Still Life: A Parent's Memoir of Life After Stillbirth and Miscarriage
By Emma Mellon
()
About this ebook
Emma Mellon
Emma Mellon, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and has been in private practice in Pennsylvania for over twenty-eight years. She specializes in trauma work with clients who have had complicated losses. Dr. Mellon has given workshops for local and national p
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Still Life - Emma Mellon
Still Life
A Parent’s Memoir of Life
After Stillbirth and Miscarriage
Emma Mellon, PhD
© 2016 by Emma Mellon, PhD
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including
information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher,
except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Sunstone books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use.
For information please write: Special Markets Department, Sunstone Press,
P.O. Box 2321, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504-2321.
Cover art by Damini Celebre
eBook 978-1-61139-473-3
__________
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mellon, Emma, author.
Title: Still life : a parent’s memoir of life after stillbirth and
miscarriage / by Emma Mellon, PhD.
Description: Santa Fe : Sunstone Press, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016013918 (print) | LCCN 2016022674 (ebook) | ISBN
9781632931344 (softcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611394733 ()
Subjects: LCSH: Mellon, Emma. | Stillbirth--Psychological aspects. |
Miscarriage--Psychological aspects. | Parents--Psychology. | Loss
(Psychology)
Classification: LCC RG648 .M45 2016 (print) | LCC RG648 (ebook) | DDC
362.198/3920092 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013918
www.sunstonepress.com
SUNSTONE PRESS / Post Office Box 2321 / Santa Fe, NM 87504-2321 /USA
(505) 988-4418 / orders only (800) 243-5644 / FAX (505) 988-1025
This book is dedicated to
the memory of Janis Keyser, Executive Director of UNITE.
Koan
Stillborn boy drops into the world
like Icarus into the sea,
like a seed into earth,
like a koan into the mind.
E.M.
Foreword
Just as the light of a new star continues through the universe long after its explosive beginning, stillbirth travels through the years of parents’ lives. Far beyond pain and grief, the story continues.
Publicly, parents tell the story in concrete and linear details: Now this baby would be five or twenty-five. Today is the anniversary. He is buried in Philadelphia. I always cry when I think of her. I never hear his name spoken. I hung his baby picture with the other children’s. We divorced after she died. We established a charity in her name. I still don’t drive by that hospital. I keep his little blue blanket in a drawer. I expect my ashes to be combined with his someday.
The deeper story of a stillbirth continues in more private, idiosyncratic experiences not usually talked about because they seem too odd, too personal, too full of meaning or emotion, and too incredible. This inside story is where meaning is made, healing continues, and the ongoing connection with the lost child enriches life.
This book offers the long view of life after stillbirth. The reader joins me in the upheaval and confusion of it and witnesses the new life that emerges. The power of the relationship with my son, before and after death, reorders life, resolves old struggles, burns away distortions, and reveals deep and durable bonds. In Still Life, loss and chaos move toward connection and coherence.
My son, Zachary David, died in utero on November 21, 1988, and was born the next day. That I have survived and thrived since his death is still a surprise to me. I can take credit for very little of this new life. I’ve had to conclude that we are built—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—to experience, to be changed, and to go on to experience more. I am learning that this innate resiliency is part of a larger resilience—a larger, universal life—that holds and nourishes us all.
I hope my story will encourage other bereaved parents to recognize their own inside stories, find their ongoing connections with their children, and be comforted and created anew by them.
1
Stranger in the House
February 2014
First, I felt everything with him. There was nothing that was not him. Then, he was gone. I mourned. Time passed, and I moved on, altered.
Now a different life than I had dreamed of in those days nourishes me.
Here, in my mid-sixties, I thrive. I have a career as a psychologist in private practice that I treasure. My writing gives me deep satisfaction. My family of friends shares the joys and frustrations of my life. And I’ve been blessed with good health.
And he is as he was: sketched from Polaroid pictures taken at the hospital. The face of an infant, eyes closed, silent and still.
I pass him many times a day. His is the last picture in a series of family photos that climb the wall of the stairway. At the bottom, my grandparents, and then my parents, me as a baby, my favorite aunt and me, and at the top step, my son. As I pass the relatives, and, depending on the day and my mood, I usually feel something—warmth or curiosity or