Life on a Different Planet

This past week, I was on a business trip, and in one of our meetings, we had an external speaker. As he finished his talk (and veered a little of course), he started to talk about how statistics and numbers could be deceiving if you don’t think them through. The example he gave was life expectancy. He commented that everyone thinks we’re living longer, but we’re not (I’m not sure that this is actually true). He said the reason the numbers look like we’re living longer is because babies don’t die. He actually said the words “it’s because your babies don’t die anymore.”

You can imagine that a statement like that is a knife through the heart for me. But, I had to sit there, push down my desire to scream, and figure out how to make it through an important meeting. There were about 30 people in the room, and less than a handful of them know what I’ve been through. I have no idea if they thought of what must be going through my head – I either looked down or straight ahead as I tried to ignore what was happening.

But, it made me think about statistics. The stats are that 1 in 4 will lose a child through miscarriage or early loss. So, of the about 30 people in that room, it would have to mean that I wasn’t the only person who had a loss. But I know that a lot of those 1 in 4 are early miscarriages. Odds would say that I was the only person in that room who held her dead child in her arms. You could pack that room with a lot more people, and the odds would still hold that I would be the only person who delivered a baby only to hold them while they died.

What happened to me happens to about 1%  – an incompetent cervix, chorioamnionitis, and a delivery at 22 weeks and 1 day. It could be a room full of 100 people, and I would be the only one.

I read an entry in another blog once that has stuck with me over the past few months. They commented that after you lose a child and everything in your world changes, everyone else lives on planet earth, and you live on planet “my baby died.” It colors everything in your world, and nothing is the same. I think about that often, and especially in moments like this meeting.

Everyone else in that room sat there thinking about what an interesting point the speaker had just made. I sat there and thought about this from planet my baby died. I live in a world where I know that what he’s just said isn’t true – babies do still die. I wondered if I was the only person in the room thinking about it from this vantage point or if there was anyone else from my planet listening like I was.

I’ve never wanted to be the person who just says to people “you can’t possibly understand” because I feel like that creates division between people who have had a loss and the people who want to support us. A main reason for writing this blog is to help people understand and feel understood. But in moments like this, it’s hard not to feel the distance between planet earth and planet my baby died. And when you feel like the only person in the room from planet my baby died, it’s an incredibly isolating experience.