I Lost You

But you'll always be within me.

[Trigger Warning: Verbally graphic description of a first trimester birth & a baby’s appearance, development & death at 12 weeks gestation. Please, protect your heart if this one isn’t for you.]

We weren’t in a crowded shopping mall. We weren’t in an airport. We weren’t at the beach, or in a grocery store. We weren’t at the doctor, and we most certainly weren’t at the hospital. We’d seen all of those places within 24 hours, 24 hours that you were still growing safely inside of me, 10 fingers, 10 toes, a button nose and the smallest, tiniest heart I’ve ever seen beat. We lived in an entirely different world in the 24 hours before we knew that life was going to fracture into the before… and the after.

We were at home…. and I lost you.

I lost you in the middle of the night

I woke up with a jolt

And before I could think,

You slid right out.

You weighed so little, I hardly heard you hit the cold water, but my mama heart knew.

Silently, I reached my hand into the opaque bowl.

That’s the first time I saw you, my beautiful son.

At just 12 weeks, my wedding band would’ve fit around your waist.

I didn't try, because I couldn't think.

I couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t move.

I just stared at you.

In my hand, you were almost as long as my index finger.

I’ve never held anything so fragile, so precious, or so heartbreaking in my entire life.

Your tiny doll sized arms were folded so tenderly across your itty bitty belly, and in retrospect I learned that in addition to your muscles, limbs and bones, all of your major organs were already formed and were starting to grow - your brain, your kidneys, your digestive tract and your heart.

The heart that I watched beat, beat, beat and stop.

You were perfect, and you were dead.

You just couldn’t let your sister go off alone. She’d already died, several weeks prior to this night that I lost you.

I love you for that.

I love you for so many reasons beyond that.

I love you so much sometimes it feels like I’m suffocating, and then I remember that grief is just love with no place to go.

Some days I yearn solely to have been able to hold onto more pieces of you...

Prints, of the smallest hands and feet I’ve ever seen.

Photos, with my hands and daddy’s hands and you.

Family photos.

A baby blanket or a piece of cloth that I had wrapped you in during the short time you were as one outside in the world.

But you didn’t get a blanket, or a piece of cloth.

You didn’t get handprints or footprints.

You didn’t even get weight or height measurements until you were cremated.

The night you died, we gently placed your tiny body in a plastic Tupperware container, one grabbed in haste around 3am by a man in such shock he had no words.

You weren’t held all night until we had to bring you to the doctor in the morning, and you should’ve been.

I should’ve held you.

But I didn’t know I wanted to, or needed to then.

All I knew is that I had just delivered a baby that died, and nobody was ever going to ask to see him. Nobody would ever even meet him. Nobody got to celebrate his pending arrival or his sweet newborn days.

I delivered a baby that would have no future except the one where I continually bring up his name in uncomfortable rooms full of hushed voices, and I couldn’t force myself to move, or to think, or to process any of it.

There. I said it. My biggest regret.

None of those things my heart or my grief needed, happened.

Because I gave birth in my bathroom at home, alone, in the middle of the night.

There was no one here to watch, to help, to witness, to advise.

There could’ve been no way in this world for me to prepare differently for that night having never lived it before.

So tonight while you’re heavy on my heart, while I’m endlessly wondering about what you would have been like in present day today, I send my love for you to the sky, my sweet boy, and I remember that your fetal cells will always be intertwined with mine - even now that my uterus has been removed.

Even though there is no longer the chance for any baby to grow inside of this body.

Even now, tiny parts of you will always be here with me.

I’ll miss you in big ways, in small ways, and always.

I lost you, sweet boy.

But you’ll always be within me.