What Happens When There is no Rainbow…

Your heart shatters.

That’s what really happens.

And anyone who says differently is lying.

I have never, not one time ever, wanted something so badly, worked my ever-loving ass off for it, made sacrifice after sacrifice medically, physically, mentally and financially for it, just to devastatingly fall short of the self-imposed finish line. To reach a point where the most painful thing I have to do is accept the literal last thing in the world I’d choose to give up on, and somehow now or down the road make peace with not being able to give my living daughter Brooklyn a sibling here on earth. Not being able to conceive, carry, and raise another baby. Not being able to grow our family.

I’ve been avoiding this topic — talking about it, writing about it, thinking about it, for close to two years now, hoping if I never put the words on paper, they wouldn’t become real. And that the mere act of putting them on paper would impact me so significantly that there’d be a cosmic size shift inside of my body, where my heart drops to the bottom of my stomach and everything around me becomes blurry. I was right about that part. The hardest part of life in this season for me is needing to move on, or rather, move forward, but without the ending I anticipated, expected and desperately wanted, which comes with an overwhelming amount of pain and grief in the actual act of moving on.

-=-=-=-

In the summer of 2022, my husband and I were driving through Texas for a friend’s wedding and he mentioned that maybe it was time to close the door on another pregnancy. We had literally just finished our most recent, grueling, back-to-back egg retrieval cycles, the second of which requiring a hospital admission to manage the induced Crohn’s flare, and we had gone through hundreds of shots and dozens of procedures and thousands of dollars to create two new batches of embryos. In no world did I ever EVER imagine that not one single one of them would ever be transferred back into my body. Or possibly, anyone’s body.

When the conversation came up, I was so hurt, so unable to see his position that for a while it drove a wedge between us.

I thought we could handle anything thrown our way, but we didn’t expect our entire world to be torn apart at the seams by the new fertility clinic we chose after the twins died. We also certainly didn’t expect to watch helplessly as over the past few years my body has had to fight for its life multiple times, spending collective months in the hospital, bed bound, attached to IV, and in and out of surgery. Before parenthood, we also didn’t realize how our village here just isn’t widespread enough for us to start again with a newborn under these conditions, no matter how desperately I want(ed) to.

Let’s suffice it to say that this… what you’re about to read in its entirety… is probably the hardest thing I’ve sat down to write in a very very long time.

-=-=-=-

In October 2021, just two months after delivering our extremely premature twins Noah and Victoria on my bathroom floor, I wrote the following italicized text. Somehow silly old me thought that two months should’ve been enough time to move forward. To accept and process my grief. The grief that I recognized instantly when I screamed out in the middle of night, and in total shock said to my husband “wow, this is going to fuck us up for a long time.”

How naive I was.

How naive we both were.

We had no idea that moment was ultimately going to be the beginning of the end and that there was still so much trauma to come, but that we’d experience it all as loss parents, not just as regular parents, and that this would wear us down in ways we never could’ve seen coming.

I mean, that version of me knew nothing, literally nothing about lifelong grief. About neonatal death. About how once the veil has been lifted, you can never pull it back down again. About how I’d truly never be the same again, and in fact every time I tried to find my footing, I’d slip further down the rabbit hole, destined to end up in a place where confronting and sitting beside my feelings was absolutely necessary.

In order for all of the pieces of the story to fit together, we have to start with this one.

Last night I wrote hurriedly and angrily into the notes app on my phone, words stumbling out alongside tears of frustration. The harder I cried, the more I wrote.

It wasn’t eloquent or magical or even sensical, to be truthful. It wasn’t for posting or even for sending, it was just… real.

It was anger and fear.

It was exhaustion and devastation and feeling more than I could think.

It was everything I needed, until it wasn’t enough.

The words stopped.

The tears stopped.

But the feelings remained.

Now I’m in a place where I’ve been tasked with holding my own hand. I’ve felt extra alone. The things that plague me, the flashbacks that haunt me, they’re still here. Sometimes my anxiety is at an 11 for no reason at all and it’s impossible to think that it’s been 2.5 months and I still feel like this.

I still feel like I just watched my baby die.

I still feel like a part of me is missing.

There’s a hole in my heart, and I can stuff it with tissues and gauze and fill it with chocolate and tequila, but it’s never really covered. It’s never really out of mind, even when it might look to others like it’s out of sight. It never stops aching in the depths of my soul.

I just constantly feel like I can’t breathe. Like the wind has been knocked out of me by an invisible force, and I’m just standing here, empty, wondering how much time will go by before I topple over.

I didn’t expect it to be this hard.

I didn’t expect it to last this long.

[Authors note in retrospect 3 years later — I was so new to the grief journey that I had no concept it would literally turn into a lifelong battle.]

I didn’t expect the hurt to eat me alive, day after day, moment after moment.

I didn’t expect every single moment after to feel like a challenge.

I didn’t expect for the end of this story and the beginning of the next to feel so awful side by side.

I didn’t expect for every decision to feel extra hard, extra weighted.

I didn’t expect for every possible obstacle to show up knocking at my door.

I didn’t expect to have new infertility testing that was abnormal.

I didn’t expect for bacteria to show up on my cervical swab.

I didn’t expect to need antibiotics, which my system would only make more complicated.

I didn’t expect for hidden grief to leave me sobbing in the middle of an ultrasound. Or on the phone with the nurse. Or hiding in my car after the appointment.

I didn’t expect to have to continue making seemingly excruciatingly hard physical and mental decisions about this process. I didn’t expect it to feel like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. But, it has been. It still is.

I didn’t expect to feel so distant from my partner. From my friends. From myself.

I didn’t expect this season to remain as difficult as it felt in August when I was just days out from the trauma.

I didn’t expect to miss the ones who left me all alone.

I didn’t expect to feel angry at the world all of the time.

I didn’t expect this.

I didn’t expect this…

In many ways, I shudder, realizing deep in my bones that these words, this sentiment, it’s still rings true and it’s still just as vulnerable and raw as all hell nearly three years later.

I also didn’t know just how many decisions I’d have to make in the time since then. And how many decisions would be taken away from me, made for me by my body or my doctors or the logistics and practicalities of my living family and my partner, and the way those decisions would literally change the trajectory of my life, my spirit and my soul, from now until eternity ends.

Like a pile of shattered pieces, I think about all that I’ve endured since that was originally written.

I still wonder today how was it possible that I had delivered our dead daughter and our still living son, and then watched him die in my hands as I sat alone on my bathroom floor in the middle of the night. Moments beforehand, he had just been growing safely inside of me. One minute we had a whole future planned for him, and the next, we were placing him inside a Tupperware container to bring his body to the doctor for testing.

How horrific.

How utterly traumatic, terribly transformative, and forever life altering.

There was a dramatic line drawn not in the sand but rather in permanent marker, noting who I was on August 3rd, 2021 and every day beforehand, and who I became on August 4th, 2021 and every day afterwards, along with everything I’ve tried to do to survive since then. It feels perhaps impossible to explain to anyone who’s never held their dead baby just how unfathomable it is to keep moving — not to move on, but to move forward, to remember and process somehow that your child now lives amongst the stars but somehow, you’re still alive on earth without them.

How do you parent a dead child?

In truth, there aren’t very many opportunities, and I’m still navigating this question today.

=-=-=-

The part that comes next feels like trauma I’ve never faced, I’ve never talked about, and I’ve never accepted, because what happened never should’ve happened, and had this part of the story been different, I truly don’t think I’d be sitting here writing this piece at all.

After the twins died, we chose to move to a different fertility clinic. We’d had three losses in a row, two early miscarriages and then the first trimester birth of Noah and Victoria, and we wanted new perspective. Outside of the box thinking. New hope.

We interviewed a few doctors virtually and chose one that felt progressive and attentive.

Boy, was our intuition off.

Although this new doctor and her clinic did an exorbitant amount of testing, followed by two rigorous protocols for egg retrieval, and we did come out with a “successful” number of genetically normal embryos, we were also treated like wheels in a cog, as if we were without feelings or without fear, as if we hadn’t just suffered one of the biggest losses that life can throw one’s way, and as if we didn’t desperately need compassion or patience during this deeply intense process.

The staff at this clinic violated my boundaries and my body physically on more than one occasion.

The staff at this clinic “lost” multiple of my genetic samples — both those drawn from my blood and those scraped from my uterus were somehow mishandled in transmission to the testing facility not once, not twice, but four separate times. Processes and procedures had to be repeated over and over again in order to finally get the information we needed, and even then, it came without much explanation and definitely without empathy. My body and my emotions became hyperaware, hyper focused, and afraid — all of the time. I couldn’t let my guard down. I became permanently stuck in “fight vs. flight” mode.

When I tried to advocate for myself, I was literally told that I didn’t know my body best. While attempting to destroy my autonomy AND chipping away at much of my grit and grace, I was given medication I had a known allergy to and had specifically asked to not be used for sedation purposes. Sure enough, after overwriting my request, I ended up in an ambulance to the closest hospital for testing, treatment and monitoring after aspirating under anesthesia. Another sign that this clinic and their staff were not the right choice (or frankly, even a safe choice) for us to move forward with.

In May of 2022, nine months after the twins died, we made another agonizing decision — we had to admit to ourselves that not only did this clinic make us feel unsafe, but we couldn’t trust them — not with our bodies, our hearts, or our potential future babies. Unfortunately we learned the hard way that these doctors weren’t in it to support patients but rather to earn income and “success rates” for advertising purposes and obtaining additional clients, and we chose to sever ties with them.

I was so utterly destroyed over the whole thing that I was advised to take a leave of absence from my job, and participate in three months of an outpatient, partial hospitalization psychiatric program for complex trauma patients. I just couldn’t come out of fight vs. flight mode, I couldn’t let go of the hypervigilence, and the grief was swallowing me whole. It was during this time that the above conversation in Texas occurred, and it was then that I realized I was woefully unprepared to fight the hardest part of this battle — accepting that maybe it was time to stop giving everything we had to an outcome that would never be guaranteed.

To add fuel to the fire, or insult to injury, it was ironically on the day that Roe vs. Wade was overturned, at the exact time that the decision was released to the public, that my husband was in the car with a critically important cryotank — the vessel keeping our embryo’s on ice, transporting them across the city from the clinic that broke us back to the clinic that felt more like home, the clinic where we successfully conceived and carried our then three-year-old living daughter.

Devastatingly, those embryos are still being stored at our “home base” clinic — for a few reasons — but mostly because making the decision to let go of my dreams has been virtually impossible. In truth, that’s why I started writing this. I hoped that I would be able to calmly and confidently reach a place where my head and heart could agree on what came next — but in honesty, I’m just not there yet. I’m actually not sure how or when I’ll get there, or if I’ll even get there at all. But I understand logically that this has to be the decision we make for our family.

Silently, I’m raging against this on the inside, but only I can see that. It’s become my secret from the world.

For almost two years now, we’ve revisited this same conversation a handful of times. We’ve discussed the major health challenges I’ve endured, the emergency surgeries I’ve undergone, the time and energy it has taken away from spending with our living daughter, the physical, emotional and financial commitments and obligations that would need to go towards trying to do another embryo transfer back into my body, and most significantly, how my body and my mental health would be impacted by my trying to carry another pregnancy to term, or in the worst case possible, if I’d be able to handle watching another one of my babies die.

Last summer we had close friends deliver a perfect baby girl, and I found myself going through the bins of all of our daughters baby clothes, picking out the outfits without sentimentally that I could pass on to our friend. As a new parent, hand me downs were the best gift I received, and I wanted to carry on the tradition. Since then, three more of our friends have delivered beautiful girls, and with each new baby and each new size, more and more of our living daughters clothes have been packed up and mailed out.

Up until that point we had literally not gotten rid of a single thing from B’s newborn, infant or toddler days, assuming that we would get to use them for another child. Ironically, all 6 of the genetically normal embryos we have stored are girls, so we already knew that IF there was another baby, she would have a lifetime of hand me downs with memories and love and side by side photos of her and B at those same ages.

As we shared pieces of Brooklyn’s childhood with the tiny babies that will one day be friends of her own, I noticed that our basement started collecting empty spaces. We went from 2 or 3 bins in each size of children’s clothes to single bins combining sizes, and in that release I realized I was trying hard to walk through the motions of moving forward — moving forward with only one living child. That thought gets stuck in my throat everytime I try to read it out loud.

=-=-=-

Three months ago, in April 2024, I was carried out of our house on a stretcher after my husband had to call 911. In the emergency room, I learned that I was pregnant — something that for seven years now, we didn’t believe was possible. We’d been told early on that we couldn’t get pregnant without technological intervention, and we had no reason to believe otherwise. We were shocked. We had no idea how far along I was, or if the pregnancy was viable.

For two or three hours we sat in limbo.

Would this turn out to be the greatest surprise of our lives? Could I carry this baby to term? Or was the severe pain I was experiencing an indication that something was wrong, with the baby or me or both of us?

Around midnight, a CT scan showed us three things — our baby had implanted and started growing in my right fallopian tube, my fallopian tube had burst, and my stomach was filled with about 1/5th of my total blood volume. Without immediate intervention, I could die.

Two hours later I was taken back for emergency surgery and when I woke up I was without my baby, without my body part, and without any idea in the world of what to think or what would come next.

Losing Rowan as suddenly as we learned about them threw me for a loop I couldn’t have seen coming, and brought out every trauma response and trigger from when the twins died. About a week later, I was diagnosed with Postpartum Depression and Postpartum Anxiety, and am still trying to manage the associated symptoms with the support of my husband, my therapist, and my psychiatrist.

I was (am) so confused. I got pregnant spontaneously. Does that mean it could happen again? Could we try? Should we try?

This was the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. How did hope sneak up on me again without warning? The last time it visited I was pretty sure I’d squashed it for good, warning it not to come back unless it was going to see things through.

Or rather, should I be thinking about how many ways in the last few years my body attacked and even tried to kill me? Should I realize that I was lucky to physically survive this emotional rollercoaster of a tragedy, and there would be no guarantee in the world that would tell us we could avoid this happening again?

Was this the sign that we (I) absolutely had to give up the dream of carrying one more baby?

I feel like this is where many people ask about alternative options, like surrogacy or adoption. We were (maybe still are?) very open to and actually considering pursuing surrogacy especially since we already have healthy embryos created, but the financial and emotional cost of such a thing would be nearly impossible to pull off. And adoption — while beautiful and altruistic and brave — that isn’t the right answer for our family right now either.

=-=-=-

So, that leaves us here. It leaves me here. It has me wondering how to wrap up this post in the same way as to how to wrap up the feelings inside of me — the grief and the loss not just of death, but of life, of loss, of change.

[Sidenote: although I gave up Grey’s anatomy seven years ago, I had watched it religiously since then. And I can’t get this quote, this scene out of my mind.]

Lexie: Grief may be a thing we all have in common, but it looks different on everyone.

Mark: It isn’t just death we have to grieve. It’s life. It’s loss. It’s change.

Alex: And when we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes, has to hurt so bad. The thing we gotta try to remember is that it can turn on a dime.

Izzie: That’s how you stay alive. When it hurts so much you can’t breathe, that’s how you survive.

Derek: By remembering that one day, somehow, impossibly, you won’t feel this way. It won’t hurt this much.

Bailey: Grief comes in its own time for everyone, in its own way.

Owen: So the best we can do, the best anyone can do, is try for honesty.

Meredith: The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief is that you can’t control it.

Arizona: The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it when it comes.

Callie: And let it go when we can.

Meredith: The very worst part is that the minute you think you’re past it, it starts all over again.

Cristina: And always, every time, it takes your breath away.

Meredith: There are five stages of grief. They look different on all of us, but there are always five.

Alex: Denial.

Derek: Anger.

Bailey: Bargaining.

Lexie: Depression.

Richard: Acceptance.

=-=-=-

I’ve done the denial. The bargaining. The depression.

I’m in the anger.

I’m trying, with everything I’ve got, to seek out and reach for acceptance. To let go of the coveting, the craving, the wanting, the wishing. To know that what’s true is what’s safest, not what I want, but apparently what I need. I know this. But accepting it — it’s not the same thing. It’s a whole different category of grief, to be honest.

I’m pretty sure somehow emotionally, this is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. Or rather, to agree with.

I desperately don’t want to.

I don’t want to say the words.

I don’t want to get rid of the rest of the baby stuff in our basement.

I don’t want to think about being alone in my body for the rest of time.

I don’t want Brooklyn to be without built in playmates.

I don’t want three babies in heaven. I want them here, on earth, sitting in my lap.

There were so many junctures where this story could’ve had triumph and not tribulation — and I’m so so angry that it didn’t. That in truth, I couldn’t control any of it.

So… here goes.

Here’s the whole point.

My hands are shaking as I think about typing this out. But that’s the point, right? To face the fear. To name it. To process it?

What happens when there is no rainbow?

Your heart shatters.

And then you rally the troops. You sink your heart and your feelings and your energy into something that you can control. You love the ever-living daylights out of your partner and/or your living child(ren). You try to find a way to love yourself — even though right now it might (does) feel absolutely impossible.

And I won’t even say you try to find a way to love life again — because I truly don’t know if or how that’s possible. I’m so far away from that type of experience that I don’t know if it’s true (for me, at least). But it felt necessary to mention here, to be honest. If it’s true for you, I love that. I support that. I hope one day, it can be true for me too.

You take a deep breath. And then you exhale.

And you let the truth spill out.

Our family will not have a rainbow baby.

Our family will not have another child.

This isn’t what we wanted. It’s not what we dreamed about. But those things will never weigh as much as the heartbreaking truth — this body is complicated and untrustworthy and flawed in so many different ways. Honestly, with what I know now, we were extremely lucky that Brooklyn came out nearly unscathed.

Our family, just him and me and B, us three, we will be together and alone for the rest of time.

That’s how you stay alive.

When it hurts so much you can’t breathe, that’s how you survive.

& one day, somehow, impossibly, you won’t feel this way.

It won’t hurt this much.

But today, it does. So today, I’m sharing it with every person out there who has to make a heartbreaking decision they’ll never come to terms with.

You can do this. It’s awful, and devastating, and painful as all hell. But you can do it, and you can survive it — even if you don’t want to.