Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (23 page)

But that day never came. It took months for me to give up thinking the letter would arrive; one day I just didn’t steel myself in front of the mailbox. Its hinge squeaked as I pulled open its metal door like a normal person would, expecting to find only Lands’ End catalogs and credit card offers, not the death announcement of a much-wanted, much-worked-for baby. Sometimes I still ask myself: is my baby in limbo? Sitting in a jar somewhere? Rationally I know that isn’t possible, that she was all heart and not much else, a loud noise that filled the doctor’s office the week before and then silence. There weren’t fingers and toes, but there was a heart, and it beat and beat for weeks until it didn’t beat anymore.

I never called the doctor about the notice. I didn’t want to seem like a desperate Gothic woman with crazy ratted hair wandering the halls waiting for a phantom sign from her dead baby. I didn’t want to explain to the person on the other end of the line what that card would mean to me, that I would put it alongside the single “Happy day! You are having a baby!” card, all sherbet colors and glitter, as a bookend to the baby’s short life. It would honor that she died. That she had lived and died, and lived dead inside of me for many days before she came out into the world. That she was then made into ash, and no one ever told her parents—her mother—what happened to her.

Marina DelVecchio

A
few hours after I had begun spotting, I found myself in my obstetrician’s office. Dr. Sylvia Becket scoured the sonogram machine’s screen for traces of life.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice empathetic but practiced. “We call this a ‘silent’ or ‘missed’ miscarriage because the mother-to-be does not know that the baby has stopped developing in her uterus until she has a sonogram. You’re supposed to be eleven weeks pregnant, but from the size of the fetus, it looks like it stopped developing at around eight weeks.”

I felt my husband Joe’s fingers grasp mine tightly, affectionately. His gray eyes peered at me, willing me to look at him, to share the loss with him, but I couldn’t meet his gaze. I knew if I did, I would begin to cry, right there, at the doctor’s office. I surrendered my hand instead, letting it rest limply in his own larger one, but I couldn’t look at him. Not yet.

I was eleven weeks pregnant, but there was no life inside me. There was only death.

Three weeks earlier, we had been vacationing at the beach. I had posed happily for pictures, touching my hands over my accentuated belly with pride and joy. Joe and I had decided on names and focused on moving rooms around the house to accommodate the new and tiny addition to our family. We had been making plans, family plans, while death had occupied my insides.

I had been informed by two pregnancy sticks and a blood test
at the nurse’s office that I was pregnant, and I never thought that this positive would result in nothingness. Even my body stubbornly clung to the thought that it was still pregnant, continuing to produce progesterone long after the fetus—
my
fetus—had stopped developing.

“What do we do now?” I heard Joe ask my doctor from a muffled distance.

“Well, you’re spotting now, so it can take a few days to a week before the fetus comes out on its own. All you can do is wait and allow the miscarriage to take its natural course.” Dr. Beckett gave us a slow, sympathetic smile, and patted my hand.

Slowly, I moved to get off the table, sensing Joe’s eyes on me. I knew that he wanted to talk to me, to console me, and for me to console him. But I avoided his gaze, his disappointment, the coldness he must be feeling as I cast him to the side, cocooned by my own misery. He let go of my hand, deliberately, waiting to see my reaction. I withdrew my fingers with an immediate force that shocked even me, and I felt him take a solid step away from me, neither of us realizing that this wide shift away from one another would create a chasm so deep it would take years to fill again with love and trust and hope.

As Joe moved away from me, giving me the space I needed, I moved deeper into myself, surrendering to the dark folds of loss and death and rage that enveloped me. There was nothing for me to do now but wait for the fetus to detach from the warm womb that had once nurtured it. And I had to witness the bloodbath, like a spectator, in ways that only women who miscarry are forced to experience such a loss—helpless to do anything about it.

For the next two days, I continued to bleed, and it wasn’t until the third night that an immeasurable amount of pain stabbed my insides. I doubled over, hands clasped tightly around my middle. It was like having contractions, like giving birth, except there was nothing
breathing, living, or crying that would rush out to be placed in my arms. I braced myself for the stillbirth.

For what seemed like hours, I bled into the toilet, and even though I didn’t know what to look for, I surveyed the clotted and bloodied contents that spewed from between my thighs and splashed into the toilet water, searching for answers, for something meaningful in the experience.

As the contents of my dead insides forced their way out of my body, there were no words. No answers. No conciliatory meaning. There was only the sound of red jellylike tissue as it leaked out and broke the surface of the water. That was the only sound: the impact of death sinking into the depths of a crimson, watery grave.

With a moroseness that I had never encountered before, I scrutinized every single gelatin-shaped matter that I could scrape onto the toilet paper.

I touched it with my bare fingertips, moving around the tissue for signs of my lost baby. I didn’t know what to look for, what the size would be, or how it would appear to me. And for every bit of matter I examined, I couldn’t decide what it was, or if it was what I was searching for.

“Why are you doing this?” Joe asked with an incredulous tone when he came upstairs at one point and found me crouched over the toilet bowl, which was now lined with blood and unidentified clumps. “This is sick,” he whispered in a thick, low voice.

I did not answer him. I didn’t know myself, but I kept examining, nonetheless, shutting Joe out. I didn’t even notice when he shuffled away, weary, shaking his head with disappointment.

I didn’t know what I was searching for exactly, but I had the notion that if I looked hard enough, I would find something related to my loss. I needed proof of life. Proof that something tangible had in fact grown inside me, making me sick and proud and joyful all at the same time. If nature compelled it to be flushed out, to be aborted, I wanted to be there to catch it, to cradle it, to whisper something softly to it. To say good-bye.

After an hour of cramping and bleeding, a sharp, biting pain in my lower abdomen propelled me atop the toilet again. As soon as I squatted, I felt a soft, rounded form squeeze out of me, and heard a loud plop as it crashed into the bloodied water of the toilet. I knew instantly that this was what I had been waiting for, the last part of my fetus as my body expelled it; it was the remains of the baby I had been nurturing inside me, the baby I had been dreaming of holding, but would now never get to place in my arms. I bent beside the bowl and looked into it, but whatever fell was now blanketed by bloodied liquid.

Compelled by a force stronger than myself, I placed my arm inside the toilet bowl, past the red surface, and reached for the gooey remains of the life that would never be revealed whole and live to me. About three inches long, I held in the palm of my left hand a C-shaped mass of flesh. It was soft, long, rounded in the midsection, and outlined by red matter that I couldn’t make out. It didn’t look like a baby, but by the size of it, and by its shape, I knew that I was looking at the baby I had lost three weeks ago. The baby that had remained inside me with a willful conviction that equaled my own, both of us rooted to each other in silence.

I cradled it in the palm of my hand and looked at it longingly, saddened by the sight of something so small and helpless and undeveloped that could not locate in me the strength it needed to survive and become something more than a seedling.

Leaning my head against the cool surface of the bowl, splattered with blood and fatality, I began to weep until there was nothing left. Until, eventually, I knew that the only thing left to do was place the small mass back in the bowl and flush it into my neighborhood’s sewer system, as if it was fecal matter, waste, and not something that had been growing inside me for the past few months, full of potential and vigor.

Crouched there, my knees resting upon the cold surface of the bathroom floor, I felt something rise from deep within me; it was a low, guttural exhalation that escaped from somewhere unfathomable
and obscure, passing through my clenched lips against my will. It was the hushed sound of a sigh that claimed the final passing of my undeveloped, unborn child. And then there was nothing—nothing inside me, and nothing around me.

In the end, I crawled into my bed and stayed there for two days, not moving, not sleeping, but simply escaping the clamor of life as it persisted around me. I wanted to disappear and be as silent as my miscarriage had been, for in the end, all that remains is the sound of an aching silence for which there are no words.

Kate Roper Camp

“How are you?”

She barely heard the question,

For the keening wail that whirled within,

Scouring her insides smooth like the pale lining of a shell.

It echoed through the hollowness tapering into every curve, every limb,

Rattling her empty womb,

Vibrating to a pitch that roared through her ears and sinuses

And pulsed in her fingertips.

It beat at the back of her throat.

She spoke through numbed lips,

Words passing through the wail,

And was surprised to hear her calm voice reply,

“I’m okay.”

Ashley Kimberley

In Loving Memory of Walker Kimberley, born July 5, 2009.

T
hat woman who I don’t know walks to the end of my hospital bed. I feel barely alive. She slides her hand up inside me, checking my cervix.

I remember her. Two years ago I watched her deliver my nephew here. She rushed in, still pulling on gloves. Frantically she pulled out a vacuum extractor and commanded everyone to step aside. She delivered my sister’s baby as his heart rate plummeted. My nephew’s head emerged from his mother’s birth canal; a few seconds felt like minutes as this doctor used a bulb syringe to pull fluid from his throat and nose and then used her gloved hands to pull him from his mother’s body. He had cried loud and strong, the way healthy babies do when they are born, and the room was filled with relief and celebration.

Now the woman looked at me with tenderness. “You’re ready. It’ll be really quick,” she whispered firmly, removing her hand from inside me. She is the doctor on-call this holiday evening and desperate to give me some encouragement. She’s willing me to be able to birth my son. She doesn’t usually show such tenderness. But tonight she is kind. She’ll take care of me and then try not to think of us again. She introduced herself earlier in the tiny triage room seconds before confirming he is dead. No one said anything, and finally it was me who whispered, “He’s dead,” in the way that I often make a statement when I am really asking a question. “Yes,” the woman had
replied, her eyes full of pity. I went numb, looking away from the ultrasound screen. Tyler sank into the chair beside me. Fear and pain I’d never seen filled him, and sobs shook his body. My world began crashing in around me in slow motion.

It’s after two in the morning on my husband’s birthday. We squeeze each other’s hands with whatever strength is left. I nod to the doctor and try to keep breathing. My nurse, Caroline, touches my arm, trying to give me strength or comfort. She has been quietly caring for us, making sure no ill-mannered residents come by to prove themselves at my expense. I plead with God again. In my head I know my baby must be dead. But in my heart I have a glimmer of hope. I am praying and begging God for a miracle. Maybe he will come out living. I feel foolish for clinging to my hope, but I can’t help it. If I have ever needed anything from God, I need this miracle. If I have ever put my hope in anything, it is in willing this child to be alive. If ever I have been faithful, it is in this moment asking God for my son and putting my hope in Him.

I am full of fear. I will hold my baby boy in a moment. Will he really be dead? The stirrups and a disposable sheet are in place. Tyler is trying to hold me. The two women are gently drawing forth my strength. “Okay, Ashley, now. Push, honey.” Silently I push with all my courage until they tell me to stop. A few seconds. I don’t have time to think. “Again. You’re almost there.” I am pushing, pushing, pushing. Through the epidural I can feel his body emerging, and I feel my womb empty.

Silence.

She is bringing him toward me all in one motion, setting my baby on my chest. I can hear only my own sobs as I get my first glimpse of his perfect, beautiful face. I’m trying to breathe, desperate for him to breathe. Walker’s bald head is cradled in the crook of my right elbow. I gasp for air between sobs. “Oh, honey,” I plead. “What happened to you, baby? Wake up!” I beg him. She is grabbing at my abdomen, careful not to stab me as she forces the scissors through the umbilical cord. She clamps the end of the cord dangling from
Walker’s belly but doesn’t bother cutting it down to the start of a proper belly button.