Please don’t blame yourselves - you can drive yourselves crazy with “what ifs.” My sincere condolences for your loss.
I felt tears prick my eyes at this line.
My heart goes out to you.
My co-worker is wondering why I’m crying. I’m so sorry.
Well, I sat here and cried. 
“They can’t find a heartbeat” is always truly bad news when you’re pregnant.
I have a friend at church who lost a full-term baby many years ago, and she’s still not over it. I don’t really have any comfort for you, any more than I could comfort her. But I did have one thought.
I do not believe God works like this. I do not believe that God reached out and “took” Zoe, for some inscrutable purpose.
What I believe is, God created everything at the beginning, and set it all in motion, and it has natural laws that act all by themselves. So sometimes Shit Happens: a tornado destroys a home, but God didn’t “send” the tornado to smash that house. And all the other “shit happens” things that happen, happen, but God didn’t necessarily cause them to happen. It’s just because we, like all the other organisms in the universe, are subject to the ground rules as set up, and the ground rules say that sometimes Shit Happens.
Does it help to think that God didn’t do it deliberately, that perhaps Zoe died with the same degree of randomness as though she’d been in a house that a tornado hit, or is it better to think, as many of my church-going friends do, that He has some obscure purpose for it, and “we’ll understand it better by and by”?
Myself, I never saw much sense in that. Why would God go to the trouble of making a baby in a woman’s womb, and then pull the plug on it at the last minute? It’s wasteful, for one thing, and as Kirk said to the Alternate Spock, “Consider the illogic of waste.” It makes more sense to me to believe that the two things happened “just because”. When you have sex, sometimes it makes a baby. And sometimes a baby dies. Shit happens.
I also do not believe that God is “in charge” of our lives to the extent that He devotes himself to supervising every little nitpicky detail. I believe that having God “in charge” of your life means that you live it according to the guidelines that He sets forth, and occasionally you ask Him for help, but not that He is up there with puppet strings and a little notebook, making sure every step of the way, every action that you take, is under His control. Because if God really is totally “in charge” of our lives, then where does that leave our free will? If He’s just up there pulling strings, what’s the point of worship? And if He’s totally in charge, then how does that explain things like dead babies? Why would He do that? Why would He order a tornado to hit your house? Why would He inflict suffering on people who are only trying to love Him? That’s evil, even if you gloss it over by saying piously, “He’s using this to teach us something.” To me, that’s just stupid. When you’re a parent, you don’t torture your children in order to “teach them something”, unless you’re a complete psycho.
So yeah, even with God “in charge” of our lives, still Shit is going to Happen. It rains on the just and the unjust alike. Bad things happen to good people. Having God “in charge” of our lives doesn’t mean that nothing bad will ever happen to us, it’s not a free pass. Good people in the Bible had Shit Happen to them. King David had a dysfunctional family. Stephen was stoned to death. The Danites were given an allotment of Canaan, but weren’t strong enough to take it from the locals, so they had to go find some other, weaker native tribe to slaughter so they could have their land. You’d think that if God was “in charge” of their lives, being part of the Chosen People, He’d have made it easier for them to take up their allotment.
It’s good that the midwife let your mourn Zoe. I’m old enough to remember when S.O.P. for stillbirths was to whisk the infant away before the parents had a chance to see it, let alone hold it and grieve it.
If you’d gone for the scan on Thursday, it might not have changed anything. Ditto for if any of the various health care professionals had “picked up” that something was wrong. Hindsight is 20/20, so don’t torment yourself with the thought that you “should have” known. You don’t have ESP, how could you have possibly known? What could you have possibly done differently? You’re not God, you didn’t have any way of knowing what was going on in there. You did the best you could with the information available to hand; that’s all that anybody can do. I don’t see any gross stupidity or negligence there.
I hope you will try again. The church friend I mentioned? After that one stillbirth, she went on to have three beautiful, lively little boys.
So don’t give up.
You have my deepest condolences.
I’ve sent you a PM. Tell me if I can help.
Me neither, it was meant as a figure of speech. “God exists and stuff happens - sometimes at the same time” would sum up my feelings toward him at the moment, we haven’t spoken in some time…
I honestly cannot believe that they would do that to you - deny you the only chance you have to hold the child you have carried and cherished for 9 months. It’s another world, the past…
We took our daughter to see her sister two days after she had been born - I wasn’t sure that it was wise, that she would be scared (she’s 16 months old), but the bereavment midwife that we spoke to told us that there would come a time when she would resent having been excluded from this time of grieving. This made sense, and the meeting went well, and we have a great photo of our whole family together that we will always cherish.
We shan’t - we’re moving back home in three months time, so we probably won’t rush into anything, but we do want more kids, and by gum we’re going to have them!!
GrizzRich - thanks for the PM, I haven’t had the headspace to formulate a response just yet, but I will.
Thank you to everyone else who has responded - it truly means a great deal that people I hardly know and will in all likelyhood will never meet care enough to read my story and take the time to respond. Your good thoughts and prayers mean the world to us at this time. Thank you.
Grim
In addition to Duck’s excellent post, there is something that sounds kind of strange, but it gives me a lot of comfort - the idea that there is no absolute certainty. We always want to know why, we want to know how things can happen, we want to figure things out, we want answers, but sometimes (often, even), there just isn’t any. Grieve for your child as long as you need to, and someday I hope you and your wife will find the peace of acceptance, that things just happen, and you can let go of the pain and hold on to the love and memories.
grimpixie–You and Pixie have my condolences. What a horrible loss this is for both of you. I know that there’s nothing I can say to make this any easier for you, but you’re in my thoughts, and I’m deeply sorry to hear about your baby.
I hope you have lots of friends and family right now to help ease the pain and help you through your mourning.
I hope Pixie concieves again quickly, and that you get a healthy, bouncing baby soon!
I’m so sorry. The lump in my throat is huge. I am so sorry about all this.
I’m very sorry for your loss. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I’m so very sorry, grimpixie. I wish you and your family peace during this time of heartbreak.
I got a 3am phone call when this happened to my best friend and her husband.
Time is the only thing I know that helps, the grief mellows and doesn’t hit you like a brick to the head after a while.
They now have two perfect healthy little girls. Good luck and good wishes.
Oh wow. I’m so sorry for your loss.
Understandably, you sound like you’re on a roller-coaster of emotions. I hope that you find some peace through all of this.
Anything I, a complete and anonomous stranger, might say would probably be meaningless. But I can’t imagine how painful this must be. I’m sorry for your loss.
All my condolences to you and your family, grimpixie – beyond that, words completely fail…
I’m so sorry to read this. Hugs, prayers and good thoughts for you and all of your family.
GT
My wife would like to post the following:
I wish I could write something helpful, but the best I can do is say that I am so sorry.
G
So sorry for your loss. My thoughts are with you during this difficult time.