THOUGHTS ABOUT THINGS
It’s six weeks after your due date and you reach the front of the long coffee queue at work.
“Oh my goodness! You’re back! What did you have?” Silence. What I had was a baby girl stillborn at 38 weeks. In the last few weeks I’d given birth to a baby I knew was already dead (in a hospital surrounding by the screams of newborn babies) and organised and attended her funeral. But people don’t talk about stillbirth, so the girl who has made your coffee for the last five years doesn’t know. What do you do at the front of that line, when a thoroughly good human being has asked you a question to which there is no answer that will not make her feel like the worst person on earth? I felt physically sick. I could feel my eyes burning. “I can’t talk about this just now. I’ll talk to you later,” I said, and walked away from a whole queue of people left wondering what on earth had happened to me. Three years on, I still don’t really talk about stillbirth very much. It’s painful not just for me, but everyone around me. Another scenario: you are at a baby shower for a friend who is about to have her first baby. All the other women tell their childbirth stories, good and bad. I say nothing. No pregnant woman wants to contemplate what happened to my daughter happening to their child. What happened to me happening to them. So the silence continues. I edit my life story so as not to frighten others. Deep down though, I know this silence about stillbirth – all these silences about stillbirth – are part of the reason that every day in the UK, 15 babies are stillborn and 15 families DO go through what I’ve been through. So as part of this awareness month, I am talking about stillbirth. The good and the bad. The good? How can there be good in a stillbirth? Firstly there’s the kindness of others – and especially others with a silent grief. There are countless men and women out there who carry with them a burden of early pregnancy loss or the death of a child that people don’t know about – or the inability to have a child in the first place. Their quiet whispering of ‘I know a bit of what you are going through’ was gentle and human and warm. But the process of losing my daughter has also given me something like a superpower. There’s something very liberating about knowing that you have survived this horrible event. I don’t worry about losing my job – I’ve lost my child. I never worry about the day ahead, because I remember waking up on the day when I had to drag my heavily pregnant body into hospital and give birth in extreme emotional and therefore physical pain. To hold my dead baby, while in the room next door a family was celebrating their live one. So throw any kind of every day stress at me and it bounces off. Deep down of course there is pain. Grace had Down’s Syndrome. We knew that from around 14 weeks and faced a lot of pressure to terminate but that is not really how my heart is set up. So I actually knew more about how her life would have been than most expectant parents and I’d given up almost every bit of work I had in preparation to care for her. These were not easy choices, and I won’t pretend they were, but I’d adjusted to them in my head and my heart and I was ready to be someone different. Someone, frankly, better. The loss of Grace took that different life from me. There I was, back at work, in the coffee queue – no longer having to worry about how my special needs child would be treated by the world, whether we’d be stared at on holiday. And do you know what? I’m now the woman who stares at the kids with Down’s Syndrome in the soft play or at the beach, but obviously for very different reasons. I was at a spa last month and a girl with Down’s Syndrome I didn’t know at all came running across and hugged me. Her mother was so apologetic as I just stood there with big smile on my face and tears in my eyes. “She’s fine,” I said. “In fact she’s just what I needed!” That mum will never know what happened to me, or why that hug meant so much. And again, that’s the silence of stillbirth. You carry with you being ‘different’, behaving ‘differently’ – but many of the people you work with or become friends with through your other children, will never know why. No-one knows why Grace died. The post-mortem couldn’t find anything concrete. She had Down’s Syndrome but her heart was perfect with none of the defects associated with the condition. I’d been having weekly scans so she was definitely not neglected by the NHS. Between the scan at the 37 weeks and the scan at 38 weeks, she died without ever seeing the world, or me her mother. I’ll never know why it happened in medical terms, and the question ‘why me?’ goes through my head every day. We’ve got to create a world where women – and wider families – aren’t expected to be silent about such a catastrophic event happening to them, because it is contributing to the problem not going away. When women know that this is a reality, they can feel more empowered to yes, turn up to that maternity hospital if they even have the slightest inkling that something is wrong. To not care about the glances from medical staff that say “she’s just neurotic”. When the outcome I am living with is the other option, please – be as neurotic as you like. Print this out and take it with you. Ask them how they’d feel at the baby shower or at the front of that coffee queue. I’ve just survived another pregnancy - barely – and given birth to a beautiful healthy baby boy. He’ll never replace Grace, but he’s the sort of happy ending that should come at the end of every pregnancy and with more research and greater awareness we can make sure that is case.
17 Comments
Ronnie Bergman
6/19/2017 06:10:13 am
Annie, thank you for sharing these moving words. I am one of many who cannot possibly know what you and your family went through at the time. I understand a bit better what the emotions were during this experience. I trust the joy of Jack will go a little way to making your future a bit easier & happier. Love n' hugs.
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Douglas Alexander
6/19/2017 10:14:22 am
Beautifully said by one of the best people the world is lucky to have.
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Gery
6/19/2017 01:35:38 pm
So sorry to hear your story Annie; so glad you got that hug and a happy ending. I hope your bravery in sharing Grace's story helps you as well as others.
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Oh Annie. I stood on the precipice of that pain, but was one of the lucky ones. My daughter lives. At 32 weeks and 5 days I was about to go to bed when I realised she hadn't moved much that day. I stayed up for 2 hours trying to get her to move enough to satisfy my mother worry, and in the end my husband made the call to head in to hospital to check on her properly. She was born by emergency C-section the next day. Elva also has Down syndrome. Thank you so much for sharing your story and your heartbreak. Sadly, you are not alone. Hopefully your story will inspire others to speak as well. So much love to you.
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Katie
6/20/2017 02:27:16 am
I lost my son, Ben, last year at 33 weeks. I can tell you that I do not want to talk about his death or even think about it--it is dreadfully painful. To not have him is excruciating, but to think of his birth is to think of his death. I am silent by choice.
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6/21/2017 02:06:25 am
Dearest Annie this is the bravest piece of writing I've ever read. There are no words to describe how sorry I am for you and your beautiful family - a family that Grace will always be part of. Love to you all... xxx
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Dorothy
6/22/2017 05:03:59 am
I lost my Sarah to stillbirth 30 years ago and the pain has been so intense. I have kept silent all these years especially as my marriage failed the month before Sarah died. I had no one to share it with.
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Morag
6/22/2017 06:41:55 am
So sorry to read your story of the loss of Grace, Annie. I don't know you, only from hearing you on the radio talking and laughing frequently about the football, and thinking what a fun, cheerful lassie you sound. How horrible that you (or anyone else) should suffer such a painful experience. How much do we take pregnancy and childbirth for granted, when in fact it's a miracle from conception to delivery. I heard another brave girl, Lisa Commons, talking on the radio of her experience on the stillbirth of Lola, and marvelled at the courage she and Kris demonstrated to go on to set up a foundation in Lola's name.
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Michelle
6/22/2017 06:43:16 am
Beautifully written. I hate the idea of baby showers - how do you tell an expectant mother that you can't celebrate her baby until s/he is actually born because you know what can happen so suddenly and tragically? My son would be 9 now and I talk about him all the time with his 11 year old brother and 8 year old sister and with friends and family but its still tough to talk to strangers. Its so hard when people ask how many children you have - I hate to deny his existence as he is my son but sometimes its easier to say "two" than explaining and making others feel uncomfortable. x
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Linda
6/22/2017 06:48:25 am
I can only try to imagine how great your pain and distress were when you lost Grace. To me this is the worst kind of sadness. I had an early miscarriage before having a beautiful healthy daughter (via a traumatic emergency C-section) and I still wonder what might have been for our first little bean. Just after we had our daughter, friends had a little girl who only survived for a few minutes. It made me so unspeakably sad I couldn't think about it without feeling a kind of physically sickening horror. Luckily they too had a healthy son later on. Nothing can ever replace the little ones who somehow were not meant to be.
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Chris
6/22/2017 01:30:10 pm
Reading your story and recognising so many elements from when we lost our daughter 23 years ago has brought back so many memories.
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Linda Klassen-Brown
6/22/2017 03:13:09 pm
Thank you for sharing and you are right - this should and needs to be a topic those affected can feel they are able to share and not keep it as a secret.
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Janyce
11/19/2017 06:53:07 pm
I think Danial came to say goodbye. When I was asked what I wanted the baby to be, when I was carrying my second, I said "alive". People find it difficult enough to talk about death when it happens at the right end of life, after a long life, well lived. When it happens before your baby is born, it is as if the death cancels out the pregnancy, and because we don't talk about stillbirth people say some utterly crass things, like dismissing a full term pregnancy as a miscarriage (and I know grief isn't a competition), or being told that at least I hadn't got attached to him, or the colleague who yelled across the car park on my first day back at work that I ought to be at home with the baby as she didn't know he'd died.
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Vicola
12/1/2018 03:21:23 am
Thank you Annie for being brave enough to put this out there. It’s a subject that should be talked about, women should not be expected to bear this awful, terrible grief in silence. I’ve had early miscarriage and that was painful enough, I cannot imagine the heartbreak of stillbirth. Thank you also for showing me that if I have a friend or colleague who has been through this that I should not take their silence as a sign they want the subject ignored, that a hug or a sympathetic offer of a chat might be exactly what they want. All the best to you and your family xxx
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Linda Paterson
10/20/2021 04:31:25 am
When our beautiful Roseanna arrived, already gone from the world, a wonderful friend told me she'd had the perfect life - always warm, loved, comfortable. She never knew how it felt to be lonely or sad or hungry. And she never even had to face the trauma of birth. I found that hugely comforting. We went on to have a daughter and two sons and we always think she moved over to make room for her little siblings. Our children have always known about their sister and we have always visited her grave together. It's in a tiny little cemetery in our village, surrounded by trees and fields with sheep. The children named it Roseanna's Garden and so it has stayed.32 years have passed and you will always be so loved, our baby.
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