The month of October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness month. I urge you to provide space to share your stories or to listen and honor the parents in your life who have experienced pregnancy and infant loss. This is my stumbling attempt to honor my dear friends, Madalyn, Adam, and Jayce Vorrie.
I don’t know when my life starting being touched by pregnancy and infant loss because I will never be able to know how many of the people I love have suffered their losses in silence over the years. In my 20s, I started to hear more friends and colleagues share miscarriages and babies they had named and loved and lost too early, but only in quiet spaces among other women.
I never knew how to talk about it. I still don’t.
A friend would share that they had a miscarriage and I didn’t know how to respond outside of the generic: I’m sorry. That’s terrible. What can I do? As someone who didn’t want children of my own, I didn’t know how to share in the loss of something I would never experience or know the true depths of, and so I often said nothing.
And then I turned 40, and loving my friends means learning to do better.
Inspiration
My intuition always leads me back to reading and writing. I read when I don’t know what else to do. I write when I don’t know what to do. I talk it through with someone I trust until I know what to do next.
This process of read, write, talk, is not only the foundation of my personal practices, but also my teaching. It is the root of my friendship with Adam, a friend I used to teach across the hall from. Some of my favorite memories of teaching with Adam involved sharing our latest reading and thinking, and talking about how we could grow as teachers.
I inherited Madalyn as a friend when she started dating Adam. Madalyn is an artist and art teacher, and I love thinking through the ways her art and my writing are both vital to our sense of self and how we share ourselves with the world. A few weeks ago, I got to see her latest sculpture exhibit, Intuition, at the Clear Lake Arts Center. When I read her artist’s statements I knew I needed to write my way through what it meant to see her work and to celebrate in the beauty she created from pain and loss and love. I want to use this space to introduce you to my birthday twin, Jayce1 through his mother’s art and words, and my attempts at sensemaking of what it means to share celebration and tragedy and love.
Intuition
On March 30, 2023, I celebrated my 40th birthday by wearing a hot pink spandex jumpsuit to work. It was an obnoxious piece of clothing on the a clearance at TJ Maxx, which means it was too garish even for the most dedicated Maxxinistas. It was a day of celebration at this newly amazing stage of my now middle-aged life. I did not know Madalyn was giving birth to Jayce at the same time I was celebrating.
Artist’s Statement: This piece is a self portrait of me crying glitter tears. I will be forever sad about losing my baby Jayce, but also happy to have known him.
My first thought when I found out Jayce was born sleeping on March 30 was worry for my friends. I have known how long Adam and Madalyn have both wanted marriage and family, and how excited they were to greet baby Jayce. As a selfish person, my immediate second thought was is March 30th ruined now? Will I forever be celebrating on the same day my friends are mourning?
Artist’s Statement: This term stands for Intrauterine Growth Restriction. It is a rare condition causing babies in the womb to not grow as much as they should. There are fewer than 200,000 US cases per year. Jayce had IUGR, which was caused by my severe early onset preeclampsia.
As soon as I knew they were coming home from the hospital, I asked Adam and Madalyn what I could do.
I have never been a good emergency friend. I have been a fun friend or a let’s brainstorm a solution friend, but I am rarely ever capable of being a first responder friend. It’s one of the parts of myself that I hate the most. Something in the pit of my gut knew that with Adam and Madalyn and Jayce, I needed to be the in it for the long haul friend. When I asked what I could do, Adam said I could come over and talk, so we sat in their living room and Madalyn told me the story of Jayce. She spoke with joy and love and it was so clear that there was one thing I could do: I could talk about Jayce.
Instead of mourning every year, my birthday is now a reminder to celebrate a little harder. Jayce was a miracle. Inside the hard wiry cage of IUGR, Madalyn placed a soft knit baby hat. Grief is hard, but the softness of love is always at the core of it. March 30 will be tinged with grief, but the celebration of Jayce will outweigh that.
Artist’s Statement: This piece was inspired by the silence on the Doppler and the ultrasound when Jayce’s heart stopped beating. I re-created a silent princess flower from the Zelda video games my husband plays to represent silence. I was also inspired by the waterfalls during our summer trip to Glacier National Park. The water transforms into tears in this piece.
My silence is something I pay more attention to since Jayce was born. So many of us face grief with silence. People don’t know how to handle death, especially when it is viewed from the outside as tragic. A long life well-lived is celebrated. A life cut short is tiptoed around, as if tragedy is contagion. The silence of Jayce’s heartbeat should not be echoed by silence of who he was and what he meant to his parents.
The hardest part of my dad’s death, so many years later, is how often the mention of having a dead parent makes other people uncomfortable. I talk about my dad all the time. In ways for better or worse, he is one of the most significant influences on my personality. There was Missy before my dad was dead and a different Missy after. There was a Madalyn when Jayce was settled and nurtured and loved inside her and a different Madalyn after.
Artist’s Statement: This is a term which doctors use for the first hour of life of a newborn. During this period, skin-to-skin contact between mother and baby is essential. I held Jayce right after I gave birth to him! There was no crying, movement, or nursing. I was very happy to be able to see him for 3 days before his cremation.
In a golden hour on March 30, Madalyn held Jayce to her chest. She spent three days loving her perfect angel baby and she spent the months after putting her nurturing into art that celebrated everything having Jayce and losing him meant to her.
Artist’s Statement: I used the same amount of clay as my baby Jayce weighed to create the seedling.
I have never seen Madalyn create her art, much like no one can peek inside my brain as I write. Creativity is often a solitary endeavor until the hardest part of the work is done.
I imagine Madalyn, sitting in her workspace at home, weighing and rolling 9.7oz of clay in her hands as she thought about this piece in its early stages. How it was the same weight as holding Jayce, but in a medium she has known longer than she had the chance to know her precious son.
I think about how she used her intuition to create to help share space with the loss, never replacing or running away from her grief, but creating beautiful monuments to it, to herself and her child, and her beautiful family.
I think of Adam, his legendary Midwestern stoicism and how he married a beautiful and vibrant dreamer and artist, and how glad I am that they found each other because it works so well.
And I think about how Madalyn’s work and current show are a celebration of Jayce that is available for anyone to see and walk through, so you can feel how the power of grief and loss shared among the people you love is a grief that eventually becomes bearable.
You can view Madalyn’s artwork, community art classes she offers, and show updates at http://www.madalynvorrie.com/ and on Instagram.
You can see her Intuition exhibit at the Clear Lake Arts Center until October 13th.
You can also see Intuition when it travels to the Charles City, IA Art Center from November 3-30th. She will host an artist’s reception there on November 3rd from 6-8pm.
Madalyn also told me about No Foot Too Small, a Coralville based organization that continues to help the Vorrie family through this journey. Their mission is to unite families, celebrate their angels, and build bereavement suites in hospitals. Their mission and the events they hold for bereaved parents throughout Iowa are truly a place where pain and grief are no longer kept silent.
“birthday twin” is my term for anyone who shares my same birthday: March 30. I was born already having my first birthday twin in my great uncle Richard. My friend Britt has twins who are also my birthday twins! Vincent van Gogh is my birthday twin who is also an epilepsy twin!
This was beautiful. Thank you for sharing.