I can’t let October go by without posting at least “something” regarding either my experience with Pregnancy Loss or at the very least offer my thoughts on the matter either on how I feel more than 2 decades after my loss or the state of Awareness.
Am I and are we moving forward?
My answer is YES.
The other night I was watching this show called “This is us” and this is the clip that sent me over the edge….:
I was a mess. A total and complete mess. Even after the show ended I could not stop sobbing.
My 13 year old son Connor came up to me a little while later, and not knowing what I was crying about, started talking about Alex. He hugged me and told me it was okay, Alex was okay etc. When I asked him how he “knew” that’s what I was crying about, he said he didn’t know how, he just “knew”.
Like I said on this quote from my blog, I find it interesting, even bizarre, how my tear ducts spontaneously go on overdrive when I remember that beautiful, horrible day that I held my stillborn baby. Watching this particular scene from the show though, knowing that even this “fictional” Doctor can’t forget about his stillborn baby after half a century, does makes me feel better.
So, “This is us”, THANK YOU. Now, can you show us them visiting the cemetery or the burial or ANYTHING ELSE? Please? What did they name their baby? We want more.
I suppose mothers of stillborn babies like myself don’t want anything crazy, just to recognize this as the profound loss that it is.
I am not crazy. I will never forget. Alex is part of me, and nobody can ever tell me otherwise, and as I was explaining to my ever-understanding aunt on the phone the other day, it’s not like I sit there and cry or am morose every day, I can go most days without a single thought of Alex, but this unspeakable loss is “there”, woven in my psyche in ways impossible to accurately describe.
We’ve come a long way in Awareness of stillbirth in 20 years. I am very glad. Like I wrote about in my book “Losing Alex“, I was so unaware of babies dying at birth in this day and age that I was unaware of the existence of this word “stillborn”. I even asked the nurse “Is that what you call it”? I had no idea.
Stillborn was never seen on TV or movies, but that has changed. Just in the past few years I’ve seen stillborn babies portrayed in at least a couple of shows and TV movies and we must encourage Hollywood to embrace this type of storyline, because more babies are stillborn every day than we realize, and these families need to know they are not alone.
Here’s a scene from the episode called “Faith” of the second Season of Outlander, after Claire has a stillborn baby:
Love & Light and remembering Alex, Always.
