Our First Pregnancy - Honoring the Dead

While at the hospital, we grudgingly gave up the discharged flesh for testing. If it were the fetus, then my wife would not have to be scraped out and we could let things take their natural course. Both of us wanted to keep it, bury it, honor it. But, we didn't. We let the doctors take it. And, we are not sure what ever became of it.
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As stated in the last post, my wife suggested that we give the baby a name. We named it "Brendan Jacob...". The following is a copy of a document that I wrote to remember him and his name.
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Brendan Jacob ____

Conceived around August 27th, 2004.

Lost October 6th, 2004.

Expected Birth May 22nd, 2005.

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Brendan - Irish in origin and means "Little Raven". Due to their dark color and the traditional association of death and blackness, many cultures viewed ravens as intermediaries between us and the afterlife. Others associated them with sorrow and dying. In Australia, the raven is a bird of sorrows. He takes the sadness from humanity and flies away with it. The raven's mournful call reflects the burden he carries.

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Jacob - Old Testament son of Isaac; father of the twelve patriarchs of Israel. Jacob's ladder can be interpreted as the connection between heaven and earth, man and god. It is also sometimes depicted as a stairway to heaven. See Genesis 28: 11-14:

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"And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder [scalam] set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it."

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We never knew you, but we will miss you.

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Losing Brendan was hard. We were told that 1 in 6 pregnancies end in a miscarriage. This was somewhat comforting to me. I hoped that this was just a fluke, a stroke of bad luck. We decided that some day, we'd try again.