Skip to main content

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
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

My Love-Hate Relationship with Teaching

I have a confession to make, one that seemingly meets the criteria of a mundane mid-life crisis: I love what I do, but I hate my job. I’m a kindergarten teacher by trade. I adore children—always have, always will—and have a natural affinity for the littlest learners. I enjoy watching their growth across a school year, the way they come in green and fresh as newly planted seeds at the start, and leave my classroom as saplings stretching toward the infinite sky of knowledge and understanding. I hate the metrics that are used to define my students’ performance (and my own). I loathe the over-reliance on a narrow band of assessment measures that ignores the intangibles of student growth and extinguishes the joy of learning. I resent seeing children reduced to numbers on a grid in the name of data-based decision-making. I cherish the time I spend with my students in the Zone of Proximal Development. I thrive on the everyday teachable moments that enable me to coach into my stud...
Read more

Going Solo

I miss my right breast. There, I said it. It’s not often that I allow myself that luxury. It’s been nearly twelve years since I had it. My late breast was warm and soft, lovely really, even if it was a shave smaller than its mate, and parting with it saddened me deeply. I could say that I lost my breast, but that would imply that there was some remote possibility of getting it back. It’s more accurate to say that I removed it for medical reasons, and replaced it for cosmetic ones. If I had known how much the laborious process of reconstruction would hurt, I would have taken a pass on the effort. When the plastic surgeon explained the process of stretching that would precede placement of the actual implant, it did not occur to me that post-surgical skin might rebel against this strain on its capacity. However, once you’ve committed to the risk, you need to see it through to the reward, which is exactly what I did. I tolerated the pain for the eventual trophy—a cohesive sili...
Read more

The Curse of Expectation

I had a disappointment last week. I’d submitted my book to an indie writing contest and the winners were to be notified by Thursday. I didn’t get the notification. It’s not that I expected to win. Wait, scratch that. My disappointment indicates that indeed, on some level, I did expect some kind of recognition. Maybe I wasn’t expecting to take the grand prize, but I was hoping for at least an honorable mention. Acknowledging that was the first step in being able to let it go. Once I recognized my expectations as a cry for validation, I saw them clearly as a self-imposed burden of proof meant to silence the inner critic who keeps raising doubts about my writing talents. My disappointment wasn’t about the quality of my work—it was about my need to prove myself. What I am learning—slowly, painfully, and inevitably the hard way—is that disappointment is an inside job, rooted in my expectation of how the events in my life are supposed to turn out. I keep slapping my preconceived...
Read more