On Your 11th Birthday

(A picture of how our family would have look, 11 years later)

To live ... for few minutes.

Once all the medical complications started to pile up, I reluctantly realized that the time of babies lives was coming to an end. I fought the idea. I prayed. I cried. I refused to accept that we were going to lose all of them. I hoped for a miracle and dreamed for the best, nevertheless my triplets were going to die.

But first, they were going to live! For how long? I didn't know. The doctors told us that they will likely live for only few seconds... Yes, somehow I had to compress all my life hopes and dreams to only few minutes, because I knew that Alexa, Jayden and Lilia were going to die right after their birth. How do you plan a life dream like this? How can I be prepared to be a daddy for only a handful of minutes, and then be ready to say goodbye when I didn't want to?

Yet, I knew that first they were going to live... at least for awhile, just for moments that will forever be engraved in my heart. Now that we’ve been through it, eleven years later after everything is over; I believe that if we had taken earlier options to end the high risk pregnancy, it would have been disastrous on many levels. Most important, it would have cut their natural life short for no good reason. It would not have been a shortcut to our grief at all. If anything, our grief would have been magnified. We would have been left with only the raw pain and without the memories of our babies and the time-tested rituals of grief to soften it.

Perhaps some people thought we were bringing grief and pain upon ourselves by continuing the pregnancy and having a full funeral and burial. Some others suggested that we should just get on with our lives. But for that brief time, for those few minutes while I held each of my triplets, it was our deepest and most beautiful silent moments that I will never trade for anything else. I know, it was very devastating and heartbroken life experience and we didn't know anything else could happen after it. Our dreams of ever having a child were shattered.

During those few days we didn't care for anything else, there was nothing more important in our lives than waiting for them to be born. And give them full measure of our time and attention and love, until they took their last breath.

I also felt that ending the pregnancy early would have contributed to the perception that the loss of an unborn baby is of little consequence. And we would still have been in shock a week or two later, with no memories to hold onto; when others would have been expecting us to get over it already. Instead, by choosing to keep all of them, and leave up to God for their future; it was a choice we will never regret.

It was a blessing watching Jess's belly growing as a constant reminder to others of what we were going through. Perhaps that meant that everywhere we went, death was an uninvited and unwelcome guest. But our painful experience has also resulted in giving us an extraordinary level of support we can give to other bereaved parents that we meet after our loss. To be able to give company and genuine understanding to them while they are grieving the loss of their “invisible” babies too.

 Aborting our pregnancy would have meant denying ourselves the life-changing, bittersweet, exquisite experience of holding our beautiful children and watch every detail of their faces, tiny fingers and little feet. Even though we never got to hear their cries; we didn’t realize later, on how crucial and sustaining those memories would be. Aborting them would have meant rejecting a gift from above. So yes they had to die. But they got to live for few minutes first.

Happy 11th heavenly birthday my three beloved babies.

"Sometimes we are only given few minutes to be with the child we love... 

But we spend thousands of hours thinking of them and those precious minutes." 

(Yasminah)