(This is a guest blog about Sydney Grace by her parents Alyssa and Ian. Thank you for sharing this with us!)
Life before Sydney Grace entered our world was so one dimensional in so many ways. Our Sydney story and grief walk began November 29th, 2007. After that, began the new awkward normal, the new awkward life and the new complex dimensions of living with grief and broken shattered heart in family and marriage and on-going life around us.
We discovered in early spring of that year that we were expecting a baby girl. Big brother was excited, momma too, but oh her daddy. Oh was he excited about having a little girl. Things went well for 8 months. The day before the 29th, we had just been to the perinatologist and baby girl checked out just fine. Baby shower invitations were passed out on the 28th during dinner with my good friends and sadly by the morning of the 29th they were no longer needed.
Sydney Grace was born into our arms on a cold November day in 2007. What was supposed to be a glorious long awaited arrival, turned into the darkest day of our lives. We met our once-womb-dancing daughter, too very still for any parent to comprehend, in a haze of trauma and awe, she was FINE just yesterday we fought in our minds and out loud. Eight months pregnant, lots of pain and braxton-hicks took us to triage that early 29th morning, thinking we might be dealing with pre-term labor. Our first child had been delivered almost three years prior via emergency c-section after a partial abruption, it all simply happened at my doctor’s appointment even and he was spared. This time the pain felt different. We walked into triage and they put me on the monitors. They fumbled with tools and laughed at silly equipment that doesn’t always work and then more people kept pouring in for ‘a try’..soon they just stared at the screen. And then they stared at us. All of them, their sad creepy death eyes on us, so oblivious to the rawness of what was fixing to happen. Even more people poured into the room soon, a doctor was called in to deliver the most horrible hellish news imaginable to a parent’s ears. Not only were we not going into pre-term labor like we thought, but our child was gone. No heartbeat. 2 months away from meeting our girl and she was gone, the very day after she was just fine at our checkup, her baby shower invite still sitting in my purse on the hospital floor….
The room went silent, although I could somehow still hear my own screaming. I remember hitting my husband in the chest, so hard, over and over and over and screaming no, wailing and thrashing and screaming no. The room began to literally spin and my ears stopped working. The nurses talking to me spoke but there was no sound. I remember hands on me and nurses trying to calm me down. I even remember tears from one nurse falling onto my arm. She was crying with me. That means more to me now as I recall such empathy.
They wanted me to labor and I tried. All day I tried. But soon they discovered I had had a full concealed abruption and was bleeding internally and by midnight of that night, I needed an emergency c-section and 14 bags of blood just to live, much less deliver our very still daughter. I don’t remember the day following the news, they sedated me and I was very very sick. I believe the good Lord knocked me out plain cold so that I wouldn’t have to deal with my reality. My poor husband though, oh the lonely day he had. Having to make decisions and face that hell alone. Losing his child, his precious little girl and almost his wife, only by the grace of God did that man not go mad that day. Nearly though, I imagine.
After midnight, I delivered our sweet girl. They brought her to us in the ICU, and we were left to figure how to navigate a post birth meeting that included a funeral home and the morgue hours instead of pink cheeks and sweet cries. She was perfect. With daddy’s dark hair and momma’s lips, even her big brother’s nose, she was definitely ours. And yet she was so so still. No movement, no cries, no stirring. I had held a baby in my arms before, our own son, and this stillness was beyond unnatural. All the months of waiting and anticipating, waiting to meet her. And the sacred, much awaited sweet meeting would go down like this? Really? So much shock, so much trauma. The world stopped. And life as we knew it changed.
It was suddenly very dark and lonely. No longer on the post partum floor, I was in ICU with our dead daughter. No words can paint that picture pretty. We had no idea what to do with her, no prompting or leading really from the staff. They fumbled through awkward silence and ill-placed words and oh the stares and the eyes, they had no idea what to do with us.
We sat with her for hours. We sang the songs to her that we sang to her brother, snot filled tears drenched her lifeless body as we prayed over and examined her all about, looking for birthmarks and features, smiling through tears at the life we had created together… we knew this was our first and last meeting time with her. So much of a lifetime crammed into hours, how can that be?
Anger and bitterness didn’t even have a way to enter our hearts in those first few raw hours, just hurt. That would come later when our hearts thawed. For now? So much heart and aching, raw bleeding open heart pain. My family flew in immediately and got to meet her and hold her, my best friend came up to meet her and hold her. But only those few people in our life really ever saw her, or knew she existed. In the kind of ‘weight in your arms’ kind of way. We didn’t know to bathe her or dress her, again, we had no idea what this process looked like. A kind nurse took a few pictures for us, but we had no idea that we could take family pictures with her. Who would know to do that with your so still child?
Oh, how I wish I knew that then. And have those now. We had days with her as I was still in ICU. The back and forth of getting to hold her and giving her back to the morgue was traumatizing and confusing and cruel. Yet, we did have those extra days with her. Until the day came for me go home. Without her. The nurse came to take her and I told her I wasn’t ready. For hours this happened over and over, they never pushed or pressured. Finally, when we had to leave her in the arms of a stranger, only God could have given me the strength to move my feet out of that room and onto the elevator because I physically didn’t know how to surrender my baby girl to someone like that. Onto the elevator we went, shaking and trembling, wanting to throw up and die, the very elevator that carried another woman in a wheelchair holding balloons and her perfectly wrapped cooing baby. While I held my funeral home folder packet and jacket. And the weight of the world and hell all through my body.
The coming days and months would prove trying for our marriage. We each dealt with our loss in different ways. Me sobbing on the kitchen floor or staring out windows, trying to gather courage to delete our registry and yelling at Target people who didn’t get why, screaming at insurance calls asking us about our new baby and throwing infant formula and diaper samples in the mail across the room… him bottling up so much anger that it had to go somewhere some heavy nights and walls were punched and holes were made. And patched. And made and patched. Our local Share Grief group was helpful to have others to talk with and share. Only these people knew the acute trauma that we were still living in. They knew about our fighting and our guilt trips and our faith questioning, our marriage test and relationships around us fractured. They knew about our fears and our depression and our emptiness. Because sadly, they wore these grief cloaks as well. We shared this bond.
The first year was a self-medicated haze, the second year was more of a shock as we realized that it wasn’t a dream at all. We lost another child through miscarriage after that first year, a punch in the gut it felt like… and we felt this looming sadness that even our faith or friends couldn’t seem to reach. But it did. FIghting through ongoing grief and anger, we tried to keep walking forward and fighting for joy. We got pregnant one more time, in crazy faith, and in a pins and needles pregnancy and much testing and home and hospital bedrest, we were blessed with our second son at 34 weeks, our rainbow baby.
We waited in fear and trembling in that OR room for cries, we just wanted to hear crying. And we did. And we exhaled. But with that joy of new life, also came a heaviness the next few days and months of the other life that was gone from our family, it was a strange reality. One was here but one was missing. Joy and Pain all at the same time. One only a grieving parent would understand.
My husband, a musician, finally found a way to express his grief through writing a song for our daughter. I helped him, him with the music and me with the lyrics. It was tremendously helpful and cathartic to be able to do this together, something tangible for our girl. Any and all proceeds from the song would go to the adoption fund at our church we decided.
Something good must come from such sadness we knew. I began speaking at the local hospital to nurses in bereavement training classes and bringing our story, our girl, our experience to them. I still speak there hoping my words, our story, my still-there-tears and pain will birth a more compassionate way of dealing with grieving parents in those first hours. Hoping to help other future grieving parents get help that we didn’t have. This year marked the FIVE year anniversary of our meeting our girl, her birthday we call it, even though she was only acknowledged in this state with a death certificate, we still call it her birthday. The day we met her, the day she went Home to be with her Lord. We bought and planted a tree this year, finally spread her ashes in the roots and prayed together and I sobbed like it was happening all over again, letting her go like that, we let the boys send balloons to heaven like we do every year. And we got through it.
Five years later, we got through it. Yet, I still struggled with a question about why stillbirth is still so unique in it’s grief process, the stigma that comes with it, the loneliness that comes with this particular loss. I have lost plenty of people in my life, some even tragically but this felt so much different.
Yes it was my own child, but the stillbirth taboo added to the ‘different’. I wrote about my thoughts on my blog this year, and it was so helpful for me and my husband to flesh things out and really understand in my heart why the loneliness? Why the still stinging need to make sure people KNOW my daughter lived… I imagine many of you reading this have your own grief stories of stillbirth and know what I mean about this unique grief/lonliness and I pray you find comfort in the ideas that we fleshed out because once I wrote them out, they made sense, I owned them and I felt freedom to just be me and grieve how I need to. And it was enough. No proving needed. Just share our girl with others, keep talking.
http://oursydneygrace.blogspot.com/2012/11/stillbirth-compassion.html
It’s why movies like Return To Zero, stories like this being told ARE going to make a difference.
It’s why we have to keep telling our stories and sharing our children with others and let their legacy speak for itself. Not trying to prove anything to anyone BUT letting us tell our stories because they are vital to helping others and letting our children DO something with their lives, a way of parenting them even now. And to giving a voice to the silent children.
And we can let it help others and make an impact, a lasting difference in this world. And we can all feel blessed for being their parents who get to share such a bittersweet sacred story. Of beautiful sweet precious babies that have forever changed us. Sweet little ones that MATTERED and still do, ones we pray will change the world. And hearts.
- Alyssa & Ian
