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.

Integration: the work of grief

I'm 41 years old. I've had some grief in my life. I lost my Dad at 56 years old, 2 uncles, 4 grandparents, numerous friends and classmates. I've sought counseling when the going got hard. I hadn't heard about integration, though. Now I hear it from my therapist, from the support group leader, in books and videos about losing a child. Integration: this is a familiar word that I am now learning has another meaning.

As time passes and the weeks as a babylost mom add up, the starkness of the situation fades a bit. If I'm not paying attention, it can seem so normal, so much like life before, at least in the macro sense (and if you don't count all the wailing and sobbing). I am checking off tasks each day. Some mundane: laundry, groceries, mother our son, go to work, feed the dogs, pay the bills. But then, some things that we are only doing because we lost our baby girl: confirm the minister for her memorial service, go to the post mortem meeting with the maternal fetal medicine specialist, book a room for the service and dinner afterwards. Next I'll be searching for readings and finding a suitable invitation for the service. All of these I am glad to do. They are all I can do for Chiara now. But as I click through the list, feeling somewhat productive, it occurs to me how awful it is, that these are the tasks I am focused on this fall. In between the therapist appointments, the support group, the acupuncture, the doctor's appointments, there are all these little details borne out of wanting to honor her memory.

I see that charting my path through these tasks begins the work of integrating her loss into the fabric of my life, of my being. This means accepting her death, while still craving her presence inside me.

Delivering Chiara

I have finally been able to complete the story of Chiara's delivery. It is just a day shy of six weeks since we lost her. Mondays continue to be excruciating (the day we learned she was gone). Tuesdays are a challenge, too (the day I delivered her). Here is our story:

What a strange thing to wait around your house for the hospital to call, waiting for them to tell you it's time to come deliver your dead baby. In between the sobbing and the worried calls from friends and family and nebulizer treatments for your sick toddler you are sitting on your couch, in time that feels unreal. And then the call doesn't come. So you have to call them. Then you find out that the worst thing you'll ever have to do is scheduled for 1:30pm that day.

We said our goodbyes to our son and my Mom who would watch him for the night, packed our bags into the car, and left for Boston. We waited in the labor and delivery waiting room. The charge nurse came and got us and brought us into the delivery room. The sight of the baby warmer sent me immediately into tears, made it more real that our little girl would not need to be warmed. We were seen by the doctor from our practice and by a labor and delivery nurse who specializes in cases of infant loss. I was glad to have her with us to guide our way. Around 2pm I started the first round of Cytotec for induction. In the next hours we were visited many times by the doctor and nurse, by a social worker, and by the anesthesiologist. We confirmed our plans for an autopsy with cremation to follow. We discussed names for the baby. We settled on Chiara Astra. Chiara is the first part of my Grandmother's maiden name, Chiaravalotti. It means clear and bright. Astra means star. Her name means clear, bright star. We had thought of Chiara early on in my pregnancy, but had vetoed it because it felt very girly. For our daughter who will always be a baby, it was perfect.

After several more rounds of Cytotec, around 7pm, I started to feel heavy cramping. By 8pm I was in a lot of pain and asked for pain medication. I did not want an epidural. I'm a bit of a wimp when it comes to needles in the back. They gave me Nubain, which is pretty weird stuff. It dulled, but did not eliminate the pain. It also made me emotionless and a little out of it. After the Nubain, I was able to sleep a little.

I woke around 11:40pm to a different sensation in my belly, not so much pain as pressure and movement. Then my water broke. I had a c-section with my first pregnancy, so I wasn't prepared for what this felt like, for the warmth. Of course the fluid would be warm from my body, but I hadn't considered that, so it was a surprise. My husband called the nurse. The baby came easily. As the doctor examined her, she noted that the her umbilical cord was quite narrow as it entered her body, and that the cord was very twisted. The nurse went to untwist the cord, but the doctor said to leave it, as it would be important for them to look at it during the autopsy.

The nurse wrapped our baby in a blanket we had brought and we held her immediately. She was only 6.4 oz. and 7 inches long. She was fully formed. I loved her feet and was amazed at her long legs. I had been very afraid of how she would look, but it did not matter. She was my baby, and I wanted to hold her. We took photos, and I am glad we did. They are so sad, we look just devastated, but I am grateful to have them. On the days when I just can't believe what's happened to us, they are helpful. We sang to her, The Rainbow Connection, her big brother's favorite song. She had probably heard it every night that she grew inside me. The nurse took her to measure and dress her and then brought her back. She stayed with us all night in our room.

I woke in the morning around 6am and just wanted to get home. We were able to leave the hospital around 10am and we said our last goodbyes to Chiara immediately before leaving. I hated watching them wheel her away. I longed to have her back inside me.

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.