Today should be Marieke’s third birthday, but instead it is the third anniversary of her passing.
I started this blog four months ago, but then life intervened, with a move and a busy toddler. Looking for a thread of connection this morning, I read my babylost mom friend’s recent posts, and noticed that she has our blog listed on her blogroll. So, maybe I do have some responsibility to write something here that will mean something to someone.
I thought originally that even if all I ever managed to write was the story of what hapened to us, so that someone who needed to find that connection could, that would be enough. But I haven’t even managed that yet. It’s felt too hard. Too hard to dive down as deep into the muck as you need to, to be able to write about it. But today is Marieke’s birthday. A hard day already. Not that every day without Marieke isn’t hard. But, a harder day than most, a harder month than most. So, what better day to write here.
After three years, the loss is still devastating. Another year passed without Marieke. Another year looming without Marieke. A lifetime looming without Marieke. Screamingly unfair. Screamingly permanent. I rail against fate. I wish her back. But you can’t. You can’t wish a baby back to life. Out of the ocean, ashes to flesh, death to life, turn back time and make everything turn out differently.
Make Nathan a little brother instead of an only child. He could have been. I met a woman yesterday with a toddler and a three year old. It happens all the time. Just not to us.
What happened to us was this:
A healthy, uneventful, joyful pregnancy. It went long, so I was induced. I labored for twelve hours. The nurses, doctors, and midwives at the hospital failed to respond to signs of fetal distress. I had a complete placental abruption. Somewhere in the hall in between the delivery room and the operating room. By the time Marieke was delivered by emergency c-section, she was at death’s doorstep. When the placenta detached, her strong little heart kept on beating. It beat her blood right out the placenta, but since it had detached, no blood could come back in. The doctors reached into me and pulled her out of a pool of blood. Her blood. She basically bled to death inside me. They were able to resucitate her, but found that her brain and all her organs had been destroyed by oxygen deprivation, and she wouldn’t be able to survive.
We held her for six hours, until she took her last breath in our arms. She was beautiful. She was perfect. She should be here today.
We miss her. Not a day passes that I don’t think of her. Nathan is here now, and having him with us makes life worth living again. But we don’t ever forget our first. We bring our love for her with us through life. We rail against an unfit hospital that stole her from us. We rail against a universe that keeps us from ever getting to know who she was. Who she would have been.
We planted a tree outside our dining room window. Jenny’s parents started it from seed in memory of Marieke after she died, and now it is three years old, too. We will watch it grow, out our window. And it will be a sort of comfort. But trees are also a measure of time. Thinking of how long it will be before the sapling is a tree makes me think of all the years, all the milestones we will miss. All the birthdays.
The baby that was stolen from us. The girl we miss. The woman we will never know.
There is so much you can’t say in a blog. I could write a book about the silence that filled our room after Marieke died and was whisked away to the morgue. How bizarre it was to sit emptyhanded in an empty quiet room after childbirth. I could write a book about all the details of the labor. All the places I wish I could turn back time. All the hate I feel for the medical professionals who attended us. I could write a book about all the betrayals of those around us who don’t understand grief. I could write a book about how beautiful Marieke was. What it was like to hold her and touch her and watch her first breaths. And her last breaths.
But I’ll stop here. I did what I said I would. Mostly, let me send it out to the world that you never stop loving your children, or missing them. Not even when they are dead. The passage of years is irrelevant.
LOVE IS STRONGER THAN DEATH.
Bittersweet 