Death is a natural part of our existence. It is as essential as birth. We will all be impacted at some points in our life with the passing of someone we know or love. Despite those facts, death still affects each of us in ways we may never imagined.
The thing about death is that we have some sort of expectation of how or when that might occur. As a child I remember losing my great-grandmother. To a kid who hadn’t been exposed to many people who died I came away thinking that is what happens to a person when they lead a long and full life.
I was fortunate that I had all of my grandparents into my adult life. I could see them aging but they still seemed young at heart. But when their time came it was again met with an understanding that’s what happens when you get old, you finally pass from this mortal existence.
That doesn’t make losing a loved one easy, but it at least feels logical that with a passage of time and at the conclusion of a full life you move beyond the mortal veil to return to heaven. It’s not always that easy nor does it always work that way.
Early in our marriage we had gotten to a point where I was out of college and had a job that would provide for my wife and me. We decided it was time to start a family and soon we had a daughter. Everything went according to plan and our little family began.
It’s funny, when you have your first child things change. It’s no longer just about caring for you and your wife. There is now another person to love and to care for. Things went perfectly. Our daughter was born and began to become this wonderful little person that we could teach and share things with. It was so simple and so uneventful that I think we took it for granted that this is just how things go. You find someone, fall in love, get married, get pregnant, and have a child who you raise the best you can.
Two years after our daughter was born, we decided that having her be an only child seemed very unfair. We felt like she needed a little brother or sister and the time seemed right to have another child. Looking back at it, I don’t know whether we were naïve or just plain ignorant. We just expected that we would decide to have a child and it would happen and we would be the parents of two children instead of one.
The pregnancy was very uneventful. I don’t remember at any time thinking about anything other than where we would put the crib, if the baby would be a boy or a girl, and what names we would pick. I didn’t realize what a miracle it was to even get pregnant let alone carry a baby full-term and have that child arrive without complications.
As the due date approached things still didn’t really register that it is possible that things might not go right. Given that frame of mind it didn’t occur to me to stay close. I was working out of town as my wife was to go in for her weekly checkup to make sure things were ready for the impending delivery. I do remember the morning I left she said things didn’t feel quite right. I brushed it off that she was just tired given she was now 9 months pregnant and told her to stop worrying.
She went to see the doctor that morning while I was hundreds of miles away. I remember going back to the office after a meeting with a client. When I walked in one of the managers pulled me into his office. His face was stoic as he told me he had received a call and my wife was admitted to the hospital. There were some complications with the baby and that someone would take me directly to the airport for a flight home immediately.
I sat in stunned silence not able to completely process what was happening. Thinking back at it I was probably in shock I just didn’t know what to feel. At the other end of the flight someone was waiting and took me to the hospital to be with my wife. When I got there the doctor came in. We headed to the delivery room where my wife gave birth to a little girl. Unfortunately, a blood vessel burst in the umbilical cord and she died.
I sat there holding my wife’s hand as our daughter was delivered. There was no cry. No moment of joy seeing a new life brought into this world. There was just silence except for the quiet sounds of tears falling down our faces. We weren’t prepared for this. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way. She was supposed to be fine. I should be going to the pay phone in the hospital calling family and friends excited to announce the birth.
Over the next several days we went through a completely different kind of events. Instead of getting ready to bring a child home from the hospital and getting ready to introduce the baby to her big sister. We should be making sure bassinets were set up and car seats were ready. We shouldn’t be trying to pick out caskets or make arrangements for gravesites or planning on a funeral or burial.
Family and friends tried to comfort us. They tried to explain things in a way that would make sense. But how do you make sense of a baby dying during birth? How do you explain that to a two-year-old? How do you tell her that the past 9 months we prepared her to be a big sister and now that won’t happen?
It was perhaps the most difficult time of my life. I hadn’t been exposed to death very much and now I was making decisions I wasn’t prepared to make. And when it came time to bury our daughter, I wasn’t prepared for what I needed to do to dedicate a grave. I should be focused on what I needed to do to have our baby blessed not how we will put her to rest.
We would talk to people trying to work through the emotions and the emptiness. I remember being told that although this was hard, time will heal a broken heart and our family would grow and things would return to a level of normalcy. I nodded hoping they were right.
This all happened 34 years ago today. I stand here to tell you that they were wrong. Things never feel normal. The memories of that day remain a significant part of me. The day I prayed over my daughter’s grave; I buried a piece of me there too. There is not a day go by that I don’t think of my daughter. I wonder how she would have grown and what her dreams would have been. I wonder whether at this moment should would have been married and starting her own family and what I would say to her while she is pregnant.
That doesn’t mean that my life stopped. We went on to have four additional children. But those pregnancies were substantially different. Nothing was taken for granted. I probably worried more during those nine months than I did the rest of my life combined. By the time the delivery date arrived I was a nervous wreck.
Each time in the delivery room for our other four children I prayed harder than I ever prayed hoping there would be no complications and that my wife and our child would come through with no complications. Each day after their birth I would thank God for allowing me to share that day with them and pray that I would be able to spend the next day with them. Our family has remained close and I wonder if that is a result of our loss early and how we adapted as parents after that.
There is nothing more unnatural than a parent burying their child. It doesn’t matter if that child was a baby like with us or if that child was grown. We are just not equipped to understand why we have outlived our child. So no, it’s not normal and no I will never feel whole knowing I lost a piece of me.
Her birthday every year is an emotional time for me. I relive every regret I ever had. I still have never forgiven myself for being out of town that day or discounting my wife saying something didn’t feel right. I know there was probably nothing I could have done but that doesn’t matter. It’s funny, my time with my stillborn daughter was short but she taught me more than anyone else I have ever known. I no longer fear dying. I hope that when I do pass from this mortal life that there will be a young spirit meet me on the other side that we can hug and spend the time together that we missed out on here on earth. That’s what keeps me going every day.
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