Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (8 page)

I went to bed and cried all night, imagining terrible scenes, like flies landing on my baby’s corpse in the next room. When the funeral home came to pick up my baby the next day, I snipped a lock of his hair to keep before I let them take him.

When I finally returned to work after my maternity leave with only pictures to show my coworkers, I placed a framed photo of Max on my desk. It was a close-up of his serene face, his eyes eternally closed, a baby cap covering the open wound on his head. You could see the fuzz of downy hair on his rounded cheek.

I found that I drew strength when I looked at his picture. I aspired each day to be more like Max—to be bolder in my embrace of life, to be more fearless, to be more accepting of the harsh realities of life. If
my four-and-a-half-day-old infant could meet his demise and go so fearlessly into the night, surely I could do the same someday.

I wasn’t as brave yet as I aspired to be. I hadn’t been brave enough to hold my baby while he died, and I felt ashamed of that. But I was braver than I thought. I’d been brave enough to love him. I’d been brave enough to let him go.

Gabriela Ibarra Kotara

In memory of my son, Kain Cohen Kotara, 12/25/12. Stillborn due to a cord accident at forty-one weeks.

T
here’s no greater actress than a grieving mother. A “bereaved” mother.

I had never even heard that word before my son died, and here it is, the word I identify with daily. I am—
we are
—“deprived of a loved one through a profound absence,” according to Google’s definition.

Yet, you would never know it when you look at me.

Physically, I wear the scars of a mother. I have stretch marks etched upon my once-tight skin, but even if a passerby noticed that, the truth of what has happened is still not visible.

To everyone, I am just another woman. Somebody’s wife, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister. But I am so much more than that, even if I don’t show it.

I am a bereaved mother.

I am a woman who holds her baby silently in her heart instead of noticeably in her arms.

I am the lady grocery shopping, who avoids the baby aisle at all costs and has to fight back tears when she places her purse in the cart seat where the baby is supposed to go.

I am the woman who listens with a breaking heart to every cute anecdote her friend tells about her new baby.

I am the wife who buys a pregnancy test every month, hoping and praying that it’ll be positive.

I am the woman who no longer has her innocence. The woman who fears the “impossible” and is a living part of the statistic—one of that 2 percent chance.

I am that cautionary tale. No one wants what happened to us to happen to them.

I am also the woman who gets told how strong she is, how amazing her will to keep going is, when in reality, I’m a basket case. Up one minute, down the other.

I am all of those and more. But when you see me, you have no idea.

Not one person notices. I am a master of disguise, feigning the old me. The
before
me. We, as bereaved mothers, wear the cloak of normalcy, but truthfully, we are anything but normal.

It is not normal to hold your cold, dead baby’s body in your arms. And it is not normal to lower a tiny casket into the dark, cold earth. But I did it. And you probably did it too.

And although you may keep your grief hidden in an attempt to control something or to have some semblance of normalcy, it still is in your heart forever and always. You are not alone, and you have more sisters in this “bereaved mama society” than you will ever know.

We wear the masks together, and only the lucky ones get to see who we really are. Who our babies really are. Not one of us is the same person
after
. But you’ll learn to take that mask off a little more each day, until the world and all those around you can know your story, and the camouflage is wiped clean off your face.

Until that day comes, wear your disguise proudly, strong sister.

Katie Sluiter

I
didn’t know what to do with my hands. I kept running my thumbs over my fingers and adjusting my rings.

The room felt so full. An exam room is not made for four people.

I could feel that my eyes were wide with apprehension. I stared silently at Cort hoping he could provide me with some sort of reassurance, but when our eyes met, I could feel his worry match mine. The deep line in the center of his brow mirrored my own dread.

I turned my focus on the professionals in the room. I searched the face of my nurse for the look of routine. I scrutinized the doctor’s demeanor for the assurance that all this was normal.

But instead I was asked to lie down. To try to relax.

While the nurse busied herself, I found my words. “Is this going to hurt?”

She paused suddenly, stopping in the middle of her prescribed procedure. Her face softened. She looked at my husband and told him to come stand by my head and hold my hand. And that no, it would not hurt. But it would probably be a bit uncomfortable.

It was. Uncomfortable.

But more uncomfortable was the silence of the doctor as he searched. And searched. And didn’t speak.

I could feel the burn of the fiery tears in the corners of my eyes. But I wasn’t going to let them come. There was business at hand. I had to know the facts and not let my emotions take hold of me.

Both my husband and I stared at the black-and-white screen, attempting to see whatever the doctor was looking for.

Finally my husband asked the doctor if everything was okay.

“Well…” And he didn’t continue.

He didn’t have to. I knew. I asked if we could take a break so I could use the bathroom.

I can’t remember if I really had to go or if I just needed to leave the room.

When I came back there was no need to lie back down.

There was nothing to see.

Corrine Heyeck

A
bout a year after our daughter Brenna was stillborn at almost thirty-eight weeks, I was talking with someone about what it is like to live after your baby dies. How compliments about strength given by well-intentioned observers have little meaning, because we’re all just getting through it because we have to.

There really isn’t another choice. So each of us learns to fold the pain into our lives, which are ever changed but moving forward nonetheless. There is no going back to the person we were before, because there is no way to undo the past.

It occurred to me that we’re a lot like onion bread.

Although basic bread involves the simplest of ingredients—flour, yeast, sugar, salt, and water—baking bread is a complex process. There is proofing the yeast, mixing together the ingredients, kneading the dough, letting it rise, punching it, forming the loaf, letting it rise a second time, and then baking it.

Once an ingredient—like onion—is added, there is no going back. Dough is sticky, especially at the beginning of kneading. If you’ve ever made papier-mâché, you know the binding power of simple flour and water. It is like glue. The dough picks up and holds onto whatever it touches.

Once the onion is added, it is there to stay. Even if you managed to pick out each and every one of the tiny pieces, the flavor of the onion would still be present in the finished loaf—even if it isn’t as pungent.

Baby loss is like an onion dropped into our life’s dough. We may have started out ready for a nice, comforting bakery loaf slathered in buttery goodness. But then came the onions, and the recipe changed.

First they made us cry, stinging our eyes and making our noses run. But even through the blurred vision, we started the time-consuming and arduous task of folding the onion into the dough. Somehow the rest of the dough eventually mellowed the burn of the onion so we could again see what we were doing.

We glanced up and everything around us still looked mostly the same. While tears poured from our eyes and our throats choked against the burn, life marched on.

And so we continue to knead. Every day. The onion is still there. It is no longer a separate ingredient in our lives; it now is part of our definition. We’re all still bread, just like we are all still parents. But now we are onion bread.

Here we are hoping the world will accept this new recipe because we’re still just not that sure. They remember the plain, uncomplicated bakery loaf. Some of them just don’t want anything to do with such sharp flavors, which are completely new and unfamiliar. And some of them expect that, after all this time, surely she’s had time to pick out all of the onion. They’re still expecting the basic loaf. Or giving us time—and space—to continue picking out the onion.

Our loaves—our lives—are different now than they were before. But onion bread can still be good. It is just a heck of a lot more complex than the plain stuff.

All our life experiences add their own flavors. Rainbows, relationships, love—they all have potential to add sweetness. But the onion will always be there. One of the many ingredients in our lives.

Saying Hello but Saying Goodbye
Amy Cartwright

Jennifer Massoni Pardini

I
n a sparse waiting area at the Santiago airport, a mother and her baby boy sat down across from my husband, Ryan, and me. The baby laughed. I changed seats.

Lorenzo would have been about that age, had he not had a fatal congenital heart defect. In the alternate reality, he would be laughing. He would have all four chambers of his heart instead of only two. I would not have delivered him stillborn when I was nearly six months pregnant.

We were supposed to take this trip to Easter Island the year before as a “babymoon,” a last chance to travel as just the two of us, as friends and baby websites suggested we do. Ryan hadn’t felt the same urgency as I had. “The baby will always be there with us now,” he’d said. At the time, I thought he wasn’t getting how important it was for us to carve out this time together. Really, he already thought of us as a family.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui in the native language, is the world’s most isolated inhabited island—stranded at sea, out of reach while the rest of the world carries on elsewhere. As we flew overhead, it popped out of the immense Pacific like a green, triangular jewel. Its history goes back over a thousand years and is like any epic tale—one of glory and hardship, ceremony and destruction, oral tradition and misinformation. It is stitched with dirt roads, studded with grazing teams of horses, and outlined with high cliffs. There can be as much beauty as there is tension in a complicated survival story.

When we checked into our cabaña at Te’Ora, the owner shared its meaning: “the start of a new beginning.” The bud of a flower. The first blush of a love affair. The color-streaked sky right before sunrise. After nearly a year of grieving our son and feeling as isolated as this island, Ryan and I were hopeful that we were also nearing a new beginning.

We took a tour with an older couple from Canada to see up close some of the nine hundred or so statues that have been discovered around the island. Called
mo’ai
, which means, “to be able to exist,” they represent prominent ancestors and were sculpted from compressed volcanic ash before being transported from a central rock quarry to their final resting places along the island’s perimeter. They were always faced inward to watch over their descendants. Only then were their eyes painted on, a final flourish to animate the statue with the spirit of the deceased.

When I held Lorenzo in my arms, his spirit would not animate his body. His eyes were closed, his heart stilled. He was gone. Ryan and I had spared him the suffering of a short, compromised life because we would not put him through the extreme and painful interventions that would have been required to prolong his life, but would not cure him or guarantee his survival. We accepted the pain so he wouldn’t have to, because we were his parents. When I held my son, I told him how sorry I was and how much I loved him. I smoothed the contours of his face, which looked so much like Ryan’s, and looped his long fingers over mine.