I’ve been quiet for the last month. Well, at least on the blog front. Life has been moving at an incredibly fast past and it’s been hard for me to keep up. I haven’t made time for writing and to be honest, I haven’t really been sure what to say. The month of guest posts was incredible. I have been humbled by the strength and grace shown by those who wrote submissions. I am honored to know such incredible people that allowed us a glimpse into their journey of life after loss. I was most surprised, however, when my husband revealed to me that he too had written a post. It was raw and honest, and it told a side of the story that he had not yet shared with me, or maybe I just hadn’t been listening before. His story genuinely shook me. To the core. I knew our experience was an absolute nightmare for him. We have been open about our grief together and we have shared many tears, but to finally have the ability to understand his side of the story was more powerful than I had imagined. It brought us to a more intimate level in our grief and our relationship and I am grateful for his willingness to share his truth, but I wasn’t prepared.

I wasn’t prepared to read a different version of Ava’s death than the one I had remembered, and processing it has brought me back to the beginning of my journey. After I read his post I started experiencing my grief all over again. It felt just like it did the first time, raw, painful, and haunting. Laying on an operating table with whatever drugs I was given flowing through my veins, I believed Ava’s death was peaceful. I remember the virtual silence and peace I felt in that room. I remembered the love I felt holding her to my chest, and I remember the overwhelming sense of relief that came with the finality of her death. For 18 months the only question I’ve continued to have on a regular basis was the color of her eyes. I never saw them open and I always wondered what color her eyes were. It is the only detail about my daughter’s face I never knew. Then I read my husband’s post. He said she opened her eyes. The first time I read his post I teared up. He saw her eyes. I had been wondering about those eyes for 18 months and he held the answer all along. I asked him and he told me, unflinching, that they were dark, like a brown. And then I cried and my world began to crumble. Because he saw her eyes, and I never did. I wanted him to say he didn’t know, or he didn’t remember, because maybe if he couldn’t recall her eyes then maybe his side of the story wasn’t as he had originally thought either. Maybe he had remembered it wrong, or maybe time had affected his memory. Maybe her death was peaceful, like the way I had remembered it, maybe he was wrong. But he looked at me without hesitation, without thought, and without a shadow of doubt. He told me confidently, her eyes were dark, like a brown. And I knew it was true. All of it. The color of her eyes, her struggle to live, her horrifying death, all of it.

I was on drugs. I was laying on a table. I never saw her alive except for a 10-second blip on the video recording of my c-section. Now all of my questions and doubts that I thought I had laid to rest came rushing back. I started remembering more details that I had hidden away from myself, perhaps as a survival tactic, and my husband’s side of the story started sounding more and more familiar to me. I remembered how much of a fighter Ava was in utero. The way she would nudge me when I doubted her the most, or the way she would refuse to stop moving when we were trying to monitor her so that we could never get a clear reading on her heart rate. She never stopped fighting. She wanted to live. She came kicking out of my womb but I didn’t know she kept kicking until the end. Reading that part triggered more memories for me. I think I knew all along that she was fighting to breathe, fighting to live. I remembered that right after she died I told my therapist about how I wondered if she knew what was happening to her. I imagined that while I was holding her in my arms she was wondering why I wasn’t trying to help her, wondering why I was letting her die. My therapist dismissed my concerns and told me that Ava’s movements were reflexes. She told me I was assigning meaning and emotion to a moment that my baby couldn’t have possibly understood. I didn’t truly believe that, but I accepted her logic because I needed to. I needed to believe that she was right and Ava wasn’t aware, but now I’m not so sure. Research suggests a fetus begins to dream in the womb at about 23 weeks gestation. Ava was almost 27 weeks. I’m no longer convinced she didn’t know she was dying. I am no longer convinced of the accuracy of my memory because I was on a table across the room, and maybe there wasn’t peace. Maybe the entire scene was merely altered by the drugs in my body, and the sounds of her death were muffled by the tears that had drained down the sides of my cheeks and pooled in my ears while the surgeons were still putting me back together. Maybe everything I have come to believe about Ava and about her death was wrong. And that crack in the things I had believed to be true about Ava’s death started to widen until the neat little story I created and tucked away about Ava’s existence began spilling out, and the questions I long ago believed were answered have once again become the focus in my mind.

Sleep stopped coming easily and some nights it refuses to come at all. I lay awake questioning every decision we made about Ava. Should I have gone to the hospital? Should I have agreed to the c-section? What did her heart rate look like on the monitor? Did they run cord blood? What was the PH? Was she neurologically impaired already? If we could have gotten her lungs to work would she have survived? Should we have let them do more? Should we have done more? Did the doctors want to do more? Did she know she was dying? Did we make the right choice? If I could do it all over again, would I? Did I kill my daughter?… My thoughts move quickly from question to question. I try to formulate a plan in my head about how I’m going to find the answers. I’ll request my hospital records. I’ll review the heart rate tracings. I’ll review her blood results. I’ll learn every detail I need in order to play lawyer, judge, and jury in my own trial before ultimately deciding…and that’s where it ends. Because what is it I’m trying to decide? What is the real question I need to answer? It doesn’t really matter because ultimately, the answer to any question I can come up with is that I did the best I could at the time. Isn’t that all we can really hope to say about anything in this life, I did the best I could? Still, somehow, for now, I continue to defy all logic and spend my time asking myself never-ending cycles of questions looking for meaningless answers to serve no other purpose than to one day be able to convince myself to rest easy knowing that I truly did the best I could. And while I spend my nights awake I reserve the daytime for the living. For my husband, my son, my family, my friends, my career, and my future. I cannot succumb to the grief and I cannot let it consume my days because in 50 years I need to be able to look back at my life and know that not just for Ava and her 26 weeks and four days of existence, but for the rest of the time that followed, I took the cards that life dealt and I did the best I could…