to pain. We are grateful for the time that we were able to spend with him, but we wish we had more. More time to love him, more time to know him, like—” he falters now, struggling to make it through.
“What color were his eyes? What would his voice sound like? Would he be tall? What would he love to do? Was he shy or outgoing?” I look around the room and take in the wet faces and nodding heads, the evident grief of the group of family and friends who knew Reid best.
“These questions are tough ones to ask, but they are important. For though we will never find the answers, they will help us to remember him.” He turns to me now, and his expression seems to tell me that this is a promise. “Remembering will keep him alive in our hearts.”
A cry escapes my ninety-year-old grandfather, Reid’s namesake. I’ve never seen him cry before, and seeing his tears—well, I think it says everything I cannot.
I WAKE THE next morning and change another pad, let the reminder that blood on bleached cotton brings sink in. I am a mother recovering from birth as much as I am a mother grieving the death of her child, and I often forget this. As I wash my hands, I let myself look up, slowly arriving to meet my gaze in the mirror for the first time since Reid died. My face appears both sunken from sorrow and swollen from a combination of tears and shifting hormones. My eyes seem to say they’ve seen too much sadness, and will now permanently rest in this pained state. My lips are neutral, and it’s as if they’re letting me know they’re willing to continue on if I am.
I notice that despite the agony my physical body is in, emotionally I feel lighter today. Something in the marking of Reid’s life, and the ritual of celebrating it, has released a bit of the burden I’ve been carrying. I decide to publish Reid’s birth story on my blog. I documented and shared most other aspects of my pregnancy with my readers, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t share this too. I want others to know of Reid, and I want his life—and our grief—to be acknowledged. I want to be honest. And maybe my words can help one other person feel a little less alone.
I enter the title into the template, Born Still but Still Born, and take a deep breath. I have never written anything so personal before. Or so painful. But as I tell my story, creating some order out of the chaos in my mind, I begin to feel different—better, almost. The words can’t change my reality—though I want them to—but they help me transform the unimaginable into something I can see. What I’ve written is a birth story, because Reid was still born. And I know it’s a story I need to share.
I hit “publish” and wait, clutching my phone in my hand.
Within minutes, the comments start to roll in. Heartfelt condolences, which I expected, but they are still so powerful. I read their words:
Reid will live on because you gave him life. Thank you for being so brave…
I am so sorry Reid is not here, where he belongs…
I am truly sorry for your loss. May your memories of holding your boy in your arms sustain you in your grief.
And then the stories start coming. Within the first few hours, tens, then hundreds. Eventually there will be thousands of stories from those who have lost children. Their names proudly written out, next to a date, on my blog. So many of them stillborn, more than I ever anticipated. They write:
My first son was stillborn at full term on August 8, 2008…
I felt as if you were telling my story as I read this. Instead of juice, I was eating watermelon and cupcakes trying to will my baby to move inside of me. Instead of watching Friends, we came home from the hospital and had a campfire in the back yard…
My heart breaks for you both. A good friend of mine recently delivered her sleeping baby.
A few days later Aaron wakes me up to say that Reid’s story has gone viral. Earlier, we had watched Google Analytics as the number of readers on my site had climbed from ten at a time to fifty. When I look at it now, the number is in the thousands. Over the next days our story is shared on American political pages with millions of followers, usually pro-life conservative groups. It appears in all of our local newspapers. Requests for media appearances and in-person interviews flood my inbox. The story spreads across the country. Soon after, it reaches countries all over the world.
At first, I’m hit with anxiety. I wrote about our personal experience because the words needed to come out. I didn’t expect publicity. And I didn’t want our story, or Reid’s life, to be politicized. But because he died before his birth, he was suddenly being used as part of a narrative of pro-life versus pro-choice. I read harsh comments such as It’s a fetus, this mother should get over it, next to imploring messages like I wish every mother about to abort her child could read this. In sharing what happened to me, I had no interest in taking sides in that debate—I don’t think that it’s either-or, all the time, no matter what. I am only pro-supporting-people-in-their-own-unique-situations, given their unique beliefs and circumstances. I wanted to tell our story, as it applies to us, with no intention of implying that everyone’s feelings and views in similar experiences should be the same. I hope that this specific kind of attention will fade quickly.
At the same time, as I watch more and more people come to my blog to find Reid’s story, a strange sense of peace spreads over me. All of these people are learning about our son. When a baby dies before they have a chance to create their own story, I think one of the biggest fears parents have is that they will disappear, be forgotten. It’s up to those who knew them to spread their legacy, should that be something that’s in their hearts to do. It strikes me that these people might never have heard Reid’s name had he not died.
A few weeks before, when Reid passed away, I didn’t know of a single person who had experienced a late-term stillbirth. All I could think of were the stories I’d come across in books or television. I think of the book The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman, set in the 1920s, where the main characters experience two miscarriages and one stillbirth. I think of how a live baby washed up in a boat on that lone island they lived on, so soon after the stillbirth, how the wife, Isabel, took that baby to her breast, nursed her. I think of how her whole body would have been aching for the experience: the letdown, the relief from engorgement, the suckling child before her.
I think of the show Call the Midwife, set in the 1950s in East London, that I watched while I was pregnant; how I fast-forwarded though any scenes where the baby died because I believed those were problems of the past.
A part of me knew all along that there must be real-life stories that inspired these accounts, must be other people out there who have had losses like mine, who also felt isolated and unsure about what to do. I just had no idea how many there were. I wasn’t prepared for my story to resonate with so many. I wasn’t prepared for millions of people to read it, and then have many of them actually respond.
As I read each message that reaches me, devour their condolences and stories, I feel, somehow, that I am being validated. I left the hospital thinking that I must be the only person in the world this had happened to, that I’d done something terrible to invite it, that I couldn’t grieve this loss—didn’t know how. But here from my living room couch—handwritten cards piled high beside me and my computer screen open to the latest email—I see that none of that is true. It is a great privilege to receive their stories, and they are a gift to me. These words tell me that I am not alone, they assure me that I did not cause this, and they provide a road map to the kind of grief that once seemed so invisible.
I start to wonder if we can experience healing through our stories. We all have a story to tell, after all, and we all learn from other people’s stories too. Even though these stories can’t make our losses okay, is it possible they can bring meaning to our suffering? I am not the first person to have lost their child. And sadly, I will not be the last. Finding healing after such a thing, I think, shouldn’t have to be lonely.