oliver with family, with friends, and even with strangers, releasing myself of the responsibility for their feelings and reactions. I’ll be able to tell his story, our story, and ensure that he is not only his death. He is his life.

Angie M. Yingst

I
am wearing a pink gown, the opening in the front. I am grateful for that small gift—back openings makes me feel so vulnerable and undignified. There is a paper blanket covering my legs. My shaking hands fumble with the thinness. I tear a hole in the thigh. It is not meant to keep me warm, I remind myself. There is a blood stain on it already. I lean back on the table. There is a skylight over the stirrups. The rain falls like a war drum, hard, without rhythm, but persistent. The wet leaves cover the bottom of the skylight.

Nature keeps falling, water and leaves. Dead things that look alive. I stare at the counter. Purell and ultrasound gel. A Pap smear kit, and non-latex gloves. A black bird flies over the building. It looks like a shadow of a happier bird, something predatory but special. I know the baby is dead before he tells me. I have imagined the baby dead in all the moments I am not actively thinking she might be alive. But I wait for him to say it aloud.

The doctor tells me it looks like a miscarriage. I am twelve weeks pregnant, but the lab work and the bleeding and the ultrasound without a heartbeat suggest an empty sac. The baby is gone—perhaps it was never there. A paradox I may never unravel. My uterus growing and believing, even while I am stunted and cynical.

The doctor convinces me to go for another ultrasound because of the trauma of Lucy’s death. He thinks I should see there is no heartbeat again. He said, “Just so you know, deep within you, that we did not make a mistake.” And I tell him steadily without tears
in my voice that I held my dead baby and I still thought it was a mistake. Her skin was torn and growing colder, and I thought she would live again. She was six pounds, and twenty inches long, and I was in labor. Not early labor. Not false labor, but the labor of full-term babies. I thought there was some system-wide error when they couldn’t find her heartbeat. She could still come back, if someone did something other than mourn and dim the lights. I thought I could puff my lungs up, cover her nose and lips, and breathe life back into her, as though the doctors and nurses hadn’t quite thought of that yet. “She just needs some air,” I wanted to explain. “We just need to remind her to breathe.”

Sometimes I still think that perhaps we cremated her too soon.

I watched a hawk chase a raven, diving and attacking. It was a spectacular show above us as we hiked through the woods to a waterfall. We all stopped and gawked. I bent over in the first bangs of unbearable cramping. The ravens have been around me all this month, waiting for the death in me to escape. The ravens swoop low, cross in front of my car, reminding me that I can lose once, lose twice, I could lose them all. It has been an unkindness of omens—dead baby birds on my front steps, and ravens stopping me in the street, daring me to hit them. Maybe I should call the nevermore baby, Raven, the blackness, the hole within me.

I received an e-mail from another woman who lost her only son. Stillborn like my second daughter Lucy. It arrived just as I began bleeding. “Your life is beautiful, so beautiful now. You have another child, a son, like my son. And your older daughter. Do you appreciate it? I think you do. I appreciate it, but I can’t bear it. I have to look away. It is painful how beautiful your life is.” It is beautiful, even though our daughter died, even though the last child is dead now. I made something else out of her death—a life I always wanted to live. I understand if someone can’t bear it. Joy reminds me of grief too. Happy reminds me of sad. And besides, two children is something, I get that. Two living children cover the holes where the others were. You’d never notice if you didn’t search for the spaces where others
were supposed to be, if you didn’t read our stances and our smiles. It would be hard not to believe the lies we are telling in our photographed smiles. My dead outnumber my living now, but still two children is not all of your children dead. I do appreciate it.

What I wanted to say, though, is that we still suffer. We have a beautiful life, but we still suffer.

They search my womb, and they don’t find the baby. The technician says the baby is dead, even though she is not supposed to say it aloud. Words I needed to hear. In moments, I begin the process of miscarriage, passing clots and tissue. As though my body was holding on to her until someone could speak the truth that she died. The little dot inside of me that was growing once is gone now. The children would ask me how big she is every day. And I would tell them the size of an olive, the size of a lime, the size of a peach. But she was no size—just my womb grew, making space for an unkindness. She is an empty space now. A hole of what could have been.

I thought I could slip under the radar with one more quick baby, like Fate could turn her attention somewhere else for a quick nine months. “The last time. The only time. One chance,” I said to my husband. “One more chance at one more child, then nevermore.”

I know what I know and I still got baby greedy. I still thought somewhere in me that things would end differently. I am not ranking my sadness, but this is a small grief compared to Lucy. Lucy died, and I held her. I felt like I knew her—she was in my womb for thirty-eight weeks, nary a thought of life without her. I never imagined her dead in those thirty-eight weeks. But my little raven died, and I only ever imagined her dead. (It didn’t help the pain.)

Perching on the fence in my backyard, like the raven, Grief waits for the physical pain to subside to invite himself into our home again. I reacquaint with Grief, another stodgy old raven wearing black. He is silent, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, sitting by my office door, whispering, “Nevermore.”

This piece was originally published on the website
Glow in the Woods
, May 2012.

Forever Held
Jen Hannum

Colleen Lutz Clemens

I
remember the last thing I said while my baby still sat inside me. “I’m not a doctor, but I think you are supposed to wait.”

I lay on the operating table. Earlier, the kind nurse warned me that the room would be cold. Goosebumps popped on my arm as the mean nurse wheeled me into the operating room. I had been spared a D and C after the first miscarriage. This time I needed the surgery. She, big-boned and brusque, wanted to take my blood from me before the anesthesia took effect. The kinder pre-op nurses all had tried and failed. My fertility doctor, whom I had now known for three years, decided I had endured enough and ordered that the bloodletting wait until I was adequately numbed. My new nurse, annoyed and impatient, didn’t like to be told what to do, but did wait until I counted back to ninety-seven from one hundred.

Looking back I wish I had said, “Can’t you let me have this last minute with my baby? Why not shove that needle into my hand since nothing can hurt more than what I feel?” But instead I remained silent and lay on my back, hearing the machines beep and staring at the white, sterile room until I didn’t see it anymore. I awoke with no baby inside of me, and a hematoma on my hand. I wonder if that bruise wasn’t payback for my back talk.

The first time I heard the heartbeat inside of me, I imagined a little girl. I saw her long hair at her first birthday party. I saw her riding a horse. I saw her going to the prom. Before her heartbeat stopped, I imagined an entire life with her. The doctor needed to take
her from my body to figure out why she didn’t make it, to try to make sure the third time would be the charm.

Minutes before the surgery, I had signed a stack of forms. In a sea of legalese, one form was memorable: the burial form. It asked for the signature of the parent—that was the first time I had been addressed by that title by someone other than myself. I had only seen her in my imagination. I was always out of view. But her mother would be there at the birthday party, the horse lesson, and the pre-prom hours.

After two years of fertility treatments, I was finally a parent—a parent of a dead baby, but a parent all the same. The burial form asked us whether we wanted to be notified when her remains had been “taken care of.” The parental consent line sat empty. Was it ridiculous to know when the ashes were buried? How many ashes could that little being make? One or two. Something that would float by in the air and one may not even notice. A fleck. A piece of dust. I wanted that piece of dust back inside me where it could grow into something bigger. But she was already gone.

I can understand the people who choose not to know about the baby’s remains, who make a vain attempt at forgetting their trauma and moving on without thinking about that ash. But I checked the “yes” box. I imagined the day when I would open the mailbox to find the card that told me our baby had been buried, her ash mixed in with all of the other dead babies’ ashes, making the saddest pile I can imagine. I imagined that moment would allow me to move on: the moment of closure when I could finally rest, finally be able to live again in a world where babies are born and statistics can also work in one’s favor.