Being a new member of the bereaved parents club, having just attended a grief conference specifically for bereaved parents, AND with October being Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness month, it's time to talk about the "Grief Olympics." There should be no such thing.
This is a sensitive topic that addresses a broad spectrum of people. I am going to talk about things I have not experienced. Please understand that I have the best intentions, and I sincerely hope that none of this post is offensive to anyone who HAS experienced what I am going to address.
Obviously, I have made my grief over losing Weston very public. A lot of people know about Weston's life and death, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Every person's grief is different, but opening myself up has allowed people to help me, pray for me, send me heartwarming messages and gifts, etc. To me, it has been a huge blessing. An unexpected outcome has been the outpouring of your own losses. Some are obvious to the world: death of a child, parent, sibling, spouse, cousin, friend, a divorce...the list goes on. However, many are quite private: many of you have told me of your own experiences with stillbirths and miscarriage.
Well, I guess a stillbirth, by definition, occurs later in pregnancy, when the pregnancy is usually common knowledge. I'm already getting myself in trouble here...
There has long been the "rule" in our culture that a woman does not announce her pregnancy until the end of the first trimester, when it is "safe" to do so. Officially, the end of the first trimester occurs at the end of 13 weeks gestation. My pregnancy problems started at 12 weeks 5 days. I had already told people close to me, and a few others. In the early days of bed rest, I wrestled over whether I should have told anyone I was pregnant. As soon as that thought would come into my head, it was immediately replaced with, "That is ridiculous. You are on bed rest now. You have a toddler you can't take care of. You need help. People are going to notice that you have dropped off the face of the earth!"
According to the Internet, a pregnancy loss before 19-24 weeks is a miscarriage, while a pregnancy loss any time after that is a stillbirth. But really, who cares? I doubt the mother experiencing a pregnancy loss at 18 weeks feels any differently from the mother whose loss occurred at 25 weeks. By the way, there are some real gems out there in cyberspace explaining the EMOTIONAL differences between stillbirth and miscarriage. Note the heavy sarcasm of the previous sentence.
Weston and I do not fall into either camp. Weston was born alive and lived less than 28 days, so his is considered a neonatal death.
So, why the taboo against talking about miscarriage and stillbirth? Why does it have to be so private? If Weston had been born just a week earlier, he would have most likely been a stillbirth or a miscarriage (depends on which Internet resource you consult). But who is to say I would be grieving any less than I am now? To be hamstrung from sharing my loss would be devastating and debilitating. As lonely as grief is (have I said that before?), I CANNOT IMAGINE the loneliness I would be feeling if I felt that I couldn't talk about it, or that people would minimize my loss. Just like I needed physical (and mental, emotional, and spiritual) help while I was on bed rest, these parents who have experienced pregnancy loss need a lot of help as well. I have been thinking about this issue for a while, but it has been underscored recently with the realization, through another friend, that so many mothers experiencing pregnancy loss simply do not talk about it because they anticipate a lack of support and/or sympathy.
This is WRONG. As a MISS Foundation person said, "We are not in the Grief Olympics." It's not a contest, people. The end result is the same: we have lost children. I am not going to posit that my experience is worse than someone who never got to meet their baby. My grief is my grief, and whether it is deeper than someone else's who lost their child, at whatever age or gestation, is immaterial.
I have never experienced miscarriage or stillbirth, for which I am grateful. But, I have been threatened with each. That day in the park, April 18 (which I wrote about here), I thought I was having a miscarriage and did not know what was going on for a few hours. Let me tell you, I was devastated. To this day, I cannot go back to that park. Caroline still remembers how upset I was: "Mommy got hurt at the park near the swings. There was a lot of blood." If I had lost Weston that day...well, I can't imagine.
And, stillbirth. It was a real possibility when I was diagnosed with CAOS at about 22 weeks. I was told, in the hospital, to request a sedative and sleep aid and just wait out this "difficult situation" because, essentially, my baby was not going to make it. It was also suggested around that time that I get an amnio so that I could terminate the pregnancy (at 22 weeks!). In other words, there was little to no hope that my baby would ever see the light of day. For the first (and, so far, only) time in my life, I did request a sedative; I was that upset.
But, thankfully, Weston did see the light of day. It was not nearly long enough, because I am still alive and he is not, but it was more than the miscarriage and stillbirth parents experience. True, miscarriage and stillbirth parents probably did not have to experience the following:
Twelve weeks of bed rest
Twelve weeks of bleeding
One month in the hospital
A panicky c-section
Leaving their sick baby behind in the hospital
Fear of breathing on or touching their baby
Not knowing the fate of their baby, minute by minute
Their one-pound, six-ounce baby actually LOSE weight
Watching their baby silently cry and be unable to comfort him
The sights and sounds of the NICU
Endless tubes connected to their baby, to the point they didn't even know what he really looked like
Agonizing over DNR orders (I did not experience that either, but it is a common reality in the NICU)
Being denied access to your baby
Agonizing over how much time to spend at the NICU, work schedules, etc.
Regretting every moment not spent by their baby's side
Having to make the decision to cease life support and watch their baby die
However, look what I got to experience that they did not:
Possession of a Certificate of Live Birth and a Death Certificate
Feeling my baby kick and move inside of me
Weston being born alive (although I have no memory of this)
Knowing the sex of my baby
Pumping milk
Introducing Weston to family and friends
Changing Weston's diaper
Wiping his eyes, feeding him through his tube
Feeling him grasp my hand
Seeing his open eyes!
Watching him grow
Experiencing some milestones (eyes open, pooping, taking breast milk)
Touching his warm body for hours on end
Seeing Weston respond positively to my touch
Smelling him
Giving Weston a bath (after his death)
Holding him against my chest while he was alive (I would go through hell and back a thousand times over to experience that moment again.)
Being with Weston as he died peacefully, and know approximately when he left this world
Having his ashes
When you lose a child, you learn that NO amount of time is enough if you, the parent, outlive your child. I would give ANYTHING to have had more time with Weston. I would do it all again-the bed rest, the hospital, the bleeding and threats to my health and life, the unparalleled stress of the NICU-even just to have three weeks again. And, although I'm breaking my rule stated above to not put myself in others' shoes, I would venture a guess that a mother who lost her child in utero, at any stage, would gladly take on my experience as well if it meant they got to meet their child.
In hindsight, I do not wish that I had had a miscarriage or stillbirth instead of being sliced open and later watching Weston die in the NICU. Who knows if it would have made things "easier?" But if my baby had died before he was born, the world and I would have never gotten to know Weston Max Yoder. Look what I would have missed. I am so thankful for those three weeks. My heart aches for those parents who did not get to experience any time with their children.
So, there is no such thing as the Grief Olympics. It is not a contest. Please do not judge or dismiss the grief and emotions of the hurting mother who never got to meet her child(ren). (And fathers too! I keep saying "mother" because I am a mother, and I write from a mother's perspective.) Please support her, love her, give her whatever she needs. She has lost a child and all hopes for the future that accompanied that child. Her loss is real.
If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it's not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench...[N]o one thinks death is more awful than it is. It's those who think it's not so bad that need correcting.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son at 34-35
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