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Incompatible with Life

I first heard the words “incompatible with life” in a doctor’s office, when my ob’s partner broke the news that my twenty-week ultrasound had revealed multiple and severe defects in my unborn daughter. 

Incompatible with life. It reverberated in my mind as a most accurate description of the reality of a mother’s existence in the parallel universe of infant loss.

Nobody ever talks about it. The death of a baby is a taboo subject, prohibited in polite conversation. When we hear about it, we shudder and wince, and never speak of it again. That is, unless—or until—it happens to us.

My baby died. It pains me, still, to say it, to write it. I ache for her even now, eight years after her death. To be denied your child’s life is one of the greatest sorrows a parent can ever know.

She was precious to us. We knew early on that she had too many problems in her little body to make life possible. We prepared ourselves for the inevitable. 

I look back now on those difficult final months of pregnancy, when I tiptoed the tightrope between life and death, fighting to keep her alive for as long as I possibly could, and realize that, challenging as it was, that was the easy part of this journey.

While she was alive, I had hope. And when she died, she took it with her. Grief is a weighty burden. The loss of hope magnifies it.

I was unprepared for the way the support would dry up. While I was pregnant, people recognized my unborn daughter. When she died, they promptly forgot her. Discomfort with death is palpable in American society. Avoidance seems to be the method of choice for dealing with it.

And so it was that when I buried my daughter, many in my social circle buried all memory of her. No one mentioned her, asked to see photos of her, spoke her name. In a world that fawns over newborns, that fills Facebook with daily infant update posts, I became a persona non grata.

It was mostly unintentional, I believe, a product of the very human reflex to look away when confronted with an event that reminds us of just how easily our own lives could veer off course—but the ostracism was the cruelest part. As I tended my grief, the world moved on without me.

Incompatible with Life: A story of hope
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