Incompatible with Life

Sammy and I make an annual trip to the floral shop down the street on the day before Easter to pick up something for Anna. We always decorate her grave for Easter, and have already placed a palm cross and added silk irises beside the headstone. However, the Easter Bunny doesn’t visit the cemetery and we hate for Anna to be left out, so we leave flowers on Easter to make sure Anna knows we miss her. And there’s something about fresh blooms that celebrates the promise of the resurrection. Sammy is a discerning and opinionated shopper who takes the lead on these missions. Perusing the selection of long stemmed roses in the cooler, she quickly dismissed the peach and red and fuchsia-rimmed yellow, and picked out the pale pink spray roses. “How many?” the clerk asked. “How many?” I repeated, nudging Sammy to make the decision. “I don’t know…seven?” “Seven?” It seemed like an unusual number. “Seven. I don’t know how many to get, but I like the number seven.” ...

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 magnitud...

Silent night Holy night All is calm All is bright Hospital bed Middle of night Doctors and nurses Witness the plight Round yon virgin Mother and child Holy infant So tender and mild Tiny blue babe Fights for each breath Mother and father Await her death Sleep in heavenly peace Sleep in heavenly peace.

Our 2006 Christmas photo, two months after Anna's death. One of the hardest parts of losing a baby is the wondering. A stream of questions without discernible answers emerges in the wake of loss. Who would this child be? What would he or she be like? What parts of family temperaments would have merged to create his or hers? What would family life be like if this little member had lived? Which of this child’s interests and talents would we be supporting as parents? And, conversely, which of his or her quirks would be driving us berserk? These are the questions that creep up on me in the middle of ordinary days and haunt me in the dead of night. When I lost my youngest daughter, I lost any semblance of the future I’d planned. My sugar-candy former life dissolved into a murky puddle of grit, gratitude, and grief. What appears clear on the surface—even now, years later—is muddied and dark at its depths. One of the ways I cope with sadness is by imagining what life would be...

On the day that I buried my infant daughter, I received a card from a distant relative on my husband’s side. I’d call it a sympathy card, but the hand-scrawled message from the sender negated any comfort it was meant to bring to us. “It’s so refreshing to hear of a couple choosing life over abortion.” Refreshing? That’s a word that wouldn’t make my top million descriptors of the experience. Was it excruciating, soul-crushing, and bone-wearying? Yes. Refreshing? Not in the least. I’ve tried, over and over again, to understand what would prompt someone to think such a thing, much less write it in a missive to the bereaved, but I can’t find a reasonable explanation, other than the fact that it’s easy to arm-chair quarterback the lives of people you’ve only met once. It’s easy to judge when you don’t have a vested interest in the case at hand. It was precisely that fact that led us to a private funeral for Anna. After months of being asked if I was going to terminate the...

Grief has a long shelf life. It lurks at the back of the mental pantry, pungent and putrid, flavoring everything around it. Years after a deep loss, it retains its potency and—at expected and unexpected moments—seeps out of its container in a toxic spill. I’ve learned to accept the grief I carry as part of who I am. I do not make a habit of wallowing in it, but when it leaks into my daily life, I’m forced to bring it to light and air it out before I can force it back into confinement. October is, for me, the month when the barrel of grief is tapped. Anna’s birthday is an expected catalyst. Every October, I cycle through the beautiful, terrible memories of birthing and burying my baby. My teen-aged daughter and I are at each other’s throats in the weeks leading up to October 10 th , bristling at real and imagined offenses and jabbing at each other in verbal sparring matches. Our tongues take leave of our brains in what can only be termed a temporary period of insanity. ...

Family portrait by six-year-old Sammy. Note that I take center stage in a larger-than-life role. Mothers are biologically hard-wired to ensure the survival of the species. They are charged with preparing their offspring to leave the nest by teaching them the skills they’ll need to navigate the world independently.      With reality television shows and women's magazines glorifying the exploits of pushy and meddlesome moms, controlling moms who demand that their children live up to unreasonably high standards, one gets the sense that modern mothers grade themselves on their children’s achievements. From the women who trundle their pre-schoolers from one resume-building activity to another, to those who spend the equivalent of college tuition on their kids’ elite sports leagues and dance teams, many moms seem to believe that it is their level of devotion that determines their child’s destiny. There was a brief spell, very early on in my parenting lif...

Brown hair, maybe blonde Blue eyes, like her sister Round cheeks, stubborn jaw A grin full of mischief The sum of our parts Put twice together In the daughter we know And the one lost forever

I used to love September. The shift from sultry summer to crisp autumn was a welcome one. I enjoyed the back to school vibe. I marveled at the brightly colored leaves drifting from the trees, and savored the sounds of apple orchards and pumpkin farms. Heck, I even got married in September. It was Anna who obliterated my adoration of autumn. She was due in November—11/11 to be exact—although she ultimately arrived on 10/10. I’d learned in June that she carried a fatal chromosome defect, and by the time we reached September, she’d already outlived her life expectancy by two months. That September was a month of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was filled to the gills with excess amniotic fluid and having contractions almost constantly. I knew that the end was near. I lived under a steady drumbeat of impending doom that none of the pleasures of autumn—not even the first pumpkin spice latte and slice of caramel apple pie—could mute. Every September since has resurrected t...

You say you know A lifetime ago (And smugly, too) I thought I knew A million dry runs in   Technicolor daydreams Yet unprepared Caught unaware I hurtled from the track In far-flung frenzy Broken, groping Faintly hoping But, oh! The dark I emerged Alive (not fully) Whole (not really) Shattered, scattered Dead and buried in The new normal You issue demands Always needier, ever greedier And stare through the obvious With reckless oblivion Don’t tell me that you know— You don’t. Can’t? Won’t. Incompatible with Life: A story of hope

“Everything happens for a reason.” It’s one of the most common rote responses we have when we hear of someone else’s tragedy. I’ve been on the receiving end of this comment more times than I care to count…and I hate it. Seriously, I’d love to see it eradicated from the English language. When people tell me that there’s a reason I got cancer, it implies that there’s a reason why they didn’t. When they tell me that there’s a reason I lost my baby, the unspoken message is—well, you know. Those words, strung together in an overture of sympathy, provide comfort only to the person speaking them. They represent a very convenient and human reaction to tragedy—seeking meaning in a way that enables us to distance ourselves from the possibility that such a thing could happen to us. Interestingly, I’ve never heard this phrase uttered by a parent who’s buried a child, or a widow who lost her beloved spouse. I’ve never heard someone with a life-threatening medical condition suggest ...

When you undergo a significant loss, you find that anniversaries--be they actual wedding anniversaries, birthdays of a deceased family member, diagnosis dates, or the date that a loved one passed away—pack an intense wallop that can knock you off your feet (and game) in the days and weeks leading up to them. One might presume that the first of these anniversaries would be the most devastating, but that assumption would be incorrect. The truth is, you don’t know how the day will feel until it arrives. The second, or fifth, or twelfth might hit you just as hard, or perhaps even more so, than the first. Sorrow takes many shapes (most of them ugly) and morphs into its various forms at the most inopportune moments, creating a temperamental typhoon that’s not entirely predictable, and certainly not preventable. In fact, the more rigidly you try to control it, the more likely you are to come unhinged. A vague sense of anxiety, an uptick in sadness, negative thought patterns, an e...

A good many people view the world through an either-or, black-and-white lens. This is particularly true on polarizing issues like late-term abortion. My decision to carry my broken unborn daughter to term probably paints me as a staunch pro-lifer—which I am, I guess, in the small realm that is my own body. However, when asked where I stand on the issue of abortion, my answer is not so simple. I firmly believe that human life is sacred. I also recognize our societal tendency to marginalize the elderly and the infirm, the physically and cognitively disabled, the poor and the homeless—and pretty much anyone else whose appearance makes us uncomfortable. I find it curious (and repulsive) that the overeager lawmakers who are so zealous in their protection of the rights of the unborn are able to cut their commitment to those babies as soon as they exit the birth canal. Their legislative concern for the health and welfare of the permanently and profoundly disabled child dries up a...

I set up this blog years ago and let it sit, unsure of how to proceed or what to write. I’d written a memoir of the time spent carrying and mourning my little girl, an attempt to distill my experience into a readable, relatable form. I thought that the blog would somehow go hand-in-hand with the book, maybe even promote it. But I found myself curiously stymied. It wasn’t just that I was unsure of my ability to navigate the technology and commit the time to posting—I had plenty of tech-savvy, would-be advisors and had blocked out daily writing time on my calendar. I was stumped by both a lack of direction and an inability to create content. I had no idea of what to write. It went beyond writer’s block. Paralyzed by self-doubt, I was linguistically frozen, unable to articulate the thoughts and emotions that churned in my brain. My circumstances had placed me on the outermost edge of the realm of moms’ groups, well beyond the normative experiential bands of the social circles...

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 diff...