Capture Your Grief: Days 6 and 7

Day 6: What NOT to Say

I've been pretty lucky. People have been mostly kind. The worst thing that's happened to us is that a colleague I ran into 2 days after losing our daughter said NOTHING. She acted like nothing happened at all. I was shocked. She'd signed the office card. I knew she knew, but for whatever reason, she couldn't acknowledge our loss. It was very painful. We were in a public park, taking a walk before a support group meeting. I went under a tree and cried, and thought, so this is how it is going to be: people will pretend it didn't happen. I'm pretty sure that I knew this before, but now I will never forget: all you have to say is, I'm sorry for your loss. How hard is that?

Day 7: What to Say

My friend Tania said this. It was over a month after Chiara died, and as she said it, she burst into tears. Then I burst into tears. It was the most beautiful, kind thing that someone has said to me. I will always be grateful to her for being brave and sharing my grief. 

Say Her Name

A friend emailed me last week to say that she had had a dream about Chiara (sounds like: Key-are-uh). I was so grateful to read her name: Chiara. We don't say it often. When I do say her name, it makes me cry. It opens the wound. But still, it feels so good. It is proof that she was here with us, that someone else besides us remembers her. I am so afraid anytime someone asks her name, I have to muster my strength to reply, and it always comes with tears. It makes me feel very vulnerable.

But I do love it when someone says her name to me. I love it when Justin and I use her name with each other. Stellan, our 2 year old, doesn't know her name yet. We have not been brave enough to tell him, have not progressed beyond "baby sister". I just haven't been ready to hear her name on his lips. We have weathered the questions about where she is, does she like to eat blueberries, does she drive a car, and why can't she be with us. I have watched his face, which used to light up with the mention of his baby sister, used to shine with the wonderful secret of her impending birth, change to reflect the confusion he feels. Why no baby sister? She wasn't growing. Why not? Why not, indeed. I want her, he says. I want her too, I tell him.

This coming weekend we'll attend a walk in remembrance of lost babies and I think that's where we'll introduce her name to him. I'm really looking forward to seeing other couples and families and being able to just be who we are, be sad, and to remember our beautiful girl: Chiara.

Where a week can take you

Last week at this time I was peacefully sleeping, preparing to spend a Sunday with my husband and 2.5 year old son cleaning the house. It was a boring, mundane day in the life of our small family. Put away the toys, vacuum the dog hair, wash the floors, do the laundry. I was 21 weeks 5 days pregnant with our second child, a girl. It had not been an easy pregnancy, I had hyperemesis with my first, and while there was less actual throwing up this time, the nausea was pretty debilitating and my apetite had been poor since the start of the pregnancy. Anyway, back to last Sunday, which right now seems a million years ago. I can't even remember the final details of the day, but I know we ate corn on the cob, green beans and tomatoes for dinner. It was a lovely summer supper. Then we went to bed early.

The next day we had a follow-up ultrasound scheduled at 2pm. I worked in the morning and we drove to Boston together. We were nervous. At our last scan our baby, a girl, was measuring about 2 weeks behind normal growth for her gestational age. At the scan before that they had found a hyperechoic bowel. We had been referred by our obstetrician to the maternal fetal medicine practice at Brigham and Women's Hospital for a consult. We got in to see them as soon as possible and ended up doing an amnio at 19 weeks in order to test for CMV and for any chromosomal issues that might be causing the signs we were seeing. So we were nervous going the appointment, hoping our little girl had grown and that things were looking up. The ultrasound practice was very busy, and we had to wait over a half hour. We were then brought into an exam room and the technician started the scan. The room was completely quiet. My husband was holding my hand. We were very scared to hear anything. After only a moment, the doctor came in and within a minute of looking at the screen she said, "I'm sorry I don't have very good news for you, your baby has no heartbeat."

We fell apart. We were so afraid she wasn't growing right but we had just not considered that she wouldn't even be alive anymore. They let us have the room for a few moments to console each other and to prepare to make our way across the hall to our obstetrician's office. Once we got there, we were whisked into one of the doctor's offices and waited to hear about what would happen next. Our doctor was on vacation, so we met with one of her partners. She led us through our options. It was very important to us to deliver the baby so that she would be as intact as possible, and so that I wouldn't have to undergo any unnecessary surgery. We also wanted another ultrasound to confirm that her heart had stopped beating. I had still felt movement over the weekend and even that day, but the doctor explained that that is very common. I felt so foolish, having considered the movement such a positive thing. It gave me hope over the past weeks, even through the worry. How much I miss it now that my belly is empty.

We opted to go to the hospital to prepare for an induction the following day. We'd be able to go home and sleep for the night in our own bed, see our 2.5 year old son, and then come back in the morning. I desperately wanted to keep her inside me, I was not ready to let her go at all and would have considered letting it all happen naturally. I was so afraid that if we did that, we would jeopardize our chances of learning how she had died. A scheduled induction seemed the best of the terrible options: we would hopefully deliver her intact, avoid surgery, and get to hold our baby and say goodbye to her in a safe environment where help was near if we needed it. We left the hospital and headed home, stopping by the pharmacy to pick up my second dose of misoprostol and some ativan.

On the way home, I called my Mom, and a couple of friends to break the news. My husband phoned his parents.

My Mom brought our son home shortly after we'd arrived. She said she thought he had a temperature, so we took it. 104.5! A quick call to his doctor and we were back in the car and off to the the pediatric non-urgent care. An hour and a half later, after one nebulizing treatment, a prescription for amoxicillin, and some ibuprofen, we were on our way home. Five minutes into the drive home my Mom yelled "pull over!", so we did. Looking into the back seat, my son, who had been happily chattering away a moment before, was now frozen, his eyes rolled to one side, his hands jerking. A seizure. His first. On this night.

We all yelled, "call 911," but in our panic, no one was doing it. I was the most free, not driving or tending to our son, so I called. My Mom got my son out of his car seat to hold him. He was spitting stuff up. My husband turned and drove back to the non-urgent care and I called an ambulance. None of us knew what this was at first. I was afraid it was a reaction to the meds we'd just given him. We made it to the doctor and banged on the door to be let in. A janitor let us in and the one doctor left in the place looked after our son while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. At that point, my mind just stopped. I focused all my energy on our dear son, telling him that his Mommy was right there, and that we love him, that he didn't have to be afraid. I forgot for a few minutes that our other cherished child, our daughter, was lost forever in the sea inside me and would emerge tomorrow, not breathing. Our son slowly came to, was awake and watching, but still not speaking or responding. I boarded the ambulance and held his hand as we made our way to the emergency room.

Its taken me 2 week to get this post finished. It's only the beginning of our story, but it's enough for now.

Trying to Make Sense of Things

It's six o'clock in the morning on the third day since we lost you, our beautiful Chiara Astra, at 22 weeks, long before you were supposed to be born. I woke to my own tears after all-night dreams of how we can preserve and honor the memory of your too-brief time in our lives. I gave all my ativan-tainted sleep over to this project and still emerged with nothing.

Two recurring memories I have right now are of similar things I have seen in nature that moved me, before I was a mother. When I was around 25 years old, I visited San Clemente Island in the Channel Islands off of southern California. I was living on Catalina island at the time, and this was a weekend adventure for the staff of the marine institute where I worked. We made some great dives and snorkeled with the sea lions in the colony there. On our very first dive, we dropped to the bottom in about 70 ft. of water and the ocean bottom seemed to be moving. Tiny, waving arms were squirming in every direction, a carpet of pale pastel. When we got close enough, the wigglers revealed themselves as brittle stars. Many hundreds of thousands of them covering the ground of the sea floor. Magical. I remember nothing else we saw on that dive.

But that is not the memory of the trip that keeps recurring in my mind. The memory I see is one from the land. One I saw through binoculars as I watched the huge colony of California Sea Lions make their way around the edges of the island. There were lots of cows and pups and big males, too. The sight that struck me most then and sticks with me during these days of my zombie-like grief is that of a mother sea lion carrying her dead pup around in her mouth. Even as I write this it breaks my heart again. Her need to still be close, or confusion at the pup's stillness, lack of warmth, and her inability to let it go, all filled me with great sadness, and perhaps some repulsion, too.  It was on the edge of what I could understand at the time, and seemed more grotesque curiosity than relatable. That has now changed.

The second memory is of a safari at Motswari Reserve outside of Krueger National Park in South Africa. My husband and I were there in 2009. We saw so much, so many of the creatures we'd dreamed of seeing all of our lives. We watched a group of lions stalk and kill a warthog, and then sat within 10 feet in an open vehicle as they devoured it. We felt the breath and the breeze wafting from an elephant's waving ears. We sat by as leopard cubs nursed in a shady spot in the bush, wrestling with each other and receiving gentle corrections from their mother. All of these extraordinary sights are not the ones that stick out in my mind.

Here's the one that does: there was a small lake we would drive by, it was a good place to see animals coming for a drink. On our last day we heard a lioness, but could not see her. Our guide explained that this particular animal had been coming for days to the waterhole and crying out, calling to her missing cub who had been eaten by a crocodile a few days before. Her keening roar could be heard each day. It is this lioness, and her mournful, lost cries that stick with me now. I relate to them. I am lost. I am calling to a baby who is no longer here.