Lost Versus Lost

A heartfelt thank you to all who commented, gave me suggestions and offered to help us deal with this mess.

By way of clarification, I wanted to note that the Doodles aren't definitively lost, via administrative snafu or otherwise (as far as we know). Rather, they are simply subject to the same horrific standard operating procedures as everyone else's babies. This isn't a terrible mistake that happened to us or them - as far as we know, nothing is "out of the ordinary" with respect to their burial. It's just that "ordinary" is, for lack of a more eloquent description, royally fucked up.

So, it's not just our Doodles that are in dead baby limbo right now - it's the babies of anyone who made the grave mistake of choosing option C at a time when they weren't in their right minds to be making any decisions, and went with the "hospital burial" scenario. I spoke again to our contact at the hospital and she said it used to be that she could call someone at the medical examiner and they would check the records and tell her that Baby X had or had not been buried at the cemetery (in the mass grave, there aren't individual graves) as of X date. However, due to understaffing and backlog at the examiner's office, they are no longer able to provide such confirmation with respect to these babies - I'm sure it would be different if the Doodles had names, a mortician, a funeral date. But they don't. And they have their parents to thank for that.

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Busted is the contributing editor for Loss. She writes daily at Busted Babymaker where she tells her infertility story as well as the story of the Doodles, her boy/girl twins (Noah and Talia) who were born at 23 weeks due to placental abruption.