Caitlin's Story, Part One

We sent out hand-lettered birth announcements 15 years ago with these words:

Our daughter, Caitlin Libby Bradshaw,
was born and died on April 21, 1994--
18 weeks premature.

We felt an amazing sense of joy,
in the middle of overwhelming grief,
that we were able to hold her for two hours.

We knew you would want to know,
because she is as much a part of our lives
as if she had lived.

This was our introduction to parenthood--having a daughter who lived for two hours in our arms before her tiny heart stopped beating.

My pregnancy with Caitlin had been high-risk from the start. Since I had three prior pregnancies that ended in miscarriage during the first trimester, my OB/GYN had transferred my care to a practice specializing in high-risk.

I didn't have trouble getting pregnant, just staying pregnant. After dozens of blood tests, ultrasounds, and a very painful X-ray-type procedure called a hysterosalpingogram , ("this might be a little uncomfortable!") the docs decided that my problem was that my body wasn't producing enough progesterone to sustain a pregnancy; this was called a luteal phase deficiency.

Treatment entailed ovulation-inducing drugs, progesterone injections, and tons of ultrasounds. If you have been through infertility treatment, or you're going through it now, you know that there is nothing beautiful, natural or unstressful about making a baby under these circumstances. You want to have a baby, so you're willing to go through it; but it is hard work, emotionally and physically.

And the waiting! Oh, the waiting. It's almost physically painful. I realize that waiting is a fact of life, and everyone, not just the infertile, endure painful periods of waiting. But the specific waiting period between Cycle Day One and Cycle Day 14--when you can test for pregnancy--is such a universal challenge for the hoping-for-a-baby crowd that one of the many web sites for them is called TwoWeekWait.com. There are blog posts and articles and on-line diaries devoted to the 2WW. Googling "two week wait + infertility" produces 365,000 hits.

The waiting ended, the treatment worked, and I stayed pregnant for 15 weeks for the first time ever. We started breathing a bit more easily, and even told a few friends and family members our happy news. We had five weeks of joyful anticipation before we encountered a brand new problem.

The 20-week ultrasound turned up a problem with my cervix. Apparently the little bugger was slacking off on its job, and starting to dilate before it received its dilation orders. The medical community, showing an incredible lack of sensitivity to already hormonally imbalanced and guilt-ridden maternal-wannabe's, calls this condition incompetent cervix. Yeah, thanks guys, for the name-calling. Could you at least come up with a name that sounds like a medical diagnosis, instead of something on a not-so-stellar performance review?

I ended up on the operating table with my legs up in stirrups and my doctor staring up my vagina. The plan was for him to put in an emergency cervical cerclage--stitches to hold the cervix closed and prevent pre-term delivery--a procedure which has a success rate of somewhere in the range of 42 - 60 percent.

"E.Peeeeviiieeee," the doctor singsonged, "We have a little problem." And by "little" he meant "life or death." Apparently my lazy-ass cervix was already five centimeters dilated, and performing the cerclage would increase the risk that I'd go into labor right then and there. I needed to decide, my doctor said, whether to go ahead and do the cerclage, or to just wait it out without the cerclage. He estimated that the longest the cervix would hold without the stitches would be a week, which would put us at 21 weeks gestation--not nearly enough for the baby to be viable.

There I was, lying on the table, pubies to the wind, facing life and death decisions, and Mr. Peevie was nowhere to be found. The doctor even had him paged him over the hospital loudspeaker; but I had to make a decision sooner rather than later.

"Do it," I told him.

Stay tuned for the rest of the story, tomorrow, on Caitlin's birthday.

Remembering Caitlin

Tonight after dinner, the kids and Mr. Peevie and I will eat chocolate cake in honor of what would be our daughter Caitlin's 14th birthday. We'll each say something about Caitlin, even though we never knew her.

One time six years ago, we were having this same little memorial event. C. Peevie said, "I miss you Caitlin, even though I never got to meet you."

And A. Peevie, who was four at the time, was not to be outdone. "I miss you, Caitlin," he said, and continued happily, "You poo-poo head."

I don't know if this tradition is weird, or nuts, or psychologically damaging--but it feels right for our family. I'm pretty sure that it arose out of our children's unquenchable desire for cake, rather than from their feeling of loss for their sister.

Remembering Caitlin didn't always involve cake. In the beginning, Mr. Peevie and I would just quietly mention our little girl's name to each other, and futilely wonder what our lives would be like with her in them. We wonder what color her eyes were, and if she'd be a gymnast, or a tennis nut, or a piano player.

We still cried, back then; occasionally, we still do. Not so much because the feeling of loss is still painful--but because we can clearly remember the pain of losing her. (I read somewhere that our brains do not have the capacity to "remember" pain. I call bogus.) I remember the strong urge I felt for months, when I would see people going about their normal lives, to shout at them, "I had a baby, and she died!"

Telling Caitlin stories brings tears to my eyes, but they're good tears, if you can understand that. Caitlin is a part of our family, just as much as if she had lived. Losing her is no longer the most important part of my identity (as it was for many months), but it will always be part of who I am. To not talk about her is to deny her, and to deny a part of me.

Shortly after Caitlin died, I read an essay about grief in the New York Times by Anna Quindlen. She was speculating about why grief "has the power to silence us." Here's a slice of her beautiful, powerful words:

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.
Maybe we do not speak of it because death will mark all of us, sooner or later. Or maybe it is unspoken because grief is only the first part of it. After a time it becomes something less sharp but larger, too, a more enduring thing called loss.
Perhaps that is why this is the least explored passage: because it has no end. The world loves closure, loves a thing that can, as they say, be gotten through. This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that loss is forever, that two decades after the event there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continuous presence of an absence. "An awful leisure," Emily Dickinson once called what the living have after death.

"The presence of an absence"--if you've lost someone, you know what that means, what it feels like.
Yesterday I was wearing my "Caitlin necklace"--an April birthstone pendant on a slim gold chain. My friends gave it to me for my birthday, six weeks after she was born. It was a beautiful, touching, sensitive gesture, from gentle friends who understood that even though remembering might bring tears, it also brings healing.

M. Peevie noticed my necklace, and I asked her if she knew why I was wearing it.

"Because Caitlin died," she said matter-of-factly.

"Yes," I said, "That's part of it. But also because tomorrow is Caitlin's birthday."

"Oh, mom," M. Peevie said, "Let's have cake tomorrow night, and remember Caitlin together as a family!"

Great idea, little girl.