118 Days

The first two weeks after Autumn died, I would wake up with my hand on my belly and have to remind myself that she is now and forever only a dream. When I wake up now, I wake up in the nightmare reality that she is dead. My belly is empty. I thought waking up with my hand on my belly was a cruel trick of embodied memory I would welcome being rid of. It is not.

I thought holding Autumn after her birth, watching the electrical pulse of her heart continue firing beneath skin that was undeveloped and bloody would be a moment I would welcome distance from. I thought I would want to choose instead the memories of our positive pregnancy test, or having her brother kiss my belly, or seeing her dance on the ultrasound monitor after I worried we lost her in our car accident or through a subchorionic hemorrhage. I do not. 

I was pregnant with Autumn for 118 days. It has now been 118 days since she died. Time keeps marching on, and I thought that would be a gift for grieving. Today it is not. Today is the cruel reminder that everyone else’s life goes on, but mine is stuck 118 days ago- mine wants to go back to that day, even knowing she would die, just so I could hold her and memorize her face again. 

I know how many days I was pregnant because I kept track. We did IVF, which means we knew the exact moment that the embryo was put in my body. I wanted to celebrate everything with her living brother after so many losses before him.  In fact, for him, I counted up the days between when he was frozen and when he was transferred to figure out how long he had been de-thawed. We had a party with popsicles and where he wore a onesie that said, “I survived the ice age.” If our lives had been times of waiting, why not celebrate moments when we broke free from that terrible waiting?One of the pictures people take now is "40 weeks in, 40 weeks out"- an image from the end of pregnancy against another well into the first year of parenting. I knew with our living child exactly how many days I had been pregnant because of IVF as well, but I forgot to count it out and missed that day of celebration. I didn’t want to miss it with Autumn. Except her 118 days in and 118 days out look so much different than I had hoped. 

At funerals, I remind people that grief does not follow a timeline, that it is measured not by time at all, in fact, but by love. Love and grief standing hand in hand is a poetic image, giving hope that love in loss is still beautiful. But on day 118, I am not really feeling the beauty. I am just feeling like I have been trying to dam up that love, make it power the rest of my life with another dead child, but the dam is too broken and leaky and I am stuck wondering, if day 118 feels so horribly lonely, how can I make it to month 118? 

I try to stop up love for my dead daughter fearing I will shatter without it- for how can I replenish any of the love that spills out? There have been too few memories with her, too many days she has been gone and too many more to go. But that isn’t how love works either. 

When I used to wake up reaching for my belly, my living child would still be there to grab my arm and wrap it around him. Now that I don’t reach for my belly, my living child still falls asleep in my lap and, if he kisses my belly like we taught him to while I was pregnant, it no longer feels like a cruel joke but like he loves me, not just me and his sister. Now that my arms are empty of Autumn, I am still picking him up to snuggle. And then I have the love of friends and neighbors checking in, sending cards and flowers and even a DVD of a terrible made-for-TV movie from the 90s that was a favorite in elementary school. The love of my spouse making breakfast for dinner and then putting up wind chimes engraved with Autumn’s name on our living child’s playhouse. 

I cannot hold Autumn anymore. If she didn’t look so much like her living brother, I might even forget what she looked like. I cannot love her the way I want to, and the grief stretching before me is overwhelming. But I can love her in other ways. By loving her brother and her father. Her cousins and god-siblings. Even children I don’t know. As we approach her due date, we are donating to causes to share our love for her. 

We will be donating to the Bloom Collective (paypal @BloominBalitmore), a local-to-us collective of health and wellness practitioners who provide pregnancy and postpartum care for mothers in Baltimore- work that improves Black maternal mortality as well. Black women are four times more likely than white women to die in childbirth in the United States. They are also more likely to have cervical insufficiency than white women (which was the cause of Autumn’s death). 

We will also be donating to UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, as the terror of war for children around the world and specifically now in Ukraine calls for us to do intervene. We encourage those who have love to share to join us in donating locally or internationally to causes that support children.

I have been dreading the day when the amount of time I was pregnant with Autumn fades compared to the amount of time she has been dead. I want to be honest that just as time can be a balm for grief it can also be a cruel kick in the gut- another reminder that her death defines the rest of my life. Her life might be a dream now, but maybe sometimes that dream doesn’t have to end when I wake up. Maybe it can help me to love in this new reality.