My husband & a couple others dug the hole. Not the standard six feet. Only three or so. Wide & long enough for the small coffin, with plenty of room to spare.
Before our priest came I stood & looked down at the grave, at the stone we had placed at its head. It sits under a tree that was sent to us from Oklahoma by the father of a dear friend of ours. He passed away only a few months after we received the tree. We weren't sure how it would fare in our climate, but it's so far survived two New England winters. It seemed like an appropriate spot for our little one, the child that will never grow under the tree that grows against the odds.
As I stared into the hole I felt suddenly self-conscious. Silly, even. All of this for a child who was only the size of a raspberry. But it didn't matter, not to me, how big or little she had been. Or if she had even been a she. I had carried her for more than 12 weeks; the first eight weeks alive, the next several for as long as my body deemed to hold her.
Fortunately I had been warned by friends who had experienced this type of loss before. I'm glad that it hadn't been my first pregnancy; I think it would have been traumatizing had I never experienced birth before, especially natural birth. It felt so similar. The contractions, the voiding, so familiar to me. I'm glad it was that way. I'm glad I opted to wait & let it happen naturally. The thought of my child being sucked out of me, reduced to medical waste, made my stomach turn. At least this way, as painful as it was, we would have something to bury.
In the midst of this loss of ours there has been plenty of arguing online & elsewhere about what constitutes a human life, & even then if an unborn human has rights. "Clump of cells," some people claimed. "Tissue," others said. "Product of conception." When I was told my baby didn't have a heartbeat I thought of the most recent proclamations that such a thing is not, in fact, a heartbeat, but an "electrical pulse." All these words & phrases meant to dehumanize an unborn child (or fetus, as many insist) - for what? To assuage guilt? To sugarcoat it? Why do people offer me condolences for the loss of my baby, but then turn around & argue that an eight week old unborn baby is just...whatever they want to call it.
Yes, we wanted this child. More than anything we wanted this child. I still want her. I'd give just about anything to still have her inside me, curled up & safe & warm. Knowing she's in heaven certainly comforts me, but I still wish she were here & that she had had the opportunity to experience life on Earth, with its beauty & its ugliness. Did just me 'wanting' this child award her dignity? Is it because I loved her that she deserved a funeral? These thoughts have crossed my mind many times since we learned she was gone.
But this is the truth: our child was a child, a human child, whether we wanted her or not. Her brief life warranted a funeral & a time to grieve not because we loved her but because she was a person. A real, living person. She may never have breathed on her own, may never have opened her eyes, but she lived. Just as a person who cannot breathe without the aid of a machine or a person born without eyes or vision lives.
I'd like people to think of this when they hear all these arguments in the news & elsewhere. We just celebrated our nation's birthday, a birth that was promulgated with the words,
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Equality & rights don't stem from the government or from the strong emotions of other people. They come from something much more powerful, something far beyond the human intellect. To say that it is dangerous to equate someone's worth with the feelings of another person is obvious as it has been shown time & time again to result in unimaginable loss. Slavery, concentration camps, detainment centers, prisons. Black, indigenous, female, Jewish, gay, sick, unborn, disabled, 'illegal', poor, none of these labels get at the very dignity & worth of the person, & none of them, NONE of them, give anyone the right to take away their lives.
So, yes, I finally concluded as I readied myself for our baby's funeral. Yes, she warranted it. Yes, she deserved it. And that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Her size, her gestational age, her potential, none of that mattered. The existence of her soul is all that mattered, & matters still.
My child will never have a birthday party. We'll never celebrate her baptism or graduation or marriage. But that day we celebrated, & mourned, her life. As it should be. All life is worth celebrating, all lives are worth mourning when they end. I urge everyone to remember that, because it's the foundation of everything else. Without life we have nothing.
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