Second Worst Outcome

I read recently that the death of a baby at birth is the second worst outcome in a pregnancy.

That's because a dead mother is worse than a dead baby.

For the mother, of course, that's debatable.

My therapist mentioned the other day that one of the major differences between the way mothers grieve and the way fathers grieve the loss of a baby is that the father, in addition to his sadness, also feels intense relief that his wife didn't die, while the mother often wishes that she would have.

The idea of a kind of hierarchy of loss--worst outcome vs. second worst--had not really occurred to me at all until I had a conversation with my brother in which he essentially said the same thing.  I can't remember what his exact words were, but the essence was something like "it is terrible that Eliza died but it would have been even worse if you had died."

It is a strange thing to hear your brother say that he's glad you're not dead.

***

It sounds so ridiculous and dramatic and juvenile to say "I wish I were dead!"

When I whispered it to David that night at the hospital, I thought I meant it.

I still feel sometimes that there is nothing to look forward to.  I think that my future will always be darkened by this sadness.  I will always be held hostage by this grief.  If we are able to get pregnant again someday, that pregnancy is sure to be plagued by stress and fear and the possibility of getting a live baby at the end of it?  Well it's not a sure thing.

And yet.  There are reasons to live.  People who love me.  Dogs that love me.  People who promise me that this will get easier.

Before Eliza died, I was so ridiculously, blindly, foolishly, naively happy.  The kind of happy where I would actually crawl into bed and say to David, "We are so lucky.  There is nothing I want that we don't have."  I will never feel that way again.

So the best we can do, I guess, is to hope for a different kind of happy.  Our happiness will forever be incomplete.  But we loved Eliza so much that maybe we will eventually find a sweetness in our sadness.  Happy won't ever mean what it did before, but I guess the only thing we can do is just keep stumbling forward, hoping to figure out what it might mean eventually.