Other Material I Shouldn't Read

I was basking on the back porch reading this week's New Yorker--don’t you love how I throw out this highbrow publication as if I am reading this stuff all the time? I manage to forget to mention the cheesy mystery with large gold letters and red cover that I really can't put down. But that's not the point. The point is, I was reading The New Yorker!

In this week’s New Yorker, I was grabbed by a title in the Personal History section which included a birth and death date 4 days apart. Looking closer, I saw that the death date preceded the birth date. Oh, no. My stomach physically sort of tightened, but of course, I read. This is a story by Daniel Raeburn (a writer who I've never heard of) about the stillbirth of his daughter. It was heartbreaking and achingly familiar, and yet, it didn't reach me totally. But maybe that is because I am not trying to read about baby tragedy right now.

In the past this is the kind of thing I would eat up. I mean that in a good way--in the past it would inspire me to feel less alone, that there are others like me struggling with the same thing. But now, pregnant again, I ended up feeling more afraid than anything else. His wife was 8 months pregnant when their daughter died in utero for apparently no reason. In reading that, the creeping sensation of fear that we are never out of the woods for this pregnancy became a bit overwhelming. And yet, getting to 36 weeks is a time I tell myself that we should, theoretically, be home free.

Maybe I should not have read it, but my heart breaks for this author and his wife, and maybe because he needed to write it, I am glad I read it. That said, in general, I think it's a good rule that during my high-risk pregnancy after a loss like we experienced, reading about losses is not so good for my general Zen (don’t laugh, can't you tell I am Zen?) pregnancy state.