Day 3: What it Felt Like | Capture Your Grief 2016

This one is a little too hard for me to write about right now, I just don't feel I have the emotional capacity. So I am going to take a little different approach.  I find so many people don't quite understand what stillbirth is, they assume it is the same as a miscarriage (please don't get me wrong, having had a miscarriage, I know they are incredibly hard, emotionally and physically) but they are different. Stillbirth includes labor at a hospital, and all of the things that come along with a full term birth of a healthy take home baby, it's just that instead of taking home a beautiful baby, you are left empty handed and with such much grief.

So here is what stillbirth felt like:

There should be no possible way that you could feel this much emotional pain, when they tell you your baby's heart has stopped.

That there shouldn't be a world where a parent's heart continues to beat after their child's has stopped

A nightmare walking into the labor and delivery department, where everyone is brimming with joy, excited to meet their new addition, when you already know yours is gone

Agony and guilt when you are in anipartum being induced, and you hear the heartbeat monitor of baby of the woman on bedrest in the room next door. Guilt that you just want the noise to stop, knowing full well it is not that woman's fault your baby has died. But agony hearing the sound of a living child's heartbeat amplified, seeming to rub in the fact that you will never hear that sound again from your own beautiful child.

Intense pain as contractions start

Confusion as you go thorough your mind all of the steps you learned in labor and delivery class, but that you never in a million years saw you needed these classes for this

Emptiness and anger as the high risk doctors treat you as a medical experiment, seeming to act differently toward you because they don't have a living child to worry about

Nausea as contractions become Stronger and closer together

Panic as you realize they are now 30 seconds a part, and that this is going to happen soon

Sadness, joy, pride, nearly every emotion possible when your daughter is finally born.

Silence, so much silence when you hear no cry, not that you were expecting it, but it becomes even more real with the silence

Bitterness with the Doctor cuts the cord when you specifically said you wanted your husband to do it, just as if your child had been living

So much joy and so much sadness as you hold your precious daughter, but knowing she is already gone.

Awe and pride at her perfect little body, 10 toes, 10 fingers, her daddy's nose.  

Love, so much love for your beautiful daughter

Like time stands still as you hold her, but like it is simultaneously going too fast knowing this is the only time you have with her

Utter despair as you walk out of the hospital room knowing you will never see or hold your baby girl ever again.  That you walk out of the hospital with no baby to take home

Excruciating pain as your milk comes in, and you become engorged because there is no baby to feed, no way of relief

More anger and despair that your body does not seem to know what has consumed your heart and mind, that your baby is dead.  But the body mocks you by producing more milk for a baby that will never be here.

Shock, disbelief and sorrow as you plan and attend the funeral for your baby girl

Desperation that this must be a horrible nightmare, when you bury your baby 6 feet underground in the cemetery

A haze as you attempt to continue living when your child has died