Lucian Smith
When a child is conceived, it is already two weeks old. It doesn't quite seem fair. The easiest pinpointable date is that of the last menstrual cycle, so when a woman find out she's pregnant by missing her next one, that's 'four weeks', meaning she's been pregnant for two. Six weeks means a month, eight weeks means a month and a half, and at ten weeks, the child should have been developing for two months.
For us, at ten weeks, we discovered our child had died at six: one month developed, and only eight millimeters long.
It was the day after Christmas, 1998. We were visiting Sara's parents in Bethlehem, PA--an appropriate enough destination for a young couple, pregnant with their first child. Christmas day had been festive and somewhat baby-oriented: a purple fuzzy monster, complete with a nose as large as its squat body was given as an inaugural gift to the child from its grandmother-to-be. A framed picture of the very first ultrasound was my gift to Sara: A black and white Rorschach diagram, if you didn't know where to look, but a way to remember when we sat excitedly (if uncomfortably) with the technician as we saw the rapid pulse of a thin, fuzzy line she said was our child.
The day started off with a trip to visit my grandparents, an hour's drive away, near Lancaster. It was a cold day, though no snow remained from the brief flurry that met us the day we had arrived. The warm air of the car's heater soon had most of us dozing off-- enough so that we ended up taking a wrong turn and a subsequent twenty minute detour. Cracking the windows revived us again, and after calling to explain our lateness, we finally made it to the restaurant we were to meet them, my grandfather faithfully waiting for us outside in the cold like some fedora-capped sentinel.
After ordering, Sara excused herself to go to the restroom. The jovial banter with my grandparents telescoped into the background when, a short time later, Sara returned with stooped posture and spoke in forced whispers with her mother, who joined her as they returned to the restroom once more. I caught a glimpse of her sky-blue eyes turned into wet steel, and my insides slowly twisted. When they returned and my mother-in-law pressed a foil-wrapped package into my hands, she didn't even have to say anything. I went with Sara to find a phone. She was bleeding--heavily--and was afraid the package contained our child.
The pay phone was located in the entryway to the restaurant: an unsealed foyer, claimed by the cold. Sara was past noticing such vagaries, however, and after she called our home hospital and had a doctor paged, we both huddled and waited for a return call. And waited. And waited. Finally after calling back and realizing the phone did not take incoming long-distance calls, we went back inside and managed to find someone who took us to a back office from which to call. The news was simple: "If it is a miscarriage, there's nothing you can do, or could have done. You should probably go ahead and go to the emergency room." Sometimes, you're glad you're helpless--it means you didn't mess up earlier.
My grandfather knew the way to the local hospital, and offered to take us, Sara's family following behind. My grandmother, overcome with emotion, stayed behind. The last I saw of her that vacation was her sitting at the uncleared table, alone, head bent over, breathing shallowly into her clenched handkerchief.
Once at the hospital, we were admitted and seen with relative speed. After waiting briefly in the sparsely-crowded waiting room, Sara and I were admitted to the OB/Gyn room in the back. The decor there was rather different from one back at the family practice clinic. In place of the month-old editions of 'Parenting' were pamphlets encouraging pregnant women in abusive relationships to seek help. Replacing the fetal growth charts on the wall was a hand-drawn chart on green construction paper detailing the signs and symptoms of various sexually transmitted diseases.
The doctor came in to see us, and was entirely too young. He was extremely professional, and performed a complete (if inconclusive) examination on Sara, and explained things to us clearly and precisely. He was probably a few years older than us. But I felt older than him. Here, now, the twisting of my stomach and the sponge of worry absorbing coherent thought from the back of my head had aged me in a way I didn't even fully comprehend.
After still more waiting, a punctuated equilibrium between thought and subdued conversation between Sara and me, we were taken to Radiology for an ultrasound, the final and conclusive test. Once again, I watched as the monochrome Rorschach appeared on the screen. But here, the monitor did not swivel around to show the expectant mother the image of her child, nor was this technician allowed to explain what she saw on the screen. I watched myself, trying to find the small, thin line I had seen beating just a month before, trying to distinguish fetus from yolk sac from amnion until my eyes swam. But the harder I looked, the more I second-guessed myself, and the screen remained a passive enigma.
More waiting. Perhaps not without some gain, as Sara and I slowly came to terms with the fact that we may have lost our child. The technician had, in a small breach of protocol, told us that she "didn't see what she would expect," for a ten-week pregnancy, and we concluded that it probably meant something was wrong, and that we had lost our baby. It still didn't prepare me for the jarring revelation by the doctor when he finally reappeared. There was no heartbeat, and, judging by size, the baby hadn't grown since it was six weeks developed.
Six weeks! It had died a month ago, and we didn't even realize it! The entire Christmas season, the shopping, the travel--even Sara's last visit to her obstetrician. Dead the whole time.
We each deal with grief in our own way. I was stoic and supportive of Sara as we left the hospital, and on our long ride home, the need to be there for her allowed me to process my own grief more steadily. I wept that night, in Sara's arms, the shared sorrow cresting over both of us. But in the aftermath, a kind of peace. A sense of getting past the sorrow by embracing it fully, instead of by rejecting it.
It was important to me to give our child a name, and 'Brief' seemed appropriate. Sara agreed, but with a modification: 'Brief Joy'. For even with all the sadness of that day, our child had brought us joy as well: the joy of anticipation, the joy of love, the joy of expression. When we talked with my parents the next day, we asked my father, a Bible scholar, what those words would be in Hebrew. He did some research, gave us some options, and in the end, we decided on 'Abagail Cheled', from the roots 'abba', father, 'gil', joy, and 'cheled', brief, reminding us that God, too, walked with us in our joy as well as our sorrow.
The sadness is now a part of me. I was touched briefly, and came away changed. And wherever we live, we will have a small shelf, on which will sit a small purple monster with an oversized nose, next to a framed ultrasound.