I had the opportunity to visit with an old friend this past weekend who I had lost touch with a handful of years after graduate school. It’s one of those relationships that when you see them you pick up right where you left off as if only hours or days had passed instead of a decade.
I got to meet her husband and two wonderful young sons who were a joy to visit with and then, when the boys napped, we got caught up. My old friend had heard briefly about our loss through a mutual friend and asked about it so I told her the story. During the telling, she told me she was getting heart palpitations and I felt awful so we changed the subject for a bit and then came back to it when they passed.
My friend is incredibly bright, thoughtful and a joy to discuss all manner of topics with so I was a surprised that her perception of stillbirth was that it typically only happened where there was lax medical oversight, poor pre-natal care, and the like. I told her that this wasn’t the case, that it happens much more often than people like to believe.
She sighed and called what happened to us “one in a billion.”
I didn’t correct her. I had already probably said too much. And maybe for an instant I wished it were one in a billion… but in fact it is 1 in 115.
We lost our child Rockette when she was 5 months in the womb. I had an infection from an amniocentesis that killed her. I went into labor and delivered a .7lb tiny girl that was wrapped in a blanket for us to hold. I carried around her blanket in my purse for months after she died. She came into the world on September 11, 1991. Little did we know the significance of that date 10 years later. We honor her memory every September 11 by putting one rose in a vase that we bought at Huntington Memorial where I delivered her. My daughter, who we adopted from China, tells her friends that she has a sister and brother but her sister died. We went to support meetings and heard stories from other parents about loosing their child. The group was really helpful but not a dry eye in the room. Thank you Sean for bring this to the attention of the public through your film. There will always be that emptiness from loosing a child - time heals but it never goes away nor do I want it to.