Tiffany

20 years ago I lost my daughter at 36 weeks due to a true knot. She was stillborn. I went through the grieving stages, and therapy, and searched for answers to my many questions. I found none. Mostly, I wanted to know that I was not alone, that this did not just happen to me and my family. For 20 years, I’ve processed my loss and have lovingly tucked it away in my heart. Recently, I found out that a couple of my friends have also lost babies at different stages of pregnancy. This has reawakened my desire to write about my experience and how I found hope and courage to try again. To provide some answers to the many questions I had back then. Here is the first paragraph of the book I am writing about Tiffany…

Life continued, as surreal as everything felt at this very moment. The sun still rose spilling its beautiful warm glow over the distant California hills, glimmering through crooked live oak branches casting soft shadows westward and ricocheting off juxtaposed office building tops. The busy morning traffic bulged with people on their way to a very normal and presumably uneventful day, much like our drive the Friday morning before. I lay there, on my side, on a small hospital bed covered in layers of soft white sheets and a thin cotton blanket atop, facing a large window, as a silent witness floating outside of a body that holds the one whom I have lost. My face feels wet and again I realize tears are running down my cheek. It stings in its established route and my nose twitches from a tear’s kiss. There is no recognizable emotion connected to them, no pain nor sorrow and yet these tears flow with such abandonment. How can these people continue as if everything was ok, how can the world continue to go? I continue to watch the morning commuters with these thoughts cycling in my mind. These masses mind full of the day’s trivial occurrences and expectations of what was and what was to be.

I fear something has gone awry, nothing feels right, and my mind has been broken. There is a disconnect to such a degree I cannot comprehend it. My mind seems almost apathetic to the events that have taken place and yet my body reacts like one does when one’s heart has been crushed to an unfortunate and rare enormity of a loss as this. I shift my body and the familiar igniting of her stirring within me is now void. I am numb mostly but pangs of fear rise and fall with moments of actualization that here in me lies this beautiful child – lifeless, imprisoned in a body that won’t let her go. Doctors induced hours ago and were waiting until I dilated to 10 centimeters. Nurses checked regularly and found that I had only dilated to one and remained there. They did not understand why, but I knew. This was not right. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t let her go.