Our Infant Loss Story

I joke about my life being “The Original” Hallmark movie. I grew up in a small town on a “Christmas Tree Farm”, moved away to the “Big City” for work. After 12 years finally moved back home to eventually take over the “Family Farm”. Met the “Perfect Man” and “Got Married”. Life couldn’t be more ideal.

Well in reality, life is not always kind. There are struggles in life that are “Real”. What Hallmark movies don’t show on the TV are the struggles that rip your heart out. This is our story of how we lost our daughter…

Jacey Grace

My husband and I met a bit later in our lives, married in 2019 and planned to start a family right away. We had a harder time getting pregnant than expected. Finding out from my Dr. I needed to have a fairly simple surgery in order to increase my chances of conceiving, we fixed the issue and conceived rather quickly after that. The families were thrilled, so were we. So much love and support came our way in this journey, more than we could have ever imagined.

It was a picture perfect pregnancy.

My husband and I had everything ready to go for our daughter’s arrival. Our daughter decided to arrive 5 days after her due date. I went into labor at 11:30am, things moved quite quickly. I called my husband, he left work, picked me up and took me to the hospital. We were there by 1:00pm. During the monitoring of our daughter, the staff seemed to have a hard time getting a strong heartbeat, our baby seemed to be in distress. By 4:00pm I was being rushed into an emergency C-section. I was put under anesthesia, the normal time frame of a C-section is about 30 mins, mine took 5. When I came to, I could tell something was wrong, the look on the Dr.’s face said it all.

Our perfectly healthy baby girl didn’t make it.

She died of aspiration, she had gotten too much fluid and meconium in her lungs that the Dr. could not get her lungs to expand. Within a few hours we went from being ecstatic to meet our daughter for the first time, to now having to decide whether to have a funeral or a cremation for her.

We were not prepared for this reality.

In a moment our dreams were utterly shattered.

From 12am to 2am I held my little girl in my arms. I gently touched her baby soft skin and admired her tiny hands. She looked like her father, she had his nose, his ears and his feet. I like to think she had my eyes.

We share our story to help others in some small way to not feel so alone. When I was in the depth of grief after coming home from the hospital, empty handed and surrounded by baby stuff, I needed to hear I wasn’t alone.

In some small way it gave comfort and hope.

I never could have imagined that I would be inducted into a group of mothers that have suffered one of the worst pains imaginable. It’s a group no one wants to join, but once you have, life is never the same. The only ones who can know this agony, are the ones that walk the same path.

This site was born out of my desires to share more specifically about our journey of taking on the struggles of life head on. My dream is that this online space will evolve into a community where we talk about it all, especially the ta-boo subject of Infant Loss, Miscarriage and Stillbirths. If you have lost a child, I want to say, how very sorry I am.

Our Infant Loss Story