In Memory

It’s not fair that I still have morning sickness after my baby has died. It’s not fair. Here I am, throwing up multiple times throughout the day and feeling queasy and seasick—my morning sickness getting worse instead of better. My body is feeling as pregnant as ever, but I know there is no heartbeat.

None of this is fair.

***

I know the baby is gone the second the ultrasound picture appears on the screen across from me. I am 8 weeks and 4 days pregnant and on the screen there is a 6 week baby. There is no flicker at all, no movement of any kind. The baby appears as a tiny spec in the sac, when it should look more formed. So, before the ultrasound tech says anything at all, I know.

***

The doctor is apologetic as she explains their protocol.

Because the practice is Catholic and thus prolife, in losses this early, it is standard protocol to make the patient wait eleven days before coming back in for an ultrasound to confirm the baby is truly not viable. She explains this is not to give me false hope, but it is protocol for the 1% chance we have our dates wrong.

I do not have my dates wrong. I know the exact day I ovulated.

The doctor shakes her head. Sorry, it’s protocol. We have to wait. There will be no exception.

So for eleven days—probably longer— I must walk around with a dead baby inside of me. My body will continue thinking it is pregnant; morning sickness will continue. But I know the truth: my body is a tomb.

***

The doctor says I can stop taking the progesterone I’ve been supplementing with. Perhaps stopping the progesterone will allow my body to naturally miscarry before my next appointment.

So I may or may not miscarry at home. I wait for blood. It can come at any time.

But most likely, my body won’t get the message. For some reason, my body doesn’t seem to know how to naturally miscarry. I’ll wait the eleven days and then get scheduled for a D&C. Last time it took a week to get scheduled for the D&C, and they won’t let me schedule it until my next appointment when the pregnancy is confirmed not viable, so realistically I know I’m looking at two and a half more weeks.

I guess at this point I’m hoping for blood. I don’t want pain, but I just want this to be over.

***

I think about transferring to another practice. One where they will be more quick to call a pregnancy over. I could just get through this process quicker. Wouldn’t that be nice?

But I want this baby to be treated as more than tissue. I want this baby to be treated like a human being. I like that, at this practice, they baptize the baby after a D&C. Isn’t that worth waiting for?

So I wait.

***

Rob and I look up gender neutral names and quickly land on “Finley.” This baby, however tiny, deserves a name.

It fits, somehow.

Finley.

***

How am I feeling?

Physically? Pregnant.

Emotionally? I feel sad. So, so, so, incredibly sad. I feel angry. I feel defeated. I feel heartbroken. I feel disappointed. I feel like my life has been turned upside down yet again.

It feels to me like the world should stop in its tracks. Everyone in the world should freeze in time—my baby died again—but no one does. Life goes on. I want to shout, scream, yell. I want to cry out from the top of a mountain: “I am not okay!!” and have the world mourn with me. Shouldn’t time stop? But it doesn’t. The world goes on.

Should I not feel so sad because this loss was earlier? We lost Isla at 12 weeks, so surely losing Finley at 8 weeks should feel less acute.

Nope. It feels so acute. It feels like I just did all this grieving, and now I’m right back smack dab in the middle of it, in the thick messy part of grief.

There’s an extra throbbing to the grief because I don’t think I have in it me to try again. There’s a weird sense of a door shutting firmly, a door that was still ajar after Isla. There’s a sense of finality to this loss, like a third child is not meant to be after all. At least, that’s how it feels right now. Maybe that’s why the grief is especially raw. I don’t know.

***

I remind myself of things I am grateful for.

I am so, so thankful for Rob. There is no one else I’d rather walk this path with than Rob. His grief is as deep as mine, and there is comfort in sharing it with someone who gets it.

I am so, so thankful for Auden and George. Now that I realize the extent of how difficult it is for me to get and stay pregnant, my children seem more and more like two little miracles. I am so grateful that they are my children, that I get the opportunity to be their mother. My deepest desire was to be a mother, and they gave that gift to me.

Even in the hardship of grief, I recognize all this. The love I have for my husband, the love for my two miracles.

***

I’m never any good at ending blog posts, but especially not right now. I’m simply in the thick of it, so there is no good way to tie this with a flourish. Because of how prolonged this process is going to be, I’m going to be in the thick of it for a while.

I’ll just leave it at this: Finley, you were loved. For a short time, yes, but the love was there. I will continue to care for your body until it is taken from me.