I Remember You

Three years ago today, I found out a baby I’d carried for two months had died. It was one of the saddest days of my life. It changed me forever.

When I got home after the D&C that Saturday afternoon, all I wanted to do was snuggle with the boys on the couch. After they went to bed, I cried and cried. No baby to bring to Thanksgiving and Christmas. No baby this year, even. No baby.

Monday was the hardest, with Brian back to work, life around me returning to normal. I’ve never felt so empty.

I did have a baby sitter back then, for a few hours in the morning. I used that time to go to the bookstore for trashy magazines and to the grocery store for chocolate and soda and coffee and ice cream. Back at home, I put all the pregnancy books and exercise videos away in the upstairs closet, hid all the hospital paperwork in a file drawer, and threw out the sympathy cards and the gorgeous, purple flowers my friend had sent me. I couldn’t bear the reminders. If only I could have hidden the cruel, crimson-soaked pads I faced every time I went to the bathroom.

For weeks I sat on the couch and ate and watched daytime TV while the boys bounced off the walls around me. Then, I got up. Life went on.

Just as the miscarriage blindsided me, so did my reaction to it. I was only seven weeks. Why was it so hard?

A few weeks ago, my local MOPs meeting was about death and grieving. We listened to some painful miscarriage stories. (Is there any other kind?) During the discussion afterwards, the table leader asked us, If you have experienced a loss, what did you learn from it that we might use to help the grieving?

I answered something about being there for the person, not to talk about the loss, per se, but just with an invite to the movies or something. After our discussion broke up and my table mates went to get their kids from the babysitting rooms, I realized what I should have said: An early miscarriage may not be as painful as a later one, but it is excruciatingly painful nonetheless. Just because my baby was, I don’t know, an inch long, doesn’t mean I won’t miss her for the rest of my life.

At that meeting they had some suggestions for grieving a miscarriage, such as giving the baby a name, planting a tree in her honor, having a special dinner on his “birthday” to remember and honor him. Listening to those suggestions I felt bad that I didn’t plant something, or name him, or hold on to items from the hospital. So busy to forget, it seemed I forgot to remember.

I mulled that over in these last few weeks. I've found that, when I look back now, I can see more than just my own stinging disappointment and rage and confusion. I can see that baby, whom I had the privilege of knowing for seven weeks, if only in the form of my nausea and fatigue and optimistic visions of the future. I can see an angel, waiting to meet me someday. And I can say to her, "I remember you, baby. Mama would never forget."