So Few Heartbeats, So Much Heartache

By Sandy Banks

Dec. 4, 2001 12 AM PT

Kristin Jared returned to school last week, six weeks after her first child was born--and four weeks after the baby died--and stood before her third-grade class trying to explain the most painful mystery of her life: Yes, Mrs. Jared had a baby, she told them, but the baby died before we could bring her home.

The children studied the pictures she’d brought, of a baby she had never had a chance to cuddle or nurse or rock to sleep. And they offered her comfort with a phrase so simple, most grown-ups find it hard to say: “We’re sorry that your baby died.”

“Kids get it, in a way adults sometimes don’t,” Jared said later. Instead of comfort, parents like her often face a world that challenges their grief, ignores it or tries to remedy it with platitudes. It is hard for us, it seems, to understand that a life that may have lasted less than a heartbeat can leave in its wake life-shattering grief.

“My mother had seven children and never had a problem,” Heather Lipari told the four couples crowded around the conference table last week in a tiny, quiet room at Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center. “Pregnancy was the happiest time of my life,” she said. “The idea that our baby might die never entered my mind.”

Like Andrew and Kristin Jared, Heather and her husband, Chris, are part of the hospital’s Early Loss Support Group, for parents whose babies are born dead or die shortly after birth. The group meets once a week for six weeks, led by grief specialist Diane Ross Glazer.

“The first few weeks, everyone is crying,” said Chris Lipari. “It’s amazing how this much misery could be contained in this small room.”

The Liparis’ baby died six months ago, two days before he was scheduled to be delivered by caesarean section. “I noticed I didn’t feel the baby moving,” Heather said, “but I didn’t worry, because all my pregnancy books said babies moved less as they got close to delivery.” But when she and Chris started poking her belly, they felt no response. They headed for the hospital, where they learned that their son had been strangled by his umbilical cord.

Even now, as they contemplate another try at pregnancy, they find their baby’s death hard to accept.

“You think it’s an antiquated concept. Stillbirth. Even the word sounds ancient,” Heather said. “With all the technology--the ultrasounds, the MRIs--how can something like this happen?”

The phenomenon does seem out of a place in a world of laboratory pregnancies and high-tech monitoring aimed at taking the mystery out of having babies. But there are 30,000 stillbirths in this country each year, and bewildered parents are often left to navigate their grief alone.

“Early loss is something that makes others uncomfortable, so it’s very isolating for the parents,” Glazer says. “People seem to feel that it shouldn’t hurt so much because you never really had the baby.

They need a supportive environment in which to grieve because their loss is often accompanied by a kaleidoscope of emotions: failure, rage, helplessness, betrayal.

“All these things run through your head,” said Laini Wolfson, who has suffered three miscarriages. “Did my body fail me? Did I do something wrong? Did I walk too much, or not enough? Then you come to this group and you realize others are going through the same thing.” The group is one of only a handful in Southern California dealing with perinatal loss. It is open to couples from any hospital, and its cost has been absorbed by Encino-Tarzana so that parents can attend for free.

For many, the weekly sessions are the only time they feel able to talk about their loss. Grief has erected a wall between them and their families and friends, and sometimes even between husband and wife. “After a while, no one wants to hear it,” said Silke Von Bauer, whose daughter died in utero during her sixth month of pregnancy. “You try to hold it in, and it chokes you.”

Sometimes, even doctors and nurses fail to recognize the parents’ grief. “They’re set up to deal with success,” Von Bauer said. “Once you’re a failure--your baby dies--they act as if you don’t exist.”

Lorena Hinojosa will never forget the first thing a doctor said to her when her son was delivered dead. What did you do to the baby? Did she fall, have a drink, hurt herself roughhousing with her four older boys?

“I’d had four perfect deliveries ... two pushes and they were out,” she recalled. How could this baby simply die inside her after her contractions began? She still has no answer, only the memory of her husband crying, as he cradled the lifeless body of their son.

They come home from the hospital to empty cribs, with nothing more than a box with snippets of hair, footprints, maybe a photo or the clothes their babies briefly wore. And our well-meaning, but bumbling, attempts to soothe their pain sometimes only make things worse.

“It was God’s will,” we say. “Your baby’s an angel now.” “You can have another one.”

But they don’t want another one. They want us to let them grieve the angel they lost, even if we cannot fathom their pain. “We know people are just trying to be kind,” said Silke’s husband, Michael Silbert. “But we still want to poke their eyes out.”

What they need, these parents say, is the simple sort of compassion that Kristin Jared’s third-graders conveyed.

“Just say ‘We love you. We don’t understand why this happened, but we’re here for you.’ And mean it,” Kristin said. Bring food, send cards, offer to tend their older kids. If the parents have pictures of their baby, look at them. If they want to tell their stories, listen.

“Let us know that we’re not invisible, that we’re not alone,” she said. “Acknowledge that my baby was real. I just want her to have been.”

Sandy Banks’ column runs Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].