Last December, I was waiting for my stillborn son Day to be born when a friend, who was also my labor doula, asked if I wanted to attend a candlelight vigil with her sponsored by an organization for parents whose children have died.
I guess I should say before telling any more of this story that: 1) my son died at 31 weeks, but we waited for me to go into labor naturally, which took about three more weeks, and then I birthed him at home, as I had done with his older sister, and so for three weeks I carried around my known-to-be-dead son, which was a hellish, beautiful, awful, perfect experience, and 2) before Day died, we hired a doula to be at his birth, without knowing at the time that her first and only-as-yet child had been stillborn at the very beginning of her own labor, at forty weeks, a year earlier. It was only after Day died that we found this out, and so our doulaturned out to be even more ideal, and amazing and strong, then we’d known when we hired her. Day’s death and life were full of this kind of incredible combination of good fortune and tragedy.
Anyway. My doula friend was planning to go to the vigil and honor the one-year anniversary of her daughter’s death, and asked if I wanted to come along. Sure, I said. She made each of us a candle decorated with our children’s names, and we made a date of it, with dinner afterward. We actually had a fun, goofy time driving around in the snow trying to find the meeting place, joking and playing rock music in the car, and when we finally slid into the church parking lot and raced into the room where the bereaved parents were already gathered in a circle, soberly sobbing, we had to quickly turn our grins into the stoic faces more appropriate to those in mourning.
That wasn’t hard. Within minutes, we were part of the circle, telling our stories, and we were sobbing along with the best of them.
(Before my baby died, I never knew I could go so quickly from laughing to crying and back again. It seems to be a neat trick I’ve picked up.)
Anyway. We were sitting in this circle of parents, all of whom were clutching candles, all of whom had lost children, all of whom were much older than us, and all of whose children had died much longer ago. My doula friend is very young, in her twenties, and her baby had died just one year earlier. I was sitting there still officially pregnant with the child who had died—he was physically there with me. These other parents had lost their children years ago, in some cases decades ago, and as a group, they seemed utterly broken, shattered. I couldn’t blame them.
One woman had lost two teenage daughters in the same car accident. Another had lost an eight-year-old boy to a fluke accident at a sleep over. Another had nursed a child through a terminal illness. Terrible, terrible stories.
All of these stories, I thought, were worse than my own. As the mother of a two year old, I couldn’t imagine what it would be to lose my girl after knowing her so well, for so long. If anything were to happen to her, I don’tknow if I could go on. I imagined the grief could be compounded the longer I am to know her. I never got to know my son—he never got to be a person who got known—so his loss would always be somewhat intangible to me. My friend felt the same way: at this gathering, we were the lucky ones.
And yet after the official part of the vigil ended and we all stood around drinking punch and eating butter cookies, person after person came up to me and my friend to tell us how horrible they felt for us, how much worse it must be to have never gotten to know our child, to have had the chance to love them the way they loved their children, how awful to be so young and know this kind of loss, all of it. And to each of them we said, more or less, “No, you have it worse! Your story is sadder!” And they would say “No, yours is!” and clutch us to their chests with tears in their eyes.
It wasn’t a competition, exactly. We genuinely had more empathy for each other than we did for ourselves. We genuinely thought things could be worse that what we’d experienced. I think there’s a kind of grace in that.
But it’s something I think about a lot in this world of loss. Is the grass always browner on the other parent’s side? I certainly have moments of complete self-pity, in which I believe that NO ONE has a sadder story than I do, that no one can possibly understand what I’m going through (I generally reserve this feeling for bad moments with in-laws and the like).
Mostly, though, I feel lucky, grateful for my own life, amazed at how the tiny details of each story of death and sorrow has such an enormous and profound impact, and astonished at the strength of others in similar-but-not-the-same situations. When I hear someone else’s story—of multiple miscarriages, of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, of years of fertility treatments—I shake my head and think, No way. No way I could survive that. No way could I be that strong. No way could I make those choices, try again.
Even though I know others are saying the same thing about me.