Hana

When you want to get married to someone, you are usually thinking about how much you love being around that person, how much you love their smile. How much fun you’ve had with them, how many adventures you’re going to have with them in the future. You imagine what your kids will look like. How you’ll grow old together.

You don’t tend to imagine what it’ll be like when you’re told you need IVF to conceive. How your heart will sink. How the both of you will get thru it day by day. What your spouse will look like digging your daughter’s grave. How you’ll watch them grieve differently than you, but they’ll still be the only other person in the world who will understand.

Thankfully, each tragedy we have been through seems to make us stronger.

I don’t want to forget the last few months and the last two years even though it’s been mostly rough. I want to remember it because it’s the story of our daughter, Hana.

After we got married in 2019, we started trying for a baby immediately. I had a suspicion that there was something off, so I ordered testing for both of us. I seemed to be normal, but my husband’s test results came back with severe infertility.

I’ve told the story of our first two rounds of surgery and IVF before, so I won’t include that here, but we ended up with two embryos after it all.

And during the time when we were about to transfer our first, my younger sister called me to tell me about a dream she had about me.  She said she had a dream that a young female child came to her and told her to tell me that she loved me and I did all I could do, and that I’d see her one day.

I admit that dream made me scared that the transfer would not work, but it did. And at 9 weeks we found out our baby was a boy. So I started to push that dream aside as just a random crazy dream that she must have had about me.

Our lives were all consumed by our first baby boy. The pregnancy, the move to a new place, the traumatic birth. The first year of trying to figure out how to be good parents. It was all encompassing. I still did pray for my other child, the little embryo frozen in a straw back in Dallas, but we just weren’t ready to think about having another transfer yet.

In 2023, we were ready. We set up everything with our new clinic here in Colorado. I started the meds, I stopped using all products that weren’t all natural. We were excited to meet our other embryo, but also terrified that the transfer wouldn’t work. We had a new protocol from the one we used with my son. It was focused on miscarriage prevention and letting my natural hormones do the work of growing my uterine lining.

We went to our church to pray and ask the saints for intercession the night before.

My lining ended up being perfect and after an emotional embryo transfer, we waited 4 days. And the pregnancy test was positive!!

It almost felt too good to be true. I took at least 20 pregnancy tests to be sure. Then the next week my blood test confirmed my beta was rising. It was just around Pascha and I remember feeling so happy to start feeling morning sickness. It was a strange comfort to know that I was pregnant. I didn’t take any medication because I wanted to feel it all.

Every night my husband and I prayed to God to keep our baby safe. We prayed to the Theotokos and a few saints who had helped us during my pregnancy with my son. My appointments at the clinic each week seemed to be going ok, there was never a scary one at that point.

The cravings and the sickness were intense, I took that as a good sign. We lived life as normal. But with the twist of IVF meds: lovenox shots in the morning, progesterone shots at night. I really didn’t mind. In fact I looked forward to them because it was something tangible that I could do to ensure my baby was healthy.

At 6 weeks we did a blood test to find out the gender, and I’m so glad I did. I remember opening that email with the results: “you’re having a girl!!”

At that moment we knew what her name was. Back in 2020, during the height of our infertility treatments we had decided on the name Hana. Inspired by Old Testament Saint Hannah, a woman who suffered from infertility for years before having children. We wanted to use the Korean spelling to connect her to her heritage.

A daughter! We were having a daughter. One of each. It was a happy time during my pregnancy.

…..

Nothing can prepare you for that ultrasound. The one where the ultrasound tech is quiet and doesn’t want to show you the screen. The room is dark, everyone silent. And she looks at me with sympathy and said words that will change everything forever: “I’m sorry I can’t find a heartbeat.”

The past appointments we had been able to find her little heartbeat, but I had a feeling a few days before that something was off. I prayed and begged God to heal her and keep her here with me. But she was meant to be born into heaven.

The rest of the day was a blur. I remember texting my husband the news. My mom watched our son for the day and took care of me as well. During lunch, my son pointed at my belly and said happily “baby.” I asked him if he meant himself and he said no. We hadn’t really mentioned the pregnancy directly to him but he intuitively knew, and that broke my heart.

That night after we had put our son down for bed, my husband broke down crying with me. I had never seen him mourn. We were the only two people in the world who understood.

The weeks after the news were horrible. I felt like a walking tomb. My little 8 week gestation baby was lifeless in my womb, but my body kept holding on and nurturing her. I still had terrible morning sickness everyday, once a comfort but now a painful reminder that my baby was dead. I took out all of the shots I had taken out from the sharps containers just to quantify my effort to keep her alive. It was handfuls and handfuls of shots, twice a day for three months. We had done everything we could.

I mourned her but also was scared for the miscarriage to begin. We waited for 4 weeks but my body kept holding on to her. With my doctor’s advice, we decided to proceed with a D&C.

The doctor who could do the D&C was up in a hospital in the mountains. She was specifically trained for miscarriages and endometriosis. She uses new techniques with a real camera and gently removes the tissue instead of going in blindly like most doctors did for this procedure. I was told to take misoprostol, a suppository that would soften and dilate my cervix over night, and then in the early morning we would come to the hospital for the surgery.

This was the most terrifying part for me, as I knew I would wake up with blood and seeing blood during a pregnancy had always been my worst fear.  But I held my breath and let go of my thoughts and just did it.

Around 4 am, I awoke to severe cramps and blood. It felt like the second week of a c section recovery. My husband had to help me get up and walk. My mom was there to watch our son and we were on our way to the hospital.

On the drive there, I started feeling contractions. It felt so unreal driving there as the morning sunrise crept along the mountains. I was really losing her now. This was it. And the emotional pain overtook the physical pain at that moment. I closed my eyes as we drove up winding roads, and I felt like I was rocking her for the last time. I didn’t want to remove her from my body; that was the last thing I ever wanted. But the risk for infection was greater the longer her body remained in my womb, and the last ultrasound I had seen there were pools of blood forming.

We made it there and the hospital staff and doctors were really great and sensitive to our loss. I was grateful that I waited to do the surgery because I think it was meant to happen this way. After the surgery I felt surprisingly strong and was able to function normally the rest of the day. The bleeding and cramps picked up again a few days afterwards, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.

Her body and remains were transferred to the hospital in our city and we came to pick them up about a week later when we were allowed to do so. The hospital Chaplin guided us to the chapel where we waited to see our daughter’s body. She came back holding a white bag. After we were alone, we opened the bag to see her remains in a container. Seeing her tiny body in pools of blood with the placenta reminded me that although we lost her during pregnancy, she is s real person with a soul. It was an indescribable experience.

We coordinated with our church’s priest to set up the funeral. That weekend we had the small intimate service at our church. And on Sunday, on Pentecost, we drove her remains back up into the mountains, to the Orthodox monastery to be buried.

My parents watched our son so that me and my husband could lay her to rest by ourselves. The drive there again just felt unreal. Clouds parting as we drove up the mountains. A flat terrain at the top, with mountain tops in every direction. A glimpse of the Continental Divide. Rain on and off. A dirt road that led to the monastery. Every part of that journey felt surreal.

When we arrived, the Mother of the monastery led us to the small Orthodox Church that was there and instructed us to take out the container with her body and to present her to the icons. As we would if we were holding our child, alive, in church. She let us alone and we went in and took her container out and presented her to the icons. We stood at the front of the church, surrounded by dim candles, holding our deceased daughter, and we prayed the Orthodox prayer for a dead child.

“O Lord, Who watches over children in the present life and in the world to come, because of their simplicity and innocence of mind, abundantly satisfying them with a place in Abraham's bosom, bringing them to live in radiantly shining places where the spirits of the righteous dwell: receive in peace the soul of Your servant, Hana, for You Yourself have said, Let the little children come to Me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.”

We cried and stood there in realization that this was happening. We stood before God and asked for him to accept her soul.

Afterwards, we headed out to the small cemetery in the back. The graves were all small ones, for miscarried/stillborn and aborted babies. The Mother of the monastery was there and handed my husband a shovel.

“Your wife has already labored for this child, now this is your labor.”

And he dug our daughter’s grave. Something I’d never imagined when we had gotten married. We placed her in the ground with my prayer rope bracelet that I had worn the entire pregnancy. The Mother left and told us to come back inside when we were done. As we buried her, tears streaming down our faces, the sky opened up and a downpour started. It was an experience I’ll never forget. It was if the world was mourning with us in that moment. We marked her grave with a small white cross.

We said our final goodbye to Hana in the pouring rain, and we sprinted back completely soaking wet. We stayed for a few hours with the Mother and had tea and talked about death and children while it just kept raining outside. Finally after the rain stopped, we headed home on our long journey so we could put our son, Hana’s IVF twin, to bed.

——-

I don’t feel like I want to die anymore, as I did when I first learned she had died in my womb. But at the same time I feel less afraid of death, because she is in the Kingdom waiting for us. It is my life’s goal for us to reunite. I feel closer to God through this immense pain. Lately the veil between the departed and the living is blurred for me, I feel so much more aware of my own future death and heaven as a tangible place. I feel closer to the saints who are alive in heaven as is my daughter. I yearn to know God and people who are close to God.

I am so much more aware of human life in every stage. She is a real person. She was a human being when she was an embryo, when she was a fetus. When she was born as a baby in heaven and in any other form. It’s hard to understand unless you’ve experienced it, but it’s much more concrete for me now.

Instead of feeling horrible about my grief, it comforts me. My grief connects me to her. When I look at the mountains, I feel a sense of home. A place for me to belong. It is my hope that I will be buried there when I die as well.

My marriage has strengthened through this tragedy as well. It is as if we are learning what marriage really means. We are inextricably a part of each other, bound together forever through her death.

And as for our son, I hope I can be open with him about what happened to his twin sister. Honor her memory by telling her story to her older twin brother.

As for the cause of her death, it was a chromosome genetic abnormality. We never tested our embryos, we knew this was a possibility. But I’m glad we didn’t. We didn’t “discard” her as an embryo. I carried her in my womb, the place she was meant to be, and I gave her the best chance of life. I cherish my time with her on earth and look forward to reuniting in eternity.