June 12th

Today is July 12th. One month ago today I gave birth to our beautiful baby daughter, Sara Hawley.  I was 32 weeks pregnant and we learned on Monday, June 10th that her heart had stopped beating.  Charles and I spent the next two days at the hospital waiting on her to arrive

Sara Hawley was born at 3:35 pm Eastern time. She weighed 3 lbs 6 oz and she had a perfect little Hawley nose and a perfect little Dixon mouth, just like her big sister. I look at the few pictures we took after she was delivered and it brings tears to my eyes to see how much she looks like Charles.

After a month of crying, screaming, agonizing, laughing (often through tears), explaining, and questioning what happened, we're no closer to knowing why this happened, and I know we never will.  Somehow we will come to terms with that.  Things were looking so good, and then suddenly, as you know from the last post, they weren't looking as good, but we never expected this. I question if we made the right decisions, and still trying to travel. Would it have happened if we'd stayed in CO? No one knows, but that maternal guilt still sits heavy in my heart and I'm trying to work through that.

We are grateful to all our friends and family for the support. It was a blessing to be "home" in the South when this happened, to be surrounded by people who love us and could care for Emmy while we were at the hospital waiting on Sara Hawley to be delivered.  Despite the difficult circumstances, we were lucky to be at Memorial and had wonderful care, especially from the nurses and doctors assigned to me during the day shifts on Tuesday and Wednesday, and who are the ones that attended her birth. I can't say enough how grateful I am for them during those brief few minutes I breathed her into this world.

That was my one little victory in the whole miserable process: her actual delivery.  I did have an epidural, but for some reason it allowed me to not feel contractions as strongly, yet I could feel everything else and I could move around in bed and move my legs. After my water broke on it's own, suddenly my Hypnobirthing training took over and I started birth breathing (breathing the baby down) because I was feeling stronger contractions and I knew she'd been positioned pretty high up. It must have worked because with in 30 minutes, I called for the nurse and sure enough there was her head. The doctors and another nurse rushed in and bless them all, they just let me keep doing what I was doing and I brought her peacefully into this world, just like I planned. No pushing, no screaming, no counting, they just stood there in mostly in silence, sometimes encouraging me, one doctor stroking one arm, Charles stroking the other, and within 10 or 15 minutes, she was here. 

We were able to hold her but sadly she had been gone for awhile so her skin was starting to break down some and her body was not in great condition, so we did not keep her with us long. We hugged her and kissed her and told her we loved her. We called her by name, (we were going to call her by both names, Sara Hawley) and we told her how much she was wanted and loved by everyone. We marveled over how much some of her features looked like Emmy. And we cried, oh Lord we cried.  Then we let the nurse come and take her to weigh her and take care of her.

Thankfully, they let me go home a couple of hours later, and so for the second time I left the hospital without my baby, but this time she wasn't ever going to get to come home with me.

We are still heartbroken and I know we will heal, but a part of us will always be missing. We were given a book by the funeral home that friends also sent to us called Naming the Child.  In one chapter the author references C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, in which Lewis compares himself (upon losing his wife) to an amputee, explaining:
     Although the stump of the amputated limb heals over time and the ache begins to lessen, the amputee will never again be able to live as he once did. He will have to find his way toward a new kind of normal. "He will never 'get over it,'" writes Lewis.  
She goes on to say: 
     Bereaved parents are not unlike the amputee. They will always remember that they once had a child, that their baby was an extricable, necessary part of their lives. The death of their child requires a new way of living. They must learn to live again despite this loss in their lives. Like the amputee, they will limp and ache and struggle even as their wound begins to heal.

So here we are, limping, aching, and struggling along. She never took a breath outside of me, but she was with us for many weeks, this baby we had hoped and prayed for for many years. We all three, Charles, Emmy and I, had felt her move and see her grow in my belly, and we are sad we are not all together now as a family of four.

Thank you again for your prayers for us and for our sweet baby girl, Sara Hawley.