When Your Son Arrives in the Mail (and Other Encounters with Stillbirth)

Today I expected my son to arrive in my mailbox – a little box of ashes with a label without a name (I couldn’t bring myself to spell it out for the mortician). But he didn’t, so I’ll wait another day to turn that heart-numbing experience into a memory to be filed with the receiving blanket and sympathy cards and plaster imprint of his little feet.

I’ve found that in the five days since my child was stillborn (at seven months of gestation) I’ve become more and more anxious to just get through those painful lingering details. I know I shouldn’t be rushing this grieving process, but it’s hard to do otherwise. Life around me is coming back up to speed, even though my husband and I are just now letting down our guard, as evidenced by the fact that we’re battling flu-like colds and sleeping like the dead (no pun intended, really).

I don’t think any expectant mother recognizes stillbirth as a possible outcome until she spends hours – sometimes days – in a delivery room waiting for her body to give labor to a child it desperately wants to keep. In my case, the process took 18 hours to start, with the most critical, stuff-you-want-to-remember-forever stages unfolding in the middle of the night, with no one but a new shift of nurses to witness them.

I remember reading with reluctance and detachment the chapters on stillbirth and grieving in my healthy-pregnancy bible. You simply forget how tender and tenuous the whole gestation process is when every check-up you’ve had has confirmed that you’re doing things right.

Until something suddenly goes dreadfully wrong.

I don’t fit any of the clinical models for high risk of placental abruption (partial detachment of the placenta from the uteran wall). But I wish someone could tell me beyond doubt that the rupture that became apparent in delivery was what caused my son to drift away from me, probably kicking less and less forcefully without my suspecting that anything was wrong. I’d even be satisfied with professional admonishment that I screwed up, that I worked too hard or that I didn’t pay nearly enough attention.