One month seems like forever

Tomorrow is the 1 month anniversary of our baby girl's entrance into heaven. A month that seems like an eternity to me. (No pun intended.) Sometimes I wonder if it has truly hit me that our baby died. I mean, I think I get it, but it is such a horrific reality that I wonder if maybe my heart just hasn't grasped it yet.

The ultrasound still haunts me, the memories of labor and delivery still wake me up at night. But now that we are several weeks past my scheduled C-section (Nov 1), I am starting to think more about what might have been. I can idealize...I can imagine her here at home, soundly sleeping in my arms. But the reality is that she would've been in a hospital crib, hooked up to a respirator while she recovered from surgery. She would've been eating through a feeding tube, not from my breast. I would be spending hours watching her breathe, hours spent away from Jack and John Mark. It wouldn't have been a vacation by any means. That of course isn't to say that I wouldn't give anything to have her with us right now. But something that John Mark brought up with me yesterday is that this whole grieving process started 6 months ago. It's a pretty big wakeup call to find out that your child is sick. Really sick. That her condition is so rare and complicated that our best option is to pack up and move 700 miles away to get her treated. Every time we drove to Birmingham for an ultrasound, we were in for even more hard news. We gradually discovered that our lives would be changed forever. But the problem was that we never had a chance to grieve that reality. We were too busy preparing for her arrival. So, when she passed away, it was like we had climbed to the highest point of Mount Everest only to get buried in an avalanche. All the pain from that climb was still present within ourselves, even if it seemed insignificant compared to the pain of her passing.

The uniqueness of our experience is important when comparing myself to others who have lost loved ones. In other words, it's pointless. No one has the same story. Even if you just look at those who experience death of an unborn baby. One mother loses her child at 7 weeks, another learns at 20 weeks that her baby has anacephaly and won't live for more than a few moments after birth. Another mother is busy decorating her daughter's nursery...she is 39 weeks pregnant and her healthy baby is about to arrive at anytime. She has no doubts or fears in her mind besides the usual anxiety and anticipation of labor. Then, when she arrives at her OB's office for a routine non-stress test, they can't find the heartbeat.

All of these situations are different...these moms have all lost their children, they all grieve and mourn. They cry, they ask "why me?", they are scared that they will never find joy again. But the grieving process is going to be different for each of them. Not because one scenario is worse than the others - they all are terrible and tragic - but because the experiences up to that point are different. So, I can't compare myself to other moms. I have yet to meet someone who has gone through what we've gone through...not many people are faced with the decisions that we had to make. Also, we all have different levels of support. The parents who miscarried may not have told anyone that they were pregnant, so they may not even have anyone to pray for them. Many moms don't have strong faiths that keep them going. Others may have other issues like infertility that make them wonder if they will ever be able to have a child. For some, their stillborn baby was their first, and they have to deal with going back to work.

So, I can compare myself to other grieving moms and say "I have it so much worse because we moved to Baltimore for her only to come home with empty arms. I have it worse because I went full-term and had to deliver a dead baby after spending 9 months bonding with her." But it's not worse. I am blessed with an amazing network of friends and family who have completely overwhelmed us with love, prayers, and support. I am blessed with fertility, so God-willing, we will hopefully be able to give Bernadette more brothers and sisters. I am blessed with an amazing son who is like this beacon of light in my life. I am blessed with a strong and devoted husband who has a faith that can move mountains. So, like I said, what's the point? We all have our stories, we all have our own ways of dealing with our pain and sorrow. We all have incredibly heavy crosses to bear. I can certainly learn from moms who have "been there done that", but there's no reason to worry that my path to healing isn't just like theirs.