On October 21, 2019, I lost my baby girl–my firstborn. Her name was Madelaine. Madelaine with an “aine” at the end, not just an “ine”. I was so secretly upset when the funeral home got it wrong on the death certificate. But what was I going to do? At that point, there were much bigger concerns than the spelling of her name, like: How am I going to get through this?
She was stillborn at 23 weeks. Not old enough to be considered a “life” under the TX state law, yet developed enough to require a funeral. Madelaine Mae. The most un-Egyptian name we could have given her. That was okay with me because she was mine and only I had jurisdiction over her. She existed. Now, it breaks my heart that only a few of us knew that fact. She was born almost as big as my forearm. Large enough for me to discern that she had my husband’s nose and toes, but too small for me to know so many other parts of her…like the color of her eyes or the sound of her cry.
23 weeks. That makes me a statistical unicorn, you know. They say that at 10 weeks pregnant, so long as the ultrasound picks up the heartbeat of your child, the less than a 10% chance of fetal loss. I made it past the 12-week marker, which meant that I had a less than 1% chance of losing my baby. At 23 weeks, I had a better chance of going down on a plane than having a stillbirth.
But lost my baby, I did. Sometimes, I wish she was just a theory, a notion, an idea…a baby we’d conceived and then lost. But at 23 weeks, it was too late for me to absently just remove her out of my body. She had to be born, alive or not. So I was induced to go into labor, only a couple of hours after I was told that they couldn’t pick up her heartbeat. It’s amazing how resilient one is forced to become under such circumstances. I’d always been so afraid of being pricked by a needle. Was it insane that even now, under such conditions, I was petrified of so minuscule a concern?
Lying down in the ER triage room, I remember thinking: How am I going to get through this? This terror. This unthinkable horror? How was I going to get through suffering labor pains? Through an epidural? Though delivery? Through holding the baby that I’ve always dreamed of having, knowing that she would never be alive?
They, whoever “they” may be, say that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. But what does that even mean? Does it mean that God doesn’t give us more than what would make us immensely sad? More than what would push us over the “edge”? More than is humanly fathomable? I’d been diagnosed with anxiety and depression for at least two years prior to this point, so wouldn’t it be logical, merciful, or just plain ol’ common-sensical that God wouldn’t give someone like me such a trial?
I’m going with: No. No, in that I think that this whole excuse of “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” is just a very, incredibly human excuse that one slaps onto a situation that is too horrible for us to consider being imposed upon us by God. I don’t know why some of us are given lesser or harder trials than mine. I don’t. And I won’t pretend to, and neither should you. Maybe (and more likely than not) we will never know why things happen the way they do, or whether they were a result of God’s will for us. You may pose as many theories as you want, but this is the one thing that I believe in my heart of hearts is true:
Life happens. You can either decide to continue in your trust in God, or you may not. The choice is yours. The result is yet to be seen, but is certainly to be hoped for. After all, isn’t that the point?
“Purify our souls, our bodies, our spirits, our hearts, our eyes, our understanding, our thoughts and our consciences, so that with a pure heart, an enlightened soul, an unashamed face, a faith unfeigned, a perfect love, and a firm hope, we may dare with boldness without fear to pray to you…”
The Liturgy of St. Basil – The Prayer of the Fraction
Veronia Mikhail is a native Californian and a proud member of St. Peter & St. Paul Coptic Orthodox Church in Santa Monica, CA. She currently lives in Houston, TX with her husband, Youssef, and two dogs: Ollie, the lab, and Lulu, the Boston Terrier. The happiest place on earth for Veronia is in fact Disneyland.
