The Agony of Infant Death
A continuation of my story of loss and anxiety leading to the loss of my faith.
So last time I talked about Fiona’s death and my childhood background with medical anxiety. I left off the morning of February 3rd, 2003 after the police and our pastor came to our apartment. After that Marc and I went back to sleep. We hadn’t slept at all the night before and the shock was exhausting. I think I woke up to Kacie coming over and crying with her. That first night we got a phone call from the state medical examiner. My mother answered the phone and spoke to him because I just did not have the emotional energy. She hung up and told me that Fiona had been born with a heart defect. I don’t think she said what it was called at that time. I think it was the next day that our pediatrician called and set up a time to come over and talk to us more about it. When he came over he brought illustrations and wrote the name of the defect down. That was the first time I heard the words that would come to define my life for several years. Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, or HLHS, a Congenital Heart Defect.
I remember in the following days people from church bringing food over. I remember my mother jumping and rolling her eyes every time Marc started to cry. I remember donating bags of clothes and unopened packages of diapers to the Crisis Pregnancy Center. Marc did all the actual errands. He delivered the donations, he had a nameplate engraved for her urn; I couldn’t deal with being around many people. Neither of us have strong memories of going to the funeral home or writing the obituary, but I know I met the funeral director before the day of the service. There were lots of phone calls with friends and family. I kept dreaming about going through the baby aisle at the store and crying.
The first Sunday after Fiona’s passing we went to church. I did want to be surrounded by church people. As wacky as that church came to be, I really felt loved by them during this time. I remember standing up from the pew and talking about feeling a peace that only God could give. How I never thought that I would be able to survive something like this but God and the church was helping me. I remember the tension in my back as I tried to hold myself up, knees shaking, pain shooting through my spine and basically falling back into the pew and breaking down in tears.
We waited two weeks to have the memorial service. I don’t really remember why except maybe giving family from out of town a chance to make plans and just needing the time to emotionally prepare. I remember really putting our hearts into planning the service. We had about 5 carefully selected hymns including Peace Like a River and Be Thou My Vision. We planned for a friend of Marc’s to play the bagpipes but that morning the bagpiper couldn’t get to us. I think there had been a snowstorm and his car wouldn’t start. So Marc ended up playing the pipes. Friends brought us flowers and the card said To: Roger, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. Right then and there I was laughing over the card saying Roger instead of The Rogers or Marc and Megan Rogers or whatever.
My mother and a good friend that came up for a couple days to stay with us had headed home to New Jersey a couple days beforehand. At the time I was in too much of a haze to put much thought into it, but in the long-run I think it’s pretty devastating that none of my family nor Marc’s father could manage to be there. That being said, the church was full and all of Marc’s extended family showed up. That was probably the first and only time all of his mother’s and stepfather’s family were all together. A big group from the TJ Maxx I worked at were there. Marc’s friends and maybe some of his coworkers. People from the church. We felt so supported by the local community. There was also an elderly woman who I had never met before handed me a card that I later discovered included a multiple page letter telling me that she knew just how I felt because she had a brother that died when he was 8 years old of leukemia.
Grief is strange. Sometimes the trite sayings were helpful, but mostly they hurt. Sometimes people who had been through similar experiences were very comforting, but mostly they made me feel even more alone. Spending hours at the library joining Yahoo groups for people who had experienced the death of a pregnancy or infant took up a lot of my time. I wanted to be around people but I didn’t. I wanted to die but I wanted to live. I wanted people to stop talking about me having more children but I just wanted a baby in my arms. It’s hard to think about, hard to remember, hard to understand why I found so much comfort in a God that I don’t even believe in any more. I wonder if that happened now, would I get through it as well or would it be worse for me because I do not have that faith community. It’s interesting that one of the top precursors to my loss of faith was watching a Christian family go through a much more drawn out version of what we went through. The mother’s enduring faith was just more than I could handle. It broke my heart to watch a child who had lived for almost a year connected to a machine in the hospital die after a heart transplant while she praised the Lord. Please don’t misunderstand me, everyone does what they need to do in order to survive tragedy and I do not judge her faith, I have been there. But to watch it from the outside was just what I needed to start spiralling away from that faith.
When I did become pregnant again, about 10 months later, my anxiety went through the roof. As much as I wanted a baby to hold, as happy as I was for that to happen, I hated pregnancy. I did with every one of my children and then I felt guilty on top of it. I worried about the health of the baby, I worried about being a good parent, I worried about money. I worried about finding a bigger apartment. I worried about giving birth. Although I felt very supported through the death of Fiona, I do not recall feeling that support in the same way with this pregnancy. I think by this point we had at least started questioning our continued involvement with the church we had been attending. That is a story for another day. But I just did not know how to talk about the complicated feelings that I was having. Everyone was so happy for us, I didn’t know how to share the fear and anxiety beyond the surface. I didn’t know how to let myself feel things and then move on. I had tried therapy for a few months starting shortly before Fiona was born until maybe a few months after she died. I quit going when the counselor tried to diagnose my husband rather than focusing on my needs. I believed that any and all of my mental health issues were because I was not a good enough Christian. I just needed to focus more on God and the Bible. I needed to “Let go and Let God”. The fact that I did not know how to do that was my own fault.
