I went to play volleyball tonight. As the two teams are setting up, the guy standing across the net from me says hey. I ask him, “how’s the baby?” A few weeks before he’d made the announcement that his fiancé was having a girl. I knew the due date was some time in the spring.
I must have known something.
Just the week before, they found out the baby was lost. An ultrasound showed no heartbeat. The baby was six months along.
He said the worst part was having to go through the labor of delivering a dead baby.
My grandmother went through something like that, some eighty years ago, though she was giving birth not knowing the child was already gone. She would lose a second child, a sickly one, as they used to say, after just a few months. Long enough to have some pictures taken. He was buried in the plot where my grandfather and grandmother would eventually come to rest. She lost a third child when he was almost fifty – heart failure triggered by asthma (and a generally unhealthy lifestyle).
Loss.
I have seen many suffer at the loss of an adult child. My grandmother was never the same after my uncle died. It’s not the natural order of things. But the pain of the loss of a child in utero can be equally devastating. When an adult dies before his/her parents, those parents have a real, concrete person, one who created many memories that the parents can turn to. A couple who miscarries has an abstraction, a sonogram image or two – there’s a reason why the word we use to describe the process of fertilizing the egg as conception – that little one is just that, a concept, an idea. And it’s hard to fully comprehend the grieving of a potential, conceived, life.
It happens so often, even in the States. Marriages have ended because of such losses. I can’t pretend to know the feeling a woman must have when life inside her stops growing. No matter what the truth is, she must go through all the feelings of guilt, despite the fact that such losses almost never have anything to do with what she did. I don’t know if it’s easier on women who have already given birth to healthy children or not. I suppose every situation is different: a neighbor of ours lost a child that would have been her third, and probably knew it was a long shot. I also don’t think she carried that far along, certainly not six months. It did seem easier for her to accept.
This guy played all night, looking pretty much his usual self, though I knew he was heartbroken. He did what most guys tend to do: settle into something that is familiar, to help cope. It is different for men, because they don’t have the feeling of carrying a growing fetus inside their bodies. But it does hurt. I don’t know that it’s any easier for a man that it is for a woman.
You both spend all that time, imagining what this little one will decide to be. You make plans. You go through books of names. Maybe you make a special room and decorate it. And no matter how prepared you might be for this possibility, it takes your heart and cuts it to pieces.
Sicilian-American women have a superstition: nothing for the baby until after he/she is born. No gifts, no clothing, no furniture – no baby shower. Because of their belief in understanding that happy times must be offset with something tragic, they wait until the life is here and in that body and breathing on his/her own before even picking out cribs!
I was very fortunate. Two pregnancies, Two girls. Tonight I’ll go to bed after doing more work and hold them a little closer.