And Life Goes On

The first few days back from the hospital, I intermittently felt relatively normal and sometimes felt as if something was tearing at my insides. I constantly questioned why this baby girl, who was so loved and so wanted, had to die. She was perfect. She had always been growing on track. Every ultrasound had shown her to be growing normally without any defects.

Medical science has achieved so many wonderful things today. They can put a woman's eggs together with a man's sperm in a petri dish and the egg can be fertilized there. Outside a woman's body, where nature intended for the fertilization to happen. They can also take a baby born prematurely, as early as twenty four weeks of gestation, and put her in a little incubator in an intensive care unit and give her a fighting chance at survival. Such premature babies complete their gestation in the incubators, once again, outside their mothers' bodies. It makes me wonder how long it will be before they can handle the twenty two weeks or so in between and grow babies outside women's bodies all together.

My friends from my online support group sent me a little pot of yellow mini roses. At first, I thought that flowers were the last thing I wanted to see at that point. It was spring, and life was blooming everywhere. Little baby animals, new leaves, flowers of all colors and shapes, and all of it just served to remind me of the life that had just died inside me. It just seemed to be completely against the laws of nature to get pregnant in the fall and to lose the baby in the spring. I put the pot of roses just outside the side door to our house, where I could see them if I wanted to, but wouldn't keep running into them every now and then. I remembered that our neighbors across the street had had a poster on their front door announcing the arrival of their little girl a few weeks ago. Now we had a pot of roses announcing the loss of ours.

The roses stayed in their original pot, which was supposed to be a temporary pot, for a long time. I was not allowed to do any physical activity that would strain my abdomen. And I did not really want to look at them too much. So I put off finding a more permanent spot for the flowers for as long as I could.

A few days after the pregnancy ended, my breasts began to feel really huge and heavy. I had not really thought about this beforehand, but I knew what was happening. My body thought that since the pregnancy had ended, there was a baby to feed. And it was producing milk for that baby. I could just stand in the shower and cry. Some literature said that wearing a tight fitting sports bra helps with the situation, but it felt to me like it was just making it worse. So I just put up with the pain. The physical pain was nowhere near as great as the emotional impact of having a constant reminder that I was supposed to have a baby and that I had lost her forever.

My husband did all that he could to help me out during those initial few days. He did part of the cooking, he rented movies for me to watch while I was home, he ran all errands by himself. But there were days when he felt low and was very expressive about it. And there was nothing I could do or say to make him feel better. You would need to feel sane and composed yourself before you could do something to make another person feel better. His outbursts of emotion just served to make me feel even worse and even more helpless. I have always been somewhat introverted and felt even more uncomfortable than usual about sharing my feelings about the loss with him.

After I had been at home for a few days, my husband and I both thought that I needed to get out of the house, go out for short walks or trips to the grocery store, just to see if I felt like I had the stamina to go back to work. The first day I tried to go out for a short walk, it was still somewhat chilly outside, so I put on my coat. It was the first time in a few months that I was able to button down all of the buttons on my coat. Something like that would have been a very happy occasion in another day and age, like when I had been trying to lose weight. Not that day. Not in the least.

Long ago, when I was too young to actually understand something like miscarriage, I read a story in a women's magazine written by a woman who had experienced miscarriage and she wrote about how strange it is that we mourn the death of those who have lived a long and full life, but nobody really holds funerals or memorial services for babies lost to miscarriage. A life that had a lot of potential. A life that ended even before it began. A life that could have been something great. I can completely relate to that emotion now.

My husband spoke to a priest about a small prayer for the baby we were supposed to have. He said we didn't really need to pray for the soul to rest in peace, since the soul doesn't even enter the body that early on. But we could do a prayer for the baby anyway. The doctors also do not think of this being as a baby at this stage, they think of it as a fetus. It's a baby only after it has the capability to survive outside the womb. Maybe they are right about that, but you can't help believing that life had begun when you had seen the baby move around and heard a strong heartbeat on all the ultrasounds and you had even felt the baby move inside your belly.