September 28, 2019 would have been my daughter Violet's 8th birthday. For 8 years I have been a mother and for 8 years, I have been without the little girl who made me a mother. I got to hold her, kiss her, dress her, change her, touch her for three precious days and then, suddenly and inexplicably, she was gone.
Some of her birthdays feel more significant than other, though all of them are painful, the kind of painful that makes me want to simply curl up into a ball in my bed and stay there until sometime mid-October. Violet's 8th birthday is one of those extra-significant birthdays. In our faith, 8 is generally the year that kids can choose to be baptized. It's a big day - dresses are made, suits purchased, parties and family gatherings planned. Her daddy would have been the one to lead her into the water of the font and dip her gently into it with his strong, capable hands. She would have worn a white dress and I would have taken extra care with her hair. There would have been talks planned by her favorite primary teachers and family members. We would have sung songs and a cake would have been baked.
Instead, I'm without her. 8 years later and, when I allow myself to be still enough, I still feel the aching, dragging, tearing pain of losing her that I felt that day.
I have never blogged about what it was like to lose her or even talked extensively about it to more than maybe two or three people. It's too painful and, for most people who haven't experienced something similar, it's too uncomfortable. People don't want to think about how vulnerable we are as humans, how near to death we are every day of our lives, how one move, one choice, one decision can stop our worlds on a dime.
But my daughter is 8 now and I am pregnant with her baby sister now. I need to get this out of me or it will fester like a gangrenous wound. I need to get it out because, perhaps by doing so, I will create a space for my constant, barely-contained terror to escape and I can sleep again. It will be hard and lengthy, uncomfortable for people to read and I may never actually read it myself. Typing it, pouring it out of me will be catharsis enough.
I have perfectly clear memories of the day that Violet was born - almost as if I had a video of those precious moments. Her beautiful face, her chubby hands reaching toward me from the depths of her tiny bassinet, her hair (she had so much hair!), the eyes that looked so much like her daddy's. She had the most beautiful chubby cheeks which belied her wee 6lb 10oz, 21" long form. She was tiny and perfect. She passed every test and was completely normal in the most heavenly way. She managed to keep her eyes open in her hospital nursery photo in which she was dressed in a delicate pink outfit with a little pale yellow satin bow on her forehead. The nurses cooed over what a good baby she was and how she never cried. She took to nursing like she'd been doing it for years. We were happy and content. I had injured my neck during her delivery and was in pain, but I still held her as often as possible and took every chance to bathe, dress, and love on her that I could. The first night she was outside of my body, she was a little fussy so I held her and swayed, singing "Sweet Baby James" to her and she calmed down and fell asleep. I had sung that song to her daily while I was pregnant with her, rubbing my belly and swaying my hips the way that pregnant ladies do, and she seemed to recognize the melody. I had read about that phenomenon in my pregnancy books but seeing it in practice was pure magic such as I had never known.
We were discharged two days after her birth and went home to our teeny-tiny house that we had rented shortly before my husband and I were married nearly two years before. My husband had painted her nursery yellow with pale green trim which went beautifully with the "Very Hungry Caterpillar" nursery art I had chosen. Her changing table was stocked with wipes, diapers, and other little baby things full of their heavenly "clean baby" scents. Her crib, which was bought by my father, was made with fresh sheets which had been sewn by my grandmother and the dresser was full of clothes purchased and gifted to us by friends and loved ones. She was surrounded by love, it seemed, and we couldn't wait to snuggle down into our little home with her.
That night, my best friend came to bring us dinner and I remember her little boy (who is now a big boy of 10) looking at Violet and me with this awe-struck look of love, a little smile on his sweet toddler lips. There was something he seemed to understand in his little boy mind about how sacred this fresh-from-heaven baby was and how these hours seemed to be cloaked in sweetness. He couldn't take his eyes off of this tiny little pink bundle in my arms.
Before my friend left, we solidified plans with my friend to come to her home the following day for General Conference (a semi-annual even that happens the first weekends of April and October where the leaders of our church speak to the members of our faith worldwide via television and internet) and she left. I was exhausted from the nursing, the pain in my neck, the lack of sleep in the hospital, and the overwhelm of the last few days so my husband took our little girl and I fell asleep on the couch. He held her through the night and brought her to me when she cried to be fed. We lovingly joked that her cry sounded like a pterodactyl cry and adored our baby like all new parents - as though she was the first and only baby ever born.
The next day, we puttered around the house, showered, my husband folded some laundry, and we took turns looking at our daughter. We kept hoping that she would wake up so that we could "play" with her - dress her and change her. She obliged beautifully and we looked at each other in delighted amazement: "Had any baby ever been this beautiful? Look at how she yawns! So cute! Look at the adorable outfit we put on her! She is envy of all babies everywhere. No baby will ever be this special!" We were smitten.
We set off for our friend's house in our comfiest clothes, swooning over how adorably tiny Violet looked in her carseat. My husband was uncertain about the wisdom of going to such a social occasion so soon after Violet was born, especially with my neck still healing, but I (crabbily) assured him that I was fine. I really wanted to go and, mostly, I wanted to be with my friend and my baby. Motherhood is sort of a club, you see, and I had just recently been inducted. I wanted to show everyone my beautiful, perfect baby in her sweet outfit. I wanted to talk about being tired and breastfeeding, teething and nursing mother cravings in the way that women have been doing together since time immemorial.
We arrived and I settled into a couch in my friend's living room, Violet in her carseat asleep and talked about the delivery and the time since she had been born with friend and her sister-in-law while we watched the talks from the General Authorities. In time, Violet started making some little squeaking noises so I eagerly picked her up and settled her in to nurse, which she did. She fell asleep while she fed, milk drunk and relaxed, and so I unlatched her and she snuggled into my chest in the way that only newborns do.
Suddenly, instinctively, I had the feeling that she had somehow become heavier on my chest. She was still. I picked her up and looked at her face and, in a moment that is emblazoned on my memory as though burned there by a brand, I saw that she had blue patches around her lips.
The moments after that come to me in bursts of flashbulb memories and, some nights to this day, in my nightmares. Me babbling semi-coherently to my friend (who is an RN) that Violet wasn't breathing. Screaming down the basement stairs to my husband to come and help me. Trying to figure out how to call 911 on my phone when I could barely see straight. The sight of my best friend of a decade or more and my LPN husband performing CPR on the impossibly tiny form of my daughter. My friend's brother trying to give her a blessing and the words not coming to him. The sight of an EMT rushing to the ambulance with my daughter in her arms, Violet's little onesie-clad arm swinging lifelessly. My friend's brother holding me up as my knees gave way and I collapsed on the front lawn.
Violet was rushed to the hospital in the ambulance and my friend drove behind in the van, my husband and I silently in tow. I remember walking through the doors of the Emergency Room with my husband holding my arm, and then sinking to the floor. Everything after that is a blank until I remember being in dad's car on the way to the University of Michigan Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor, two hours away. Violet had been life-flighted there via helicopter and my husband had gone with her. By all accounts, I had passed out and regained consciousness, only to be unresponsive to verbal stimulus. People would talk to me and ask questions and I would look at them, but I didn't seem to be hearing them and I didn't reply. I have no memory of any of that. It's just blank, empty. I will never stop feeling guilty for abandoning her that way, leaving her with doctors and nurses working on her tiny body. It wasn't a choice and it wasn't something I could help but it still feels as though I failed her.
That night, at the U of M, a nurse led me to a private room where I could pump milk in private "for when your daughter wakes up." I was left there, alone, behind a curtain, and hooked up to a machine which worked to pump milk that hadn't really come in yet, one more way in which I felt like I was failing my baby. All the while, my daughter was being given an ice bath to bring down a sudden spike in fever and the doctors battled a cycle of regaining and then losing her heartbeat in a cycle that felt increasingly hopeless.
Finally, a doctor came to see us and we were led into a tiny, beige, windowless room. I stared straight ahead while the doctor did his best to explain that there was very little that they could do and that, given how little she was and that they couldn't find anything wrong with her to treat, it was unlikely that she would survive. He recommended that we agree to cease life-saving measures and disconnect her from the machines. We agreed, in a moment that to this day feels unreal, and she was brought to us dressed in a crisp cotton dress with little pink flowers on it and wrapped in a blanket. Her eyes were closed and, if you couldn't feel her weight and the lifeless chill of her skin, you would think she was sleeping. I held her and rocked her, my husband's arms around me and his tears falling on my hair. I cried, I kissed her cheeks, and I sang "Sweet Baby James" one last time. It's the last time I've ever sung that song. I could hear my dad's choking sobs from the across the room and that gutted me in a way that will stay with me forever. Finally, the nurse came and said it was time. I stood, with my baby in my arms for the last time and followed the nurse to the triage room. I laid her gently on the bed that the nurse indicated before stepping away so that we could say goodbye. How could I do this? How do you say goodbye to your daughter for the very last time and walk away? What do you say? I kissed her and ran my hand over her soft, downy head, marveling again at her long, beautiful hair. I told her that I loved her, thanked her for making me a mama, and told her to be a good girl, that I would see her soon.
Then, I turned around, walked out of the room, out of the hospital, and into the yellow light of the parking garage. No one spoke. No one touched. I was more alone that I had ever been before in my life. I felt like I had been hollowed out by a red hot piece of steel. She was gone.
In the days that followed we lived at my father's house because I couldn't bear the idea of going back to our tiny house with the little nursery where no baby would ever sleep. I barely ate. I barely got out of bed. I wore the same clothes I had put on that last morning with my daughter until I started to stink and my husband guided me gently into a shower. One morning, he woke up to me sobbing on the floor next to the bed, my breast pump working at draining my breasts of the milk that had just come in and that would be dumped down the bathroom sink.
Instead of planning a baby blessing at our church, we planned a funeral. I picked out a tiny, 6" tall pink and purple cloisonné urn for our baby, a purchase that days before would never have crossed my mind. We chose a photo to include in the order of service and songs that would seem fitting. We requested in the obituary that people wear purple to her funeral in honor of her name.
The nights, after the visitors had gone home and all of the family that had come into town had gone to bed, were the worst. I would wake myself up sobbing, the smell of my baby fresh in my mind. I would wake up screaming, crying for her, calling her name. My husband kept the painkillers that I was still taking for my neck and the sleeping pills I had been prescribed counted and under lock and key out of fear that I might do something drastic.
The first time we went out of the house together, someone from my husband's work ran up to us and exclaimed joyfully, "So how's that baby?!" She hadn't heard. I broke down right there in JoAnn Fabrics and walked to the car while my husband tried to explain. Everything hurt. Everything was torture. Everything was a process.
We had arranged to rent a home from my husband's parents and I never, ever went back to our dear Little House that I had loved so much. I couldn't bring myself to do it. Kind people from our church came and packed up our belongings and my best friend took all of our baby things and stored them at her house if or until we ever needed or wanted them again. We moved out of my dad's house in late October and we were, once again, alone. There were no people surrounding us, no well-wishers dropping by, no meals in the evenings. We were half an hour outside of town in the middle of the woods, alone. I had left my job the month before in anticipation of being a stay-at-home mother which meant that I was completely alone most days. I would play audiobooks incessantly just to hear another voice in the house. I talked to myself, sang to myself, played music, unpacked boxes. I had never been so lonely, so afraid, so desperate, so numb.
We met with numerous specialists in the following months - geneticists, obstetricians who tried to staunch the hemorrhaging I was experiencing thanks to not being able to breastfeed, neonatal specialists. Finally we received the report in the mail with the cause of death being listed as SIDS - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The geneticist on the phone call that followed explained that SIDS truly is just what is listed when there is no discernible reason for why a baby dies, that "sometimes, babies just die." That is as close to an explanation for why my daughter is gone as I will ever get.
Sometimes, babies just die.
Something strange happens when you lose a child. You become less yourself in the eyes of others and more one of "those poor people." The looks of pity start to gall and people say truly asinine things to you as a way more of comforting themselves than you. The morbid curiosity sets in and people want to know "what happened?" They expect explanations in the most bizarre places - the grocery store, the middle of church, the park. What they are really looking for is reassurance that this could never happen to them - their children don't have such-and-such condition, they don't put blankets in their babies' cribs, their babies are healthy. It suddenly becomes the task of the grief-stricken to comfort those around them, to assure others that the platitudes being offered really do help, that their children are safe, that they are good parents. Something like this could never happen to them because, you see, you are now "someone else" and everything always happens to "someone else."
And so. It is 8 years on and I have finally put this out into the ether. I have sobbed while writing this while sitting in bed next to my husband, knowing how blessed I am that three beautiful, healthy little boys are sleeping in the two rooms across the hall from us. I feel the bounce and flip of the little girl who is living deep inside of me right now and I pray, as I always do, that she is healthy. I pray that lightning doesn't strike twice, that this time it will be different. I try not to let my mind consider the possibility of genetic mutations that the specialists didn't catch, that maybe it's only girl babies that are affected by them, that maybe there is more heartbreak on the horizon. I try not to allow the terror to consume me, to enjoy this pregnancy which will in all likelihood be my last. It is hard but I try. I try to engage in the excitement of the people around us, to talk about baby names and due dates, to think about whether this baby will have lots of hair and chubby cheeks like her sister. Some days I succeed and I catch myself getting excited at the prospect of painting tiny toenails and buying glittery tutus. Other days I am so frightened that I can hardly drag myself out of bed.
There is no easy way to conclude this post. There is no succinct way to close that doesn't sound trite. I could say, "everything happens for a reason" and that I'm counting on God to "trade beauty for ashes" but the truth is, I just don't know that right now. I don't know the reason why this happened and I don't know what God has planned for us, for her. I'm not certain that we will have a happy ending for this story or that this baby will be close to celebrating her first birthday this time next year. I don't know those things and I have learned to be brutally honest with myself throughout the process of building my family. It hasn't been a smooth journey and I will forever be scarred by some of those experiences.
I am not the starry eyed 26 year old that I was when I was pregnant the first time but that's as it should be. To still be that girl I would have to sacrifice the woman that I am today and the family that I have now and I know that I couldn't willingly do that. All I can do is move forward with the wisdom and experience I've gained, giving myself grace for whatever state of mind I find myself in from day to day. I can understand that saying "I don't know what to say but I'm here" to someone who is facing grief is better than saying nothing or something stupid and that simply showing up for other people's lives is more powerful than being able to "fix" any perceived problem. I can embrace the woman I am and say "thank you" to the woman that I was for the things she taught me. I can love my babies and my husband, I can face my fears, and I can vow to love this coming baby with abandon no matter what happens.
