![]() Each step of our process seemed to require greater leaps: Conceive naturally, agree to various fertility procedures, travel to China. We had originally intended to adopt one of the thousands of girls abandoned in China, where parents limited by law to one child prefer boys who will care for them in old age.Īdopting from China was an idea to which we opened our hearts, and of which we had grown quite fond. In May, Gilna had encouraged us to consider Vietnam as an option for adopting an orphan baby girl. But the trail of events that has caused sleepless nights, self-doubt, anger and all too frequently feeling the fool. Not the legs from Chicago to Detroit to Seattle to Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh. My thoughts drift through our journey to date. "Is one going to take us to you? Could we possibly be this close to the joy of your smile and shining eyes? God, I pray it is so." "The windows show winding rivers," I write. On the plane, I am writing a letter to this baby girl, who I imagine someday will be wearing heart-shaped sunglasses. It is one day short of a year that we met Derek Gilna, who is accompanying us to facilitate what we think is a first meeting with our future daughter. We are flying from Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City. But I still felt almost dead inside, sluggish and labored, as if I was spending my days in a deep freezer. It was no shock and far from the first month of disappointment. About ten days earlier, there was bad news on what we decided was our last try at conception with fertility specialists. We opened a special bottle of wine, one saved to celebrate life and marriage and the gift of each other. Mary and I are eating dinner at a favorite restaurant in our neighborhood. It was the happiest holiday of our lives. We figured the pregnancy would be safely through the first trimester, always the most vulnerable time. Thanksgiving had been a day to hug everyone just a little tighter, talk that much more tenderly on the telephone, quietly anticipating the joyful news to be shared at Christmas. Please understand it has taken so very, very long for our hopes and dreams to even reach this point." I am sorry we weren't more unabashedly joyful about your arrival. ![]() You brought us great joy, if it was a bit guarded at times. "Please know I will always love you and miss you and silently honor your precious few minutes in our family. I'm not even sure you exist as a true, formed spirit or if you are more like an angel baby that hovered over us in the last six weeks. "There are so many things I want to say, and more I want to ask you. I slipped out of bed, sat at the kitchen counter and wrote a letter to our baby: One night soon after the first miscarriage, I couldn't sleep. I wanted so much to give a first grandchild to Mary's parents, maybe even the first grandson on our side of the family. I ached so much that summer-for Mary, for her parents, for the lost child, for myself. Our first miscarriage, earlier that year in July, broke our hearts. ![]() We first discovered the heartbeat on an ultrasound screen two weeks earlier, on Thanksgiving morning. Our baby would have been 8 weeks old that day. Our fertility doctor, who minutes before had called this a "graduation ultrasound" because our next pregnancy checkup would be with Mary's obstetrician, could barely tell us he discovered no heartbeat on the ultrasound. She is on an examining chair, and I stand next to her never feeling more helpless, never feeling less a man. Her body is shaking involuntarily from shock and disbelief, her mouth forming the word, "no," but somehow unable to say it.
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