Finding Peace

It can be hard to make peace with an ectopic pregnancy.  For the few days, it was just panic and overwhelming and medical necessities.  There was too much urgency to really stop and think.  Once I got home from the hospital, grief moved in with us.  Grief is not polite.  It doesn't ask when would be convenient or offer to come back later.  Grief sneaks into bed with you, embraces you in your sleep, taps you shoulder when you're getting dressed, shadows you. 

Somehow we had to move on.  As much as I just wanted to curl up in a ball somewhere and give up, I still had two kids who needed me and didn't understand what was going on.

Here's how we made peace.  My husband and I felt that we needed some type of memorial, and my husband had the great idea to plant a tree.  We took our daughters out to nurseries and garden centers with us, and eventually we picked a beautiful little weeping willow. 

One day we sent the girls out with a relative so that we  could have a couple of hours without them.  My husband and I held our own little service.  We sang a couple of hymns, although saying we sung isn't really very accurate as we don't sound very good at the best of times and both of us were trying not to sob.  We prayed.  We read some religious quotes about the eternal nature of families and the hope of seeing our baby again.  We went outside and planted the tree, and then we planted flowers around it.  It's in a spot in the yard where we can see it easily from the biggest windows in the house.  We held onto each other and cried, but in a new, healing way.

We also picked a name for our baby.  It was too depressing for me to think that they never had a name.  So we picked a name with a beautiful and appropriate meaning.  

We concluded our little memorial service by praying together, and then we just sat and cried and hugged and looked out at our new little garden.

It seems like such a simple thing, but we've both felt so much better and more peaceful since then.  I still miss my baby and mourn for them, of course I do, but it is manageable. 

Loss

Only a few weeks ago, I told my husband that the only thing that I was really afraid of was something happening to him or any of our kids (including the one not born yet).  I can't say that I really faced that fear, but because of my pregnancy being ectopic pregnancy I have been forced to live through it.

Unless you have had this experience, you can not imagine how heart-wrenching the loss is.  You walk into the surgery pregnant, and you walk out empty with a huge gaping aching spot instead.  It's not a hole, because a hole is passive.  It's more of a black hole that threatens to suck everything into its grief.

If we hadn't already have had two kids, I don't know how I would have made it through.  My daughters were my reason for trying to hold it together.  This baby, this tiny baby who will never be born now, was already a part of our family.  My husband packed away the baby things that had already started accumulating so that I wouldn't have to see them.  I packed away the maternity clothes calmly, then burst into tears.

I need to go now, but I'll write more about this later.