My story actually begins almost three and a half years ago when our two-year-old son passed away.  Jacob, our third son, drowned while in the care of a sitter ten days after his second birthday.  I had experienced the loss of grandparents and an uncle before this, but nothing could have prepared me for the raw, physical pain of losing my child.  I lost it when the officers came to the door to get us, but as we raced to the emergency room, denial set in and I just knew everything was going to be okay.  Jacob would be fine; everything was going to turn out just fine.  Because this is something that happens to other people.  Not to us.

My world was shattered the moment I saw him.  I knew the instant I laid eyes on him that he was gone, even though they were still working on him.  I functioned the rest of the day in shock and now remember the events as if I were viewing them from the outside.

The next morning was the worst morning I had ever endured.  It hurt so badly that I couldn’t do anything but cry.  Never before had I been in such agony, and there was nothing that could take that pain away.  During the next few days, the shock returned and allowed us to function and take care of the necessary arrangements.

Over the next several weeks, nights were so difficult.  I was tired, weary, and I had lost the ability to act like I was strong.  My husband and I would just hold each other and sob.  Sleep would finally come, and then morning would arrive.  We would awaken to our awful reality, and it seemed to slap us in the face each and every morning.

We began counseling through LDS Family Services.  The help we received was invaluable.  It felt so good to just talk to someone who wasn’t judging me for feeling one way or another.  She never tried to put herself in my shoes.  She just helped me make sense of the new, painful life in which I had suddenly found myself, and she helped me find ways to deal with this new reality.

As time went on, our ability to bear the pain of our loss increased.  We still had two sons who needed our care here on earth, and life had to go on.  We welcomed a daughter into our family just six months after Jacob died, and life began to have a brighter outlook.  We continued to heal and get stronger, one day at a time, for two more years.

I had always had a relatively easy time with pregnancy.  Other than the typical morning sickness, everything went very smoothly each time.  But when I became pregnant with our fifth child, it was rocky from the start.

I had the usual morning sickness, but I was suddenly more tired than I’d ever been in my life.  I slept all the time and couldn’t muster the energy to do much of anything.  It was the first time I’d felt so unable to care for my other children while being pregnant.  I spent most days on the couch or throwing up.  Near the end of my first trimester, I began to have sore throats unlike anything I’d ever experienced.  I casually mentioned my symptoms to my OB and after feeling my neck, he sent me for a thyroid ultrasound.

The ultrasound revealed multiple nodules, and I was sent for a biopsy.  This whole time I was beside myself with worry for the child I was carrying, but everyone constantly reassured me that the baby was fine and there was no need to worry.

I had the thyroid biopsy when I was 18 weeks along.  During the biopsy, I felt the baby moving a lot.  I chalked the extra movement up to my increased adrenaline during the painful procedure.  Later I realized it was the last time I remember feeling my baby move for certain.

For the entire following week, I endured a nasty allergic reaction to the iodine, which had been used to sterilize my skin during the biopsy.   I called the nurse at my obstetrician’s office and was told to take Benadryl.  A few days later, my thyroid swelled up and I was in bed for a couple days.  Another call to the nurse and I was told to take Tylenol and not to worry unless I ran a fever.  I never ran a fever, and after a week I felt better and didn’t worry about it.

Over the next few weeks, I mentioned to my husband a few times that this baby didn’t move as much as its older siblings had.  But I thought I was still feeling some movement, and it was really too early in the pregnancy to be too concerned about it.  My concerns were only fleeting.

When I was 21 weeks along, we took the whole family to my OB for our gender ultrasound.  The doctor came in and joked with the kids about putting dragon boogers on my tummy, and the whole mood was lighthearted and excited.  Then he started measuring things and got really quiet.  I kept asking what things were, and he was giving me short, one-word answers.  He finally said the baby was only measuring 18 weeks, and that he was having trouble finding a heartbeat.  He suggested we take the kids into another room.  I started to cry as my husband ushered the kids out of the room and another doctor in the practice came in and concurred that there was no heartbeat.

We took our kids to stay overnight with relatives and checked into the hospital to be induced.  After a relatively quick but very intense labor, my nurse delivered our baby boy around 3:30am on October 29, 2008.  My doctor came in a few seconds after the delivery.  Everyone agreed that he looked perfect for his gestational age.  He weighed 7 oz and was about 9 inches long.  Though so tiny and underdeveloped, we could still identify his features as looking like our other children.  Having seen how their brother’s death had affected our boys two years before, we decided that it was in their best interest that we not have a funeral.  We decided to name him Joseph, and after spending some time holding him and crying, we said our good-byes.

The partially healed wounds from losing Jacob just 2 years earlier were ripped open again; but somehow it was different. I grieved more than my husband, probably because I had been carrying Joseph and he was the most real to me.  It was more of an abstract loss for my husband.  He felt the loss and grieved in his own way, but not as openly as he had with Jacob.  He’d never been able to feel Joseph move and had not experienced an emotional connection yet.  It was strange and difficult for me to feel the grief more intensely than he did.  It was very different crying on his shoulder when he wasn’t simultaneously crying on mine.

As my grief progressed, I blamed myself.  There were no obvious signs of anything being wrong, other than his umbilical cord being unusually skinny at the navel insertion point.   Autopsy results indicated no known cause of fetal demise.  I then thought I had to have done something wrong.  I must have eaten something I shouldn’t have, not gotten enough exercise, slept too much on my back.  Something!   I was repeatedly assured by my OB and a perinatalogist that this was NOT the case.  They told me I’d done nothing wrong.  But in my mind, I was the one responsible for this baby growing inside me.  It had to be my fault.

I also blamed the doctors for dismissing my fears that the difficulties I'd had with my thyroid might cause problems with the baby.  I still wasn’t convinced when doctors (my OB, perinatalogist, and my ENT) told me it could not have caused it.  Then copious blood tests came back clean on every kind of thyroid issue, so it couldn’t have been a factor.

I was briefly angry with the Lord that He had taken two of my children.  However, as I prayed for comfort and understanding, this anger was quickly replaced with a feeling of peace.  It was the same peace that came into my heart after losing Jacob.  I knew that the Lord loved me and my little family and I was able to move forward much sooner than I had after losing Jacob.

At my two-week follow-up, my doctor told us there was no need to wait to try again for another baby, but just to make sure I had had one complete menstrual cycle before conceiving again.  To our surprise, we conceived again the next month.

I was confused with conflicting emotions of excitement and fear.  We kept telling people we were cautiously optimistic.  But in reality I was a nutcase.  After pregnancies with the typical morning sickness, this time I had almost none.  And my thyroid behaved itself this time.  I felt great, had energy, and rarely felt any nausea.  This was so unusual that it filled me with great concern.  The only time I’d not been morning sick were two miscarriages I’d had years before at six and eight weeks.   I was so worried that something was wrong.  However, each time I went to the doctor, everything seemed to be fine.  I even went in a few extra times when my paranoia got the best of me.

When I was about 18 weeks along, the time it was estimated that Joseph had died, I drove everyone crazy with my obsession with trying to feel the baby move.  I couldn’t feel as much as I thought I should have been feeling at that point, but I convinced myself that I was just being paranoid.  I didn’t trust what I could (or could not) feel, because the last time I had never noticed that my baby had died three weeks before he was delivered.

My nervousness increased as my 20-week ultrasound approached.  I was so afraid of a repeat of the last time.  My ultrasound was scheduled on a Monday, the day before I would be 20 weeks along.  Three days before my scheduled ultrasound, I noticed some bloody show.  I went straight from the general uneasiness I’d been feeling to complete panic. I couldn’t reach my husband.  I called my doctor’s office in hysterics, and the nurse actually tried to convince me not to come in.  She said bleeding was a common occurrence.  I told her that this had never happened to me before unless I was miscarrying.  She again tried to tell me I was fine.  Tired of her consistently dismissing my fears (she had all along during my last pregnancy), I rather rudely told her she had my chart in front of her and to look at my history.  I was coming in.  Now.

I rushed to the office and was forced to wait for what seemed an eternity.  I was finally taken back, directly to the ultrasound room.  My doctor came in and started the ultrasound, and told me what I had dreaded – there was no heartbeat.  My husband, whom I had finally reached, came in just as he was telling me.  It was a girl, and she had only grown to 16 weeks.  I waited for the doctor to leave the room before I burst into tears, asking my husband what was wrong with me while I sobbed on his shoulder.  Why, after four healthy pregnancies, couldn’t I carry a baby to term!?!

Feeling numb, we went home to make arrangements for our children to stay the night with a neighbor so we could check into the hospital for yet another induction.  We sat our children down and told them what had happened.  Our eight-year-old son angrily exclaimed, “Again?!”  Our five-year-old son said, “I guess the guys who make the babies don’t want us to have another one.”   Oh, how that broke my heart!  All we could say was that we hoped that wasn’t the case.  Our two-year-old daughter was too young to really understand.

I was induced later that evening.  I was so lucky to have my doctor there with me nearly the whole time this time, and his daughter was my nurse.  Not only did they work great together, they were so understanding and caring. Katherine arrived around 1:30 in the morning on April 25, 2009.  I was shocked at how much smaller she was than Joseph, since I carried them both about the same amount of time.  She was 6 inches long and weighed just 2.7 ounces.  It was immediately apparent she had died from a cord injury.  Her cord was twisted so badly that it was pinched off in several places.  She had slowly starved to death in my womb.  This time I’d been trying to track movement and knew for sure I’d felt her move on Tuesday, and my doctor said it was possible that she did live even until that very week.

Immediately afterwards, my grief was different.  I was on a crusade to find out what went wrong.  After days and weeks of research, I began to suspect that both of my babies died of the same thing.  A cord twisted as badly as Katherine’s was called a Hyper-Twisted Umbilical Cord, caused by a lack of the substance called Wharton’s jelly inside the umbilical cord.  That jelly is supposed to help the cord to torque instead of twist.  Causes of this jelly loss are unknown so it is unpreventable, but in every known instance it causes death in the second trimester.  And the primary indicator of a loss of Wharton’s jelly is an abnormal thin cord at the navel insertion point.  Just as Joseph’s had been.  It is extremely rare and little is known about it; there is only one other documented case of HTUC happening multiple times to the same mother.

Finding this information was helpful to me in a way.  I felt some comfort in having a reason why this all happened and to even have a possible explanation for Joseph’s stillbirth as well.  My doctor agreed that it was definitely possible that that is what happened, but impossible to know for sure at that point.  But that comfort didn’t last.

I became very wrapped up in the unfairness of it all. I withdrew into myself and functioned only through my routines.  I tried not to see or talk to anyone, and I made every effort to feel nothing at all.  I knew the raw pain of loss all too intimately, and I did everything I could prevent myself going through the stages of grief yet again.  I wanted to feel numb.  Numb for the rest of my life.  I had tried all my life to do what was right, and at that point I felt like I was being punished.  I began to be very hard on myself for any shortcomings.

Eventually I got what I wanted.  One day I became aware of my loneliness.  I had the distinct impression that people were avoiding me.  I don’t know if it was all in my head or whether people really were avoiding me.  Whichever the case, I felt alone and friendless.  I knew I was to blame for avoiding everyone else, but still could not bring myself to reach out, either.  I did not want to go to counseling again, because I knew I would have to acknowledge my grief.  I’d have to relive the grief process.  So I convinced myself that I would only hear what I’d heard before and did not go.

Our son turned six years old a few weeks later, and he was increasingly acting out.  I knew it was because he was reacting to my attitude.  I began to feel myself craving the peace that had come following our previous losses.  I knew I wasn’t finding it because I was avoiding everything, including the Lord’s efforts to show me He loved me.  I was simply going through the motions of taking care of my family.

I began to read my scriptures again.  I prayed fervently for peace.  Still, I felt that I was making little progress.   I still felt no peace.  And I was still pushing everyone away.  I was envious whenever anyone announced a pregnancy, irritated when they’d complain about pregnancy symptoms that I would gladly have experienced, and bitter when someone would have a baby that they were able to keep.  At one point I told my husband that I was having a hard time being sympathetic to people who were having their own trials, and he said something I’ll never forget.  He said that the Savior could say that to any of us… but He doesn’t.  He went through much worse than any one of us has. That really helped me, and I realized that my anger wasn’t doing me any good and was definitely a stumbling block to me feeling peace

Over the last several months, I’ve vacillated between bouts of depression and some days when I feel pretty good.  But mostly I got really good at pretending that I was doing great.  I don’t think too many people knew how I really felt on those bad days.

I spoke with my LDS bishop at the beginning of November.  I expressed that I was still struggling so much day to day.  I have been overwhelmed by the hurt caused me by other unrelated events, but my inability to handle that stemmed from the raw, open wounds in my heart from my losses.  It had all become too much for me.  This good man expressed his love for me and our family, and the Lord’s love for my family. He encouraged me to take time everyday to look for the messages from my Heavenly Father: the small and easily overlooked ways He is telling me that He loves me.  While I’m far from feeling like I am “choice,” I am grateful to say that my bishop’s advice is helping.  Slowly, but surely.

I was recently reading a short book written by Carlfred Broderick called The Uses of Adversity.  My friend gave it to me the weekend before we lost Katherine, telling me she felt prompted to give it to me.  I didn’t pick it up until just before Christmas.  How I wish I’d given it my attention before then!  I was immediately drawn to the foreword, written my one of my favorite authors, Emily Watts.  She wrote, “When there are no earthly answers, when our understanding is stretched beyond its limit, when mortality is simply too much for us, there is hope.”  That struck a nerve, and I devoured a book.  I can now echo what a bereaved mother in the book is quoted as saying at her young son’s funeral:

  “I am content that God be God.  I will not try to instruct him on his duties or on his obligations toward me or toward any of his children.  I know he lives and loves us, that he is God.  He’s not unmindful of us.  We do not suffer out of his view.  He does not inflict pain upon us, but he sustains us in our pain.  I am his daughter; my [children are] also his [children]; we belong to him, and we are safe with him.  I used to think that we were safe from grief and pain here because of our faith.  I know now that is not true, but we are safe in his love.  We are protected in the most ultimate sense of all – we have a safe home forever.  That is my witness.”

It breaks my heart that I’ve given birth to six children and have only been able to keep three of them.  There are still days where I do not feel like going on, but they are getting further and further apart.  I am finally feeling hope for the future.  This hope does not take away the sometimes overwhelming and crushing feelings of missing those I’ve lost and desiring what could have been, but it softens the blow.  I do not understand the reasons why I’ve been given these trials, but I do know that the Lord does not want me to be miserable for the rest of my life.  And I don’t want me to be miserable for the rest of my life.  I don’t want my pain to embitter me.  I have so many blessings; so much to live for.  I have a husband whom I adore, who has been so patient and gentle with my fragile psyche.  I have three amazing living children, and three perfect children waiting for me above.  Beyond that I have extended family, friends, a home, hobbies, talents, church and a myriad of other things that don’t just make my life worth living – they make my life worth living well.

So I will continue to strive to feel peace and happiness.  And I think my efforts to do that will make all the difference in my life.