Janel C. Atlas - They Were Still Born: Personal Stories about Stillbirth

It would have been an innocent question in most circumstances, in the kind of world I used to believe in, where pregnancies ended happily. But when directed to me unexpectedly after a year of grieving for my son Ben, it only pointed out the loneliness of my loss and the navet of the questioner.

Wheres your baby?

Without any warning or preamble on a dreary December morning, a woman I barely knew turned to me in the one place where I thought I was safe from insensitive remarks and stupid questions: in the arms of the church that had supported me and my husband as we grieved our lost child. But on this particular Sunday, a near stranger who had somehow missed the announcements, the tears, the grief heavy on our faces for the past months, asked the one question I didnt want to answer.

Wheres your baby? she asked again as I stared at her, bewildered, not sure if I had heard her correctly. Was she serious? How could she not know?

My last conversation with this woman had taken place nearly 365 days earlier, in almost the exact same spot and at the same Christmas program where she cornered me now. Then, Id been happy to tell her that I was expecting my second child, a boy, due on the third of January. Today, I wanted her to melt or vaporizeanything to get her out of my sight.

What? I replied, incredulous that anyone who knew me even remotely could be ignorant of what had happened to my family, the death and birth of our son on New Years Eve morning the previous year.

Once more she repeated her question, and I stumbled out that horrendous phrase: Hes dead. You might hope that a reasonable person would stop the conversation there, hastily say, Im sorry, and try to discover the circumstances of the death by asking another party, but on that morning I was not to be so lucky.

What happened? she asked, and I told her, as quickly as I could, that my son died from a knot in his umbilical cord, pulled tight in my womb, ending his life when it had barely begun. Where , I wondered, have you been for the last twelve months? How have you not noticed, in those times you must have seen us, that there was no baby in our arms?

Sadly, this woman was not the first to ask me about the whereabouts of my child; another woman, a clerk at a local store, asked me on four separate occasions where Ben was. Once upon a time I would never have believed the absurdity of peoples reactions to my childs death or their tactless comments, but losing Ben taught me much about things I never wanted to know.

My sons death is the dividing line in my life, a firm delineation between what I knew and believed about living in the world before we lost him and what life became after his death.

Before, with a capital B, was that blissful, happy time full of plans and hopes and dreams, full of future possibilities. If you were anything like me, you read pregnancy books with tips to prepare for the coming changes and the way your body would transform itself to support a new, tiny being. You were perhaps overwhelmed by the myriad of magazines doling out advice about how your relationship with your partner would alter under the strains and joys of parenthood, while you depended on magazine articles that specified exactly how many undershirts, diapers, and pairs of tiny socks to purchase before bringing your baby home.