My baby died two months ago tonight.

I still can’t believe that. I am still waiting to wake up. I still get involved with something, forget for awhile and then crash back into the truth of that. I still awake and savor the few moments before I remember.

Today, I saw the name “Lyle” and thought, “Hey! We haven’t thought of naming the baby Lyle. I should tell Danny. . .”

Today, the pedicurist said “Are you pregnant?” and I said “No.” And she said, “Oh, the way you were touching your belly. . .” and trailed off.

Today, I got an iced coffee and rested it on my belly as I drove like I did with a baby in there. I noticed and I just left it there.

Today, I thought “It will be so uncomfortable to nurse this summer in this heat.”

Without having my baby to hold and nurse and care for, I sometimes forget that he came out. I am sometimes still waiting for him to arrive. I sometimes have the bliss of forgetting and have a moment of planning or considering names again or wondering what it will be like to have two children to take care of at once.

At times, his absence is surreal.

At times, his absence is all too real.

And I protest. I seemingly cannot stop protesting that this is happening. I cannot stop knowing that he was born already and that he is now dead. I rail against it in my mind almost constantly. I drive with an empty seat. I sleep next to an empty space where the co-sleeper would be. I dress my daughter from a closet with an empty shelf where diapers and baby supplies were. There is an empty drawer in my dresser as I’d made room for him and can’t remember what filled it before that. I am constantly aware of his absence. He would always be with me these days and he still is, except in the form of emptiness, of space, of absence. Except in the worst possible form. And there is a part of my mind that refuses to accept this. That is still holding out hope.

I have spent a lot of time learning to accept “what is”, making a practice of not fighting what is happening, and this has made my life easier, more enjoyable, even happy. This I will not accept. I seemingly cannot accept it. I will continue to protest, like a child, despite having no possibility of a do-over, a second chance. I know why people believe in parallel universes because, sometimes, I can literally feel us there, in some other awareness, all together, loving our new baby, struggling with the new challenges, time stopping in those moments of pure joy only a newborn human can bring. Sometimes, I can close my eyes and almost feel him in my arms. Sometimes, I hear the beginning of a crow call or a cat’s emphatic meow and just for a moment, I hear my baby crying for me. Just for a moment, he is there. And then, he is gone again.

Original 6/23/13:

My body is an asshole.

It was all too eager to conceive and then it wouldn’t let my daughter out. Since we had the good fortune to be in this tiny window of human history when both of us wouldn’t die slowly and painfully in childbirth, we were saved by modern medicine.

Ten days after she was born via c-section, the left part of the incision opened, superficially.  I had an open wound through all the layers of my skin on my abdomen which my husband or I had to “irrigate” and then stuff with cotton pads, twice a day, for months. We had a little box with all the tools: the squirt bottle filled with warm water, the long necked metal tweezers, the 2×2 surgical pads, the towels laid under me and kept in hand to wipe away the bloody water, the mirror I would hold between my knees so I could do it myself once I was able. And I thought that was bad.

Two and a half years later: It happily, easily conceived again. No problem. Except the baby died at 6 weeks gestation and my body waited another 5 weeks to let me know. Just to get those hopes up. I went to the ultrasound after we knew the baby was gone and I saw it inside there: a lima bean sized human. Curled up and dead, unbeleivable to me that it wouldn’t just keep growing or come back somehow. It’s likely there was something wrong with the baby, but I don’t deal in likely anymore, so I’m calling it inhospitable environment.

One year later: Conceived too early. I had a few more days before I would be in the ovulation window but that eager body, following it’s biology, performing the nearly impossible, mysterious and, yes, miraculous merger of sperm and egg, created our son. From two cells to four trillion cells in 9 months.

After the fear of the first 12 weeks, the “riskiest” time for most people, (“Don’t anyone get excited!”, I would say, “We have no guarantees this pregnancy will last.”), I began to relax and get excited and plan and purchase and make room. My body carried that baby like a pro. I certainly had more symptoms than with my daughter: swelling, numbness in my fingers, heartburn, but low blood pressure, normal weight gain, our baby kicking and moving and heart beating like he was ready for this world.

Water broke, early labor, active labor, transition, pushing, baby. It’s perhaps the most amazing feat the human body can preform and this time, seamless. No problem and also no warning. Imagine for a moment that your body tore open along some scar in your skin. The moment of rupture brought swiftly and acutely to your attention, the subsequent  insult of further opening and then the throbbing of the open, bleeding wound. This is what happened inside me, except without all of that normal, expected communication. Not just skin but layers of think muscles, torn apart, bleeding out, killing my baby and not a word. Not a dipping heart rate, not some extra, extraordinary pain. Nothing.

7 weeks later: I wake up on blood stained sheets and rush to the phone to call the advice nurse. She  says, “Fever?” No. “Increase in pain?” No. “Filling a pad every 15 minutes for an hour?” No. “Honey, I think you have your period.”

What. The. Fuck. Really, Body? You’re ready for this again? Should we give it another go? Roll those dice and see what happens. Just for fun.

This means I’ve ovulated since my baby was born and died, likely just 5 weeks later. In the midst of the deepest grief, the highest amount of stress in my life, my body didn’t skip a beat. What would it take, I wonder? How high would the cortisol level have to be for the pitutary to shut this thing down for a minute? How can I have such ease in creating and such utter disaster or narrowly averted disaster in delivering?

What about this situation calls for preparation, ovulation and shedding? There is no part of my being right now, not body, mind nor emotions, that could mother another child. I can hardly take care of the living child I have, I can hardly take care of myself. But it’s ready again. And if history is any teacher, it’ll be ready again in 16-19 days from now. That will be 9 weeks postpartum, 9 weeks postmortem.

My body is a machine: Daily suffering several episodes of crying, nausea, dull headache, blood that feels toxic from stress hormones, waves of anxiety, and the heaviness of depression. And yet, it just keeps going, uninterrupted, driven by the physiological mandate to reproduce. No matter what carnage lays in it’s wake.

My body is that asshole who taunts and cajoles you into doing the very thing you know you should not do. That asshole that makes the whole thing sound so easy and fun and amazing. That asshole that you curse later that you never should have listened to, that you wish you never even met. Assuming you survive.

Updated 7/15/13:

My body is an asshole. It’s remnants of needing someone, something to blame, to be at fault, when there isn’t. But I’m still mad at it. I didn’t know how mad until I start to move again.

After my baby died, I got several “mandates”. A voice inside told me what I needed to do. One of them was return to my Nia practice. I healed my depression dancing and moving in a class of women who were in their bodies, sensing their bodies, experiencing the joy of having a body to move and shake and shimmy and twirl. I started taking these classes and started crying through them. No thoughts, no story, just tears and so began my journey from daily misery to daily contentment, happiness even.

So I’m back. Back in the very same room, the very same teacher, the very same practice 12  years later. Back to heal this new aching wound, to find my center, to still the mind and just be in the body. Except that this body is impossible to be in, uninhabitable. The stress hormones released by the grief are a million ants crawling through my veins. My shoulders and neck continually ball up into tight, aching knots no matter how many massages, hot baths, and Tiger Balm patches I use. I cannot stand to be in this body where everything has become uncomfortable, where I literally want to crawl out of my skin. I want out and I’m stuck.

I’m stuck here, laying on the bamboo floor, in this asshole body. This broken body that failed me and killed my baby. I am so angry at this body that I’m stuck in. I am angry that it is all ready to have a newborn: that it gained 40 pounds during the pregnancy, that it  has stored up fat and nutrients and released hormones to literally keep another human alive with it’s milk. I hate that I have all of this weight on my bones. I hate that I don’t recognize myself and I don’t feel like myself in this body and it would all be fine if I had my baby. I hate that all of that energy, those calories, that effort is wasted and now I must go about the business of losing it. Shedding those pounds, chiseling out the body that is actually mine, that looks and feels like mine. The body that is still underneath this body that was made by my brilliant biology for Harvey. I can feel it, sense it, under this weight. It is strong and graceful. It moves without pain and with ease. It is balanced and aligned for the most part. It does not have these tight muscles, ligaments and tendons grown hard from grief and inactivity and atrophy. It responds the way I want it to when I ask it to. It doesn’t ache and throb at and all around the rupture site, deep inside my abdomen. It can lift it’s knee and kick it’s leg and step back in a deep lunge. And yet, it’s still the asshole body that failed me, that killed my baby, that is taking it’s sweet, sweet time to get better.

I move through the room during class and I cry again, just like I used to. I lay on the floor for the last 15 minutes and sob and sob as the cellular memory releases. I sob and sobas the people in the class get their things and go home. As I move, I remember, my cells remember.  They remember the sensations of him pushing his feet into my ribs and elbowing  my hip joint and pressing his head into the top of my cervix. They remember the sensation of bone against bone as he slipped into the birth canal. They remember the sensation of impossible stretching of swollen, red tissue as his boulder of a head waited there, just at the edge of this world, to be pushed out. They remember the limp, lifeless newborn that the ocular cells scanned and scanned and frantically scanned for any kind of movement, some response, maybe a reflex. They remembered his weight, how the muscles cells got tired and the nerve cells stopped firing in my forearm from sitting and holding him in the same position for hours and hours. He was not easily moved for all the tubes and wires protruding from his swollen little body, so the body started to give up under him, the light weight of his tiny head. They remembered the physiological ache, first for my baby, and then for a short time, any baby to hold and feed and respond to. They remembered how that slowly transformed into the emotional ache, how those same cells became flooded with the chemicals of grief and returned to the ache for my baby, the one that looked like my first baby, the one whose genes were my genes and my husband’s genes, who called to us at that very atomic level. As I moved my body, it remembered. It told me the story again, this time with the opportunity to release it. And I did. I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed. But it’s not done with me. There is more in there to remember, to release, to live with.

I’ll keep going. I’ll keep moving and sobbing and remembering. I’ll keep trying to heal this body. But partly it will be out of spite. It will be to regain control. To feel that I am not at the whim of this faulty body that failed me, that killed my baby, that will fail me again at some point, no doubt, and kill me, too.

April 26, 2013
3:32am
Early labor

Dear Vesta,

I have loved you as my only child for the past 3 years, 6 months and 20 days. There is no one I love the way that I love you. You have been my constant companion, my little buddy, my partner in this journey of motherhood and childhood. I have done my best. I will forever cherish this time we spent: days and nights of just the two of us, just the three of us.

Right now, I am waiting for your little brother to be born. His presence is going to change a lot of things in our lives. I will necessarily divide my attention in ways that may be challenging for you. I will continue to do my best to care for you and meet your needs.

But the truth is, he will bring us so much joy. You will have a friend for life, a childhood companion to play with, teach and learn from. He will join in on our activities and we will be better for it: happier, more fulfilled and complete.

I cherish you, my daughter, and I cherish the gift of the most joyous, challenging and wonderful 3 years, 6 months and 20 days that you have given me.

I will always love you fully and uniquely. Nothing about my love for you will change except that it will expand as I watch you care for, interact with, teach and love your little brother.

Your dad and I are the luckiest people on this planet to have you, and within hours from now, your brother as our children, as our true family.

If you know only one thing as you walk through your life, know that you are loved. That you were loved before you were even born, through every moment of your life you are loved and even after your dad and I are gone and you are a grown up, maybe with your own kids, we will still love you.

Always know that you are loved. Fully and completely.
Mama

There is something so primal about this grief.

It oozes from my cells. It is called forth without a thought, without a story in the mind to trigger the emotion that create the physical response of weeping. It just comes out of me, out of nowhere sometimes. Just being in this body that conceived and grew and labored and birthed him. This body that bled for him, that leaks milk for him, that sags from him. He is in my cells, my cells in his and so it is for his absence, as well. Holes left in otherwise functioning viscera. Essential parts of me gone: mitochondria and DNA and stardust. My son. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, ashes to ashes.

This grief brings out the most irrational thoughts, the mind making up ways to fix it, to make it different. Someone was driving me to the hospital while he was still alive and I thought, “If we never moved back here. If we’d just stayed in San Francisco, this never would have happened.” I have stood, naked in the shower, begging a God I hardly believe in, to give him back to me. “Please. Please.”, I whisper into the darkness, into the steam, into the deaf nothingness.

By the pulling forth of my grief from cells, the sobs unaccompanied by thoughts, I recognize my animal nature in all of this. My massage therapist tells me of grieving animals: elephants, dolphins, monkeys, who won’t leave their dead baby until the last minute, who nudge the body, who pace and moan, who become visibly depressed. A farmer friend tells me of being in the field with her daughter, moved to tears by the cries of the mother goat who lost her baby in birth. I remember the redwood trees who grow in circles from the body of the dead “mother” tree. The whole world mourns. Not just me. Not just my species. Not even just my classification. They are like me and I am like them.

I am an animal and the irrational, ridiculous mind wants to be a different animal. A polar bear, a beetle , a spider, a shark, a hamster. These animals who care so little,  that they eat their own young. I don’t want to be the mourning animal. I want to be the callous, survival of the fittest, cycle of life, cold-cruel-world animal. I want to have an understanding that living things live and die without reason or purpose, that some are not fit for this world, that there is an evolutionary advantge to not caring, so much so that the benefit of the child’s death outweighs its life. I want to know this in my bones  as biological and natural facts. Cold, hard truth that is not right or wrong but just is. I want a scientific understanding, a biological knowing so that I can just continue, so that I can just accept my place in the natural world. I want to be a different animal.

At Harvey’s baby shower, our friends and family wrote blessings for us, for his birth and beyond, and put them in a small box. It has sat on my messy desk the last several weeks. It was in my bedroom while I labored, I have debated putting it in the bag of his things, hand and foot prints, hat he wore, all of our sympathy cards, some photographs, but it just didn’t seem right to mingle his before birth things with his after death things. At least not this box. So, I have picked it up, moved it and set it down several times. Tonight, I tidied up his altar, lit his candles and remembered that my cousin sent him a quote as part of her blessing. I knew it said something about angels, so I opened the box.

I unfolded the first paper, known to be hers and read:

“It has been said that , “Babies are a link between angels and man.” Little one, you come from some great angels and are entering into an amazing family.”

I placed this paper on his altar and noticed another piece of paper folded in the box. The blessing sent from Harvey’s Grandmother from a Jewish naming ceremony she attended, ended like this:

“And now the angel says, “I have given [babies] all that an angel can. I have given them a song, and a smile, and feet to dance, and a sensitive hand, and a tender heart. Now I shall give them this prayer: As they have been blessed, so may they, through all the days of their lives, bestow blessings upon others.””

Below that I came to the small, rectangular folded papers of blessings written by those in attendance at his shower. I had arranged them so that they were in a stack, gently folding in on itself as they were all once folded in half. I could read on the top paper, in my best friend’s unmistakeable script:

“I love you.
And so do all
your angels.”

I read through all of the papers. The well wishes, the blessings, the words of encouragement, of welcoming, of excitement of love. But none others mentioned angels. Just the three on the top.

6/16/13                                                                                                                                                                                     Father’s Day

Dear Harvey,

I’m not going to lie: We were hoping for a girl.

I’d never tell you that of you were alive. There are a lot of things I say now that I wouldn’t if you were still here.

But I’ll tell you now that is was mostly out of fear of the unknown.  (Oh, and the Kardashian size wardrobe of girl’s clothes size 0-3T occupying most of the storage space in the basement). We felt like, we have a girl and we know how to take care of a girl, so lets just stick with that and hope for the best. New parents have the jitters, even second time parents, and ours shown through with this ridiculous thought. When I was pregnant with Vesta, I also wanted a girl. I imagined, since I am a girl, that the first child being the same sex as me would make me transition into parenthood easier.  I would know how to relate to her, understand her experience better, and be a more successful mother. It doesn’t make and sense or any difference really. It’s the kind of thing that we tell ourselves to help prepare us for the huge, looming, frightening, and exciting prospect of becoming a parent. So that we feel like we have some control.

We began to adjust to the idea. We joked about getting  “pee pee teepees” and the lifelong fart and butt jokes we’d be subject to (well, me subject, your dad a happy participant in, I’m sure). I began to imagine being a parent of a boy and thought about how I might parent you differently than a girl. What a boy needs to know in this world about being a man, dealing with the extra power society gives him for that particular roll of the dice, and if you were straight, how to teach to love and respect women in a world that encourages you otherwise.

I began to imagine the kind of relationship your dad with have with you. First, of course, was going to the ball game. I can go with him to the game, but it’s not like when he goes with his brother. Vesta can go with him, but I imagine, it’s not like when he goes with his son. There is some bonding, some intimacy, that happens for your dad with other men in the bleachers, beer in hand, yelling the most unique taunts at the outfielder I have ever heard, laughing, commentating and, with you, I imagine leaning in to teach you the ins-and-outs, the strategies employed in this situation or that, and the joy it would give him to answer your questions about the game. Thanks to your Grandma, your dad and your uncle are true gentleman: considerate, thoughtful, observant, kind, and caring. They are strong and loving and protective of those they love. I imagined the subtle ways that your dad would teach you to be all of those things. I imagined how he’d invite you and your sister into the kitchen to help him cook. He’d teach you knife techniques and how to set up your mise en place and maybe even some of the nutrition priniciples I taught him along the way. Your father loves being a father and a family man, just like his father did. He wants nothing more than to come home to his family and do the daily things with us: the outings, the activities and the big things with us: the achievements, the holidays, the celebrations. Your father, who is now a fatherless son and a sonless* father, looks at us sometimes like no man has ever loved his family this much. As if he is the first husband and parent of all time and just discovering it’s many mysterious and wonderful joys.

But son, I never could have imagined exactly what an amazing father he would have been to a living son until your service. Two days before, he handed me a thick stack of folded note paper. “This is what I’m going to read,” he said. I read through this incredible eulogy your father wrote for you, the baring of a grieving soul, the torment of a father meeting his dying son in a panic, the description of your birth stats as all that we knew of you, being in the presence of the machines and tubes and electrodes that engulfed his newborn, the grappling with the meaning and purpose of your short life and how it makes our seemingly long ones no less significant or important. I said, “You are going to read this?”. He said, “I am going to try.”

And so the candles were lit, the poems read, the words spoken and then your dad walked to the front of the room, overfull with people he has known his whole life, people he’s only just met and people he didn’t even know. In front of his high school buddies, his coworkers, his family, he spoke. He read his eloquent words between and amidst sobs, his face and his body contorted to betray the depth of his pain at your loss, as a protest of this moment and this obligation. In some ways, it was the ultimate act of fathering: to eulogize your dead son. To me it was horrific: my partner, my best friend, my true love in shreds in front of me. I looked at the face I’ve looked at everyday for 12 years and it was transformed by his grief. It was my husband up there, I could recognize him but he was different now, utterly transformed as he fathered you in the only way he could now. To me it was also beautiful: impossibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Having not yet adjusted to your not being with us anymore I thought, “He is going to be an amazing father to our son.” This brought me to inconsolable sobs yet again, as in that moment, I saw that your father would have taught you by example, through words and actions, exactly what you’d need in this world as a man: to be vulnerable and strong at the same time, to be both expressive and eloquent, to be scared and confident all at once. It’s a different world you were born into. A world where men must be all of these seemingly conflicted things, and yet there he was, my son’s father, demonstrating it in perfect form.

Harvey, you chose well and Vesta chose well and though I’ve always known that I chose well, I know it now in a whole new way, in a deeper place inside of me, in my every cell. He would have been a great father to grow up with. With his grace and humor, his curiosity and practicality, his intellect and vocabulary, his casualness and sureity of self, his love of simple things and simple moments, his desire to teach and be heard, his constant growth as a man, a husband and a father. He would have been a great father to you, Son, if you lived and he will be an excellent father to you still. He will protect and nurture and celebrate and father your memory.

Harvey, you brought out the very, very, very best in your dad. And as he continues to be a grieving husband to a grieving wife and a grieving father to a grieving sister, he just gets better and better. And as our grief dulls and we begin to live again, he will be never be the same, transformed for the better, the stronger, the more loving, the more compassionate, the more comfortable in his vulnerability, the more alive, the more of what it takes to be a man in this world. And it is all thanks to you, his son. Our son.

Thank you, Harv. On this Father’s Day, our first as your parents, I thank you for the opportunities that you provided and will continue to provide your dad to step into the fullness of his fatherhood for the rest of his life.

I love you, my son. I love you,                                                                                                                               Mom

*As I type, the spell check recognizes the former as a word, but not the latter. We truly don’t have the words for this type of loss.)

We are a statistic.

My daughter is small. She always has been. We go to the pediatrician and get the charts and she’s way at the bottom of the bell curve. 5th percentile, 10th percentile, sometimes 15th but always small. Her doctor said to me once, “Don’t worry. Someone has to be at the ends to create the averages.”

That someone is us. Our children hold down the statistical ends and create averages. Defying the odds. Statistically unlikely. Nothing to worry about.

“Fortunately, a uterine rupture from a prior cesarean with a low-transverse scar is a rare event and occurs in less than 1% of women laboring for a VBAC.

Medical experts state that the risk of a uterine rupture with one prior low-horizontal incision is not higher than any other unforeseen complication that can occur in labor such as fetal distress, maternal hemorrhage from a premature separation of the placenta or a prolapsed umbilical cord.”

What happened to Harvey could not be explained. A healthy pregnancy, a normal labor with neither of us showing signs of distress, a fetal heart beat heard just minutes before the final push. And then, dead baby. The midwives worked on him, the medics worked on him, the doctors in the ER worked on him and got him back. Well, got his heart started again.

Harvey’s doctor in the NICU chose her words carefully. She focused solely on the 24-27 minutes without a heartbeat. Something was wrong with his heart, it stopped beating, he suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen to the brain due to stalled circulation for “an extended period of time”. Her concern was the 24-27 minutes after birth, she said repeatedly. So much so that, she would not look at the homebirth chart notes. She would focus only on the moment of birth on. I said, “But he his heartbeat never faltered during birth”. I said, “He had a heartbeat just a few minutes before he was born.” With her carefully chosen words, she basically said that we couldn’t know those things for sure. And she wouldn’t look at the chart notes. (I don’t know if you have ever seen home birth chart notes but there are an extensive documentation of everything that is happening. I don’t know how they do it and take such good care of a laboring mother and then her newborn, but somehow the notes are just minutes apart. I have never seen chart notes for a hospital birth, perhaps it is the same. Perhaps they are documenting every significant event, vital sign, shift, words the mother says and other observation several minutes apart for hours but I doubt it.)  And so here it comes: the first judgement, the first person who knows better than I, the first criticism, now thinly veiled since my baby is about to die. Behind her carefully chosen words was “You had a home birth. This is a bad choice that put your baby at risk. The only relevant information begins when you entered the hospital system”. I want to say, “I didn’t hire a bunch of teenagers to birth my baby. I want you to be a scientist and be curious and use every spec of information available to figure out what happened.” My friend, who has no opinion on birth venue says, “You should get a new doctor. Why doesn’t she want to know what happened during the birth?”. But we don’t have it in us. We just put our trust in the opinion of this lady who thinks our baby is dying because we weren’t at a hospital. Later, when his death becomes absolutely clear, she says, “This happens with babies born at the hospital, with babies born at home or anywhere else. They suffer insults during birth that we cannot explain, that come with no warning, and they die. And I’m so very sorry.” I appreciated hearing her say that, her attempt to absolve me or at least give me a little peace.

For a week after Harvey was born, I stuffed and muffled and attempted to ignore the voice that said, “You killed your baby.” The voice that ran all the scenarios, that also focused solely on those 24-27 minutes, that told me “If you were at the hospital, they would have gotten his heart started right away and saved him.” If there wasn’t time it took for us to realize he was not okay, for the ambulance to arrive, for them to get him from the house to the vehicle to the hospital to the ER doctor who finally got his heart started. That series of events was a result of my poor choice, that felt like the right choice. If I had not put my baby in a position in which he could not be resuscitated for nearly a half an hour, he would be alive. Another voice quietly wondered, “How are you ever going to live with yourself?”. My husband and I got on the same page so that when we talked about what happened to him that we would not reveal that we were at home when he was born: “Something was wrong his heart, they couldn’t get it started in time and he died.” I had such intense judgement of myself that even the slightest insinuation, even that little bit that crept through the doctor’s words, was unbearable for me. The inside judgement, guilt, shame, anger were exactly as much as I could take. Any sideways word from the outside would literally break me. How would I ever live with myself.

Uterine rupture in pregnancy is a rare and often catastrophic complication with a high incidence of fetal and maternal morbidity. Numerous factors are known to increase the risk of uterine rupture, but even in high-risk subgroups, the overall incidence of uterine rupture is low. From 1976-2012, 25 peer-reviewed publications described the incidence of uterine rupture . .  .yielding an overall uterine rupture rate of 1 in 1,146 pregnancies (0.07%).

– http://reference.medscape.com/article/275854-overview

It didn’t make sense. His heart was the only donatable organ in his body. It never faltered during the whole pregnancy, nor during the labor and birth. It was there and then 5 minutes later, it was gone. How could it be that there was something wrong with his heart? I trusted that doctor because she must know something that I don’t. She is not grief-stricken, post partum and in physical pain, so there must be something that I am missing. She is an educated and experienced neonatologist. Sure she wouldn’t look at the birth notes, but she must be confident enough that it was his heart to tell us so, even though she did say that there truly is no explanation. It rolled around in my head. It was an annoying fly buzzing around in there. “It just doesn’t make sense. His heart was fine.”

One week after Harvey was born, my parents took me to urgent care. I had run out of pain medicine, they didn’t prescribe narcotics over the weekend and so I had to go in to get reevaluated. The advice nurse on the phone, after hearing my circumstances, attempted to get them prescribed for me so that I wouldn’t have to leave my bed. To no avail. I had to go in. So, before we grabbed lunch, they drove me over for a quick evaluation, a prescription and off we’d go.

Eric M was a physicians assistant who saw me. He came in and talked to me for about 15 minutes about my grief first, how I was handling it, what they could offer me in terms of support. He then examined me. He asked me many questions. Sometimes, he asked the same question more than once. I didn’t down play that my pain had increased from the previous day, but it had been changing day to day, I had walked more yesterday, sat in the park for hours, it could have easily been explained away. He very easily could have done what I was asking: just give my pills so I could get out of here. He gently but firmly suggested I have an abdominal ultrasound. I reluctantly agreed.

My step-mother wheeled me towards the ultrasound room. I didn’t realize until I was standing up out of the chair that I was about to lay down on the table and look at the grainy, blue-black and white image of my empty uterus. The techs at this hospital do not know the details of patient’s case that they are working on, so she happily bopped into the room and began the procedure. I asked her to turn off the TV monitor, positioned so that the patient (aka happy mother about to see her baby) can see the whole thing. She did so and asked questions that ended up in my having to say I was pregnant, I am postpardum and the baby died. And that was the first, not the last nor the hardest, time I had to tell an unsuspecting stranger the tragic news, hear the initial gasp of air, the slight squirming, hands to her heart, embarrassed and apologetic and so, so sorry for my loss.

I was wheeled back to my room and then the wonderful PA, who as it turned out, could very well have just saved my life, came back into the room. He told me clearly but compassionately that the found a large hematoma between my uterus and bladder and that I would be taken to the hospital by ambulance, right now. He continued speaking about internal bleeding, abdominal surgery and emergency and then he became Charlie Brown’s teacher, “mwaht maht maht mah mwah” as I was flung right back into shock. There I sat, dumbfounded and unfeeling, staring again at a hospital wall thinking as a lady came in to take blood and out in an IV. People were coming in and out of the room, making preparations, my family decided my dad would ride in the ambulance and my step mom would take the car back to my husband. “Oh,” I thought slowly, “I should probably tell Danny about this” and slow as molasses, I dialed his number. He was scared but calm because now we are old hat at this, a good ol’ boys team at emergency situations. He would meet me there.

I ended up spending my son’s one week birthday in a hospital bed as our friends and family from far and near were arriving and gathering at our home. My greatest fear was that I would miss his service the next day, due to the seemingly likely event that I would need to have abdominal surgery to stop whatever internal bleeding was happening. Seemingly every nurse, doctor, and CNA told me they knew about the service and were doing their best to get me out in time to attend. I had a CT scan and a morphine drip and life was good. I felt so normal. I knew my son was dead, I knew I was in for possibly more medical intervention and extended physical pain and recovery but I just felt normal, unconcerned, like everything was going to be okay. It was wonderful. The next day as the morphine slowly wore off, I felt my heavy heart pull my spine back into it’s new, defeated C curve shape, I felt the heaviness of my loss and the bubble of thick sorrow that surrounded my return. Having had the relief, the several hours of neutrality thanks to Morphine, my new reality seemed even harder to return to.

It turned out that the incredibly unlikely event of uterine rupture had happened to me. The uterine muscle tore apart at the scar of my previous c-section from the inside out. The hematoma they found in my abdomen was actually held just inside the outer most layer, the skin, of the uterus. I was one thin layer of tissue away from an internal organ bursting open. I was saved. By whatever luck that I had that was not shit, I did not die in child-birth, I did not continue to bleed internally, I did not have to have abdominal surgery, at least not today. I was saved.

But mostly my luck was shit.

“The initial signs and symptoms of uterine rupture are typically nonspecific, which makes the diagnosis difficult and sometimes delays definitive therapy. From the time of diagnosis to delivery, generally only 10-37 minutes are available before clinically significant fetal morbidity becomes inevitable. Fetal morbidity occurs as a result of catastrophic hemorrhage, fetal anoxia, or both.”

– http://reference.medscape.com/article/275854-overview

While the risk of rupture is only about .07% for all mothers laboring for a VBAC, birth professionals are always on the look out for signs and symptoms. I had exactly zero symptoms: no pain between contractions. As most birthing mothers, I greatly looked forward to the time between contractions when I could breath deeper again, when I would have a relief from what felt like the entire front of my pelvis being slowly but surely torn apart. No vaginal bleeding. No change in vitals. No change in frequency or intensity of contractions. Nothing. Harvey either. All we have to take care of our babies during birth is their heartbeats. His never faltered. He had one way to communicate to us and it failed him. He and I, too hardy for our own good.

So, my uterus tore open and killed my baby. My body turning on its precious cargo. The blood that was supposed to go to my baby was spilling out of the uterine cavity and he, slowly but surely, began to lose brain function. Not enough blood, means not enough oxygen, means death of brain cells. I imagine that it happened over several hours. The scar slowly continued to tear contraction by contraction, the blood slowly diverted into complete uselessness, the slow death of my son more and more inevitable.  I believe that he had a heartbeat minutes before he was born because his brain stem was only starting to shut down. Perhaps the intensity of being born and the progress of the brain death culminated in a few minutes and at the time of his birth, 6:02am PST on Saturday, April 24th, 2013, he also died. The brain had suffered so extensively that it began to shut down even involuntary function, like heartbeat, circulation and life. They got him back and we go to have time with him but he was dead when he was born. I felt it in my bones.

None of this is true. No one can confirm it. It just makes the most sense. It is the most logical explanation. It confirms my suspicion that there wasn’t anything wrong with his heart.  It gives me relief from an incredible amount of guilt and shame for being so committed to a VBAC and a home birth. It gives my grieving brain something to point to, soothes some important human desire to know “why”. It wasn’t the 24-27 minutes without a heartbeat (though that certainly didn’t help) but that my kid’s brain was significantly damaged already. Without symptoms, my baby would have died no matter where he was born. “We see this”, said the neonatoloigst, “seemingly healthy babies with normal deliveries die.” This is true.

“For term pregnancies, the reported risk of fetal death with uterine rupture is less than 3%.”

– http://www.vbacelpaso.com/death_rupture.html

There is comfort in these numbers: less than 1% chance of uterine rupture and, within that miniscule amount, there is a less than 3% chance the baby will die. There is comfort in being the outlier, in holding down the ends of the bell curve. There is comfort in knowing that there were risks in a second c-section that held a higher probability of happening and I made the choice that made the most statistical sense.

There is no comfort however in shit luck. In being too hardy. In becoming a statistic.

It is spring and babies are being born.

As I gingerly walk from my front door to the park next to our house, a crow begins to caw. He is perched low in the tree and looking out onto our courtyard, eyeing me in particular it seems. As I approach his caws become higher pitched and more frantic. I pass underneath his perch and swoosh, he soars down towards me, almost skimming my head as he passes. More cawing and then back again from the direction he came, diving again towards my head making a horrible racket. Within my physical limitations, I begin to run a bit to get away from him. Later, I go out to get something across the street in my car and the same cawing warning, frantic cries and then dive bombing.
As the hours and days pass, he is sometimes there and sometimes not. He dive bombs my friend in the morning but is nowhere to be found midday when the mailman, he who is best prepared for the onslaught with his hard-shelled sun hat, clambers up the walk and then he is back again when my husband returns from work. He goes after passers by on the side walk, people walking in the park and those of us living in the apartments adjacent to the tall pines he and his family, it turns out, live in.
As I am first annoyed and yell, fruitlessly, “Stop! Stop it, Crow!”, it quickly turns to frustration and anger. I consider walking around with my kid’s Wiffle bat and swinging it at him as he heads toward me. In this time of heightened emotion, I even have a fantasy of shooting him down with a gun. My anger morphs into fear as he becomes bolder and more and aggressive and I worry that he will come after one of the small children that lives in our complex.
Then my friend tells me he must have a baby around here somewhere that he is trying to fend us off from. I notice the next day that he is watching from his perch, not just me walking towards him, but also another crow below him in the bush, who is tending to, I can only imagine, their baby.
I stand at the end of the walk, look up at him for awhile and him at me, my fear turning to compassion. Connection even. I tell him quietly, “I understand now, Crow.”

I, too, am an animal. I, too, am at the whim of nature, at the mercy of this natural world. I, too, would hurl myself at a giant predator to save my baby. If I had the chance.

We sat outside to eat dinner last night. We live right on a park. The golden light of the evening sun shown through these majestic, enormous trees onto the green, green grass. Children were still playing on the playground. Birds flying low through the tress and calling there evening chatter to each other. The sky was a darkening blue and cloudless. I felt the breeze, but too cold against the warmth of the rest of the day.

Earlier in the day, I was driving and trying to make sense of how the world has changed for me, how it has shrunk and caved in  and what it is like for me to be alive now. And sitting there last night, I realized this was how it has changed: I can see the beauty and the peace and the warmth and the joy and the essence of life right now just as I see that beautiful scene of nature in our park. But as I sit and see this truth, there is a constant, chilling breeze that makes it utterly impossible to fully receive it anymore, to be a part of all of that. It is beautiful and warm all around me and I can see it but I am slowly dying of hypothermia from some unknown source of deep chill that is constantly blowing in like that breeze. I want to say that I am outside of life now, of it’s poetry and beauty. But I’m not outside of it. It’s worse. I can see it and touch it and am squarely in the middle of it, but I am no longer fully a part of it.