by Charmaine Ragpala

Created on: April 30, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Some people say that God walks into your birth and breathes life into your baby. But what about when he walks in and decides not to? What then? What about when you have no answer to this mystery, you have no control over the situation, and there is no consolation for the loss of life. In my experience, I have lived with surprise pregnancies and surprise death. It is truly like a thief in the night.

For me, I had already been going through a lot of marital upheaval. There was a lot of life altering new coming to surface when I decided to comfort my best friend who thought she could be pregnant, and had to find out right now. So we bought a twin pack of birth control. She peed on one and I peed on one. She had one line and I had two! I almost fainted.

Even though I was continuing to head towards divorce and my husband could care less that I was pregnant,I came to terms with being pregnant. So I built myself a network of people to support me through all of it. And joy slowly took over. It turned into a sisterhood that embraced the new life to come.

Then, 4 months later on a random sunny afternoon when everything seemed hopeful, I felt a trickle of heat run down my leg. I'm mortified to look down and see blood spilling out of my pants. And in an instant, the life that was growing in my belly is snuffed out.

I cleaned myself up. I laid myself down, and I waited for it to pass through me. You lay there. Death in your womb and it feels like you're waiting for this mass of sadness and sorrow to move itself through you're body and out you vagina. Love making and the miracle of conception is deceiving. It becomes an experience that is suffered through in deafening silence. How then do you live?

I eventually went to the hospital that night. My husband never came to be with me through it. The doctor came in. He spread me legs and withdrew a mass of tissue that made even the walls seem grief stricken. And there in front of me in the middle of all that tissue was a baby. Not bigger than the size of my hand. That fully formed baby was my child. He was a part of me. He was proof that I existed. That I procreated. I was cleaned up. Given some paperwork and allowed to leave. Just like that. Like He never existed. Like life goes on with or without you. A man with a screaming child who'd broken his arm was ushered into the ER to fill the bed that I just birthed Death on. It was the darkest day of my life to have a death in my belly, and have to go home with no evidence of new life. I sat that night in the nursery. And I had no reason to celebrate. My heart felt no joy.

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