(1.) It is an experience that many will never need to make sense of and one that will make others feel as if they are drowning. It is tragic and heartbreaking and completely unfair and yet thousands of families find themselves in this position every year. Here is what we know—
They give you a pamphlet after. A ‘how to’ guide for learning to cope with the loss of your child. Silent Grief: Surviving Early Pregnancy Loss.You read it on the drive home from the hospital the evening after the shooting at Cuttle Creek Elementary, your husband already embracing his silent grief in the driver’s seat as two men argue gun legislation on NPR.
Last year, there were 346 mass shootings in the United States.
Americans own 48% of the estimated 650 million civilian-owned guns worldwide.
They start talking death tolls, and you open the hospital’s six-paged leaflet to a picture of a sad-looking woman swaddling a teddy bear. Approximately 15-20% of confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriages, the pamphlet tells you. To remind you you’re not alone. Plenty of other dead babies out there besides yours. The other NPR man rebuttals—
In 2016, there were 384 deaths as a result of mass shootings. The death toll is dropping.
Progress.
Everything outside your window looks dead. It’s March in Minnesota. Last year, you went to Florida to escape it. Instead of barren trees, green palms caressed your window at night in the rain. You and your husband drank Raspberry Bacardi out of a coconut with a smile carved into its face. There is a picture of him drunk inside the tub in a Facebook album somewhere, swaddling the coconut like that woman with the bear. You flip your pamphlet over to a new photo of a woman crying beside a window. She has a single tear. Dangling off the corner of her cheekbone. You keep waiting for her to wipe it away, or let it drop, or maybe for your husband to remember your baby just died.
About 80% of miscarriages occur within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy . . .
The nurse who gave you your new brochure said it’s normal to feel a sense of “denial,” and you wonder if that was what your copay for the ultrasound afforded. A fifty-dollar confirmation of the empty hole inside you.
There’s a new voice on the radio now. A snippet of an interview with one of the paramedics on scene at the elementary. He tells you about a woman they rescued who was found with a dead teacher wrapped inside her arms, the carpet-stained rust beneath them. You spread your legs slightly and check between your thighs, but the hospital people have done a good job erasing the memory of your failure. You think your husband notices this, so you spread them more, but he is just checking his blind spot.
You were having a nightmare when it happened. A nightmare with pain that followed even after you were awake. A nightmare that smelled like Sulphur—rotten eggs. You jolted out of bed, your husband snoring beside you. Waited alone on the bathroom tile, until the pain finally released you, and you stumbled into the living room, too exhausted to disturb your husband’s 6’2″ tempurpedic indent in bed. There were trench marks in your skin after. From where your nails had squeezed your belly.
The next morning a nineteen-year-old opened fire on a class full of first graders. And after that happened, you told your husband about the nightmare. But first you burned the sheets.
She wouldn’t let go of the body. The paramedic’s voice is quiet through the speakers in your car. No matter what we told her . . .
He tells you how the woman in the elementary held her dead lover in her arms. Squeezed her to her chest. Stroked the sides of her cheekbones. And as you listen, you dig your nails inside your palm, until you form new trenches, and think about the fact that you will never get to hold your child. Never feel the softs whirl of curls between your fingers or caress the cheeks of their chubby little face. And you decide you hate this woman for having something to hold on to, and bury, and say goodbye—but you say none of these things to your husband, who keeps turning the story about the shooting up louder, as if that tragedy will somehow drown out the one you flushed down the toilet.
(2.) Relationships with loved ones may be affected by your loss. It is important to recognize the tendency to isolate during this time.
Tonight, instead of viewing the latest episode of Modern Family, you and your husband watch the prime-time news special they’ve shot in honor of Cuttle Creek Elementary. It airs at 6pm Central Time—after Jeopardy and before a new episode of Law and Order. You point the irony of this out to your husband, who gives you a look that reminds you, you are not supposed to make jokes like that anymore. Now that you have a dead baby. He watches beside you, standing, not sitting, a habit he’s taken to recently. The last time he let himself sit down after the hospital three weeks ago, he wept, without you, for almost an hour. Now he stands for everything. TV. Dinner. Ordering groceries for you on his laptop. He catches you staring and reminds you again of the article he read online. How sitting for prolonged periods of time can shorten the average life span by two years. You whisper refusing to be near your wife can shorten the average marriage to two years, but they are showing clips of one of the parents sobbing, so he doesn’t hear you.
There are lots of little boys and girls on the special. One with big green eyes and fuchsia ribbons all caught up inside her ringlets who looks exactly like the nameless child in the dream you keep having. The one where you are happy. The host of the special tells you the little girl’s name is “Kiera,” and you swirl the syllables inside your head to see if they will stick—but it is not the name of your baby. Your ‘it’ baby, that you will never know for sure was a boy or girl, and you decide it doesn’t matter anyway, with the rate all these schools are getting blown up by psychopaths. You probably would have always lost them in the end.
A new photo of Kiera flashes on screen. She is with her daddy, holding a giant pumpkin carved like Jack from A Nightmare before Christmas. He pulls her close as she gazes up at him with lights in her eyes. The focus zooms closer, and your husband turns away from the image, mumbling something about going to the store for milk, and leaves you alone inside the dark room with nothing but the dead, smiling faces on screen to keep you company.
(3.) It is important for mothers experiencing loss to know they’re not alone. There are many others out there coping with grief, too. Find others who have experienced something similar.
You read an article in the Pioneer Press about the mother of the dead shooter while you wait for your new therapist to finish her last appointment. The article is titled “It Starts in the Home,” and your new therapist is now eleven minutes behind schedule. The parents’ negligence, the article tells you. The mother’s failure to spot the appropriate signs . . .
Negligence. You pull up Dictionary.com and google the word on your new smartphone your husband brought home yesterday as a consolation prize.
Negligence. [ neg-li-juh ns ] noun. (3.) the failure to exercise that degree of care that, in the circumstances, the law requires for the protection of other persons or those interests of other persons that may be injuriously affected by the want of such care.
You come up with your own definitions as the clock above the door with the hanging Mardi Gras beads ticks by another minute.
Negligence.
(1.) Slamming belly first onto a Slip N Slide at your niece’s second birthday party despite the fact you were almost a week late on your period.
Negligence.
(2.) Skipping the most important meal of the day, every day, for the last year and a half you decided to stop taking the pill.
Negligence.
(3.) Having one last two-for-one Chilis’ Margarita before you bought the test.
Negligence.
Forgetting to take your vitamins. Not enrolling early enough in pre-natal yoga. Not drinking the recommended six to eight glasses of water a day. Not drinking that water in a BPA-free plastic water bottle. Not minimizing toxin exposure completely by drinking said water in glass, instead of bottle. Not purifying that water using a Brita water filter you could have bought on sale at Target for fifteen bucks. Not going organic. Not learning to reduce your stress. Not reading the book about ways-you-can-learn-to-reduce-your-stress. Not diaphragmic breathing. Not HEPA air filters. Not holding the cell phone away at one fourth the strength at a distance of two inches and fifty times lower at three feet to reduce the amplitude of the electromagnetic—
Gave it up too easy, your mother used to say. Men don’t want a woman who can’t keep her legs shut.
Negligence. Def:
It is always the mother’s fault.
Your new therapist tells you there’s no one to blame. These things happen, she says, and takes another sip of tea. And you think about the shooting, and the 346 deaths in one year, and the fact that the five deadliest have occurred in the last decade and decide that she is right. These things happen.
She asks about your husband. Wants to know how things are getting along. You blink a few times and tell her last night you tried to have sex again, and when it was time for him to come, he started to move away, until you latched your nails against his hips to keep him inside you and give you another baby. You pause two seconds for effect, then ask if this makes you a bad person.
She asks: Do you think you are a bad person?
You say you are a bad mother. And when she asks why, you think about the mother of the shooter, and the reels of photos she released of her homicidal son blowing bubbles on the beach as a child, and you try to decide which is worse. A mother who raises a monster, or one who opened her legs too wide and lost her child inside a toilet. But before you can decide, the fifty minutes are up, and she apologizes, and tells you as of next week, she will no longer be accepting your insurance, and would you like to go ahead and book the next three appointments today?
(4.) It is normal to feel triggered into despair when you least expect it. You may find reminders in places you could have never anticipated. This is normal.
It’s staff development day. Staff development day means filler lectures and your co-worker Susan asking twenty questions about the library’s new circulation policy. You decided today would be a good day to return to your job as a Reference librarian. You’ve been on an LOA for a month now but have still worked on your professional development skills by watching a lot of Jeopardy with your husband and the bottle of Glenfidditch he keeps nestled in the couch between you. Today, though, instead of lectures, the police are here to do active shooter training, and you can’t decide which is worse, the men and women screaming in the video they force upon you, or the pitiful looks your coworkers keep giving you whenever there’s a break for coffee. There’s a cop here from Cuttle Creek. Hernandez. Partner of the guy who took down the shooter. You will tell your husband about this later, and he’ll remind you how lucky you were to have been in the same room as a hero who saved so many children’s lives. And you’ll say yes, and mutter something like ‘inspirational’ as you tug your shirt further over your flat tummy.
Hernandez divides you into three groups. Flight. Fight. Or Hide. Then rotate. The last staff development day, they rotated you through three areas as well for shelf-reading, customer service webinars, and rock painting, so you are pleased there is at least some continuity. When the simulation begins, you choose the ‘Hide’ group to avoid having to speak to anyone. You are in the Children’s Department, crouched behind a desk with the new girl from Administration. She got hired about a month before you left for your LOA. She is now four months pregnant and wearing a Piglet tee-shirt with the words, Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.
You were shopping with your husband on 50th and France when you saw it. About a month before you two started trying A Piglet and Pooh cotton muslin baby quilt, dangling off the clearance rack next to an art print of a daisy. You made an excuse about having to use the store bathroom so you could secretly purchase it while your husband waited outside. Two weeks later, when you finally worked up the courage to show him, he stroked the folds of cotton before grabbing the sides of your face and kissing you so hard you almost fell off the couch.
The new girl is giving you a strange look now and keeps asking if you’re okay, and you realize you are sobbing so hard, you have lost the ability to keep holding your body upright. Heavy boots thunder up the stairs. She tries to comfort you and tells you to remember none of this is real. It will all be over soon. Her hand rests on the part of your shoulder where your husband’s fingers used to draw circles on your skin. Those same fingers that would later put away the tiny quilt without you, folding and refolding until each edge rested perfectly over the other before sealing it away inside a vacuumed storage bag in the closet. You dive further into the carpet, your cheek grinding into an old pile of animal cracker crumbs beneath the desk as the second group takes “Flight” out the emergency exit. Winnie the Pooh should come with a trigger warning.
(5.) If you feel like a mom, and yet are not acknowledged as one by others, know that this feeling is normal, and whether or not others see this, we value you as a mother too.
You got kids?
That’s what the woman in Whole Foods asks as her child screams something unintelligible from the car-shaped grocery cart at your feet. She lifts a can of condensed milk from the cart and plops it onto the belt. You let the woman with the screaming child and single can of milk cut in front of you, despite the fact you were already running fifteen minutes late to group, because you figured it was the holidays, and you should probably stop acting like such a bitch. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and you’re in line to pay for the pre-made family meal you ordered for the occasion. Originally you planned on making most of it yourself. Even got as far as pre-heating the oven three days ago to toast a sheet of pecans. But after spending fifteen minutes contemplating sticking your head inside instead, you decided it was best to order out.
You got kids?
Three minutes. That was how long the home pregnancy test said it took to discover the reward of the last year of servitude to the Period Tracker on your iPhone. You and your husband raced home from the CVS and ripped open the fuchsia box, waiting to see if the lucky symbol would appear inside the little gray screen like a winning scratch off. You remember your husband whispering something against your hair.
You got kids?
Everyone else in the room stared at the blurry sonogram image projecting beside you, but you closed your eyes and let your breath dance to the pulsing heartbeat emanating from the screen, occasionally peeking at your husband, who kept his hands clasped over his grinning mouth for the entire twenty-five minutes, as if afraid the happiness might abandon him if he released it.
You got kids?
Tuscany Hillside or Forest Rain. The two of you debated for forty minutes over which green to paint the nursery. You each made a square, dipping your brush into the quart-sized sample from Home Depot and messily slathering it across the drywall. After, you both splayed around the room—standing, lying, sitting at different angles for different perspectives, trying to decide which color would best represent the growing life inside you. The swatches are still there on the wall. You use the room now for storage.
The woman plops a divider behind her single can of condensed milk, and you shake your head no to her question as the child shrieks again and flings their Minnie Mouse sippy cup at her feet, a few drops of the bright orange liquid splattering along the side of the woman’s Nikes. She stares at her child’s thrashing figure inside the car and sighs. You have no idea how lucky you are, she says.
The can of milk tips as it approaches the scanner and rolls down the belt toward you. For a moment, you consider smashing it to the ground but instead chuckle and make a gesture that conveys something appropriately sympathetic to the woman’s motherhood woes as you glance at your phone and realize you are now running twenty minutes behind to “Postpartum Progress.”
There are five women who meet for the monthly support group in Lake Forest Senior Community Center. The powers that be put you inside a room with a giant tree mural and rows of chairs along the wall that remind you of a hospital waiting room. The group usually meets on Thursdays, but since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the facility decided to move all therapy sessions to Wednesday so everyone could have the holiday off from recovery to celebrate. Two doors down is where they house the family members from Cuttle Creek. No matter what time you enter or leave the community center on group days, you can always hear someone sobbing from inside. No one ever cries in “Postpartum Progress.” You wonder if it’s because everyone feels guilty falling apart next door to parents who lost a real child. A woman is speaking as you sneak inside. Mara. Lost her baby only two weeks after spotting the plus sign. Too early to have to decide whether or not to return the onesies, or stop taking the Folate, or post a status on Facebook so she wouldn’t have to risk people asking about the baby. Your eyes drift over to an old stack of holiday O magazines on one of the tables near the mural. “The Power of Gratitude,” one of the headlines reads. “25 Surprising Reasons To Be Very Optimistic.”
You think about your husband and the Thanksgiving two years ago when you snuck out to Hidden Valley Park, his fingers hurriedly tugging and unclasping as you straddled his body inside the car and flicked your tongue across his freezing neck. You think about the stillness of those hands as you told him about the blood, and the sheets, and the baby—stiller as he sat beside you in the hospital and heard the doctor say it to him all over again—You’ve lost the baby. Lost the baby. Moving the transducer around and around your abdomen as if somewhere deep inside you, they might find it.
Why didn’t you wake me? That was the only thing he asked. After you told him about the nightmare. Knees sunk into the living room carpet. Images of children and parents screaming and crying on the TV behind him. His voice fading softer and softer until you both quit trying to figure out the answer, and the only sound left in the room was a reporter confirming that at least eleven people were dead.
Someone starts to sob loudly in the room down the hall. Mara pauses, her fingers twitching at the sound. The same way your husband’s do now every time he sees a stroller. You listen and think about the mother at the Whole Foods with her screaming child and the single can of condensed milk rolling down the belt toward you.
You have no idea how lucky you are.
(6.) Sometimes others are scared to address a person’s grief directly, for fear of saying the wrong thing. But we want the world to remember. Your memories are a lasting memorial to a very special person in your life.
The church is bleeding. There’re poinsettias everywhere. Leaking down the stairs. Clotted in clusters along the stage. You wonder if this is how people tithe during the holidays so they can afford better screens to parent their children. Your husband shifts in the pew beside you and mouths along to the carol on stage. The two of you hadn’t stepped inside a church since your wedding, but when he disturbed the usual thirty-minute silence that accompanies dinner to place the candlelight service invite by your plate, you figured now was as good a time as any to try and make sense of God.
When the service ends, everyone is ushered outside toward a large, unlit display near the nativity. Fifteen wire angels idle atop the snow. Below each is a card with a name and a candle that wavers from the gusts whisking through the forest behind you. Fifteen names for the fifteen victims of Cuttle Creek Elementary. Everyone around you hunches forward and quietly takes in the makeshift memorial. You curse yourself for not reading the program schedule more closely and think about leaving, but you are wedged in too tightly to avoid making a scene. Your husband grasps your hand, and you wish you could feel the warmth of his skin beneath the glove.
The pastor shuffles forward, his nose and cheeks blooming like the poinsettias inside. A woman near the front hands him a silver bell. He talks about family and Christmas. About angels laughing in the sky. You focus on the Nativity near you—its plastic figurines’ gaze forever fixed on the child between them. The bell tolls as the pastor reads the first name.
Gina Ableman . . .
ding!
An angel flashes alive. Her ten-inch wings ablaze with little twinkling lights. He reads another name, and the bell tolls again, a second angel lighting in the row.
. . . Dylan Faerber
ding!
A few muffled sobs escape from the crowd. The woman who handed over the bell rubs at her eyes with an oversized glove, slashing two black streaks across her cheeks. A man beside you in a Vikings ski cap kneels onto the snow. He crosses himself and begins to pray. A familiar sense of panic swarms inside your chest. You look to your husband, but his eyes are clenched, and he cannot see you.
. . . Thomas Halloway
ding!
Another angel illuminates in the snow. Your husband’s grip slackens as tears stream down the side of his nose. You stare at him and retighten your hold. The pastor keeps on reading the names.
. . . Jade Laboda
ding!
He’s weeping now. You can hear him. The congregation huddles closer. Hands clasp around you now as arms reach out to hold, and support, and wipe away the faces of everyone grieving the fifteen wire angels in front of them. You stiffen your grip even tighter around your husband’s fingers as they begin to pull away.
. . . Jessica Machemer
ding!
. . . John MacGregor
ding!
With each name, he weeps harder. Harder and harder over all these children with names. Harder than even after the hospital, when he sat on your stripped and naked bed, only to stop when he sensed your silent presence in the doorway waiting there to join him.
Why didn’t you wake me?
That was all he asked you. Over and over inside that horrible, screaming room and then over and over again inside your head for the lastfour months of watching him quickly change the Johnson and Johnson shampoo commercial, or steer you away from the double stroller at the Farmer’s Market, or hide the invite for his niece’s fifth birthday party underneath a stack of sweaters. How to tell him . . . How to explain—you didn’t want it to be real. It couldn’t be real. Until it was the only thing that was.
The pastor reads another name.
And now you want to scream. Scream out the name of your baby. Scream over everyone out here praying and weeping and dinging. But you can’t. Because there isn’t one. Because you didn’t get a name, and you didn’t get a memorial, and you didn’t get to cry over a grave or a body or even a black hole in the ground, because there was nothing left of your baby but the tiny specks of death every time you pulled down your underwear.
. . . Kiera Lightly
ding!
The final angel glows in the snow. Your husband drops your hand.
You bolt—stumbling for the woods, pushing through bodies. Away from the glittering lights as fast as the numbness in your legs will allow you. You hear your name. The sound of crunching boots. And you move faster, your eyes roaming wildly through the forest, until you hit a root and faceplant into the snow. And now you do scream. Punching puffs of white into the air, until the boots catch you, and the arms you have so desperately wanted to consume you finally do. And he doesn’t tell you that everything will be all right, or you can always try again, or any of the other horseshit things you have heard for months now. He just holds tightly as you both weep. Together. For your child. Your child. That will never have a name.
A few members from the congregation approach wanting to make sure you are all right. He looks up and nods at them and collects your hands inside his palms, and you watch them turn away back toward the lights as the two of you linger together in the snow. One hand resting on top of the others. Holding space for the thing between you that was lost.