Four Losses in Two Years

I have shared my story for all of those who have loved and lost so that you know that you are not alone.

My story begins on May 21, 2018 with the loss of my father-in-law a few months before my husband and I got married. His father was just 67 and passed away in his sleep. My husband was devastated, and I was devastated for him, and for the first time, we understood the trauma of the sudden and inexplicable loss of a loved one. We had no idea that he was the first of a series of losses that lay ahead.

Fast forward to October 2018, we got married and took a two week honeymoon in Europe. One month later, I got an offer for a job in North Carolina, and we were elated that we would start our newly-wed life in a new place with new opportunities. Simply put, we were happy and hopeful again.

On Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2018, I received a call from my dad before dawn. I will never forget the sound of his sobbing, through which he told me that my younger sister, who was 28 at the time, had taken her own life. I cannot describe the pain that I lived in from that moment forward. I began living in a new reality which consisted of the things and events of nightmares. Because my parents were (understandably) emotionally incapacitated by her suicide, my husband and I took on the responsibility of the logistics of her death. We filled out her death certificate and chose her coffin. We planned the set up of the visitation and the clothes she would wear as we saw her for the last time. We packed up things in her apartment and shipped various reminders of her existence to my parent's house, where they have sat unpacked for almost two years.

At the same time, my husband and I were planning the logistics of our move from Massachusetts to North Carolina. We had no choice but to continue with that plan and I felt as though I began living a "double life." In my "new life," I cheerily introduced myself to my new coworkers and shared only the superficial details of my life. I feared any question that would implicate my family and require me to divulge that my sister had died by suicide just weeks before arriving. I could not face that information, let alone share it with people who were essentially strangers. When I got home from work, I would allow myself to feel the heavy burden of grief. I would wake up with a stabbing pain in my chest as I remembered the new reality I was living in - that my sister was dead, that I hadn't known the extent to which she had struggled and for how long, that I hadn't helped her and wasn't able to stop her, that she was gone forever, and that my "old life" was over.

Four months later, in March 2019, my mom was diagnosed with ALS and we were told she may have anywhere from 1 to 5 years to live. Over the last 15 months, I witnessed her physical decline and her mental suffering, and my dad's suffering, over the painful absence of their youngest daughter. They were tormented, as was I and my older sister, over the unanswerable questions that are left in the wake of a loss by suicide. "Why had she done this?" "How could she do this to us?" and the hardest - "What could we have done to save her?"

My husband and I knew that we wanted a family and in the wake of my mom's diagnosis, we accelerated our plans. I wanted for her to live long enough to meet a grandchild. After months of trying, I got pregnant in February 2020. I told my family immediately and I kept them updated on every visit to the OB as I wanted to give my mom some piece of happiness, some reason to keep living. In early May 2020, we learned the baby was a girl and we decided to honor my sister with her name. A few days before Mother's Day, we had planned to announce to our friends and our extended family that we were expecting our daughter in November. That afternoon, I went into my OBGYN for a quick, routine scan. The nurse fumbled with the abdominal ultrasound wand for several minutes before telling me she needed to get a doctor. I knew immediately that something was wrong. As the doctor probed my belly, she told me that the fetus had stopped growing at 10 weeks and that there was no heartbeat. I wailed on the examining table, my feet still in the stirrups and half dressed, the doctor and nurse each holding my arms and shoulders. After a procedure to remove the fetal tissue, my husband and I were determined to try again.

A little less than two weeks ago, I received a second early-morning call from my dad. Through a familiar sobbing, he told me that my mom had passed in her sleep. It was expected and yet entirely unexpected. We thought she had at least six months left. For the third time in a little more than two years, we said goodbye to a family member.

I didn't get to tell my mom before she died that I am pregnant again. It is my greatest source of hope and fear, as I am both excited and terrified of the future - will it be another loss or will this be a new beginning?

Death has taught me how to hold two seemingly opposite concepts at once. I am tortured by feelings of guilt, regret, anger, and despair that their deaths have inspired. At the same time, I relish in happy and funny memories of them and share stories about their lives with friends and family. I mourn the loss of my pregnancy and I fondly imagine our future children. I have learned that these thoughts and feelings are not mutually exclusive; they don't cancel each other out. It is the only way I have learned to survive my journey of grief and loss, to heal, and to have hope.