The Tiny Tragedy - A Personal Story

I’m a dad, yet I’ve never been a dad. I have a child, but I’ve never seen it. I’m a parent with nothing to parent. I am a paradox.

Not long ago, I got the life shaking news. Mary Jane, my wife, surprised me with a Hallmark approved love letter conveying the expected sentiments of affection, but along with the usual mantras of romantic love came a surprise twist, a handwritten addendum reading, “And you will be an amazing father.”

That Friday evening, my whole world changed in an instant as I discovered my wife and I were having a baby. The next evening, my world changed again as I discovered my wife and I were having a miscarriage.

Shell shock is the only way to describe it. Neither of us expected the pregnancy or the miscarriage, and yet both hit us within the span of thirty hours. Severe cramps lead to a trip to the ER, and we soon found ourselves greeted with the blunt news that our child was dying and nothing could be done to stop it.

We retreated. I fled into my video games and she into her Netflix. We waited. The doctor said miscarriage was likely, but a follow up test would be required in another two days to confirm, so we escaped into fantasy worlds hiding from the feelings we couldn’t understand or begin to process, but we came together again on the day of the second test. Blood was drawn and tests were run, and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves while waiting for the results. We ran errands. We went shopping. We ate lunch. Time passed. In attempt to inject some muted fun into an otherwise dour morning, Mary Jane had her nails done while I read comic books in the salon. After hours of waiting, the call was finally made, the expected results were given, and we went home. Behind closed doors away from the eyes of the public, Mary Jane burst into a bout of short, jagged sobbing before quickly falling asleep. I quietly stayed by her side.

Then, it was over. Mary Jane awoke a couple hours later. We spent some more time together, but soon Mary Jane said she was fine, and since then, things have returned to normal.

Except life isn’t normal anymore.

It’s not bad. I’m not sad. I’m not obsessed with it. I haven’t screamed. I haven’t cried. I’m not frustrated or angry or mopey or discouraged or hurt, and yet I’m not the same.

We were incredibly fortunate that the miscarriage followed so quickly our discovery of the pregnancy. I can only imagine the pain so many have felt losing a child in pregnancy after months of anticipation, yet despite my ever so brief time as an expectant father, it still happened. For a few hours, I was a dad.

Now what am I?

I simply don’t know what to feel. This is simultaneously one of the biggest events in my life and yet an incident that has almost no impact on my life. How can you reconcile these two disparate realities into one being? It fills my head with questions I can’t quite answer. Am I even really a father? Does this even count? Will I now have an unknown child in Heaven that I will one day meet in the afterlife?

When does life become life? When is a person created?

It’s an issue that’s been central to the abortion debate for years. One side says a new person comes into being from the moment of conception. The other side says, a human life is not a person until it comes out of the womb. If limited to these two options, I have no doubt about which view I hold. I would certainly prefer people to hold the extreme view that personhood begins at conception as opposed to the other extreme view that it’s morally acceptable to murder a fully developed nine-month-old child just because it happens to be located in the mother’s body, but I’m not sure the truth can be found at either extreme on this issue. It’s a crystal clear scientific fact that a new human life is created at conception which if able to mature will result in a child 100% of the time, but it’s hard for me to think of it as a person at a stage where it doesn’t even have a nervous system. The brain doesn’t even begin development until week five, so does that mean it’s not a person prior to this or does it still deserve personhood just by virtue of being human? What’s happening on a spiritual level?  Does God bestow a soul to each fertilized egg at the moment of conception? What then of identical twins who begin as a single fertilized egg and then split to form two siblings? Has the soul God provided split as well or are two souls inserted from the beginning?

I can spend all day asking myself unanswerable questions, but I know that such dry mental gymnastics are just an attempt to emotionally distance myself from something immensely personal. It’s safer to deal in the realm of religious and political theory than to accept the ambiguities of my current reality.

The truth is that my wife and I created a new human life, and that life died before we ever got the chance to know it. That is our small, tragic reality.