Remembering Kyria Hope

This week marked the one-year anniversary of learning that our third baby's heart had stopped beating.  Our miracle baby, the one we conceived six months after the worst heartbreak of our lives.  The one who restored our hope in the possibility of more children.  We had seen her heartbeat twice on ultrasounds - and supposedly seeing a heartbeat means the risk of miscarriage drops.  But risk means nothing when it is your baby's heart that has stopped beating.  And the realization that our children in heaven (two at that point) outnumbered our children on earth was heartbreaking for me.
I was eight weeks along at the ultrasound where we learned our sweet Kyria had gone to heaven.  We had seen her heartbeat a week before, but she measured six and a half weeks at that point.  She measured one day more on the day of our appointment.  So we figured she died sometime during my seventh week of pregnancy.

When you have an early loss, it's hard to know what days to remember later.  Is it the day your baby died?  The day you learned about your baby's death?  The day you actually miscarried? Or the day you had a medical procedure that emptied your womb? And how do you talk about a baby whose gender is unknown?  Maybe all of these unknowns are why there's so much ambiguity connected with early pregnancy losses.  We are missing so many of those things that are normally a comfort when we lose someone special -- pictures, memories, a body, even something as basic as the pronouns we need to refer to our children.

We chose to give our baby a girl's name, Kyria Hope, and I think I remember her pretty much the entire month of October (when she probably died) and November (when we said good-bye).  If she had lived, she would have been born around our eighth anniversary and would now be nearly five months old.  The "if only" of another, phantom world.  Instead, we are living this reality, and we remember her with both tears and smiles, and look forward to being reunited with her someday in heaven.