By JOSEPH KELLARD
Alison represented Amy and Eric Abbey's third try to have a child together, after the first pregnancy ended in a stillbirth and the second a miscarriage. Amy relays those hellish months in a new book of anecdotes she complied entitled "Journeys: Stories of Pregnancy After Loss." The book reads like 11 different journals of individuals retelling their experiences losing their expected child. They include stories of first-trimester miscarriage, second-trimester delivery and full-term stillbirths, and each story contains a segment on getting through the next pregnancy.
After Solomon was born still at five months, Amy suffered both physically and psychologically, and her tale offers insights into an array of emotions, from anxieties to depression she either battled or succumbed to after her losses and through her third pregnancy. She reveals having feelings of failure at womanhood, letting down her stepson, Alex, after he anticipated being a big brother, and being convinced that her third pregnancy would also end tragically.
"I started to wonder what I'd done to deserve all this," Amy writes after noting that her miscarriage was due to a blighted ovum.
While Amy also reveals in her chapter, called "Solomon's Flower," a fleeting flirtation with a thought of suicide, the ultimate in underscoring her depressive state, she also includes positive steps she took to cope better. "Even though my child hadn't lived, I still had given birth," Amy writes.
Alas, when carrying Alison, superstitious anxieties got the best of Amy. "I was bursting out of Eric's XL shirts that I wore longer than I should have because I was convinced if I did anything different, like ware maternity clothes, I would lose the baby," she writes. In the weeks before her due date hit, right up to delivery time, Amy became increasingly convinced she'd lose the baby.
Providing the only husband's perspective, Eric Abbey contributes his own story to Amy's book. His chapter, "The Decision," centers around a particular life-changing choice, and how he is sometimes reminded of this in the subtlest of ways.
"For the rest of our lives I will have the guilt of convincing Amy to not hold the twenty week fetus," Eric wrote. "I thought I would be sick at the sight of it. I looked for second and third opinions that day. Had I made the right decision? ... I get often from Amy that tone in her voice telling me I let her down by the decision."
Eric tells how pregnancy loss can be different for the man, and that while he took it hard, he had personally suffered the deaths of loved ones earlier in life and thus seemed better able to cope. "Where did my wife go?," Eric asks about Amy¹s fragile emotional state. "I understood, after the loss, that she would grieve eighteen months, and that would have been OK but after we got pregnant again it was the worrying that went on. The daily 'what if?' Well, this time it worked out better and Alison was born."
Another distinct part of Eric's tale is that he recounts the birth of their last child, Adam, and how this was different. "The biggest reason is Amy didn't have time to worry as much because she was taking care of Alison," he writes.
And what is distinct about "Journeys: Stories of Pregnancy After Loss" from the many pregnancy loss books available?
"My books is set apart because it is only a collection of stories by parents and about what happened when we lost our child and the steps we took all the way through to having a child," said Amy, a health educator and past president of the Greater New York Society for Health Education. "Whereas the other books are more professionally based, and have a lot of information, speculation, and education with just brief anecdotal paragraphs or verbatim quotes from parents."
Among the steps the Abbeys took to heal was to join a support group. And through grief counselors Amy know, she was able to find the nine other authors who contribute their stories to her book. The concluding chapter, for example, features a parent who lost her 13-months-old daughter to a fetal genetic illness, and how she went to genetic counseling to see if her newest baby may have the same illness.
Amy's book does offer something on the clinical side. A social worker offers a summary chapter that advises women not to suppress their grief and not to turn away from their partner.
"I wanted to write this book to help other moms in my position," Amy said. "... Like any other book out there, my book won't replace anyone¹s individual counseling. I just felt that, if there are a 100 things to help me with my coping, I needed one more. So hopefully this is just another piece of somebody elses puzzle."
For more on Amy Abbey and "Journeys: Stories of Pregnancy After Loss," visit pregnancyjourneysafter loss.com. The book can be purchased there and at barnesnoble.com.
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 287.
