Noah’s Story
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month in Canada, and for this first blog post of the month, I want to do something special. I want to tell you about my son, Noah, who was stillborn on January 1st, 2009. I want to start by saying that I know reading and listening to stories about baby loss is hard. For those of you who are currently expecting and for those of you who have lost babies yourself, I want you to know it’s okay to protect your heart. Sometimes, protecting your heart looks like deciding not to read something you know is going to make you feel sad or worried. Sometimes, it looks like setting aside a day and time where you can make the space around you soft and safe to navigate hard things. I often hesitate to share his story in a detailed way because I don’t want others to be sad, afraid, or uncomfortable. I also worry about how, when we are going through a loss, it is easy to start comparing our experiences to those of others in a way that usually minimizes the intensity and meaning of our own losses. I never share my story with the intention that people compare their loss to mine. All our losses are unique and the challenges we face as we navigate grief and life in the years that follow are also uniquely ours. In spite of these concerns, I’m using this space to tell our story anyway, because his life deserves to be honoured. Noah’s life, however brief, deserves to be remembered.
Our story begins on a cool, spring morning. I’m seventeen – eighteen that summer – and walking across the street through the mist to catch the bus to school. I’ve got my headphones on and my discman bouncing along in my bag, little on my mind but the routine of starting the day. As I’m mid-way across the street, the strangest sensation comes over me. I suddenly feel as though I am not alone. Rather than being alarming or concerning, it’s a rather peculiar sensation of presence that hadn’t been there a moment ago but now was. I stop in my tracks, looking left and right to see if I can spot the person whose presence as suddenly joined me only to find myself alone on the quiet street, not a soul in sight. And then it hits me. I’m pregnant. It’s really just a hunch at this point. I’ve never been pregnant before. I certainly wasn’t trying to have a baby, though if I’m being honest, I really wasn’t trying all that hard to prevent one either. But somehow, I know that’s exactly where this feeling is coming from.
I take a pregnancy test; it comes back negative. I tell my boyfriend at the time about the result but also that I know it’s wrong. It’s just not time yet. A few days later, I wake early in the morning before the sun to the feeling of my full bladder. I had consumed a large glass of water before bed, wanting to make sure I had enough pee for that first morning urine to take a pregnancy test. I remember how cold the bathroom tiles were on my bare feet as I shuffled in to take the test. Positive this time. I cry. I’m happy. It’s not an ideal time to have a baby. In fact, it’s exactly the worst possible time according to seemingly everyone. But I’m happy anyway. I feel filled with love and possibility – and maybe a few nerves about telling my mother.
I take the coming months in stride. I tell my mom. I graduate high school. I start a full-time job at Starbucks, where I’ll work to save money for this new life I’ve started. I postpone going to school to become a massage therapist. I break-up with the boyfriend, who isn’t a bad guy but also isn’t responsible enough to be a good father or a husband. I get ready to have this baby on my own. I navigate morning sickness – puking in the bushes on the walk to work or quickly, in the bathroom, between answering calls at the drive through – until it finally passes. I experience the twinges in my belly as it expands and grows. On my 18th birthday, I have a doctor’s appointment where I hear his heartbeat for the first time. It’s the best birthday present I could ever – or probably will ever – receive. At the 18-week ultrasound, I find out I’m having a boy. Noah. The moment I saw his name in the baby name books I knew it was his, a feeling of right-ness just like that first time I felt his energy in my womb. It was a pretty easy-going pregnancy. I walked to and from work every day, took afternoon naps, painted my bedroom so that it could become a nursery. I wasn’t afraid of childbirth or being a parent. People have babies all the time. My ancestors all figured it out and so could I.
3D Ultrasound photo of Noah at 18 weeks gestation.
Despite being essentially a teen parent, most of my pregnancy was idyllic until about 30 weeks. I switched care from my family physician to an OB who took appointments through his office. My belly started measuring small. Once. Then twice. At 34 weeks, my OB referred me for an ultrasound to check his growth. She reassured me that he sounded fine and things were otherwise looking great, it was just a precaution. The front desk booked me for one week out and a little voice inside me said, that’s not soon enough but I didn’t dare speak it out loud. I was just being a worrier. What mother wouldn’t worry about her child? The doctor said he was fine and I’d see him in a week on the ultrasound monitor. On Christmas Eve, I have a moment of panic. I don’t think I feel him moving. I talk to my mom and she tells me to have a little sugar and rest a bit, wait to see if it picks up again. I do as she recommends and, sure enough, I think I feel some movements. Reassured, I carry on with my day. On Christmas day, my family is gathered around the tree and I joke with my grandmother that I seem to be having some little contractions and, if he comes early, we might have to change his name from Noah to Jesus. I tell my colleagues in the days that follow that I have this feeling that he’s coming sooner than expected. One of them chuckles and says, “that’s what I thought too but they always take their time.”
6 Months Pregnant
On December 30th, 2008, I have an ultrasound appointment. The tech rolls the probe across my belly, back and forth. There’s a look on his face that worries me, but he doesn’t say anything. He tells me to go get dressed and come back to the room. When I return, my mother is there. They’ve asked her to come from the waiting room to sit with me. We know something isn’t right. I tell her that something must be wrong and they’ll want him to come sooner. The tech returns with a male doctor, who I barely remember. He says, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your baby is dead.” The rest is a blur. It’s hard to remember what people are saying to you when your whole world comes to a screaming, crashing halt. My mother drives me from the ultrasound clinic to the hospital, where I am rude to the triage nurse because I’m in shock and where we wait for hours in a hospital room for a doctor to come explain to us what will happen next.
I’m told that they don’t have a room for me today, but that they will call me back to have labour induced. I tell them that I want a c-section – I can’t imagine labouring to bring my baby into the world when he’s already gone. They tell me that I can’t have one because I’m at risk of postpartum hemorrhage. I’m sent home to my nursery. As I shower, I rub my hands over my belly that feels tight and sore. I feel like a giant bruise. My grandmother comes downstairs and hugs me while I’m still in my towel. I try to sleep, but it’s fitful. In the night, I go upstairs to crawl in bed with my parents. And in the morning, they call because they have a room for me.
On December 31st, 2008, I’m induced. I’m told they need to stick these pills in my cervix to prepare it for labour and it hurts. I haven’t taken a childbirth class, and I have no idea, really, what is to come. My mother brings me banana bread to snack on while I wait for labour to begin. It’s not long before contractions start and I vomit. I quickly feel overwhelmed by the sensations happening in my body. I hadn’t planned to use pain medication of any kind, but I also hadn’t planned to be labouring to birth a child who wasn’t coming home. I’m being encouraged to accept an epidural but I’m scared. As the contractions pick up, I know that I need it but I’m still afraid. The anaesthesiologist probably wasn’t actually mean, but they didn’t feel kind either as they harshly told me to stay still through a contraction as the epidural was inserted. I’ll never forget the clicking and cracking sensation as it was inserted. Even though it isn’t really what I wanted, it gives me the blessing of sleep. I sleep through most of my labour.
I had one nurse at the beginning who was very kind. When she meets me, she says, “I want you to know it’s okay for you to feel whatever you’re feeling right now.” I say, “you don’t want me to feel what I’m feeling.” “Why not?” she responds. “Because I’m angry.” This didn’t phase her at all. “Good,” she said, “you should be angry. What’s happening to you is horribly unfair. I would be angry too.” She changed my life. The nurse I had later, toward the end, was not so kind. She buzzed in and out, brushed off my concerns that my epidural had stopped working because, suddenly, I was feeling everything except a numb patch on my thigh. She mentioned they could try to replace it, which I didn’t want, but offered no other options for relief. At one point, she comes in and says, “take this, it will help you relax” and pops a pill into my mouth. It’s Ativan, and I spend the rest of my labour and birth in a fog. Not relaxed, still in pain, but feeling decidedly not myself. My mum, who has been timing my contractions notices a change and tells the nurse she thinks I’m nearing the end. The nurse brushes her off too. She tries to get me to use a bedpan and, as she does, my water breaks in an explosion. Before I know it, I’m surrounded by doctors and nurses encouraging me to push. Twelve or so hours after being induced, 35 minutes after midnight on January 1st, 2009, I push my breech baby into the world.
Noah's silver footprints stamped onto a pale blue card.
They bring him over to the warmer to bundle him as I await the birth of my placenta. My stepdad stands over him, seeing my son for the first time, and he’s crying. They bring him to me and he’s perfect. His skin has worn away in a few places, as they told me it probably would, but it doesn’t take away from how beautiful he is. He has a head of dark hair and a nose the size of my thumbnail. Sometimes, even 15 years later, I look at my thumbnail and remember how perfect he was. 3lb 4oz at 35 weeks gestation. “I’m so sorry,” I cry as I hold him. I feel awash with love and grief and a bitter sense of failure that I didn’t protect him the way I should have. When a baby dies, there’s never enough time. They take him from me so that I can get some sleep and bring him to me again in the morning. He’s cold, which nobody warns me he will be. That last time we spend together is a blur now. I wish I had the chance to bathe him and dress him. The hospital has collected mementos for me to take home – his hand and footprints, a lock of his hair, photographs, and his hospital bracelets – but it’s time that I really can’t get enough of. I remember, vividly, the way they rolled him away from me in the bassinet that one last time, covered so nobody else would have to see.
The weeks that follow are a blur. I hear all the cliched and painful things that loss parents often hear from well-meaning family and friends who just don’t know what to say. “Don’t worry, you’ll have more babies someday” they say, not knowing that it doesn’t appear that I ever will. “You were too young to have a baby anyway, next time it will be better.” I also get a bewildering, “you look good though!” from a neighbour the day I come home from the hospital, empty handed. One week later, we have his funeral. I speak for him because I feel that I’m the only one who can. It feels like the last thing I can do. And each day, I do the work of healing. I deal with painful engorgement as my milk comes in and then slowly dries up. My uterus shrinks back down to size. I grieve. Sometimes I think about ending my life, but I think of my mother. I see her in a whole new light now that I’ve had a child of my own and could never put her through what I am going through. I care for my newborn sister, who is only two months older than my son would be. Without her, I don’t know that I would be here either. I take a trip with a friend. I have Noah’s footprints tattooed on the small of my back. I start nursing school, hoping to turn my pain into something that can be of service to others. I have symptoms of PTSD for at least that entire first year that go completely unchecked, undiagnosed, and unsupported. I claw back my life, one day at a time, but I never forget.
Noah's memorial stone to mark his grave.
As time goes on, it seems like most of the people around you do forget. For me, each year that passes is a milestone that makes me wonder about who he would be now if he had lived. Just this year, I had the oddest sensation one day as I was walking on the treadmill at the gym of a boy standing behind me. I knew nobody was there, but it was as though his spirit – a boy of fifteen – was standing there with me for just a moment, offering the comfort of his presence unexpectedly. Just this week, I was out for a walk and was passed by a group of young boys and one of them, gangly still, was awkwardly shoving something into his mouth and my heart ached a little. In him, I could see what my son might have been. I write our story because, for so many, he was never real. He was an abstract idea, a future possibility, who wouldn’t really exist until they could see him and hold him for themselves. But he was real. He kicked harder in my womb when a Beastie Boys song came on, he stretched so much sometimes he made my belly lopsided. He had an energy about him that I could feel before a pregnancy test could even confirm that he was there. He left a mark on my life that changed me forever. I write our story because what I went through, a girl of 18, was unbearably hard and because very few in my life truly stood by me. That girl I used to be deserved better and she deserves to be seen.
Last, but not least, I write our story for all the other parents navigating losses of their own. You are not alone. Our grief never goes away, though our lives grow around it. We become a different version of ourselves than we might have been if our children had lived or never been conceived. The reason that Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month is so important is because so many of us suffer in silence. 1 in 4 confirmed pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. Somewhere between 1 in 160 or 1 in 200 pregnancies end in stillbirth, as mine did. The infant mortality rate in 2011 was 5 deaths per 1000 live births. It makes people uncomfortable to talk about these deaths and what it means for the families that survive them. And, for the most part, I downplay or don’t talk about my own experience because I don’t want people around me to feel uncomfortable. Nobody wants to imagine something so hard. But the unfortunate consequence of that is a significant number of parents who feel invisible, whose parenthood – however unique – is not recognized. Parents who feel like the rest of the world is happy enough to forget their children ever existed, as though they, themselves, could ever forget.
My son’s name is Noah. He would be fifteen years old. He had dark hair and would probably have his father’s dark eyes. He had the sweetest, softest energy. I still love him with the whole of my heart. The work I do supporting families – through losses or live births – I do because of him.
Noah's first birthday cake.