decision

I say goodbye to my husband and walk down the hall into the room. I lay down on the table and silently cry. The doctor holds my hand in her papery one. The anesthesiologist says “Here comes a big glass of wine,” and I go to sleep. Did you know your baby would not survive? Do you wish you did? Alternatively, do you wish you did not know your baby’s diagnosis? Since your child's or children's death, have you wrestled with any decisions you made during or about your pregnancy? 

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Love Song for the Grim Reaper #2

I didn’t sleep the night before we went to the hospital when Terra was to deliver our Roxy. I switched back and forth from the couch to the bed. I twitched and breathed. I changed channels. I smoked (I was a born again smoker that day/night). I put my hand on Terra’s shoulder. We didn’t speak. It was such an incredibly terrifying and endless night, that just imagining it now has me shaking in fear that I could be transported back there.

Terror, like I’d never known or ever come close to knowing, at the imagining of what we were getting ready to do: meet our dead child. We were going to see the face of our dead daughter. From the moment on the day before, when we received the news the news (“I’m sorry hon, there’s no heartbeat,” said the ultrasound tech), every panicked darting thought landed on this simple, impossible fact: we were still going to see her, and she would be dead. Having a baby, generally, is kind of scary business. Having a dead baby, however, is like being reborn inside of fear. Your blood is fear. Your teeth are fear. Your thoughts are fear. Your eyes are fear. All sounds are fear. I can still feel it pumping through me almost 6 years later.

There was one, amazing thing though, that this terror did not prepare me for… how amazing it would feel to hold my dead child. How perfect she still felt, in my arms, even as she was gone. It was so calming, just looking at her. Even in death, she brought me some peace that day. She was so familiar to me then, and she still is. Something about her was alive- something that is still inside me. I understood immediately why chimps would carry around their deceased children for days. It really makes no sense to let them go. I guess we never do.

This song is about meeting and holding Roxy, and how the feeling tied in to my first memory of death as a child, when a neighbor somberly walked into our yard with a dying animal in her arms (it actually was a rabbit, not a cat, but well, artistic license and such). All my life, there was something too familiar about death when it showed its face in my life. It sometimes felt and feels like I was being programmed, engineered and prepared for losing Roxy from early childhood. It sounds crazy, I’m sure, but when fate disintegrates your confidence in statistics, I suppose reason goes with it.

The first time I saw you
You walked up from the neighbors
Holding your tabby cat like a
Like a newborn baby
My daddy rolled his eyeballs
Thinking you were crazy
But I had to admit myself, well I
I knew your face right away
I knew your face right away
You were never a stranger
And it felt alright
I carve your name across my wrist
And every day it looks new
I drag my hand along the fence
The way I pictured you might do
And there’s a cat watching
From the other side
Yeah it’s a song I’ve heard
One too many times
I knew your face right away
I knew your face right away
You were never a stranger
And it felt alright

How did you survive your child's delivery? Do you feel you suffer from PTSD as a result of that day (as I most certainly do)? If you chose/were able to see your child, do you feel it brought you any peace?

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Our dog, the world's best dog, is a touch over 19 months old now. We got him when he was two and a half months old, four days before A's fifth anniversary. He was tiny, and mostly black. He has probably reached his adult size and weight-- north of 50 lbs-- by now. He's black and tan, a proper and gorgeous Airedale coloring. He is playful and sneaky and gentle and social. He lets little kids, even kids who don't live here, pull his tail and stick their hands in his mouth. I mean literally elbow deep. A one year old's elbow deep, but still. He even lets selfsame shameless shorties take his most prized possessions, his tasty-tasty cleanly polished bones, straight out of his mouth. 

Monkey says he's a relaxation aid, because it is impossible, according to her, to sit next to that dog, one arm over him, the other hand petting him, and remain tense. Especially after he twists his head up to declare his appreciation. The dog is a saint. 

He is also a damned crazy rat bastard who takes nearly every opportunity to run off for a mad dash around the neighborhood. The woods behind the houses across the street, the back yards of the houses on our side, back and front yards of the houses one and two streets down. As far as we can tell, he never crosses that second street down and never goes farther than one over on the right. He stops by the houses of his doggie friends in the neighborhood for loud and urgent conversations. But mostly he runs, like the wind.

When he's done, he peaceably surrenders to one of us. Next to last time he did this, he actually came to the front door and waited while the search party returned. Oh, did I forget to mention that he's smart? Last year, he dug under the fence so carefully and masterfully that it took us weeks to figure out how he was getting out. Now that we've used that knowledge to close off his escape route, he is reduced to taking advantage of momentary lapses of judgement or inexperienced operation of the front door. But he doesn't run where the cars are (anymore) and he always comes back. 

He bounces when he walks, and his tags jiggle. It's a mood-elevating sound, a reassuring one. I remember the first time I caught him after he escaped, I didn't bring the leash with me as I ran out. So walking back to the house, I had him by the collar. I had to bend a bit to keep a good handle on it. I was supposed to've been mad. But the rhythm of his steps next to me, echoed by the rhythm of the tags, and his whole pleased with himself air-- somehow all of that made me feel mostly amusement mixed with tender gratitude that he exists, that he's ours. 

Mostly, because there was, also, a familiar ping of anxiety. Not, mind you, anxiety that the crazy puppy could've gotten lost or killed by a car just then. No, anxiety about the fact that someday, hopefully a good decade or more on, someday he will die. This doom-preview is better now, though not entirely absent. I think I just got used to it, acknowledged it into background, if that makes sense. Back at the height of its head-messing reign, this thought would loom the largest during the walking of the dog. Possibly due to the limited multitasking potential of the dog walk, the anxiety would expand to fill most of my headspace. One moment I'd be walking this lovely creature, enjoying the sounds of tag jiggle and his happy little bounce, view from behind, and the next I'd get slammed with the complete certainty that one day he won't be here.

It's not that he is the only creature in the household whose existence causes me anxiety. I am, if we are being honest here, a much more anxious person now than I was before. But with the humans, the anxiety tends to ebb and flow depending on what's on life's menu. And with most of them, rational thought is that they will, most likely, outlive me. The dog, on the other hand, is the only one whose death preceding mine is baked in the cake, barring any catastrophic event or illness on my part. With humans, anxiety is about modicum of control, or maybe just an illusion of it. It's about holding on, hoping not to lose them. With the dog, it's about knowing that I can't. 

It's not going to be the same kind of sadness or the same kind of missing. But in getting a dog, we did sign up for an extra dose of that, eventually. I sort of think that living with missing A makes me know that when it happens, I will be ok, terribly sad for a while, but ok. And in the meantime, there's the sound of clinking tags and the consistently high entertainment value of the dog sliding on hardwood as he chases a ball inside the house. And, and, and... 

 

Do you have pets? What do they mean to you? Has your view of your pets shifted at all after the death of your child(ren)? Did you decide to get a pet after? Or has it made you decide not to get one? 

Are you more anxious now? Or have you found zen of not sweating most things? 

Battle fatigue

We waited for seven months after George’s death before we started to try and get pregnant again.  It felt much too soon to me at the time, as if by trying to have another child we were somehow betraying our firstborn.  If not for fear of the encroaching title of ADVANCED MATERNAL AGE I probably would have insisted upon waiting longer. Fear can be powerful motivation.

If someone had offered me the option of a medically induced coma for the duration of my subsequent pregnancy I would have given it serious consideration.   It wasn’t just the emotional aspect of another pregnancy after a loss and all its possible complications that gave me pause but also the pure physicality of it.   My pregnancy with George was brutal even before things went sideways.  Hyperemesis lasted for nearly twenty-three weeks and then, one week after it resolved, I was in the hospital being pumped with enough cardiac medication to make me long for the days of vomiting only every hour.  Of course, then there were the IVs and the constant blood draws and the headaches and the jabs to my stomach with epidural needles.  By the time I went in for the emergency C-section to deliver our boy I was nearly fifteen pounds lighter than I was before I got pregnant. 

As it turned out I survived the next pregnancy with most of my sanity intact by doing my best impression of an ostrich.  I simply pretended, as long as I could, that none of it was happening.  I assumed that my state of pregnancy was a temporary one and went about my life as if everything was the same as before.  All of those things pregnant people are supposed to do like glow and beam and make plans for nurseries and have baby showers I did none of.  What I did do was take my prenatal vitamin every day, avoided the laundry list of foods and drugs that I was supposed to and I continued to grieve the loss of my son. 

Everyday I was pregnant I fully expected it to be the last.  But somehow my luck held out and after 277 days I gave birth to a living, breathing baby girl.  The moment I held her for the first time the uncertainty of those previous 277 days became completely insignificant.   It all seemed worth it.  I would have chosen to do it all again for twice as long in a single heartbeat.   Perspective is everything and if fear is a powerful motivator than love even more so.

Eighteen months after she was born we looked at our daughter, growing up at the speed of light, and thought that it was time to do it all over again.  She needed a sibling and we needed another baby.   So we took another deep breath, crossed our fingers, and with eyes wide open made that leap of faith. 

It did not come as a shock to me when a few months ago, at 12 weeks, I had a miscarriage.  A routine office visit and an absent heartbeat, it was a scenario I had envisioned happening many times in the years since George’s death.   Then, just last week, a variation of the same story; positive pregnancy test followed by spotting and then heavy bleeding.  An early miscarriage, they say.  Part of me, the part that will be forever in that hospital room holding the still body of my son, will always expect the worst and be surprised when anything other than that happens. 

 

I could rail against the unfairness of it all or shake an angry fist at the universe.  Lord knows I did all that when George died.  I wailed and screamed and cried until I thought I would shrivel into a dried husk.   It was what I needed at the time.  To be angry and indignant was important.  

It has been three and a half years since I began this journey and it has been a battle the entire time.  Four pregnancies later here I am with one son gone away and one amazingly thriving daughter who is currently singing a song about boats.  I don’t feel angry or indignant anymore.  I recognize how lucky I am to have made it this far with one living child.   Yet I still long for another baby and somtimes even dare to dream about a son.  But I’ve grown weary of the battle and wonder when is it time to finally stop fighting.  Is it now?

 

 

If you have had more than one loss in what ways has it affected you differently than your first loss?  Was your reaction to it as you expected?  What is/has been your motivation for trying to have another child?  Have you made the decision to not try or to stop trying?  How did you come to that decision?