Stillbirth - Nature's Cruelest Act

It’s been two weeks since the birth of my first grandchild, my grandson Liam, to my only child and his wife.  But instead of the joyous occasion we had anticipated for the past 8 months, it was a family and personal tragedy for all.  Liam died, in utero, at slightly less than 37 weeks gestation.   After a perfectly normal pregnancy he died.  After being active and healthy, up until the day before the activity inexplicably stopped.  He died.  HE DIED.  WHY??

What a cruel joke.  Not only is your child (or grandchild), who you have loved and nurtured with your body, who you have felt do fetal gymnastics, who you have laughed at as he hiccoughed inside you, who you have built decades of dreams onto (fairly or unfairly) dead, he now has to be expelled by the act of giving birth – not a miracle anymore.  What should have been a miracle is a painful, chemically driven, act.  You don’t get to see the first breath, hear the first cry, feel the first sucking on your swollen, ready breasts.  You do get to see the lifeless beauty that was your child/grandchild.  You get to hold him – and reflexively you rock him to comfort him.  But that is comfort for us not for him. You whisper to him how beautiful he is, and how you wish you could have met him.  Waiting, wishing, for his eyes to open, for him to say “it’s all a bad dream, I’m really alive, I’m really here.”  But that doesn’t happen, and you cry and you grieve and your heart breaks, as you look upon this beautiful, but dead, child’s angelic face.   

We took pictures, and professional pictures were taken, and hand and feet molds were taken, and his ashes will be given to my son and daughter-in-law in a week or so -  this beautiful child will not be forgotten.  Just because we never saw him breathe, or cry, or run, or hug, doesn’t mean he wasn’t very alive to us. 

I still became a grandmother – but my grandchild died.  I didn’t know I could cry this much.  I’m going through the stages of grief not just for myself, but for my grieving children.  As a mother I want to “fix it” for them – so in some ways it is double grieving.  There is nothing that can fix this, not even time.  Time will make the pain more tolerable.  Time will take this event from the center of our world to the periphery, so we can function and go on.  But time doesn’t make it go away – there is no bandaid for this.  Another child, sometime in the future, will help to push that pain to the periphery, but another child won’t, can’t, replace Liam.  Another child will bring the joy, and pain, of childrearing.  Joy and pain we won’t ever get to have with Liam. 

This raw pain will ease, I know it will, it has to.  But meanwhile I cry, and grieve, and finally was able to write in my blog, sobbing the whole time.  I sincerely hope that no one out there who reads this ever has to personally experience this pain.