Surviving My Daughter’s Stillbirth

How are you? Pretty common question. Generally not considered too painful or prying. For me, the friendly greeting is now a tiny assault peppered throughout my day. Like a violent gust of wind, I’m left off-kilter, momentarily blinded, with a now farkakte hair part. It’s been over a year and a half, and I’m simply flummoxed and flailing when asked how I am since the death of our baby at six months pregnant. Since her stillbirth.

My father would get the question constantly. How you doing, John! A hazard of his daily battle with Parkinson’s, cancer, and a weak (but mighty) heart. Pretty good, how’s about you? he’d reply, every time. He couldn’t stand from a chair, walk, swallow efficiently and all five words left him winded, but he meant it. He was good! How are you? I’m forever my father’s daughter, but lacking his Boomer aversion to negative emotions, I could never answer the same.

Right after her birth/death, I actually didn’t hear it much. Everyone knew how I was.

Together, my husband, my cousin, and our four-year-old son and I navigated those first surreal days back home. We filled the days with finding space for the flowers, penne alla vodka, bleeding, The View, funeral home coordination, FaceTimes with my sisters, and, in an epically surreal and shame filled about-face, the formidable task of telling people our bad news after we had just told people our good news.

By March, an adorable month in the Tri-State area, I’d leave the house no longer trying to conceal the growing bump under my coat but now, the lack of one. The How are you? was landing as if someone had asked for directions in another language.

“Hey. How are you doing?”

“Um? (squinting) What? I don’t- sorry, I can’t help you with that.” Puzzling; how would I possibly know this?

By Spring, I’d rehearse answers. With clammy hands, I’d brace for knowing eye contact and warm inquiries into my well-being. Hangin’ in was a solid go-to, always making sure to drop the “g” to maintain a sense of breeziness and brevity.

Summer came and with it, I’m all baby weight and no baby. I knew I seemed glib, but I was genuinely trying to gauge where constantly organizing her clothes, yelling, throwing things but also being the most present with my son since his birth placed me on the good-or-bad scale. Last Fall, I gave a Good!! to another Mom that was so pitchy and tragic I almost collapsed in laughter halfway through the very short word. How tempting to release the pent-up energy, right there on playground wood chips, that it took to look back at someone and try to tell them, or try not to tell them, how I was. Because, just how and where, praytell, do I start?

Do I start with the seven IVF egg retrieval cycles we slogged through over two years to get to this pregnancy? Or with my father’s death?

When my son’s first birthday came, and with it a global pandemic and my father’s death, we decided that “Life. Its ‘circle of’ is what we need,”. Our next baby was hope. Visions of Eli’s younger buddy lived rent free in our heads. We giggled at my nausea as I left for the pregnancy test uptown. I changed my passwords to my Dad’s name, this one’s namesake since I always knew I was destined for boys. I skipped off the 1 train eager to check my phone. Weird - the nurse hadn’t left a voicemail yet with results. Why hadn’t the nurse left the voicemail? I reached the West Side Highway and understood. I was not pregnant. My dad died again that day.

Sadly, IVF is commonplace, which may be why it’s too often perceived as something one casually just “does.” Like your taxes or the Magic Kingdom. Do IVF, get a baby. Fin.

What’s not accurately communicated is the failures and mainly, the emotional beating you’re left with from a months-long daily dogfight that comes with these treatments. And the real kicker - waiting. Shots are easy, but waiting and wondering what your life will be, who you’ll be Mother to, waiting on hold to plead with insurance again, waiting to see if your posture will ever release the shame it holds from having to resort to this while seemingly surrounded by women who pirouette into pregnancy is what takes the often undisclosed toll.

We did the dogfight all over again. And over again. Two cycles and both times the handful of embryos created did not survive the week it takes for them to grow to viability. My beloved doctor switched potions for a third and last try. Half a year and thousands of dollars gone, and we didn’t even make it to a pregnancy test. WAIT, THIS IS TOO MUCH SCIENCE! What’s this woman going on about? I’ve lost you. Eyes tend to glaze over when one gets too deep in the brass tacks of fertility treatment speak. I’ll stop.

I could tell you about the way my second wonderful doctor placed her hand on my right shoulder as my own first wonderful doctor, who’d brought Second into the examining room for reinforcement (it takes a village) told me that she could no longer detect a heartbeat. At six months pregnant. Was it my shoulder or my shin? If I could tell you the time spent at traffic lights pondering shoulder or shin.

Or how, after a petrifying first trimester of tests with normal results to our blissful awe, that eventually I couldn’t zip my coat over my bump and had to start telling people our good news. And how, I’d repeatedly tell those ecstatic to hear I was finally pregnant to simmer down; I’d consider this pregnancy real when it was time for the gross drink which tests for gestational diabetes. Wink. And how the drink was already in my kitchen cabinet for my next appointment when I stopped feeling her move. (Too much? Too maudlin? Whiny! At least you have the one!)

I’ll tell you about the nurses. We’re nothing without our nurses. Nurse Helen: roughly 6’4”, same age as your fave aunt, born in Ireland who walked as if en route to deliver an emergency freshly baked loaf “We’ve been waiting for you,” she said in a waning brogue, busy as a bee. She tended to us, sans pity, while we waited in the precarious position for our stillbirth in the bustling lobby of Mount Sinai’s Labor & Delivery floor that February evening. Nurse Michaela: young, quiet, slight with fine brown hair all belying a keen inner sturdiness. She wore pale blue Hoka’s and, thank all the gods, was not a talker. She nursed us as steadily at bedtime when the surreal was quiet and dim, as she did at dawn when things were suddenly fluorescent and OH SO NOT quiet. I demanded the epidural way too late thinking our two pound girl wouldn’t cause me pain. Big mistake. Huge. And lastly, Nurse Carly who, I realize now, is not of human descent but of the Clarence Odbody species. She relieved Michaela at dawn and nineteen minutes later, Tegan was born. She stayed until the evening when Jed and I would leave the hospital two entirely different people. An angel of the chatty origin, Carly helped deliver then bathe our sleeping daughter, wrapped her in hand crocheted yellow blankets, cried and laughed with us, completed Tegan’s birth and death certificate. She then returned to her spaceship and beamed herself to one of the other 20,999 stillbirths that occurred in this country last year. I’ve never told anyone about the nurses.

I’ll tell you about Mrs. Zaimi, a preschool teacher of Eli’s at the time. A delicious old soul with Audrey Hepburn frame and unfussy brown bob, she and her joie de vivre were incapable of typical teacher formality. Each morning, she’d greet a beaming Eli with a huge hug and kiss. “I cannot not hug this boy,” she’d say in her thick Albanian accent whisking him out of the car. A musician, she played the flute on each child’s birthday. I adored her. The morning I finally returned to drop-off line, my whole body trembled about to reunite with her and the other women who had felt my growing belly and counted down to Eli’s little sisters’ arrival. Before I could brake on that raw March morning, Mrs. Zaimi climbed in the passenger seat next to me, gripped my shoulders and through steady tears said, “Me too. Same time.”

I could hold sermons about the love that embraced our family. After moving here, I quickly discovered the intimacy that comes when a group of women find themselves raising children next to each other. A pride of lions zoned for the same school district. We didn’t anticipate the swift ferocity of the lioness when a pack member’s hurt which came in the form of the Online Meal Train. For two weeks, we were fed. New Jersey’s best chicken parm, chicken soup, bales of arugula, tiny Tupperwares of homemade salad dressing, bagels from Goldberg’s (never Noah’s), mini cupcakes and organic lollipops for Eli. Weekly fresh berries. One night, when Andrea and I couldn’t do a tragic taco pasta that the boys devoured, two overflowing bags from Roots Steakhouse arrived. Besides the food, thick warm socks, blankets, sweats, a handle of Casamigos, monster trucks and new markers from bosses, neighbors, or friends. It was endless. Sometimes before bed I still peek at the handwritten schedule of meals by my closest lion and Train organizer, fluent in loss. The slant of her S's in Sheetpan Butternut Squash Risotto will lull me to sleep. And when a “T” and “E” bracelet that doesn’t come off broke on Christmas morning leaving me unhinged, my sisters college roommate sent two more. Best to have a backup.

I can’t tell you what it’s been like watching a now almost six year old as her void cemented in our home. I can just share text messages sent to my sisters since she died:

Eli just asked if we can name his next sister Tilly.

A nanny just asked us when I’m gonna give that boy a sibling! Lol!

E just told Oscar’s mom that his sister died in my belly so he hates leaving playdates.

Eli just asked our waitress if she was Ariana Grande.

There’s more, but I’ll spare you the complicated dance of having handed your family a silver platter of grief. How sometimes placentas are the size of a silver dollar pancake. Standing next to a woman holding her newborn in the elevator leaving the hospital fighting the instinct to say, “Aw, congratulations. Is yours alive?” The silent standing O the front desk staff gave us waiting for that elevator. Gripping Tegan’s mini urn in my pocket at Christmas Eve mass while petrified I’d faint from the incense. A chemical pregnancy last August. The fitness your marriage demands when your body has killed your daughter. But it’s enough already. Dead babies don’t land, and “stillbirth” is a word people prefer tucked away. Confirmed when, last Fall at a Perinatal Loss Symposium, a pathologist shared how he could count on one hand the professionals properly trained in reading a stillbirth placental report in our country. Because, as he was told early in his career, “There’s no money in dead babies.” 

So now, months away from the second anniversary of Tegan’s death, my grief, fury and jokes are for a select few. And every day, surrounded by children with siblings to spare and women struggling to maneuver babies around pregnant bellies, you take the pain and push it down to your feet. Then cry in the car outside Dunkin. And, later at dinner with the lions. While laughing. Always praying the anger doesn’t end you. Then you do it again the next morning and the morning after that. And, unlike so many women who left hospitals as mothers to only sleeping babies, I go back to my boy. Don’t cry for me. Like my Dad, I’m pretty good! And it’s alone in my kitchen, chopping vegetables for dinner when I allow myself to to get lost in what might have been-

Chop, chop, chop-

Who was she, who was she, who was she.

What would she sound like, what would she sound like, what would she sound like…

Would her hair have curled, her hair, her hair

Her brother, her brother, her brother.

Eli and I left his school on a sunny, warm day this Spring. We planned to get a croissant to start the weekend, after I timed his running jump to the stone bench flanked by hydrangeas. We passed his buddy whose Mom I’d met once, but liked. While Eli and her brood of three ran to the cars, we chatted quickly and swore we’d get that coffee. After reaching my car and saying goodbye, she turned and asked, “Is Eli your only child?”