A fundamental truth of pregnancy and infant loss is that a
mother blames herself. It doesn’t matter what the doctors and nurses say to
reassure her that it wasn’t her fault—that it was nobody’s fault—she believes
at the deepest part of her being that she caused her baby’s death.
All around her she sees other women who have delivered their
perfectly healthy babies with ease. Her awareness of having been singled out
for the agonizing fate of loss is compounded every time she realizes that she
is the only mom in the room who didn’t get to keep her baby.
The broken record of prenatal admonitions screeches in her
head. If only she’d exercised more, or eaten better, or been able to keep those
horse pill vitamins down, or prayed harder…She ponders what she could have done
to deserve such disaster. She wonders if God hates her.
Her shame is a secret so dark and deep, so powerful, that it drives
her sorrow underground. To publicly display her grief would expose the magnitude
of her failure.
Her sense of isolation grows with every baby shower, birth
announcement, and baptism. It does not help that her presence makes such events
awkward for happy new moms, some of whom misread her emotional bankruptcy as
jealousy and behave as if her inability to muster sufficient joy at their good
fortune is a friendship-ending personal flaw.
She sets her sights on closure—another if only—and obsesses
over how to reach it. But closure will never come, not really. Whatever event
or milestone she sets, even if she reaches it, will never undo the forever-after
absence of the child she loved beyond measure. And she knows it.
She stumbles forward, day after day, month after month, year
after year. She slowly regains her strength and equilibrium, eventually finds
her way back to life. But even with the space and distance of time, shame
and guilt remain.