Karen Billings said she still feels a lingering sense of loss 44 years after suffering a miscarriage.
Her husband, Tom, had just wrapped up his four-year stint in the U.S. Navy near the end of the Vietnam War. On the day she picked him up from the airport, she suffered a miscarriage with their first baby.
“We were sad and heartbroken. We wanted this baby so bad,” said Billings, of Chesterton, who’s now 65.
The couple later had three sons, leading to 10 grandchildren and a wonderful marriage of 48 years.
“But every year come August, when our baby was to be born, I feel a wash of loss,” she said.
Earlier this month, I wrote about miscarriages through the eyes of a handful of women willing to share their story of loss, pain and grief. I then heard from a dozen or so other women and a few men about their feelings of loss through miscarriage or a stillbirth.
“As a product of the 1970s, and me being a former Marine, we’re somewhat taught to keep our emotions in check,” said one 60-year-old man whose wife experienced a miscarriage before giving birth to their daughter.
“I had to be the strong one, the rock. But inside, it was tough. I wanted nothing more than to have a son,” he told me.
Becky Joseph, of Hebron, shared with me her complex story of physical and emotional trauma after a miscarriage, followed by a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress order. Her medical ordeal began in 2010 when trying to conceive her third child. It has never ended.
“I went home empty-handed and pretty confused,” she said, recalling her hospital visit after her miscarriage. “Over the course of grieving, I became pretty depressed, receiving mail and emails for baby things that wouldn’t stop coming. All kinds of terrible blows that are pretty common to grieving moms.
“I hated seeing pregnant women and babies. I had to return to work within a week and everyone looked at me like a monster, or ticking time bomb,” said Joseph, who works in the radiation oncology field.
“I became pretty depressed for a while. Everything set me off. I was very angry for a long time,” she said. “Hearing a baby or seeing a pregnant belly might just tip the scale and make me cry again, or relive my miscarriage for the millionth time.”
Joseph got pregnant again and delivered a healthy, normal baby girl, her “rainbow baby,” as they’re called after the death of a previous baby.
“Even after having a beautiful rainbow baby, it’s never over,” she said. “Nothing makes sense about a baby dying inside you.”
Lori Utesch experienced two miscarriages, but the first one changed her life, she said.
“I lost my daughter, Ava, on Feb. 23, 2008,” recalled Utesch, who was five months along in her pregnancy while raising two sons. “Up to that moment in my life, the word miscarriage was not foreign by any means, but I was not fazed by it.
“Looking back, I don’t believe I was capable of feeling true emotion about something so profound and so jarring without ever having experienced it myself. Now I know,” she said.
After hearing from a doctor, “Your baby’s heart stopped beating,” she heard nothing else, she said.
Still, doctors had to induce labor to remove the baby.
Once the baby was removed, a nurse brought her back in a tiny blanket and held her up for Utesch to see.
“I remember praying silently for her to move, to gasp, to see her chest rise even slightly,” she said. “There was nothing. Just silence.”
“I blamed myself for years. I couldn’t protect her. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t save her. I was completely and utterly devastated. I grieved for her like I have never grieved for anyone in my life,” she said.
Melissa Parker, of Wheatfield, began “miscarrying” her third child in July 2007.
“Having been pregnant twice before, I felt different this time,’ said Parker, a nurse who knew what she was going through. “I told the tech who did my ultrasound, ‘I’m having a miscarriage.’ She looked at me strangely.”
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Parker was right.
“I didn’t cry over it for about three weeks, when the hormones were sufficiently whacked out, I suppose,” she recalled. “I told my husband it was for the best. Mother Nature’s way of letting go of a little life that was already not growing correctly.”
Still, the mother of three sons has always wondered if that baby was the girl she never had. She still refers to that lost baby as “she,” not he.
“Her name would have been Brooke,” Parker said. “I believe in heaven. I know Brooke is waiting for me there. She will be blonde haired and blue eyed, like her three brothers.”
She doesn’t mind sharing her painful experience with hospital patients who suffer a similar fate and end up in the emergency department, where Parker works.
“I tell then that as hard as it is right now … it’s not the end,” she said. “If not for the miscarriage, I wouldn’t have my third son, Lucas, my rainbow baby.”
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