In a Different Place

Doug has posted a couple times about how things have been since Alexandria’s death. I figured I should also document my perspective because, as we are two different people, we are also in two different places in grief.

People ask us all the time how we are doing.. with an “it must be so hard” look on their faces. I have to say, August 10th – the day she was diagnosed – was the hardest day for me on this whole journey, not February 4th when she passed away. One minute Doug and I were discussing girl names and how the family would change with a girl presence. The next, I remember sitting in the OB’s office with my mouth hanging open while she explained the things they’d seen on ultrasound. I remember thinking “Oh my God.. this can’t be happening.” I remember Doug leaving the room for a moment (to call my parents to get them here asap) and me turning to her and saying “I don’t know if I can do this again.” I remember dry heaving… coughing… choking. When I finally had it together enough to go home, I remember being unable to go back through the waiting room where all the other pregnant women were sitting. We returned home without our kids (who were being watched by a friend in our old neighborhood). As the van door closed, Doug called out to our neighbors to come quickly. He left to get the boys while they sat with me hugging me, holding me as I sobbed. Then there were the phone calls to family. My parents came to look after the boys while I stayed in bed unable to be a part of a world that was going on as if this horrible thing had never happened.

Some mothers who carry babies with fatal diagnoses will tell you many times the diagnosis is more scary than the thought of losing their child. I think partly because it’s the day you find out the world as you know it is completely different than you hoped and dreamed for your child. It’s a day of complete unknown. By the time you get to your child’s death you’ve had months of anticipation of that very day and it’s no longer the huge shock it was when you found out.

I also think men and women have very different experiences. Women carry the baby in their bodies for the duration. You get to know your child in utero. There was not one second of one day that I could forget about Alex. She was with me all the time. Her diagnosis was with me all the time. There was no escaping or forgetting about it. Every kick, every hiccup. Every morning I’d wake up and maybe for a split second I’d think “We’re having a baby!” and then came the realization of the nightmare we were in.

With men, they really don’t bond or get to know the baby until birth. They go to work and get distracted. Maybe be able to forget about it for a while. It’s not living with them.

I spent 4 1/2 months anticipating Alex’s death prior to her birth. The Drs kept saying she could die at any time. At first I didn’t want to hope for her to be born alive. It seemed impossible. There were 20 more weeks to go.  Doug and I went in weekly for heartbeat checks and I held my breath waiting for the Dr to find it each time. I read story after story of women in the same situation who lost their babies after carrying them 22, 28, 32, 36, even 41 weeks. The closer we got to her due date the more I feared that my hope of her being alive would suddenly end – that she would be stillborn and I would never look into her eyes and have her hear how much I loved her. How much I wanted her.

We finally made it to our induction day. Even then I knew the odds of her making it through birth were not the greatest. We listened to her heartbeat a couple times but ultimately decided not to have heart monitoring during the birth. We felt if she started to have trouble there would be a franticness to the birth, perhaps a sense of helplessness if we knew she was dying as she was coming out. When she did make her way into the world she opened her eyes wide and looked around in wonder. I don’t remember any of my other kids doing that. They placed her on me. She was not breathing. I had an awful feeling she would never take a breath. She would die like this, laying on me, looking up at me while I looked back, unable to help her.  When miraculously (and I do not use that word lightly here.. it WAS a miracle) with no intervention, she started coughing and breathing at the word “Amen” after the Lord’s Prayer, I knew that every single day she was here would be a gift. In my mind she had died. The joy I experienced when she “came back to life” is indescribable. What I thought would be 5 minutes turned into 50 days I never thought we would have. I think about her life and sometimes I’m sad at what we are missing but most of the time I smile.

Contrast that with Doug, who expected her to be alive. He had a never-ending hope I did not have. I’m glad he did. I needed to see that and subsequently develop hopes and dreams – “the bucket list” – for her. We needed to have memories and important events to look back on and cherish after she was gone. But now he is left mourning her because he didn’t have that time before she was born.

We are in two different places. And that’s ok.