I stare at my quiet belly and repeat the words to myself slowly, trying to understand. Our baby is dead. Beneath my skin is the body of our child, and somehow that body has to come out. I am sure that they will put me under and cut him from me.
In the throes of trauma, time moves strangely. It can’t have been more than five minutes, surely, but somehow my father, sisters, and in-laws have joined us. But my in-laws would have had to drive in from the Fraser Valley, over an hour away. It makes no sense, but little does right now.
With our loved ones by our side we let the doctors back in to talk us through what we need to do next. Dr. L. appears in the doorway and says he will take us to get a detailed ultrasound to try to determine the cause of death.
“Do you want a wheelchair?” he asks.
I refuse. I’ll walk, of course I’ll walk. But as soon as I take a step I realize it is a terrible mistake. My body feels different and even though nothing has changed physically from this morning—I walked to the car, I walked into the hospital—I am hyperaware of the lifeless body inside me, shifting from side to side as I move. Perhaps that was why they offered. I make my legs move anyway.
We walk through the hospital to the ultrasound wing, the same one we went through twenty weeks ago to find out we were having a boy. We walk past couples standing in the hallway, then couples sitting in chairs waiting for their turn. They quickly look away from our grief-stricken faces, but their knuckles turn white as they hold each other’s hands a little tighter. We are their worst nightmare. They don’t know exactly what has happened to us, but they can guess. And they know, without a doubt, that they do not want to end up here.
We enter the ultrasound room. It is dark and no one turns on the lights. I fumble my way to the bed and Aaron helps me onto the fragile paper sprawled across it. Then Dr. L. is talking. He asks us if he should turn on the patients’ screen. “Do you want to watch?”
I turn to Aaron for an answer. How can we decide? I am sure I will regret it if I don’t. But how can I watch that screen? A black-and-white movie, frozen on the edge of possibility, forever without color. In the end, I look.
After some searching, Dr. L. sees that my placenta is pale and that there is a tiny bit of fluid around the baby’s heart. But both of those things are also common postmortem, he says, so they don’t necessarily indicate the cause of death. He says that we most likely will never find out what happened, that it’s a sad part of life that sometimes babies just pass for no medical reason, and being dragged through months of tests and autopsies will be more painful than we realize right now. But, he says, the choice is absolutely ours. I am inclined to take his advice, even understanding that without an autopsy, we’ll probably never know what happened.
He leaves us by saying that the chance of anything like this happening to us again would be like getting hit by lightning twice. We shouldn’t fear the future.
Back in the assessment room, a new obstetrician comes in to review our options. All of them involve me having to deliver our dead baby vaginally, something I am completely unprepared to hear. The idea of laboring, which I was so calm about before, terrifies me now. I’m not ready. I want it to be finished, but I also don’t want it to start. How strange that something I anticipated with such joyful ease, I now view with such fright.
Why haven’t they offered me a C-section yet, offered to medicate me into a deep sleep? I just want to close my eyes and wake up with it all over. A part of me hopes that during the process, there’s a chance I won’t wake up at all. But I don’t ask. Maybe because I can’t fathom how any woman can get through birthing her lifeless child, either vaginally or surgically.
I am given the option of either an oxytocin drip to induce labor right away, or a Cervidil insert to soften my cervix. I choose the latter so that we can go home to rest and prepare for what comes next.
The obstetrician unwraps the Cervidil and reaches a hand inside of me. I struggle away from her to the top of the bed, in pain. She holds my hips in place with her free hand to stop me from squirming and reaches in further still. She simply tells me, “You need to get it right up there against the cervix.” Then she pulls out her hand, takes the glove off, and continues, “It’ll likely take a few doses of this, so come by in the morning to get your next one. They might start you on the oxytocin if you’ve progressed.”
A nurse with white hair and soft eyes comes in and hands me a pair of hospital underwear and a pad, in case of bleeding if my cervix starts to dilate. She has a gentleness about her, one that suggests she might have done this before, cared for others through losses.
“But our due date is tomorrow,” I tell her as a silent plea for her to change what is happening. Can’t she undo his death if I make it clear how impossible it is? He lived for thirty-nine weeks and six days in my womb. How is it that he stopped living just one day before his due date? One day.
“I know, dear,” she says as she helps me off the bed. “I’m so sorry.”
I put the mesh underwear on in the bathroom, avoiding the mirror as I do.
IT WAS DECIDED that we weren’t in any state to drive home. My mother-in-law, Annette, waited behind to take us in our car while the others went ahead to our apartment. I don’t remember leaving the hospital, but we end up in our car. Annette takes the speed bumps slowly and it makes me wonder if she senses the pain they’ll cause me, each bump startling the body at rest inside of mine.
It’s five thirty when we walk into the apartment. Hank, Aaron’s dad, is standing off to the side near the corner window in our living room. My parents are in the hallway, and my two younger sisters, Alana and Rebecca, are sitting on the couch—they are both university students, and I think of how they should be studying for their finals right now. Hanah, Aaron’s sister and one of my best friends, and her boyfriend, Carson, are on their way. Aaron’s brothers are out of town—Derek on a missions trip in India, Levi at school in Ontario—and we’re told they’re booking flights to come back as soon as possible.
Arriving home feels like tumbling into a twilight zone—like we’re stuck in a past that no longer fits, with the future lingering just out of reach. Everything is exactly as we left it just a few hours earlier, except the dishes have been washed and our living room tidied.
My mother tells me later that they stressed about what to do to prepare for our arrival. Should they put away the baby items? Do our laundry? Hide evidence of my pregnancy? In the end, they knew that they couldn’t just wipe all signs of our child from existence. So they left everything as it was—including the nursery door, slightly ajar. Once they were exhausted from conversation and tears they looked for something to watch on our TV. Unable to figure out how to summon Netflix into view, they rifled through our towering stack of DVDs in search of something happy to distract them. They ended up pulling out the disc Aaron had made of our trip to Disneyland, a year after we’d started dating. Tears poured out of them as they watched us on the screen: happy, naive, carefree teenagers. We rode rollercoasters and laughed as the cart turned this way and that, kissing for the camera on the upward climbs. Would we ever be the same? they wondered out loud, to no one in particular.
In the haze that surrounds the hours after that resident wheeled in the ultrasound, there are pockets of dreamlike clarity. I feel vividly aware of my senses as I sit down on the couch and fold my legs up beneath me. I am mindful not to move, not wanting to feel his lifeless body stir inside of me. The sensation makes me ill, and then incredibly guilty in turn. My belly is still round, but it has changed. I’m not sure what to do, but I can’t let it be real yet. I don’t know where to put my hands. It feels wrong to place them on my stomach, so they fall awkwardly at my sides. Someone hands me a bowl of tomato soup and tells me to eat. As I sit there, slowly and methodically lifting the spoon to my mouth, I hear my mother and Annette in the kitchen around the corner, whispering.
“I think she’s in shock,” Annette says to my mom.
I mull that over. Am I not acting how I’m supposed to? How should you behave while waiting to birth a child