Remembering Isabella on Her First Birthday

A few months after Isabella died, my husband and I commented that the first year would fly by. It did.

Had life been different, we would have a one-year-old. Since we have not watched Isabella grow up, I cannot even imagine what life would be like these days with a toddler. Intellectually I know our daughter would be either walking or on the cusp of taking her first steps, using a handful of word approximations, full of giggles and smiles, and getting into mischief. There would be portions of days where we would be at our wits end, exhausted, frustrated, and yearning for adult conversation. We’d have read books to her hundreds of times and be diaper-changing pros. We would have been able to pick out her cry from a roomful of babies, known the color of her eyes, and seen the sparkle of delight in them as she explored. And we would have taken it for granted.

Instead of having a one-year-old, we are one year closer to seeing our daughter again. Our home is quiet, the nursery unused, and the baby clothes boxed up with the hope of using them in the future. We are part of a community of grieving families who have shared their stories of loss and grace with us, we have a strong network of support whom we love and who love us well, and we are irrevocably different than who we were one year ago.

Cake for Isabella featuring the tree of life.

The combination of Isabella’s and Mom’s deaths has caused us understand in the depth of our bones that nothing is guaranteed. Growing up I always assumed that my mom would outlive my dad. Many assumptions about how life is going to look have been stripped away. We’ve had serious conversations about what we would each do if one of us died. When talking about the future we use caveats such as, “God-willing” and “barring anything unforeseen.” We know how to walk beside others in the midst of pain and sorrow because we have walked the path ourselves and know what helps and hurts. The lessons we’ve learned over the last year were only possible through sorrow.  

In the several days leading up to Isabella’s birthday, it was impossible to not remember what this time was like last year. One of the most notable aspects is the unbridled hope and excitement we had. My husband encouraged me while I was in labor that we would soon meet our daughter; the pain and discomfort were necessary for the next stage of parenthood to begin. Were we just naïve? No. We did get to meet Isabella, although it looked nothing like we expected.

I remember the joyful anticipation and my heart aches with how quickly everything changed. According to my medical records, we checked into the hospital at 7:57 a.m. By 8:20 a.m. I had signed consent for a C-section. The anesthesia started at 8:28, the surgery at 8:32, and she was born at 8:35 a.m. Less than forty minutes after we arrived at the hospital expecting to take home our child, she was being resuscitated before spending the next thirty hours in the NICU. A year later I keep glancing at the clock, recalling what was happening in the hospital. Picturing my mother holding my hand in the recovery room, the awkwardness of pumping coupled with the knowledge that the milk would nourish her, the relief when the neonatologist told us the first night that her oxygen saturation was at 90, and the life-shattering moment when she took her last breath in our arms.

Isabella less than half an hour after birth, in the NICU

In the week leading up to her birthday, I made a photo album of Isabella’s story. I want to say it is “for” her, but she will never see it. The photos begin with a positive pregnancy test, they document my belly’s growth as she grew, the smiles as we set up the crib, the obligatory “off to the hospital” picture, the photos of her in the NICU, then the black and white images taken after she died. It shows our tattoos, my Hope Mommies retreat, her headstone as the seasons changed, and some of the flowers we received every month. It felt so right to be able to do something tangible, to spend hours remembering that I am her mom.

While I poured myself into making her photo album, I froze when even thinking about mustering the energy for other areas of life. We are having a small get-together with friends and family to remember her and make Hope Boxes. The task of sending out evites was too huge to attempt on my own and I started to panic every time it crossed my mind. I had a short list of work and life related phone calls to make that took tremendous effort to tackle.

A couple times this week I’ve intentionally left the house for a walk when my husband leaves for work. If I don’t walk out the door when he walks out, I may not leave the house that day. I was a mess the morning that marked when my labor started last year. Given everything the doctors can piece together, Isabella was truly healthy until my contractions started. We’ll likely never know whether the placement of the cord caused it to become occluded with each contraction or whether there was an obstruction, but something happened during labor that ultimately killed her. On the walk that morning I kept thinking about how she had been okay until that day, and I had no idea her life was suddenly in peril. As I sobbed, I realized that I did not have to journey alone and I reached out to friends, two of whom had also lost their firstborns.

A year ago, our lives forever changed. We are different people, marked by loss. We hold more tightly to each other and more loosely to our plans. Our hope is not rooted in kids, but in Christ. My arms still physically ache sometimes for my daughter and I treasure holding friends’ babies. I pray that we never have another year filled with the loss of a child and a parent. We hold onto the hope that God will bring living children into our lives and we trust that somehow, in ways we can never understand here on earth, he is using our precious daughter’s story.

Birthday flowers from a family who
lost their firstborn, also named Isabella