Elizabeth's Story: Grief After Stillbirth

Everything was fine until my son’s head emerged and then he stopped descending.  

Tookie weighed 9 pounds. His shoulders were stuck and the umbilical cord wrapped around his shoulder. The doctors swiftly scooped him away and began CPR.

Sometimes babies are born quiet. We thought a few rubs and he would come to. We didn’t know.

The doctors didn’t tell the couple what was happening, or maybe they had and Berrien didn’t remember. She was delirious after birth. She had no concept of time. Later, Brian would tell her that the medical staff had worked to revive Tookie for almost an hour.

What she does remember was Brian telling the staff, “if there’s something wrong, just tell us.” So they did.

I never thought that losing a child could happen to me. And yet, at the age of 26, I lost my son to stillbirth.

Loss. It’s the section in pregnancy books many couples with healthy pregnancies skip, sometimes out of fear, sometimes because of the whole-hearted belief that the chapter just doesn’t apply. While infant deaths have dropped in the U.S. over the past several decades, stillbirths have remained steady. One in every 160 pregnancies in the U.S. ends in a stillbirth, about 26,000 each year, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. More than one-third of these deaths cannot be explained.

The term miscarriage is often mistakenly used to describe a stillbirth. Unlike miscarriage, a stillbirth occurs when an infant spontaneously dies anytime after 20 full gestational weeks.

Tookie was weighed, wrapped in a blanket and placed on his mother’s chest.