by Band Back Together | Sep 13, 2010 | Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Miscarriage, Neural Tube Defects, Pregnancy |
Our timing was so perfect. We tried casually to conceive for a couple months, then got pregnant the first month I charted my temperatures. Our baby would be born in May, a month I thought was perfect to have a baby. I’d be off all summer on maternity leave, and I’d still be thirty–a milestone that felt like a relief after our decision to start a family seemed to come not a moment too soon. I had almost made it to the end of the first trimester when I started spotting. We went in for an ultrasound and the baby measured 9 weeks, when I knew for sure I should have been closer to 10 weeks… but there was a heartbeat! We had some sweet relief for a week, in which I felt comfortable telling a few more people at work–because the chance of losing your baby after you’ve seen or heard the heartbeat goes down dramatically. But then my hormone levels seemed to be falling after another blood draw. Dr. Google told us that it was normal for HCG levels to fall later in the first trimester, so we tried not to go wild with worry over a weekend spent waiting for Monday’s ultrasound.
Our baby had grown and developed more in the week since we had last seen it, and there was still a heartbeat. The ultrasound tech spent a long time looking at the baby, doing things we didn’t really understand like examining the blood flow. She gave us a couple pictures and said “good luck with everything.” We went back into the waiting room for the midwife on call to let us know the results. They handed me the phone across the front desk and she started by telling me that yes, there was a heartbeat and that was a good sign, but… BUT. The nuchal fold looked thickened, which was a sign of a chromosomal abnormality. We would need further tests and they would help me get the screening scheduled. She was going to come in to talk to us more. I looked across the room at Jed in utter terror. He rushed over to me and I couldn’t believe I was getting this news over the phone in the middle of the waiting room. I started crying instantly and they ushered us into an empty exam room.
We held each other, crying and afraid, until the midwife came in to expand on the bad news. What the tech saw in the ultrasound didn’t look good–the thick nuchal fold and an omphalocele, I would probably miscarry. In the meantime we would go to a big nearby hospital for a better ultrasound. Either way, we would probably “have some decisions to make.”
That was a Monday. The next ultrasound was on Friday. Neither of us went to work that week. We stayed in, crying, devastated. I needed help getting out of bed every morning because the sadness was paralyzing. We distracted ourselves by painting the kitchen and baking zucchini bread. Our 4th anniversary was on Thursday. I was 11 weeks pregnant with a dying baby.
Friday arrived and we trekked through the hospital to Maternal and Fetal Medicine and one of the top ultrasound doctors in the country. The room had a second ultrasound screen on the wall facing the exam chair, so the mamas can have good views of their babies. I couldn’t decide how much I wanted to look. My husband wanted to punch the resident who hovered around, looking at the screen with barely veiled repulsion. I didn’t notice; I was busy trying to survive. After a really long exam, we sat in a meeting room with the doctor and a couple nurses, where the doctor explained that our baby had edema–cystic hygroma–all over its body, to a level that indicated a chromosomal abnormality so severe the baby wouldn’t survive. There was no way to predict how long I would stay pregnant. I could miscarry that day, or I could go to term and deliver a baby with a certain death sentence.
Termination for medical reasons was suddenly an option they would help me look into.
We went home in shock. It was impossible to comprehend the gravity of this most horrible thing that had ever happened to us. We made the heartbreaking choice to terminate our much-wanted pregnancy and scheduled the appointment. There were only a couple places in our area where I could get an elective termination, despite it being for a pregnancy with no chance of a positive outcome. My midwife wanted to help me but there was nothing they could do in their office.
While we waited for that awful date to arrive we both went back to work. I was like a ghost. People were sad for me and each hug made me cry. I also kept catching myself in “preparing for parenthood” mode—bookmarking an article about librarianship and parenthood, making note of the book about treating common childhood illnesses at home, realizing my new shirt would also make a good maternity shirt. Telling a coworker about how we thought we might dress up our 5-month-old as an acorn for Halloween next year. Falling silent and trying not to start sobbing. I realized my life wasn’t in that place anymore, but my heart hadn’t caught up. I hadn’t yet fallen out of the habit of preparing for baby.
Late that week I felt like my symptoms were diminishing–my nausea was suddenly totally gone. I made a last-minute appointment with the midwife to check for a heartbeat. If there wasn’t a heartbeat, I wouldn’t have to go for the termination and I could stay in the care of my midwife for whatever happened next. The ultrasound tech–who I now reflexively hated–told me I didn’t have to look at the screen while she checked for, and found, the heartbeat. It felt so cruelly wrong that I had almost been hoping for the opposite. I wanted the suffering to be over, for us and my poor sick baby. The midwife understood my emotional state and emphasized that when abnormalities this severe are found this early, there is no chance of survival.
That weekend we went to have dinner at my parents’ house. We’re close with our families, and in a terrible piece of timing, my parents had been in France this whole time and dealing with our news on their vacation. This also meant seeing my sister-in-law who was also pregnant, with the same due date as mine. You read that right. She’s not the most empathetic person, and this was the first day of the next seven months she spent avoiding us.
The next day we arrived at the family planning clinic at a different big hospital in the area, first thing in the morning. The only other people in the waiting room were a small cluster of people centered on a very sad woman. They were obviously there for the same reasons we were–the pain bubbles around all of us were huge. We got in to see the doctor and asked if we had any options as far as anesthesia, because we had been told that today we’d decide with the doctor whether I’d be put to sleep. This seemed like news to the doctor, who kept talking about how it was less expensive to do it the way they usually did–local anesthesia only, awake the whole time. That was pretty much the last of our concerns, not to mention the fact that amazingly my insurance was going to cover it either way and we ended up paying $47. But we just numbly moved forward. It was happening. She flipped on the ultrasound and we saw our baby for the last time, laying peacefully in my womb, no heartbeat. I suppose we could have walked out right then, but it was over for our baby, and we wanted it all to be over so we could move on with our grief. Three hours later, the baby was no longer a part of me and we were on our way home, empty. The D&C was painful and traumatic. It couldn’t have taken long, but it felt like forever. The physical pain was a distraction, but so inconsequential to this pain I was positive was going to be lifelong.
Our terrible limbo was over, but this was only the beginning of our suffering. I write this now almost a year out from the nightmare, with a baby girl who appears to be healthy kicking in my belly, but the intervening months–and subsequent bonus chemical pregnancy just to show how very cruel life can be–have changed me forever. I will never have the innocence of getting pregnant and assuming I’m going to have a baby. I can still place myself right back in the pain and terror of the slog of grief.
by Band Back Together | Sep 13, 2010 | A Letter I Can't Send, Grandparent Loss, Grief, Guilt, Help For Grief And Grieving, Hospice, Loss, Stroke |
Dear Grampa,
I don’t know if I will ever be able to live down the guilt that I feel for abandoning you in the end. I should have gone. I should have called. I should have written.
When the stroke hit, I felt like my own life was falling down around my feet. I was barely hanging on to my own sanity so I said a few prayers and cried a few tears as you lay in that hospital bed over a thousand miles away. I took the rest of the day off of work to feel sorry for myself and to soothe my sense of loss but I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
Time went on and you went home. Gramma did her best to take care of you with some help from Dad and your other kids and my cousins. I cried when I talked to Mom about the difficulties you were facing. You had to learn how to let other people do things for you instead of being independent like you always had been. I felt better with the sense of urgency gone so I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
It was a Sunday when Mom called. You were in the hospital again and it wasn’t looking good. Your kidneys were failing. They were going to let you die. I cried and I cursed Mom for waiting to tell me as you’d been hospitalized days before. I went to work the next day, numb and angry but still I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
You slipped away on a Thursday, two weeks before my birthday. I got the voicemail from Mom just before I went into a meeting at work. It was all I could to keep the tears from my face as my boss yammered about something or another. I sobbed all the way home, grief and guilt overlapping in my tears. I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
I don’t know if I kept myself from your funeral because of the expense (which is what I told everyone), out of selfishness (I’ve never been good at dealing with death) or to punish myself. By staying away, my guilt is complete. I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
My Grampa, I have eulogized you in my heart: You were a mean, ornery old bastard that said what you shouldn’t and stepped on plenty of toes, but we never doubted that you loved us. You taught me my first swear words and gave me my first gun. You were the hardest working and most independent man I’ve ever known and I will miss you for the rest of my life.
I’ve never believed in communication with the dead, so my pleas for forgiveness must fall on deaf ears or be lost in the air. Still, I wish I could tell you that I am sorry that I didn’t go and didn’t call and didn’t write.
I will love you always,
Stephie
by Band Back Together | Sep 12, 2010 | Adult Child Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Infidelity, Loss, Trauma |
The Year Was 2009
I was 19 and had been attending college but, thanks to financial difficulties, had to leave. I moved back in with my parents and started working a minimum wage job, 50+ hours a week almost an hour away from home. Mid-December, in the middle of my shift, I got a tearful call from my mom asking me to come home. I left as soon as I could.
At home, I calmed my mom down so that I could understand her. She dropped the bomb: my dad had been having an affair for about a month, told her about it AND had no intention of stopping it.
I called into work the next day to be home with my mom to make sure she didn’t try anything stupid and when I needed a second day off, I was fired. Guess I got all the time off I needed, right?
I saw my dad about 3 times between the 14th and Christmas. The presents he got us he bought while he was with his girlfriend, and were wrapped in surgical paper from the office because he was there with her the whole time. My mom, younger sister, and I moved out the day after Christmas. It was mostly quiet for a few months, other than struggling through visits with my dad when I was so angry at him I could barely control it.
In March, my aunt came up to visit and we planned to visit my dad at my grandparents house one night. Because of a rumor, my dad ended up staying with his girlfriend that night. My sister and I stopped by dad’s on the way home, to find a police car sitting out front speaking to my dad, and my mom at the gas station across the street. ‘Supposedly’ my mom had tried to break in to get financial records and then tried to attack my dad when she realized he was there instead of with us. ‘Supposedly’ my dad then punched her and pushed her down a flight of stairs. April to June was a constant barrage of being lied to from both sides and listening to my parents bad-mouth each other.
On July 12th, 2009, I was headed home from a bonfire at a friend’s house. I was completely sober. Northbound on a north/south highway, there is a hill with an intersection about 100 feet from the crest. I looked down for half a second to put my cell phone in the cup holder. Wrong second to look down. There were two cars stopped at the intersection, going opposite directions, each making left turns. As soon as I saw the car in front of me, I slammed on the brakes. It wasn’t enough. My truck rear ended the car in front of me, which cause the car to spin around and hit the other car in the gas tank. They caught on fire. The car headed southbound had 4 teenagers in it, who all got out okay. The car I struck had a teenage girl driving and her boyfriend. She got out okay. He did not. He was pinned in the backseat and burnt to death. I can only pray that he was knocked out from the impact.
At 20 years old, I was responsible for someone’s death, a someone who was a son, a brother, a boyfriend. I was charged with vehicular homicide as a 3rd degree misdemeanor, which carries a 2 year license suspension, 2 years probation, 200 hours of community service, and 90 days in jail. I was given the maximum sentence.
In October, my dad and his girlfriend announced she was pregnant. I haven’t finished a single credit hour of school since the accident, despite my best efforts to keep going. I work for my dad because I have no way to get to another job. I have a jail sentence hanging over my head as a threat. I am afraid to go places in the town I live in because I don’t want to run into the family of the boy who died and cause them more grief. I was single for more than a year and a half. And you know what?
I love my life. I am happy. I have an amazingly supportive family. My relationship with my dad is better than it has been in 15 years. I am actually pretty good friends with his girlfriend now. I love my baby sister so much. I am in a relationship with a man who knows about the accident and loves me anyway. I am proud of myself, proud of how I have dealt with this traumatic situation that I was given, and that I’ve turned it into something positive.
I talk to young drivers about what can happen if they don’t take driving seriously. And they listen. I appreciate life so much more now than I did. I know it’s easy to be preachy and say “Oh, you just have to find the silver lining, blah blah blah.” Fuck that. A year ago I was at the lowest point I’ve been in my life, but I just kept trucking, because really, what other choice do you have? And things got better. It took time. And they definitely got worse before they got better, but it happened eventually.
My only advice is hang in there. And stay off your fucking phones while you’re driving please.
You will never get a text or call that’s more important than your child’s or your mother’s or your partner’s life.
by Band Back Together | Sep 12, 2010 | Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, How To Cope With A Suicide, Loss, Suicide |
Everyone else has photos either stuffed away in a box on top of the wardrobe or crammed into battered shoe boxes under the bed, but I have none. That’s not entirely true; I do have one solitary wooden framed black and white wedding photo which is now buried in the bottom of a drawer, but that is all the photographic evidence that remains of my life.
All those yellowing albums I used to have, full of smiling faces from the past 45 years, have now been thrown away. Without ceremony, without ritual, without even a final review of the pages inside the garishly decorated album covers, all my photos were heaved into a garden-sized green garbage bag and tossed into the back of the rubbish man’s pick up truck.
Does this mean I don’t want to remember my past? That I want my memories to fade and eventually disappear? What I long for is amnesia – not to forget the smiling posed slivers of happiness captured in the abandoned photos, but to be free from the picture in my head that has been imprinted on the backs of my eyeballs and etched into the neurons of my brain.
The picture in my head is a full colour photo. Not your normal 6″ x 4″ snapshot, but a 10″ x 8″ – the size reserved for headshots and family portraits. In the centre of the photo is the oversized bright blue upholstered armchair. It belonged to the lounge suite that I always hated. It always seemed too big, too stuffed and too blue. The couch and the two armchairs had never fitted into the lounge so the extra chair had ended up in the room that had once been my study.
In that photo I carry in my head I can still see him sitting completely still and lifeless in that blue armchair, sitting in my room. Next to the blue chair is the red gas bottle used for an entirely different purpose than filling balloons for a child’s party. And carelessly scattered on the floor in front of him are those old forgotten photo albums with ugly pink floral covers. He had pulled down the box from on top of the wardrobe and emptied its contents on the floor.
So it wasn’t the albums and the photos that offended me so much I wanted to destroy them, but rather the place they occupied in that scene. They demanded that I give meaning and significance to the fact that they were now on the floor and not safely tucked away in their box. In the days that followed, when I was clearing up the mess and the blue armchair was empty again, those wedding photos jeered at me whispering “you were the last thing he looked at … so it must be your fault”.
I have eradicated the physical evidence of that day, but in my head, bright exaggerated images of blue fabric, red metal, and pink floral still remain.
by Band Back Together | Sep 12, 2010 | Coping With Divorce, Divorce, Guilt |
My parents broke the news to me and my brothers when I was nearly 17, about five years ago. We kind of expected it, really; as my mom said, “We would argue over what shade of blue the sky was.” I’d spent plenty of car rides with my mother where she angrily ranted about my father, always apologizing at the end, and me saying that it was okay, I understood.
My father wasn’t, and isn’t, a bad man. I think he has problems coming to terms with that sometimes, but he isn’t. He’s strict, and he has high expectations. But I think he’s just as lost and confused as the rest of us, trying to do what he thinks is right for everyone, and until lately that meant to the exclusion of himself. His well-paying job kept us more than comfortable, but he loathed it; business trips every few months became once a month became twice a month became every week. He hated it, and he still hates it.
My mother was, is, more laid back, and prone to leaping without looking. Which, I think, is how they came to be married so quickly after their first failed marriages. I was born into the world with a half-sister already eight years older than me, and a half-brother legally adopted by my father who was only a little less than two years older than me. My little brother followed three years later. Then my mom became a nurse, and bounced from job to job, looking for what made her happy.
Nothing really did.
And so I sat in the kitchen with my brothers, listening to my parents going over the reasons I already knew, and I cried anyway. Because my mom was moving out, and my life turned upside down.
I was leaving for college soon, anyway, so my mom’s new apartment only had one room for my little brother. When I was there, I would sleep on the couch. Every time I went there, I felt guilt dragging me down, avoiding saying more than I had to, to my father. Every time I left there, I felt guilt that I couldn’t stay longer, even though there was no where for me to sleep.
I began walking a thin line. I know my parents tried not to put me in the middle, but they couldn’t help it. I’m sure it’s difficult. My older brother was already in college, and he lived with his girlfriend at the time. My younger brother had no car, and was dependent upon me and them for transport, so they set his schedule. I had to balance my own schedule and pray that it would be somewhat fair.
Every week I would have a chore list from each of them, and I would travel back and forth between houses, doing what I could. There were always arguments over “you do more for your Mom/Dad than you do for me.” Eventually, I broke down. I was trying. I really was. Maybe I could have tried harder, but I hated doing chores when they were together, and now I had two different places to do them in. Plus extra chores, like sorting out the boxes of photos so my heartbroken father didn’t stumble across pictures of my mother and sob over how she hadn’t wanted to go to couple’s therapy.
When I first knew, I allowed myself some time to grieve, and then I focused on what I would do. How I could handle this. I had seen the movies and the cartoons, of children rejecting step parents and acting comically like brats in order to somehow fix their parents back up together. I knew that was stupid. I was nearly an adult, nearly in college; I would handle it with grace and maturity.
I complained, sometimes. Sometimes I bawled about how unfair they were being to me, not by their divorce, but how they tore me between them. Home became uncomfortable, a constant trip back and forth, til I had two of everything, and even then there were forgotten cell phone chargers or shoes or books. I slowly lost my “place,” living in dorm rooms, couches, or spare rooms.
I was counselor, sympathizer, errand runner, schedule balancer. I assured my father that he would be okay, assured my mother she was doing the right thing for her, scolded the both of them when they tried to talk down about the other to me. I took my mother’s elopement in stride, as well as my father’s ease away from the Catholic faith and his decision never to remarry.
I found guilt. Guilt in accidentally letting slip the word “stepfather” around my own dad, when talking about Matt. Guilt for having to leave my mother’s early for dinner at my father’s. Guilt for working for my mother watching my stepfather’s kids when I couldn’t find a job. Guilt for hiding from one parent at another’s house. Guilt for not knowing the answers, for watching TV instead of doing some chores, for asking for money because my gas was almost gone and I needed to drive between houses more, guilt for not being able to evenly spread my time during spring breaks, guilt for trying to partition holidays, guilt for blaming my brothers for not “doing anything.”
My family has come back together, in a way. In pieces. Five years is too short a time to mend everything, but I can say I’m going to my mom’s without my father feeling hurt. I can talk about her dogs in his house without pain. I can discuss my father with my mother without there being insults. Everyone is calmer, and I’m drifting away. My father still won’t call the number at my stepfather’s cabin, and avoided them at my commencement, but…steps. Everything is in steps.
I just signed a lease to live in the basement of a woman’s house, so I will be moving out on my own. I won’t rely on their sofas or guest rooms for living, their money for my car, or even their judgment on how long my boyfriend can stay over. I won’t do their chores, and I’ll call once a week or so to check in and chat. Money will be tight, and I’ll be looking for a second job to fill hours and plan for my next big life step.
But I’ll have my own space, my own time, and I’ll begin the final process of unwrapping myself from the middle and moving on.
