Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

Visiting Sam's grave has been pretty weird for the last couple months. It was previously a generally quiet and peaceful visit-- you can see the Severn River from his spot and at the right time of day you can see midshipmen participating in various athletic practices, but more often than not I go there while they are still in classes and that area of the campus is empty. There are so few funerals there that I have never actually visited while another one was going on. But for the past six or so weeks, there has been a steady stream of visitors just across the walkway at John McCain's grave, and this is super weird to me. Like, taking photos of your kid at some stranger's grave is bizarre and inappropriate, right? Especially when your kid is clearly too young to know what a senator is? Anyways, now when I visit people are milling about, bringing trinkets and flowers, and asking me where he's buried. (Uhhhh see that giant pile of flags and cacti? That's him...) Graveyard tourism really shouldn't be a thing. (I say this as someone who visited Colonel Sanders' grave before hitting up the KFC across the street when passing through Louisville seven years ago, though, so I do kind of get it.)

Sam’s grave marker is a freshly hewn one amid an area of weathered and older markers— other buried babies from decades ago. The Naval Academy cemetery is so full now that very few people are buried there anymore. It’s pretty limited to distinguished graduates and highly decorated Admirals, astronauts, and those who pass away while attending the Naval Academy. (Jim Lovell apparently brought his headstone to the campus just to reserve his spot in case they wouldn't authorize his burial there even though he’s been to space and commanded an Apollo mission and Tom Hanks portrayed him in a movie, etc etc. I may be messing up this story but the point is, Jim Lovell is alive even though his headstone clearly marks his burial spot. If you're going to visit a cemetery just to see the headstones, one that isn't even marking someone's remains is probably more worth seeing.) 

But Sam, as I said, is buried amid a group of other children that died as infants or were stillborn, ages ago when infant mortality was more common and when cemetery space was more plentiful. I both love and hate that he is surrounded by babies— love that he is among his people, other little ones who were surely dreamed about and waited for and mourned over. And I hate that there are so many babies that needed burial. Even now, the babies who died so long ago that their parents and siblings and even their nieces and nephews are probably now gone; they have left ripples that have the power to reach me even today. When I visit Sam I look around him and wonder about these other babies. So many of them aren’t even named on their gravestones. It just says something like “Baby Girl Smith” or “Baby Williams.” So many graves with just one date on their markers— likely they were stillborn, just like Sam, or lived a mere few hours. Maybe they were given names by their families and they have been lost to history. Or maybe they were following conventional wisdom of the time— to pretend this had never happened, move on, not treat it as though it were a real thing that they endured. Maybe the babies were even whisked away at birth, so that the parents never even had to confront the sight of their perfect but dead child. Something so terrible— surely you’d just want to forget, right? 

Right.

Except... you can’t. You can’t forget the terrible pain, or the silence, or the powerful isolation. You can’t forget the tiny scrunched face with the familiar features. Whether you named your baby or you didn’t, whether you met them or you didn’t, you can’t help but wonder who that child would have been and how they would have opened your world.

And that’s what I think about sometimes when I visit Sam’s grave while randos bearing succulents are milling about John McCain’s final resting place— all those parents who didn’t put a baby’s name on their gravestone. Maybe they really thought that that would protect them from all the pain of making a dead child real, but I’m sure it didn’t. I’m sure that, like me, they thought about their baby every day for the rest of their lives. I'm sure that those mothers have tortured themselves over what they could have done differently to produce a different outcome. If they had subsequent children I'm sure that they looked at those babies, and even through their gratitude they thought to themselves, "Your sibling had to die so you could be here." 

Today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. No bereaved parent needs a day to remind them of their baby-- those of us who have lost children are remembering them daily and thinking of them constantly. So I assume that when this day came into being, it was for the purpose of reminding the rest of the world that our babies were here and they mattered to us and they still matter to us. Today, in that space I always hold for Sam, I’m thinking of all the other little ones who are dreamed of and missed by their families. I’m thinking of all those babies buried near Sam, who were born and died before there was a national day set aside to honor them— whose parents surely silently carried their memory in a world that was even less open to sharing these stories than the one we live in today. I’m thinking of the babies who said only a brief hello to their parents, of the parents who had to make agonizing decisions to withdraw care or end a pregnancy on their terms and afford their child a dignified life, birth, and death of limited pain, of the parents who had no choices at all, and of the babies we carry in our hearts instead of our arms.