Craft For Health

Giving Birth To a StillBorn Child by Kara L.C. Jones

Giving birth to death. 

Desire to voice my experience.

Trying to rediscover my heART in the aftermath of grief. 

Attempting to be patient with myself in an impatient world. 

 

All of these things and more were happening simultaneously after my son Dakota died at birth.  He had been a full-term, perfectly healthy pregnancy.  At his birth, he was perfect.  Except that he wasn't breathing.  "This baby has no heartbeat."  That line rings through time and space. 

 

It seemed impossible to make sense of it all.  We'd read and had lots of educational sessions about miscarriage.  We'd read and had lots of educational sessions about SIDS.  But stillbirth?  That was something that happened in olden times to our great-great-grandmothers back in the old country before decent hospitals and healthcare.  Yet here we were.

 

After his death, I learned that my husband's sister's first child was stillborn.  My great-grandmother had two children who died.  In my own family, there was a history of stillbirth.  But none of those children were on the family tree graphics.  No one had ever mentioned them on their birth/death days.  No one had ever uttered their names.  Besides just being a sad commentary on how we deal with death, these silences cheated me out of my full medical history.  My caregivers had no idea to look for markers like PCOS that might need special care to avoid stillbirth outcomes.  They didn't know because I didn't know.  It reminded me of my youth when people would whisper, "Cancer." 

 

I came to discover there are whole organizations formed around the support of stillbirth families.  Research institutions.  Entire books of study written.  And yet stillbirth is ignored.  In some places, death certificates are issued and families are required to arrange for burial or cremation, but no birth certificate is given.  The stillBIRTH is ignored.  Not counted.  Estimates on U.S. stillbirths vary because there is no standard for counting us.  Lowest rates say 29,000 stillbirths per year in the U.S.  Divide that by 365 days.  Divide that by 24 hours.  You get almost 7 babies dead every two hours of every day of every year.

 

So a couple of years after Kota died, I was invited to make art for a show titled "Women's Bodies: Violence & Healing" to be hosted at the Vashon Allied Arts gallery.  The opening night party was scheduled to be two hours long.  I decided to make a series of 7 Womb Books to represent the 7 babies who would die while we were all looking at art for that two hours.  The 7 mothers who would be told they didn't give birth by refusing them a stillbirth certificate, but who would be handed death certificates, confirming for each of them that they had become vessels of death.  Talk about violence against the body of mother and child.

The Weight of Sadness Lifted with Paint and Paint Brush by Stephanie Paige Cole

Creating artwork was never my intention.  Not with this exhibit. I went to school for fine art and I love to create sculptures and paintings and photographs, but this was all far from my mind as I stood in my driveway heaving clay pots at the asphalt, cursing and crying. 

My daughter had just died and I was feeling desperate and destroyed, overwhelmed by the intensity of my emotions.  The sound of the clay pot crashing into the driveway and splintering into pieces was satisfying, if only for a moment, and so that became my outlet.  Then one day I picked up a few of the broken shards.  I felt a connection to them, I was as broken and useless as they were, and I decided to give them another chance.  I brought them inside and sculpted them into a mangled heart.  I held this jagged little heart and stared at it and wept.  It was me.  Broken and destroyed but somehow still here. 

Seeing how creation could come from destruction was incredibly inspiring to me, and it opened the floodgates.  I explored the depths of my soul as I sculpted, collaged, sketched, photographed and wrote.  But it was painting that saved me.  I sculpted and sketched when I had an idea I wanted to express, but that's not how it was with painting. 

I painted because I simply felt incapable of doing anything else.  Most of my paintings were created late at night, when my husband was asleep and I was alone with the suffocating silence of my empty house.  I would sneak downstairs and sit on the floor of my living room, painting and crying until the sun came up.  It was such an incredible release to be able to pour myself all over the canvas.  The pain, the anger, the fear, the longing, it was all there in a way I couldn't have expressed in words.  Sometimes tiny glimpses of hope and gratitude would appear, which always surprised me. 

I could feel the weight of my sadness lifting as I transferred it onto the canvas, and by the time the piece was finished I was able to climb the stairs to bed and actually drift off to sleep.  I credit my creativity as the tool that allowed me to navigate my way through the darkness of that first year after Madeline's death, and I still cling to it today- three and a half years later- as I continue to struggle to adjust to life without my daughter.   

Stephanie Paige Cole is the author of  Still: A Collection of Honest Artwork and Writings From the Heart of a Grieving Mother.  She is also the founder of the Sweet Pea Projectand the artist behind the Beauty In The Breakdown exhibition.  Her firstborn child, Madeline Jonna Cole, was stillborn one week after her due date in January 2007.