For some of us, underneath an unbearable weight of grief and loss lie layers of complicating feelings of guilt and confusion.  My story about rainbows and sapphires centers on the notion that grief is not a feeling as much as it is a process or journey that has no arc, climax or ending.  Instead, grief entwines itself in aspects or pieces of our lives and those around us in ways that one could never have fathomed at the time of the initial loss.  I think that’s beautiful.  And terribly painful.  Grief moves through us, fluid, every changing, unpredictable.

Humans have an innate need to consecrate our losses.  Tattoos definitely.  Or the roadside crosses we all pass and pause for a moment as we round corners.  Sometimes we’ll be at a stoplight and the car in front of us will have an in memoriam sticker, most often in that case remembering a life lost too soon.  I think we all read those and pause and wonder what happened – an accident, cancer?  The business of Memorial Day wreaths and crosses has gone strong for generations.  We even use golf tournaments or fundraisers as ways to make sure a person lives on with us.  And that’s what all of it is – the tattoos, the roadside crosses, the auto decals – we have to know this person we loved, who was so important, was so significant, is remembered.  It’s a huge component of grief for anyone – it’s why we have ornate grave markers at cemeteries and why families hold onto old photographs or why we wear our grandmother’s necklace or treasure our uncle’s shotgun.  If we didn’t, how would we share those people with those around us?  I have a Nebraska cousin who recently restored her grandfather’s old pick up, it’s incredible and such a personal, beautiful way to channel pain and remember the best parts of our memories of someone.  Our grief is part of our identity, and not just internal identity, but our outward identity and who we want the world to see.  We need our losses to be seen.  We need some outward acknowledgement or sign to the world that there was this person who mattered and if you care about me, or want to be part of my life, it is tantamount that you understand I loved someone enough to tattoo their name on my wrist, or that I cheer for the Cardinals because it was someone’s favorite baseball team or that a certain song brings forth such a strong memory and that feeling needs to be shared so others understand it’s part of me, part of us, part of the essence of our relationships with others and part of our common human experience.

If a baby dies, I have worried it was never actually born.  My baby died, and was delivered in September of 2011.  So was he born?  I spent several months fighting this need to preserve his memory.  God, I wish then I knew he would never be forgotten, but at the time, he was so tiny, babies are lost so often, did people know?  Did people know he was everything to me and so loved, so wanted?  I considered a tattoo right away.  His name was Roman Francis, so I did google searches, drew up little drawings and thought a Roman shield would honor a boy I knew was strong and pure.  For a time, it was so important that people understood I had had four children, not three.  One isn’t living, but he was my child, is my child.  He was my children’s sibling.  I carried him for months and he was loved and perfect and a child of God every bit as much as my living babies.

If you are born in September, your birthstone is a sapphire.  But was he “born” in September?  He died in September.  My baby Roman was the only of my four children I delivered.  For all kinds of reasons (which could be its own essay), my other three children were c-section deliveries, but baby Roman was the baby I laid in that hospital bed and pushed, refused pain medications, had sweat streaming down my face and soaking my back and felt every goddamn feeling a woman could ever feel – and I wanted to feel that birth – all of it.  It took days.  It was a terrible delivery.  Things went wrong.  But I delivered my dead stillborn baby, so to me, he was born in September.  Whatever born means.

A sapphire is said to be good for attracting abundance, blessings and gifts.  It has been used over centuries to calm the mind, strengthen intuition and invite spiritual clarity.  And over the years I was tortured with my complicated heartbreak over my baby Roman, I came to understand he is my sapphire, he has brought me unexpected gifts and clarity.  A few years ago, I worked with a woman through Etsy.com and had a ring made that is made up of four thin rings.  Three are moonstones, for my three vibrant living children, and one is a sapphire for the baby that made us all better, made me better and led us to the particular kind of joy a rainbow baby brings a family.  The rings that I stack only cost me $100, and I explained the meaning and background to the woman who made them, but somehow through that process I came to realize my baby Roman brought me abundance, clarity and intuition and in a very real sense, he’s the story of my family enshrined in this stack of rings.  He’s a perfect sapphire and I’ve stopped torturing myself with questions of if he was “born” and if a sapphire makes sense to commemorate the birth month of a death.  Because time, the critical component of grief, has taught me he was born in September.  And it is the pain of losing him that brought me the blessing and gift of learning to love and be the mother and woman I am proud to be.  Which is exactly what a sapphire symbolizes.  Baby Roman was born into my family, my whole world, in September 2011 – and his birthstone is a sapphire, and he has attracted an abundance of blessings to my life through pain, grief and heartache.  And in the end, he brought me to hope.

For all of us, wearing a stack of rings, or naming a child after a beloved grandparent, or a yearly gift to a special charity in someone’s name allows us to carry on, publicly, by ensuring our grief is seen and our person is not forgotten.  When it comes to grief and loss, we need each other to recognize one another’s pain to heal and move forward.

A giraffe gestates, or is pregnant for about 14 months.  I was pregnant for about 14 months back in 2011-2012.  For reference, elephants can be as long as 20 months, whales more like 16.  I had a kindergartner and a preschooler and so so badly wanted another baby.  I shared the news of that third pregnancy with the world.  I had charts laminated and on the walls of our home so my little ones could follow along and monitor if the new baby was the size of a pea or a plum.  We’d even eat plums for the week that he was plum size.  Those little kids rubbed and touched and talked to my tummy, as did their little friends.  We were all so excited for another baby to be in the house, especially my son Cal.  He talked about it constantly with his friends, he drew pictures, he was preparing to be a big brother, even declaring his plan to share his bedroom.  And he already had a little sister, so of course he wanted it to be a boy.

I went to a professional dinner one perfect fall evening and sat on a gorgeous patio in the evening fall weather with some of my closest friends.  I loved being pregnant.  I’m tall, so I loved maternity clothes, I wore heels all the way through my third trimester with all of my babies and everything I wore hugged that protruding precious belly.  I had times I felt rotten of course, I had sciatic pains, sleeping issues, heartburn, felt sick particularly driving to and from work – the normal things, but overall being about 20 weeks pregnant, which is where I was at that evening, was the best.  I remember that night I was drinking some kind of sweet, pink sparkling drink and telling a couple of friends that it was making the baby move.  Everyone told me I was glowing.  I swear to God they were right.

The next morning, I had my twenty-week sonogram.  We had no intention of finding out the sex, but the excitement was still there.  I was going to get those little printed out black and white photographs that were so dear and bring them home to my little kids and hang them on the refrigerator alongside the other photographs of our family.  Our sweet baby’s little profile shot from the black and white screen, I knew my young kids would treasure it.  But that’s not how the day went.  The cold, dark, shameful day I can hardly sit here and write about.  The room went dark.  The sonogram technician turned the machine off, fast.  She was so cold.  Everything felt cold.  I felt like I was sinking into the cold, hard table I was laying on.  It all happened so fast and it chills me trying to put it into words. I can hardly think of it.  I still can’t relive it.  Suffice to say, there was no black and white image to take home to my eager happy little ones.  Everything went dark.  And cold.  And I mean everything.

My family likes to hike, quick small hikes with the young kids, so that’s how we told them.  We went on a small hike and sat them down towards the end on a little bench and explained that the next morning mom and dad were checking into the hospital because the baby had died.  They’d be with friends.  We’d come home in a couple of days.  Unbeknownst to us, our Cal did not understand that meant there would be no baby.

It was not a couple of days.  It was horrible.  The women in my family had babies fast.  I had an aunt who had a baby in a hospital elevator.  My sister had one within an hour or two of her water breaking.  My family history was part of the reason my doctor had set a c-section early years before so we thought once I was induced, he’d come.  He did not.  They couldn’t find my vein for my IV.  They stabbed so many times, I was in that hospital for five hours before they could even get me hooked up to an IV.  They eventually called an anesthesiologist from an office nearby and ran the IV through my hand instead of the typical spot because they had destroyed my arms.  Even my forearms.  And every piece of the rest of the god awful process felt that difficult and painful.  Everyone was melancholy and guarded, every nurse that walked in that room and doctor I saw knew why I was there because they taped a rose to the door, which apparently all hospitals do because god forbid someone walk in that room chipper and happy while someone was delivering a dead baby.  I would have died.

I still didn’t believe he was dead.  How could I not have known?  I felt him moving the night before as I drank my bubbly drink on that patio?  They told me he had been dead for several days – what kind of a woman would not know the baby she was carrying in her own body was dead?  I knew I had felt him.  Or her.  Of course at that moment, I didn’t know which.  I knew I would know if something was wrong though – this was my third baby.  Wouldn’t something, some type of intuition or mother’s instinct have told me?  I wouldn’t let them induce me until they did another sonogram.  I had to relive that horror a second time because I did not believe them.  I could see the pity in their eyes.  They wheeled the machine in.  Every single person involved knew it was ridiculous.  They knew I was a rambling mess of a heartsick woman who couldn’t bear to face what they all knew.  They did the sonogram.  There was no heartbeat.  All of them looking at me with those same pitiful eyes.  They thought I was crazy.  I hated them all.  I still do.

I wouldn’t talk to my friends.  My dad kept calling, I couldn’t speak to him.   I felt shame.  I couldn’t shake that cold, dark feeling from that first sonogram.  My girlfriends wanted to visit, I said no.  Finally my brother came to the hospital, after I had told him not to, because my friends and my dad needed someone to come in and at least see me.  He brought me ice cream like he had done with my other deliveries, but this time I didn’t want it.  I didn’t want anything.  We had a priest come in, it did not go well, so we had a different one come.

My husband at the time went home to tell the little kids he had been born.  To share the story.  They had taken all of this in stride until that evening, when their dad explained to Cal that it was a boy, and we named him Roman – and in that, likely the naming of his brother –  it finally hit my Cal this meant there wouldn’t be a baby coming home.  Somehow, his little mind thought there would just be another baby right away.  And now, he realized he had had a brother and he was gone.  That the baby he was going to share his room with, play ball with and guide was dead.  Cal was a boy who rarely cried, still rarely cries.  But he fell to the floor sobbing dramatically.  I think it was the hardest part of the entire process for my ex-husband.  That moment with Cal curled up hitting the floor with his fist, I think it was the loss of his innocence, and I now know that moment changed that boy forever.  That moment right there made my young man who he is, all while breaking his father’s heart to pieces.

I came home from the hospital as a shell of a human.  I still couldn’t talk to anyone.  My milk came in, I wish someone had warned me that was going to happen before I left the hospital.  I loved nursing.  Having no one to nurse only made me want to curl up further inside myself.  I still looked pregnant.  My boss couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just come back to work.  It was that lingering cold.  The lingering dark.  My husband was half scared of me and what I was becoming, sorting through his own grief and dealing with how fragile Cal seemed.  My friends and siblings and dad were texting him because they were worried.  Everyone around me knew I was losing it.  I was watching it all happen from some blurry place outside of myself.  I wanted my baby.  I wanted to be pregnant.  I remember this wild moment standing inside my narrow closet just sifting through my maternity clothes thinking about what I was supposed to wear with my still swollen belly and no baby, I wonder how long I stood there –  it was too long, I know that.  I sat down on the floor in my closet, alone.  Dark.  Cold.

That was the first time I sat down alone in that closet, it was not the last.

People don’t know.  People don’t know that when you lose a baby like that, you still look pregnant.  Only a few days after being home I was out in my front yard watering my flowers and a neighbor came up and was asking how far along I was now, commenting about how excited my kids must be. I lied.  I just acted like the entire nightmare never happened.  There was no way I was going to tell this man, this man about ten years older than me, who did not have children, that my baby died and yes, I still look pregnant.  Actually, man who never had children, would you care to know I’m also leaking breastmilk while I stand here because my goddamn breasts do not understand the baby did not come home with me.  I’m wearing maternity clothes.  I’m basically STILL PREGNANT just with no baby.  Because he died and now I have a tiny blue and gold urn in my house wrapped up with a white rosary.  Hell no.  I just pretended.  I pretended one day at Walgreens across the street.  I pretended a few more times than I care to acknowledge.  I think I pretended in part, because in all sincerity, I was pretending.  I wanted to be pregnant.  I mean, in a sense, I was still pregnant.  There just was no baby.

Baby Roman was born in late September.  My Cal had just started kindergarten that August.  As I was hardly even trying to survive those few weeks after my baby was born, but not born, a family we had recently met who were also neighbors met us at the park with their little boy who was in Cal’s kindergarten class.  I understood a few hours later this park meeting was staged because this mom needed to tell me that her son had come home from school the week before and told her that Cal’s mom’s baby died because Cal wouldn’t stop sitting on his mom’s lap.  So, in my sweet formerly innocent Cal’s mind, he killed our baby.  If there is ever a moment that a child’s life could have taken two roads, I am telling you that was it. Had that family not taken it upon themselves to tell us, to tell me, the woman barely hanging on nearly pretending she was pregnant, shutting out the world in her own paralyzed cold and darkness, my Cal would have never been okay.  That was a life’s godsend.  I climbed out of myself.  I started to care for my babies, the babies I had, despite the primal, wrenching longing for another.

My doctor told me not to get pregnant right away.  She did not merely advise me not to get pregnant right away, she told me it would be dangerous and reckless.  I knew my doctor well because I had had complicated pregnancies – and I knew she damn well knew I was going to try to get pregnant right away and that at that moment, she was my enemy.  She had been there through that delivery.  She was part of that experience, that pain.  I was going to try to have a baby and she knew it.  My poor husband knew it too.  Everyone around me was on pins and needles waiting to see if I was going to break.  And then, a few weeks after my baby died, my Dad died – out of no where.  And my best friend in the world who was fighting cancer, took a turn for the worse.  Everyone around me knew I was on the verge.  I was teetering.  I was still wearing maternity clothes.  I was about to quit my job because I hated the world and couldn’t believe my not pregnant, but still pregnant self had to go there every day and act like anything else in the world mattered.  And then, I took a positive pregnancy test.

My doctor told me any pregnancy test I took was going to be positive because, as I said above, my body still thought it was pregnant.  How gut wrenching is that?  When you lose a baby, your body doesn’t understand you lost it so keeps acting pregnant.  Isn’t that the damnedest thing?  So a pregnancy test can’t tell if you’re pregnant because your hormones are still carrying on as if the baby is in there when it’s not.  I went in for blood tests.  They called to tell me the blood test was positive as my family was driving out of the cemetery after we buried my father.  They still couldn’t be 100% sure, so scheduled a sonogram for when we came home from his services and by God, there was my baby.  My new baby, who was not baby Roman, but was a different baby.  A baby that no one – not my doctor, not the tech who did that sonogram, not my friends, not my family, not my husband – ever thought would make it through a pregnancy.  But there he or she was on that screen and the world did not go dark this time.  It was not cold.  I did not feel like I was sinking into the table in that room.  I felt hope.  I felt hope while everyone around me watched in dread knowing I may not emotionally survive another loss like that.  And that is how I was pregnant as long as a giraffe in 2011-2012.

The pregnancy had endless twists and turns.  Everything went wrong, but then turned out right.  I had to give myself daily shots in the stomach so my whole big pregnant belly was tender and covered in bruises, I had low amniotic fluid and had to take regular deep baths to keep my baby afloat, I was taken by an ambulance one harrowing night and spent a week in the hospital in agonizing pain with a burst cyst, and by the end of the pregnancy, I was going in twice a week to be monitored.  I never stopped spotting – the start of the pregnancy up to the end.  And then one night, I was out for dinner in a leopard print maternity dress and my water broke.  And there he was.  Louis Matthew.  He was to have a scheduled c-section, but did not want to wait for the appointment.  The baby I was told not to have, the baby I was first told would likely not make it, and then, alas, there was an afternoon my doctor smiled at me while holding my hand with tears in her eyes and said, “Michelle, I am cautiously optimistic now that we’ve crossed the 20 week mark, we might make it.”  That little baby had so many sonograms through that pregnancy that I didn’t even hold onto the little black and white photos anymore, there were so many my refrigerator was plastered in them this time around.  We joked it was like he or she was a celebrity being stalked by the sonogram paparazzi.

From the moment that pregnancy started to this day now in September of 2022, that baby has been protected by my Cal.  Many big brothers watch over their baby brother, but most did not lose one right before.  Cal has felt a sense of responsibility for Louie that alternates between being one of the most special things in my life, to one of the most concerning, like a pendulum, over and over.  From the time he was a kindergartner, Cal has scolded me for not being careful enough with Louie to an end that would blow anyone’s mind who knows Cal, because he is inherently a reckless and wild kid himself.  But not when it comes to his baby brother.  Cal is sixteen.  The number of times I have asked Cal to do something for Louie, help with Louie, take Louie somewhere, care for Louie, play with Louie, watch a movie with Louie and he has complained is zero.  Zero times.  I learned many years ago this is something I have to watch and cannot take advantage of to the detriment of them both.  Plus, of course, there’s been therapy all around 🙂  When Louie was about eighteen months old there was a harrowing scene in our house on a gloomy, cloudy afternoon whereby Louie was choking on a grape.  My daughter and I remained calm.  Their dad panicked and tried to reach in his mouth and grab the grape, while calling 911 and then taking him to the ER, but Cal’s reaction is something that traumatized me for life.  We speak about it rarely, but we all know it happened.  Out of respect for him, I won’t go into detail, but he had lost one brother (and for a time, thought it was his fault) and as a little boy, the fear of losing another was overt, raw and horrendous.

Would Cal have loved baby Roman the same as he has loved Louie?  Could little Cal have loved baby Roman the same?

From the first time I held Louie, my rainbow baby, I have been caught in a web of guilt.  You see, if Roman had lived, there would be no Louie.  And dear God I love Louie.  Surely Roman would have been different than Louie, because that’s how science and genetics and babies work.  Would he have looked like Louie, or would he have looked like my older kids and been dark?  Surely he would have.  We held baby Roman, in fact we struggled handing him back to the nurses when they asked, he had a round face like all of my kids and I remember thinking he looked just like his brother and sister.  But, Louie has fair skin and freckles – no one else in this family has Louie’s coloring.  Louie is laid back and calm, would Roman have been like Cal and been wound up and wild, or like my daughter and been focused and driven?  All three of my living kids are outgoing and bold, would Roman have been quiet or an introvert?  Would he have fit in the same?  Would he have laughed at everything his siblings said and did like Louie does?  Would he have treated his older sister like she’s the most beautiful, talented, perfect young woman who’s ever lived?  How different would our lives have been if we had baby Roman in it and not Louie?  A world without Louis Matthew is tough for me to imagine.  How is a mother to reconcile that?  I am so eternally grateful to have Louie, he made me whole.  I needed Louie and he has felt like a gift from the stars from the start, a baby that never should have been.  But if baby Roman hadn’t died, and I didn’t have to survive that nightmare, then found that hope, there would be no Louie.  So am I grateful for that?

I have rarely yelled at Louie.  I have loved Louie in a way that is unfiltered, that holds nothing back.  Because I know.  Because just before him, my life was torn apart with loss and I was sitting alone in a cold, dark closet.  I was told I couldn’t have Louie and nearly lost him too.  My patience for Louie is endless, which surely flowed to my other kids as well.  Had baby Roman lived, I wouldn’t have had that loss, and I would have loved differently.  Maybe not just my kids, but perhaps everyone.  Including myself.  And definitely God.

My daughter has a necklace charm that is a crescent moon with a baby laying at the tip of the moon.  It’s her baby Roman necklace because I once gave it to her on baby Roman’s “birthday.” She’s a stylish fourteen year-old who wears jewelry from Kendra Scott, Urban Outfitters and Alter’d State, but a few months ago she wore that necklace to Cal’s confirmation.  Because baby Roman is part of her and for whatever reason, something about a confirmation turned her mind towards wearing something to commemorate this part of our family.  At least once a year, we dedicate a mass to baby Roman, and most often, one of my kids reads the petition for him during that mass (including Louie, the rainbow baby).  There have been a couple of times their friends have done it and it’s almost more powerful.

Baby Roman is like a thread that laces through all of us, through my little family, and at times pulls us all closer.  I learned to love harder because of baby Roman.  I learned to take a risk and defy the odds for love.  I learned to trust myself, particularly as a mother.  My older kids learned to value their younger brother, and perhaps each other, in a way they would have never felt absent a loss.  His little life is and was so big.  It was so short, and it was tremendous.

I have read that the term rainbow baby is not new, but has become popular over the last several years because of what we have come to know as “mommy bloggers” sharing their stories, just like my story of rainbows and sapphires.  A rainbow baby is a baby born after a loss.  There was a time I found that term trite and I thought the notion of “mommy bloggers” was unsophisticated.  But then late one night in a breadth of loneliness, feeling lost, I dove in.  Over the last decade, I’ve read stories of women who delivered babies they lost at 20 weeks and moved on with their lives without much disruption – in fact one of the first I came by was a woman who almost felt put-out and inconvenienced by having to “remove” the baby.  And, I’ve read stories of women who lost babies and were never okay again, the experience taking over their entire lives and swallowing them whole.  And I’ve read accounts of every single feeling, emotion and expression in between.  I am grateful for them all.  I am in the lucky group, or I should say my family is in the lucky group, with a true rainbow baby.  A baby who came from cold darkness that led to joy.  And the baby who guided the path, my baby Roman, will never be forgotten among his family.  Be it through a small sapphire ring or my daughter’s necklace charm, we all seem to understand that if we lose sight of his life, that valuable, precious baby who threaded himself through our family and hearts, we lose the central bind of our family.  I know baby Roman made me who I am, and I am better for his brief little life no matter how much it hurt and how cold and dark things got.  Because I found a rainbow.  And if I found that rainbow in the very darkest time of my life, there are other rainbows out there for all of us if we can dig deep enough and sort through our conflicting feelings of shame, guilt and sorrow with one another – and I believe sharing our stories is how that starts.  Grief can be all consuming, but it’s also unpredictable and finds its own ways to remind us that sometimes, stories are developing and evolving while we’re too cold and hollow to see them.  We need to remind one another to share our grief, our pains and our hopes and keep looking towards the skies.  And that is my story of sapphires and rainbows.