something old, something new

I'm sure somewhere -- here, there, in a comment -- during the past three plus years I wrote something to the effect:  "If I could just fit into those old jeans.  It would be like getting the old me back."

As if a smaller ass would magically mend my heart.

:::

When I moved to this house I was pregnant with Maddy, so I packed up all the old clothes -- the ones that fit a few months earlier, and the really nice tiny ones that fit before Bella -- thinking someday, certainly someday, soon, I will slink back into these.  (Clearly I wasn't taking the timeliness of fashion into count, which I suppose says a lot about me and the way I dress and is subject for another much more hilarious post.)  As it was, I gained almost 20 lbs more with Maddy than I did with Bella, in large part because I couldn't exercise during the pregnancy, and in no small part, because I didn't eat nearly as well.  In retrospect I'm pretty sure I was stressed out and likely depressed during that pregnancy.

Anyway, you're all familiar with the rest:  Baby is born, baby dies, can't breastfeed the pounds off, and don't feel like subjecting myself to fresh air.  Flab stays.  About four months after Maddy died I went into a running frenzy thinking I would just blow the pounds off in a matter of weeks, and wound up blowing up my plantar fascia.  The pounds stayed.  

By the time I got pregnant again last year, two plus years later, I was still 20 pounds over where I wanted to be.  In some fit of nonsense, I went on a closet cleaning purge last March (while almost eight months pregnant), and tossed out everything.  I was tired of opening the closet and seeing the old clothes mocking me.  That was the old me.  The really old me.  If I ever got down to that size again, I'd buy new clothes.  (Hell, you should buy new clothes anyway for the love of mike -- who wears those anymore?)

With three exceptions:  Three pairs of pants.  Two jeans, one pair of cords.  All designer labels, all bought after losing the Bella weight and feeling good about my bod again.  Maybe, I thought, maybe.  I hid them in the back behind all the loose fitting skirts and blouses I had purchased to hide the fact that I had another baby that wasn't around to help legitimize my midsection.

Right now, as I'm writing this, I'm wearing a pair of those jeans.  They're a wee bit tight, especially the top button that hits uncomfortably right in my three-baby pooch.

Does that make me feel better?  Yes.

It is not, however, Nirvana.

Huh.

I put them on, stood back and looked in the mirror, and waited.  For what, I don't know -- lights?  Peels of electric guitars?  Suddenly clear skin and shiny hair? (wouldn't that be cool?)  Would my brain melt into a pile of lilac scented goo,  would I crave positive thinking and trot downstairs to announce, "Christmas has arrived, y'all!  Joy to the World!"

I sat and stared at the person in the mirror wearing five-year-old jeans and realized:  I am never going to be the old me.  Which is stupid, I suddenly realized, of course I'm not.  I mean, forget tragedies for a second:  I'm never going to be the old girl I was in High School again (thank goodness), or the young woman I was in grad school.  You can't go back.  You can't be the person you were before you had kids, before you met X, Y, or Z, before a certain job, or place or event or music album.   Even seemingly trivial things can shift your worldview.  How on earth I ever thought I could somehow morph into the person I was before Maddy sounds a bit wacky to me now, almost four years later.  I'm a bit stunned, to tell you the truth, that I spent so much time and verbage yearning to get back to a place and mindspace that I obviously would never return to again.  I like to say I didn't experience the station of "denial" in my grief, but today touching this denim again I think I realized I've been living in it rather heavily.  Jeans are not going to transport me back in time any more than they're going to raise the dead. 

The new me is old.  The new me is almost four years older than the old me, and that's four people years which are measured not quite as badly as dog years in grief time, but close.  There are a few gray hairs, bags and wrinkles around the eyes, extra skin around my neck.  My skin now shows the blotchiness of not two, but three pregnancies.  There's the pooch, that I'm sure some people can work off (Heidi Klum!  Call me!), but even for those of us half-way in shape, is hard to budge -- muscles have moved and atrophied, and skin has buckled around them.  I'm not sure a million sit-ups would conquer that mound.  

And then there's the inside, the stuff my fancy jeans can't possibly hope to distract me or anyone else from:  I'm more cynical (hard to believe that's possible), less trusting, less trusting of medical technology.   I'm occasionally sad, which I never can remember being.  My psyche still feels as though it's a bit bruised and achy -- no longer bedridden or uncontrollably bleeding certainly, but not one-hundred percent either.  It approaches corners cautiously, and peers around them before putting a foot forward.  I still clutch my family.  If Bella were asked what her mother says most often, after "shit" it would be "Be Careful."  I still love my friends who stood by me and think of Maddy and speak her name, and still resent the people who were silent, or worse.  Although the anger is less a hammer and more an itch.  

I still love her, I still miss her.

I realized today  this incredible seismic shift followed by modest improvement since that horrible February has nothing to do with weight loss, or the subsequent baby who helped with said weight loss.  It has to do with the simple, uncontrollable passage of time.  I'm going through my fourth Christmas without Maddy in a few weeks, I'm attending my fourth candlelight memorial service for her this Sunday.  In two short months, I will be walking through her week for the fourth time.  

I'm still changing, it turns out -- not backwards really, but forwards.  Not all great as my hair will attest, but not all bad either.  

It happens less often, it hurts less.  It has nothing to do with my body and everything to do with distance.  But it will always be there, I am firmly on this side, and I can't go back.  Despite my hemline.

I know a lot of us talk about being that person we once were -- what would you most want back?  What do you think would help get you back to that place?  Have you managed to get anything of the "old you" back?  How does it feel on this side of things?   Is there anyone else far enough out that they can see how time is helping somewhat?  Or is something else helping you move forward?  Are the ways you changed after the death of your baby/ies changing yet again as you move farther away from the event?

Kindred Spirits?

A month or so ago, in the space of about 10 days, two women I know lost step-children to gun violence. In two completely separate instances (in two different states), two teenagers lost their lives in broad daylight for no other reason than being in "the wrong place at the wrong time."

When I say I know these women, I should clarify: I've never had either over for coffee. But I see one almost daily, weather permitting, and we chit chat about weather and kids and such; and the other I see in her professional setting when I happen to be there and we are on a hello basis. But it really doesn't matter how near or far I hold these women: children died.

I don't claim to know what it is they're going through -- I have no fucking idea. One woman I hugged, said I was sorry, asked if there was anything I could possibly do, asked to please express my condolences to her husband. I felt trite and superficial and wondered if I should have said something deeper and more meaningful. I wondered what on earth that something could be. For the other woman, I attended a memorial service for her daughter. I hugged her tightly twice, and told her as briefly as possible that I understood the very outer parameters of what she might be feeling, and could relate to much in the service. She said she'd like to call me.

These deaths have made me feel extremely small, and extremely . . . lucky. I at least got to set the terms of my daughter's death (to a degree), and she died in my arms.  She did not die violently, she likely felt no pain. I said what I needed to say to Maddy even if she likely heard not one word of it. She did not die in view of the world, in the headlines. These parents have none of that peace.

Since Maddy died, I feel a strange sort of connection to parents whose children die in war, or die in gun violence, or die in car crashes. Or jump off bridges, or accidentally step off cliffs, or fall victim to being on the wrong Duck Boat on the wrong afternoon in the middle of the Delaware River. Just this past weekend, the local headlines blared the death of a child in a house fire. We are not remotely the same these parents and I; I can't claim to have any idea what it is they might be feeling.

And yet. What used to be some otherworldly Shakespearean-type tragedy glimpsed peripherally between the day's political news and the comics now hits very close to home. I now stop to pour over these stories, and the language is so similar -- the grief so familiar in it's outline. These parents hang on to times and places. There was the man who kept his son's watch set to Iraq time. Time. That bastard. It doesn't stop for us. It keeps going. Even where your child fell for the last time. The mom who sat in a lawn chair, simply being in the presence of a cold piece of granite bearing her child's name. Parents who try desperately to have something positive come out of their most horrific experience through scholarship funds and concerts and road races. The pictures, the shrines, the tears.

I don't know. I can't possibly. And yet once, while listening to a program about mothers of fallen soldiers who congregate at Arlington cemetery, I had to fight every fiber in my being not to whip my car in a U-Turn, hop on 95, and drive three hours to see if they were there.

As a historian who spent a fair amount of time studying war, I've always felt I at least understood Memorial Day and observed it to the best of my ability. I realized after Maddy died that I didn't have a fucking clue. Three Memorial Days ago, the remembrances in the paper and solemnly on my radio -- that I absorbed on my way to a family picnic -- broke me in two. I asked my husband, who was driving, if he felt like continuing on the road to a small Pennsylvania town where the son of the man speaking on our radio was buried. He said he did, but we had another commitment. We did decide that we both needed to do something more on this day, now that we at the very least could hear what people were saying.

We have yet to formalize our observance in any significant way. But this holiday now strikes perilously close to home for the both of us. We do spend time thinking of it's meaning. And all of the parents who who received the worst possible news and then spent the remainder of their lives tending gravestones instead of grandchildren.

I'm loathe to call such new awareness a "gift" because Maddy's death was simply a tragedy and I've come to decide I don't need to peel any good away from it unless it beats me on the head. I certainly don't need to look for it in order to understand it. But it left me with a new frame of reference, a new vocabulary, new metaphors, fluent in a language that I now recognize instantly. Because I may not know what they're going through at all, but I understand what they're saying. About missing, and promise, and a future without. About having a child permanently frozen in time as a child, never to progress.  About mourning dreams. About having to move through time (that bastard!) while the milestones rain down like an avalanche of boulders.

In the memorial service I attended for the young woman, people spoke about continuing the speak the child's name, associating her death now and forever with a season (Fall), and not wanting to find joy in what was left, but simply wanting her. I have never been good at languages, finding all the rules too easily malleable and forgetful. Here, for perhaps the one time in my life, I felt I grasped everything said while everyone else sat rather uneasily, shifting in their seats, trying to comprehend the sounds and locate sympathetic similes within their life stories.  I got it all.

And yet, I have absolutely no idea.

I just felt horribly sorry for the parents, and wondered what on earth one said to another at a time like this.

How do you feel when you encounter other parents -- either in person or via the news -- whose older children have died? How has it made you feel about your own grief and circumstances? Do you find their situations -- with children older than babies dying by means other than usually discussed here -- completely foreign or somewhat comprehensible? Do you feel a strange camaraderie with these parents, or do their vastly different circumstances leave you fumbling for words and feelings? (Is it possible to feel so similar, and yet so wildly removed?)

The thin (disappearing?) line

I'm sure you're all anxiously awaiting the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V (also known as DSM V, replacing DSM IV). You should be. In now-outdated edition IV there apparently was a footnote of sorts that made grief an exclusion to depression. In the draft edition of V however, the footnote is removed, and grief is essentially enveloped into the definition of depression. Which means, you, me, anyone who experiences a loss that s/he mourns (well, mourns deeply for more than say two weeks), will be thusly classified as suffering from depression. (To reiterate, right now V is in draft stage. The following discussion is on a possible -- but significant -- change in psychiatric diagnosis.)

If you've ever been hit up in a doctor's office by the quicky depression Q&A, you know it asks such things as, Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you have trouble focussing and making decisions? Has your appetite changed recently? And if you check yes to a certain number of these, you go on the doc's radar as being depressed. But if you're grieving the death of your child(ren), many of us probably answer yes to these questions, too. Have you lost joy? Does it take a great effort to do small things? Do you ever think about killing yourself?

So how to tell the difference between grief and depression? Is there a difference or is this a matter of semantics? Does it help or hurt our case when we say things like, "You never really get over it, you get through it and learn to live with it"?

There's an NPR news article on this shift in classification here.  According to this article, there is in fact a difference between bereavement and depression, but according to the doctor quoted therein it seems to be one of time: weeks. Not months, but weeks. If you're not rethinking some of those questions above in the space of 14-21 days, you will now be hit with a diagnosis of depression.

Huh.

Allen Frances has emerged as one of the lead critics against this particular change. Frances was the chairman of the group who devised DSM IV, and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times highlighting his concerns. (Op-ed can be found here; sign in may be required.) Among Frances' problems with the proposed change from IV to V are that healthy people who happen to be hit upside the head with a loss will now be labeled as depressed. Which is a problem if you're applying for health care or a job. Frances also worries that drugs will now be willy-nilly doled out to people in mourning, who either won't need them, or will unnecessarily remain on them. Frances writes,

Turning bereavement into major depression would substitute a shallow, Johnny-come-lately medical ritual for the sacred mourning rites that have survived for millenniums. To slap on a diagnosis and prescribe a pill would be to reduce the dignity of the life lost and the broken heart left behind. Psychiatry should instead tread lightly and only when it is on solid footing.

+++

I used anti-depressants, but they were not foisted on me by a doctor in the hospital. They also came later than two-three weeks. On the contrary, I went about a month or six weeks until it hit me one day that I was no longer functioning in a capacity that I needed to for the safety and well-being of my two-and-a-half year old. (I wrote about my decision to use anti-depressants here on Glow; the post can be found here.) I was also in the care of a psychoanalyst, and the decision to go on medication was entirely mine -- as was the decision to go off them in six months. They did not take away my pain or mitigate my grief. They did not put me in a fog, or even make me feel better. They helped me function. I still felt the awful full force, but could now drive and lift myself out of bed and otherwise make sure my toddler didn't play with knives while I hid under the covers.

Perhaps I'm different in that I actually sought help, and I'm wondering if there are babyloss parents out there who should but are caught in that whole "Can't make decisions" and "Small things are difficult" mode and don't pick up the phone to make that appointment. Or maybe I'm the rarity of which Frances speaks who actually needed treatment.

I'm a bit confused about the change from IV to V because it seems that there are already clear markers in place in order to make this distinction, markers that medical professionals are quite comfortable with. When I interviewed a grief counsellor for this site (interview found here) I asked her point blank what the difference was between grief and depression, and she gave a long and nuanced answer involving "normal" and "complicated" mourning, and the ability to "bracket" one's feelings later in the process and keep them somewhat separate from other parts of their lives. She also pointed out that it takes much longer than a few weeks to process loss and go through some of the more severe feelings. It seems to me this makes an enormous amount of sense. Are the people writing version V worried that psychoanalysts won't be able to do their jobs properly and discern these gradations? (Hey wait, aren't psychoanalysts doing the re-writing? Are they saying this is too difficult a job, or they can't be bothered, or what?)

Although I agreed almost entirely with Frances' arguments, I bristled a bit at " the sacred mourning rites that have survived for millenniums." Because I think babyloss is it's own little dark corner of bereavement, and I think we show here and on our blogs on a weekly basis that contemporary society has a ways to go before it wholesale accepts our particular grief as a healthy if not painful and uncomfortable process that people experience. Babyloss parents frequently speak of having no one to turn to or talk to, and in fact, document people turning and running in the other direction when given their news. God bless the internet, because places like this -- here, online -- have become a life-line for many who need to grieve and make sure they're in some bounds of normalcy. As we all showed a month or so ago when I asked for input on funeral services, there aren't as much "rites" as there is "getting through the moment to the best of our abilities." So where does this put us on the analytic scale? Are we difficult to place? So difficult that we might as well just lump us in the larger definition of depressed? I'm not saying because we as a group lack a cohesive and common social experience ergo we need Zoloft; perhaps this is a clarion call to examine babyloss more closely and for society to agree to abide and sympathize with us and give us the support that we so desperately need.

+++

I want to open this to discussion to the people whom it actually affects. You. And find out what you think.

But.

I don't mind anyone here getting defensive about being labeled depressed right out of the gate. Hell, I'm a bit pissed about it all, too. But I think we need to be a bit careful that our arguments against Draft DSM V's line of thinking don't play into any preconceived negative notions of depression, therapy, and anti-depressants. Society may not know how to deal with babyloss parents, but let's face it -- we're also battling a stigma of depression that paints its sufferers as weak. Weak and perhaps suicidal, delusional, or even alcoholic depending on what Lifetime movie you've seen recently. And there are people here, who read here, who have sought out therapy and used anti-depressants to their advantage, who have crossed that line between mourning and depression. Let's not take them down, too.

And what I'd really regret is slamming the new proposed change and taking down anti-depressants with it and then leaving a newly bereaved parent saying, "Well hell, I'm just grieving goddammit." And not wanting to eat his or her words two months later when they get knocked to the ground and are scraping the barrel because sometimes it's hard to make a decision, and sometimes its really hard to make a decision where you have to admit you were wrong about something, publicly. It shouldn't be that tough to ask for help, and to get it.

If I've learned nothing else writing and reading around here over the past few years, it's that everyone grieves differently. So I ask that in the comments, we're mindful of this.

So let's hear it. How do you feel about the proposed change that will essentially make grief a mental disorder? Semantics? Do you see a problem that could impact your life directly? Do you feel funny being labeled as such, or relieved that someone is even paying attention? Do you think you ever crossed that line between grief and depression, or think that you could? If you could address the people drafting DSM V, what would you tell them that you think might be helpful in making their decision? I realize many of you have already addressed this issue on your blogs -- please post a link to any posts in the comments.

all kinds of honouring: how to plan a baby's funeral

There. There it is, a title shed of euphemisms, because I want someone out there who is desperate and lonely and grief stricken to find us immediately with a search engine.

It's a horrible thing to contemplate, but those of us who read here have had to do it -- have had to think about what to do now, what to do next, even if the answer was "Nothing."

Our ways of dealing with death are various, as are our glances backwards at the whole process. Would we have done it differently? Did something go wrong then, too? Do we have regrets? Did someone give us incomplete information? Would we have asked more questions had we been less in shock? Was there anything we wish we had known?

Or was the horrible experience as perfect as it could have been? Was it meaningful and powerful? Was it redemptive and constructive? Did anyone shock you with kindness or simply shock you with mere understanding of death itself?

Today we add a permanent piece to the cabin library, over there on the left side, on funeral planning. The experiences of just the contributors are varied, and we hope helpful to those coming to find information and company. As with anything we write here, our words are magnified and enriched by our readers' comments and we hope you find time to go and add your experience over there so that others might be strengthened and find some common ground. I think it's always helpful to know that whatever it is you're going through and thinking, you're not alone.

When you have time and inclination, please go comment and add your experience to the permanent record.

Hearing Voices

Last year I befriended a woman who moved to my city to give birth at Children's with the knowledge that her baby girl would need surgery. (To cut to the chase: Her daughter, though she came close to brink -- dangling her feet off the ledge even -- survived and is now a beautiful fat one year old.) I packed up some cookies and fresh fruit and went down to the hospital one spring day to see how the parents were doing. I had no intention of "helping" really, but simply listening, which I did.

There is, as many of you know, a certain language that comes with a stay in the NICU. It's full of medical jargon and loaded with fear. But for many, it's also dripping with sarcasm, and dotted with macabre humor: responses to doctors, observations on treatments, acknowledgment of fears. It's also a kind of humor that I could see someone with no reference point not understanding, being made uncomfortable by, or even being offended by. I of course smiled and giggled (while passing out kleenex and adding my own one liners when appropriate).

The respirator machine that shakes like a hotel bed hopped up on quarters. The doctors that are so young you watch that you don't slip and call them Doogie. The lines from doctors that they have no idea will stay in your consciousness for months or years to come: "The sickest baby in the hospital." "We're not out of the woods." How many times did you discuss your child with a man in a suit while you were topless and hooked up to your double-pump?

Here at home, we had our own humor after death, too. While trying to cease lactation, Bella asked, in full voice in front of a kitchen full of people, "Mommy why are wearing Salad on your boobs?" To my husband, through tears, telling him that the receptionist at my six-week post-partum visit asked if I brought the baby: "Why yes, here she is!" whipping a box out of my purse.

Riffing off the bad lines that people fed us; musing on the irony of a relative who gifted us with alleged daily prayers at the Vatican for our unbaptized daughter whom we pulled off life-support.

"I made the therapist cry today." High five.

One reason I love my husband as much as I do is his sense of humor, and the way we can banter back and forth. We deal through a lot of adversity through humor -- it's who we are. And a week after Maddy died I realized this was a place where humor didn't work. I didn't know how to communicate with him for any length of time seriously. I dragged us into therapy.

Eventually we found the funny and the means to talk again, and when I started blogging six months later I used this voice. My voice. The only one I've ever known, the one that got me through everything from infertility to my doctorate to watching my team lose in the championship game. I needed to fall back on it, to rest on it, to rely on it, and allow it to guide me through this passage, too. I only knew how to communicate effectively with cynicism and profanity and funny. It would have to do.

In grad school, one of my advisors said a line to me regarding one of my drafts that went down as one of THOSE lines -- that get repeated and used in conversation by everyone, especially when drunk, and ultimately become quite funny:

"You don't read much poetry, do you."

No. I don't. I don't write that way either, obviously.

I was a bit surprised when I noticed that readers whom I'd describe as, let's say, "religious," began reading my blog. No more surprised than when I consistently started reading theirs in return. I think we all need to fall back on our voice, whether it's religious or spiritual, lyric or poetic, wry or fucking side-splitting. And when writers channel their grief through that voice, the one, the true one, I'm riveted. It's always raw and powerful and beautiful. It's as if this grief has introduced me to a world of different languages.

There are writers who question their voice -- question the appropriateness of humor, the need for positive thinking, or the bedrock of their religion. They swim in their voice, challenging the metaphors, pushing the limits of prose and sacredness and flat-out good taste. Others find a new voice -- a dollop of sarcasm or perhaps a streak of divinity. Even though I never questioned nor found God or the sonnet, I love these writers too.

About the only voice I can't bear to sit with is one that is obviously false, the one that hangs like a bad suit: It's glaring to me when the person brings up the Almighty in the first post and it's evident they haven't used the language in years if ever. It's painful when they drop an F-bomb and are awkwardly, overtly, uncomfortable about it. When they start in, very soon, too soon, with the happy-sunshine-y "I'm finding the positive in this," and "This has given me unbelievable perspective and strength." Or when they assume that speaking of a deceased child necessitates florid vocabulary and intricately constructed metaphors when it's evident to the reader they simply need to cough up the facts and state the obvious: My baby died. I'm fucking sad.

I know people adopt false voices for a variety of reasons -- convention, assumption, or because mom and dad are reading the blog. I feel for them. I think the only way through this mess is leaning on what you know, what is yours, what this can't take away. My voice, thankfully, did not die with my baby.

How would you describe your voice? Did it change after babyloss? Do you find yourself gravitating towards writing that uses a certain type of voice? Are there voices you appreciate even though they're not yours? Does your blog voice differ from your true voice, and if so, why?

As if losing a baby wasn't loss enough

Well, it's official.

According to today's "Motherlode" blog at the NYT titled "Breaking Up After Miscarriage" (sign-in may be required), a Michigan Study (discussed here and) published in Pediatrics  (Abstract) claims that couples who experience a miscarriage are 22% more likely to break up.

More pertinent to those who read here: Those who experience stillbirth (they say nothing of neonatal death or late-term termination as causalities, but I imagine the same applies) "had a 40 percent higher risk of their relationship ending."

Impressively, the study ran for 15 years, and contains information for 7,700 couples. It concludes that "for a miscarriage, the risk persists up to three years after the loss. For stillbirths, it persists up to nine years after the loss, according to research data."

Yikes.

:::

My husband and I are one of those crazy couples that met the first week of college. We dated (at times long distance) for eight years until we moved in together, and another five until we got married. This summer we'll celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, and our 23rd year as a couple.

Our miscarriage way back in '02 didn't threaten our marriage. At least not in the immediate "holy shit" sense. The almost two years of infertility that encompassed the miscarriage was a bit . . . well, let's say it wasn't all rosepetals. We remained quite candid with each other about what was going on, and I guess we always thought "If we can pregnant once, certainly . . . " That is to say: there was hope. Even when the timed sex and timed vacations and the constant onslaught of pregnancy announcements filling our mailbox got old, we felt we were in it together and eventually, with enough time or money or pharmacology, it would happen.

And it did.

So even though Maddy's pregnancy rather sucked, as a couple I felt at the time of her birth that we were fine. Sure, he had been overworked for months, and I was at the end of my rope with exhaustion and longed for him to be home for a few hours, but that would come now with the baby, right?

We went through Maddy's week on earth with the same simpatico used to renovate our kitchen or purchase art together: an occasional opinion might sail slightly adrift, but eventually the other person followed. There were no raised voices, no conflicts, no epithets -- at least at each other. More often than not, we were exactly on the same page, if not the same sentence. In fact, when the doctors said they wanted to take a tissue sample of Maddy while she was alive, I wanted to ask a question and couldn't get a word out of my mouth I was choking so hard on vomit/tears. My husband simply turned to the doctor and asked, "Is there a risk she could die while she's under?" which is exactly what I was going to ask. I have no idea to this day how he knew what I was going to say. Deciding whether and when to take her off life support was less a decision than a shared feeling. Not just the same sentence, the same words. It was time.

I thought we were strong going into this, we had never had problems, and I wouldn't have described our marriage as anything other than strong and happy. And yet about ten days after Maddy's death, I made a phone call to a therapist for the both of us. I could no longer speak. I could no longer get off the couch. And given everything I had ever read in popular literature or seen in a movie or a bad Lifetime tv special, we were doomed to fail. Hell if I was going to lose my husband along with my baby.

In retrospect I don't think therapy saved our marriage. Was it good for our marriage? Absolutely -- it's always good to have an hour set aside to discuss what's eating you with a neutral sounding board in the room so you don't end up throwing the piles of poo at each other. I think we're just one of those couples that came in with fairly good communication skills and a rather solid marriage and needed some reminding and nudging and support. Not to mention four walls, an uninterrupted hour, and a sense of safety and security discussing the worst thing that had ever happened to either of us, as individuals let alone as a couple.

I guess I'm one of those people that looks at this study and on the one hand, I'm thinking I should probably not be so naive as to not check my husband's email or text messaging some time; and on the other I'm not wholly surprised nor am I afraid. I think I feel that your mutual experience of a trauma as a couple is only as stable as what you bring into it. That is, I'd like to see if these stats are much different for couples who experience financial ruin, for example. And that if you're not communicating horribly well, it probably takes far less than a miscarriage to start to fray at the edges.

Sadly though, according to this study, there's still time. Six more years, in fact, of an increased risk for hubby and I. So I can either wring my hands, or fling myself into it. We can continue to talk -- or not. We often find ourselves -- humorously -- asking each other how we "feel" about certain things, in our best therapist voices. But even though it's brought up with a smile, we are asking the question, aren't we? I feel as though we've been tried by fire, and made it through.

At least, so far.

How would you describe your marriage before and after the death of your child(ren)? Are you a couple that's finding it difficult to work through this particular tragedy, or is it one of those things that you feel will make you stronger? Did you do anything as a couple after babyloss that you feel helped you (or in retrospect, do you wish you had done something)? How far out are you, and does the above study's extended timeline of risk worry you? Please reply anonymously if you need to.