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I know for us we did have the hospital chaplin come into our room and say a prayer over our son. We do not do the whole baptize thing but it felt right at that moment to have those words spoken and I am glad that we made that choice.

We didn't name our first until about 6 weeks after his birth/death. We were blindsided at the 20 week ultrasound when we learned he was very sick and not going to make it, and he was born a few days later. Like most naive first-timers, we had never considered the possibility that our baby would be stillborn. We weren't sure what people did when their baby was born at 21 weeks...hold the baby? name the baby? It was all new and very frantic to get through, so we didn't initially name him. About six weeks later we realized the depth of our grief and had to give him a name.

Nat,

I honestly have been struggling with this same concept... my wife's best friend and her husband had a healthy (yet ugly) baby boy 6 weeks or so before Kaleb was born via c-section. Why does their baby get to live and mine not so much? I honestly don't know and it's been driving me crazy.

Wonderful word wandering Julia. It has always been biology for me. The God thing the afterlife etc.-just don't work for me. Though I love the song, food, and tradition of my Judaism I am not religious. I think even if I was it just wouldn't matter it would always be biology. It's tangible, it makes sense-things just went terribly wrong from the get go. baby taz was born full term-incredibly easy birth with undiagnosed trisomy 13 (yes doctor incompetence). 1-20-25,000 live births. Wow think about the statistics there. Statistics don't matter when it happens to you.

Recently, reviewing my blog stats I came across a link back to a christian infertility forum, and a discussion about me and my blog. The general consensus seemed to be pity for me and my lack of faith, and more specifically the women were concerned that my not "knowing Jesus" meant that my grief was "true", and if only I could "know Jesus", "recognise the signs" he was sending me I would be comforted.

We baked cupcakes here last night. It was Monkey's half birthday, and I promised her last year, after spontaneously doing one for JD, that we would start doing half birthdays as a matter of policy. Of course, we then equally spontaneously skipped mine, but who's counting. It was a lovely affair, the half-birthday, and it made my daughter happy way out of proportion to the effort required. But I am not so much talking about her half-birthday as the fact that it was sandwiched, not unexpectedly, between two other days.

Why are we here? All of us, I mean, humanity? Philosophers have been at this for millennia. So have uncounted and uncountable others. What we call regular people. Happy, unhappy, kind, lonely, content, brilliant, sad, successful, lovely, mean-- all kinds of people.

I'm typically a non-believer when it comes to spiritual matters. BUT, today I left a message on my dead friend's Facebook page asking him to look out for Juniper. My friend died a year and a half ago. He never got to have a family of his own. When we dated our song was Michelle Shocked's "when I grow up". He wanted that"hundred and twenty babies" she sang about and never got to have one.

You're not crazy. I like to think of them [lost babies of parents on Glow] up there together.

Not long after Matilda died, I had a nightmare that centered around there being no one up there to look after her. She's been the first loss of a family member I've been close too so in my dream I was worried about her. But now I know about all these other beautiful babies for her to play with.

Thank you for this post. Holding in mind at the same time both the absolute insignificance and crazy miraculous significance of life has always been my personal religion, as far as I have one. I think most of the time, even now, it brings me peace.