An evolution.

In the beginning, I felt everything.  All of the feelings, I felt them.  Disbelief, emptiness, anger, guilt, confusion, self-doubt, fear, what-ifs, and incredible, incredible sadness.  The sadness of losing her, and of feeling like I had somehow failed her when she needed me.  Sitting in the dead silence of our apartment with all of those feelings was too much to bear.  It was a relief when 6PM rolled around every day so that I could focus on making dinner and just going to sleep.

We did a lot to try to distract ourselves in those first few weeks.  Three weeks after Mila was born, we ran away to Japan.  Japan, in all its unfamiliarity, was frankly less foreign and terrifying than the new Mila-less San Francisco that we found ourselves in, which is full of parks where I planned to take her, shops where I had bought her 12-month clothes in anticipation of a lifetime together, and other parents pushing the same model of baby jogger we had gotten her.

We wanted to be lost in translation, to disappear for a while.  Japan felt like a friendly refuge.  The lights were bright and the food tasted good.  There was good running for D, who has been channeling his negative energy into long, long runs.  People smiled at us, and the sound of Japanese chatter was a cheerful background buzzing that didn’t intrude into my thoughts.  I liked the Shinto shrines, especially Fushimi Inari-taisha with its thousands of red torii gates winding up Mount Inari, which were contemplative and integrated into their natural surroundings.

I couldn't escape completely, even there.  I saw kawaii stuffed animals I wished I could take home for Mila.  At a drugstore in Kyoto I saw a basal thermometer, of all things.  At the bullet train station, a dark-haired, pink-cheeked baby girl, bundled up against the cold, giggled and smiled at me intently.  I smiled back at her for a minute before I had to turn away.

But it helped, even though we knew it wouldn’t actually help us “work through” our grief, whatever that means.

Getting the autopsy report and all of Mila’s genetic test results after we returned from Japan helped, too.  D warned me against reading the autopsy report, but there was never any question in my mind that I would.  I’m her mom; in good or in bad, I cannot turn away from her.  In a strange way, I almost liked reading it - ten solid pages all about her, written by someone who had taken the time to observe every detail of her.  And it confirmed that she was normal, and whatever happened was probably sudden and unpreventable.  That went a long way towards putting our guilt and what-ifs to rest.  We tired ourselves out on all our medical questions, and we’ve turned to our philosophical ones.

Six or seven weeks out, my mom told me she’d had a dream about Mila as a little crawling, laughing baby.  She told me that this was about the time that souls came to visit their loved ones before going on to be reborn.  I don’t and didn’t believe this, at least not in any literal sense - but nevertheless, I felt a little miffed that I hadn’t had any dreams about Mila.  That night, I went to bed and I did dream about her.  In it I was trying, unsuccessfully, to help her pass gas.  After a moment she cooed as if to say that she actually felt fine, so I turned her over and rubbed her back.  And she smiled.

These days the grief still feels heavy, but it also feels less complicated.  Now it’s mostly just the sadness, of missing her and wishing she were here.  In the first weeks, I couldn’t take any pleasure in the sushi that I had been looking forward to eating again, having free time felt wrong, and the first beer tasted like a transgression.  I didn’t want to be able to do all those things.  Nowadays, I eat sushi and undercooked eggs, I snowboard at Tahoe, I drink Hendrick's & tonics at Lion Pub with D and my friends and we laugh - and while it’s not what we thought we’d be doing, and I miss her intensely, I don’t feel like running away anymore.

Perspective.

It is strange to think that, even in a world without Mila, there is something to be grateful for; but I am.  I am grateful that we were able to get pregnant quickly and naturally.  That she was with us long enough that we have some very happy memories and funny stories.  That she, the sweet baby that she is, gave me a fast and uncomplicated labor.  That she was otherwise beautiful, healthy, and normal.  That there was no agonizing anticipation of problems in the months before she was born, nor any drawn out aftermath in the NICU and hospice before we could start grieving.  That my physical recovery has been fast.  That I have D, who is full of love and fiercely protective of our family.  That we have our parents, our families, our friends, and our health.  I know enough now that I cannot take any of these things for granted, but right now, I have them.

Making sense of it.

When you lose a baby, you get a lot of comments that are meant to be comforting.  And I take them the way they were intended, and I appreciate that people are trying to make things feel better.  Really, I do.  But the truth is, if I really think about what they mean, it’s hard to find any comfort in some of them.

“This was meant to be.”  Was it?  Then what was the point?  Why didn’t we conceive someone else, who was meant to be?  Why did we conceive her, and gestate her, and love her and anticipate her for nine whole months if the entire time, it was predetermined that she would not live to make it into the world outside my womb?

No.  No.  That makes no sense.  I cannot accept that.

I find more comfort in the belief that this event was just random, shit, meaningless bad luck.  I cannot assign some kind of bigger meaning to her death.  She didn’t do anything wrong; she wasn’t “weak”; we did everything right given the information and technology that we had.  It could have easily turned out differently, but it didn’t, and that’s what we have to live with.

“Move on; you can still have more kids.”  Actually, it does help to know I can have more kids, because I still do want a family.  But wanting a family and wanting Mila are two related, but different, things.

The fact that she died as a baby does not diminish her personhood.  There is no replacement for Mila.  Just as there is no replacement for D, for my parents, for his parents, for each and every one of our friends and relatives, for any children I might have in the future.  We are all individual and irreplaceable.  And so it is for Mila.

I’ve met, read about, and heard about bereaved mothers who are 5 years out, 20 years out, 60 years out from the loss of their babies; and while they continued on to have full lives and families, they are still forever changed.  They remember their lost children; and every once in a while, they will see something, hear something, or smell something that will bring back the sadness of that loss in full force, even if just for a minute.

You cannot erase this shit.  I will miss her forever.  And I am justified in missing her forever.

Mila's life.

Two weeks after we lost Mila, after we had broken the terrible news to our extended families and most of our friends, we composed a mass email about her and hit send.

Her death leaves us with an awful sadness, and it’s not just one kind of sadness.  This is a sadness that has all kinds of terrible facets.  I turn it over in my mind, and I see that there are so many things to be sad about.  Of all of them, one of the worst ones for me is the knowledge that, for the rest of my life, whenever I talk about her, the most salient thing that people will know about her is that she is dead.  This bright, happy little baby, full of joy and life and potential, whom I felt I knew - all that, reduced to “Oh, she was your baby that died.”

The death of a baby is not like any other kind of death, where the person who died leaves behind many friends and relatives who knew him well, remember who he was, and have happy memories they can treasure and smile over.  The death of a baby leaves behind nothing.

I felt I had to do something to fight that darkness.  Her death will always be a tragedy, but her life was light; and I can only ever feel gratitude that she lived.  So we wrote that email, and so I reproduce it here - not about the manner of her death, but about her life.  So that someone could know her, other than just me and D.  So that we could tell all the funny pregnancy stories about her that, otherwise, no one will ask to hear.

Here it is.

Since she didn't get a chance to meet the other important people in our lives, we'd like to tell you a little bit about her and how we hope she will be remembered. Over the 37 weeks that we carried her, she developed a distinctive personality that we came to know and love very much.

Her nickname is Nuggs, short for Nugget (or Nuggette, when we found out in late August that she was a girl). She got her nickname when she was about the size of a chicken mcnugget, and it stuck. 

Like everyone in her family, she liked to eat. In her parents' long running debate on the deliciousness of mint chocolate chip ice cream, she sided with her dad and made her preferences known by turning her mom into a mint chocolate chip ice cream lover. She also helped her mom judge the first annual family Thanksgiving/Hanukkah bacon-off - and naturally, she thought her dad's entry was best in class. 

She was happy and liked fun, and had a naughty sense of humor. She always kicked up a storm when watching her favorite HBO comedy, Ja'mie Private School Girl. To our mild concern, her favorite scene seemed to be the one in episode three where Ja'mie hosts a giant house party. She bounced around a lot and liked to show off her moves at the doctor's office and during her mom's important work meetings. The sounds she knew best besides her parents' voices were Pitch Perfect, the Homeland theme song, and Howard Stern. She was never shy about showing off her ladybits during ultrasounds. We think this had something to do with her Vegas beginnings. (More on that below.) 

She was a very sweet baby and gave her mom an easy pregnancy. But she also stood up for herself - she did not like the fake baby from parenting class, and made it known by trying to push it off of her mom's lap. She knew that thing was a fake.  

She was well traveled. One of her very first trips was to Vegas - in fact, her parents found out they were pregnant the day after returning from that trip. She was a San Francisco native, but she has also visited her grandparents in Boston and Fort Lauderdale, and her cousins in Phoenix. She paid her respects at the Boston Marathon bombing site two weeks after the attack. She kayaked off of Malibu and in Kealakekua Bay, where she encountered wild bottlenose dolphins. She camped and road tripped down to LA, and went sea otter- and elephant seal-spotting along the way. Most recently, she cheered her dad on to a Boston qualifying time at the California International Marathon in Sacramento. 

She was born on December 23, 2013 at 10:13 PM at UCSF, weighing 6 pounds and 14 ounces, and measuring 19 inches long. She had her mom's dark hair, long fingers, and eyes. She had her dad's ears, long eyelashes, and long skinny feet. She had a button nose, red little lips, and soft cheeks. She was the prettiest baby girl we have ever seen. 

Her first name, Mila, is a Russian name meaning love and grace. Her middle name, Nalin, is a Thai name meaning lotus flower, a Buddhist symbol for purity of spirit. 

We will always love and remember her for these things.

Biology.

A woman’s body is amazing.

For a long time when I was first pregnant with Mila, you could not really tell.  I looked in the mirror each morning, hoping to see the first signs of a legit baby bump, but just saw a weird-looking, high-seated fat roll.  For a long time, every time I saw my friend M she would wail in disappointment that I wasn’t showing yet.  We want a baby bump now!

When things finally got going, maybe shortly before week 20, they really got going.  Each week, I didn’t think I could get any bigger; but I did get bigger, every week until she was born.  I was all belly.  I felt like a capital-W Woman.  I kind of loved it.

The day after I had Mila, I remember looking down and realizing my belly looked really, really strange.  I had been lucky not to get any stretch marks, but my belly looked stretched out.  Pouchy.  I prodded it and it felt loose to the touch.  Empty.  It was sad.

Two days after that, my boobs suddenly blew up two or three cup sizes.  They hurt.  They leaked freely.  They looked like bad fake boobs, tacked up too high on my chest wall.  They were a sad reminder of who we had lost.  I didn’t recognize them as belonging to my body.

A few days after that, the boobs were gone as quickly as they had come.  I think that was when my body decided it was time to start cleaning up shop.  My stomach started to tighten up.  The swelling in my fingers subsided.  My joints felt more stable.  I started exercising again.  Now, two and a half months out, except for a little extra padding over my belly, you’d almost never know what my body has done.  I am back to running on the treadmill, lifting weights, doing planks.  The baby weight is not melting off.  I am having to starve and exercise it off.  But it is coming off.

Even while I hated the extra weight, weird sags, and misshapen boobs, part of me grieved the loss of these changes, the last physical signs that I had once wholly carried Mila.  But my body is not letting me dwell, and is charging inexorably back towards its original state.  In the span of less than a year, I have produced and expelled many strange and foreign fluids, an extra organ, and a lovely little human; and subsequently, have very nearly reverted to normal.  Biology is wild.

We are animals.  It is gross.  It is beautiful.

Promises.

We wrote our vows kind of at the last minute, sitting at opposite ends of our hotel room at 11PM the night before our wedding, each quietly tapping at our laptops, while our friends were out getting smashed on piña coladas at Bahia Cabana across the street.

When I wrote my vows that night, I of course meant them deeply; but I did not expect that we would be faced with so much sadness so soon, less than two years after getting married.  It is such an unnatural tragedy, too - the death of a child, our first child.  It is deep and lasting.  It goes against the natural order of things.  It is so wrong.  I didn’t ever even consider that it might happen to us.

But here we are, and we are laughing and smiling and crying and feeling a little bit broken and loving each other through what I think is one of the hardest things that a couple can weather, together.  I am so lucky.

I, P, take you, D, to be my husband.
I promise that I will stand by you, care for you, and defend you.
I will be your rock and your friend.
I will travel with you and discover with you,
laugh with you and cry with you,
hold my heart open to you and love you,
through whatever joy and whatever sadness may come,
today and for all days. 

I, D, take you, P, as my wife.
I promise to be your biggest fan and your toughest critic.
Your strongest ally and your best friend.
I promise to make sure we laugh and smile together every day, even in the hardest of times.
To never let the little things distract us from what's important.
I will always share with you, love you, and take care of you now until the day I die.

Facebook, part 2.

So I posted.  And I got a pretty overwhelming response.

Here is what I said:

Today, like every day, I am thinking about my baby daughter Mila Nalin. She was stillborn on December 23rd at 37 weeks, completely normal except that she wasn't alive. She would have been 2 months old by now. 

This article struck a chord for me. People rarely talk about how they deal with grief, and almost never talk about the kind of grief that follows stillbirth or similar losses. It's hard to talk about. It makes other people uncomfortable. But one of the things I've realized since Mila died and was born, in that order, is that many more of us have struggled through these experiences than I ever imagined, and feel like they have to do it in silence and alone. 

So I am talking about it, and about her. During her short life, she made us laugh a lot, accompanied us on many adventures, and already seemed like a little bit of a troublemaker. I'm sad she won't get to experience all the beautiful things in this world, but I take some comfort in knowing she was held and loved her whole life. There are good moments, but still a lot of bad moments. It sucks not having her here. But we're getting by, somehow.

I got a lot of supportive comments, but also a lot of private messages and emails from other women who have experienced loss, or people who know someone who has.  I spent the rest of the day reading and re-reading them, and feeling a bit more like I was part of a universal network of mothers and parents and families and friends.  I posted this follow-up:

Thanks for all the kind messages, comments, texts, and emails. I've heard from old friends, new friends, long-lost friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and many, many other moms and moms-to-be. I have also heard from expecting moms who have experienced loss before, and having also lost their naïveté, are very anxiously awaiting the safe arrival of their babies. These are the kinds of stories that make me feel less alone. 

It really means a lot.  

It's still hard to talk about it, but harder not to talk about it.

I still do find it hard to talk about.  Not only is it painful, I am also usually private.  I am introverted. There are things I am still scared to say to other people, on Facebook, on this blog.  I am scared of some of the things I have already posted on this blog.  But I’m getting too old to worry too much about what other people think, so I am trying.  One of the many things that Mila taught me, and still is teaching me, is that life’s too short.