Tara Shafer

It has been twenty years since my second child was stillborn. At that time, I had a three-year-old; I would subsequently give birth to two additional healthy infants. For those who experience stillbirth, bookended on one side or another by living child(ren), I have wondered lately if there is a case to be made that the absence that stillbirth causes may exacerbate parental empty nest syndrome. Studies show that the parents of stillborns’ depressive/PTSD symptoms can last for upwards of 18 years. This aligns with the living-children-empty-nest flight. 

I have been feeling this hard of late. My living children are mostly living out of the house.  Sometimes I think to myself that I am the parent of three children and a ghost. Sometimes I have four children. I have found comfort in odd places — in science that reveals a child gestating within a mother will leave behind permanent cells; in wacky concepts like antenatal incarnation. Whereas my living children are known entities, the Lost One is forever a fantasy. With no lived memories, this baby is forever slicked in amber; unknown.

Now that my living children are beginning to move on, I, too, have been forced to move on. I find the afternoons particularly tough - there are no pick-up lines, homework, or dance class —my anxiety spikes; I don’t want to take up hobbies. Instead, I drift around, idly wondering, more than I have in years, what would have happened if my experience in parenting had extended to all my children. This doesn't depress me exactly, but it does confuse me. As one loss mother put it, “Now as my children move out into the world, their independence brings me joy. But the ghost of my grief remains. It doesn’t grow up and leave home.” 

Let’s leave little to the imagination. After days of induced labor, my baby emerged into silence in his still world. In the fluorescently lit room that was somehow still grey, no one was talking. Machines beeped; I was allowed ice chips; the glow of a muted television threw blue light. The nurses brought me warm blankets. My doctor took the baby to wash him as she would if he were alive. She swaddled him in a hospital blanket and put a hat on his head. The IVs made me want to scratch at my arms. 

No one waited for the first infant cry—only my keening. He was dead, but he looked peaceful and perfect to me — slightly translucent. My baby was placed in my arms; I was bleeding profusely; I was now almost entirely out of my mind, stoned on valium. The room suddenly seemed brightly lit — no flickering fluorescent; no inexplicable grey tint. I started to feel transcendently religious or something like it. I could breathe like my lungs were being filled with billows — something I had never experienced that felt almost like relief. I was closer to belief, to ecstasy, to a protective white light brain barrier, to grief, and life — closer to the edge of the universe than I had ever been. 

My living children are now 22, 18, and 15. Some days go by when my lost son seems further and further away. Some days, I forget to think about him. The living children for whom I provided tangible care for years occupy the majority of my thoughts. They are so much more present. And as I necessarily recede from their lives in a certain way, I wonder about what, really, was lost; and where I can go to find evidence of my ghost baby’s vanished existence; he will likely remain my most significant curiosity. 

One evening, not long after the event, I sat with my son outside under a bulbous, glowing moon. “Mama, I wanna ride the moon ring.  You wanna come with me?  We could fly up and up and hold on tight to the string.  If you let go, you could fall and hit your head really very badly.”  It was half-pretend, but only half.  But just then, something in him still believed that this was possible – a flight to a moon ring and a jaunt around it, holding on tight. This was but one of the observations I swore not to miss. I am glad I didn’t. 

I have learned to carry this baby as the memory of an inanimate being. Memory feels like a lifelong responsibility I must treat with love; nurture as I would an always-infant.  Time is no thief; not if you sit with it and allow what fills it up to be a multi-faceted contradiction; then, time can be both tender and pliable.

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Tara Shafer is a writer and activist living in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and on National Public Radio, as well as Psychology Today, Huffington Post, and BabyCenter. She served as the Deputy Representative of Amnesty International to the United Nations during the wars in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda and continued as the Asylum Program Officer at Human Rights First, coordinating direct pro bono services for indigent asylum seekers. Editor-in-chief of Give InKind, an online connectivity service for those in the aftermath of trauma or transition, she also most recently served as Executive Director of Wethersfield Garden. She has collaborated with the National Institute of Health in delivering a keynote speech to the Placenta Project’s researchers and has taught political science at Marist College. She has an MA in Human Rights from Columbia University and was the inaugural recipient of the Meidav Award for Creative Nonfiction.