The Short Version: The Story of Hannah Grace: Part One

I long to write our story. It is a good story. It is a story of the Lord’s sovereignty when the world can only ask ‘why?’ It’s a story of the Lord’s goodness when all the world can see is the sudden end to our sweet girl’s life. It’s a story of the Lord’s peace when we lacked any morsel of understanding. It’s a story of the Lord’s plans when all my plans seemed ruined. And it’s a story of the Lord’s strength; when people have told us ‘wow you are so strong’ I want them to know that all I am is weak, but that we have the Lord and He is strong. The story of our sweet girl Hannah Grace is one I’ll never forget. As the weeks pass and she fades from your memory, as the months pass and she is not my every waking thought, I want to make sure I remember her story. So I’m writing.

I long to fill pages with the incomprehensible joy, sadness, and laughter that has been the past year in our lives. I want to tell my story of becoming a mother for the very first time, even though my story doesn't end like most. I still have a story to tell.

I remember a friend telling me that after you lose a child, after you deliver a baby who has already left this world, after you lose your very first daughter that it’s hard to tell stories. Ladies gather in rooms while the husbands watch football and they talk about their kids, about their babies, about who got an epidural and who decided to breastfeed or use cloth diapers. She told me that you listen and you laugh, but you often don’t share your story. Because your pregnancy stories, your epidural stories, your baby stories, they end with loss. And as much as you smile and laugh as you speak of the awkward moments of labor everyone else gets quiet. Everyone else remembers your hurt and your pain and when it seems like the most polite thing they can do, to stop and remember your pain, all you wanted to do is share your story and have them laugh, too.

My sweet baby girl has a story and so I’m telling it here. And as you read you may laugh at things you never thought you’d laugh at, you may cry about things you never wanted to imagine, but just don’t be too scared to read it. Don’t fall silent and pretend I’m not a mother too.
Because I am a mother. Here’s my story of life after death.

If you'd like to read the other parts to Hannah's story and you haven't already. You can find them here.

The Short Version

I feel as if I should start with the short version of the story. The part with the details people really want to know. I saw something the other day that said something along the lines of ‘Obituaries would be more interesting if they told you how the person died.’ I used to laugh at that line but now it makes me just a bit sad. But it is true, people want to know what happened. I was also reading a book not too long ago that held me in suspense over multiple chapters at whether the author’s baby survived or not. I won’t do that to you now. It’s better that you know the short version ahead of time.


My husband Kyle and I got pregnant in the spring of our 3rd year of marriage. We were expecting our sweet girl to arrive on Christmas Eve. She was healthy and happy all the time it seemed. The doctor kept saying ‘she’s perfect’ again and again at her twenty-week ultrasound. And she was, she was perfect. After the showers were held and the maternity pictures taken, we prepared her nursery. We packed the hospital bag and we waited as the calendar said 38 weeks. And then one day I didn’t feel our baby girl moving. I did all the things the doctors say to do, but they didn’t work, she didn’t move. And we went to the hospital expecting to be turned away like anxious first-time parents, but we weren’t turned away. They told us our baby girl didn’t have a heartbeat. They prepared us for delivery where they found that she had a knot in her umbilical cord that had gotten too tight. Nothing we could have caused, nothing we could have prevented, nothing we could have known. She was perfect in every way except that she was lost, she had been trapped in my body with no way to breathe. We delivered our baby girl at 12:47 in the morning on a Tuesday. We have never seen anything so beautiful; we have never experienced more joy. She was 8 pounds 3 ounces 21.5 inches long and she was in almost every way perfect. Except that she wasn’t breathing, her heart was not beating, and she didn’t cry like all babies do. We held our sweet girl knowing she was already with Jesus. And then we started our road to recovery. There has been great sadness, yet great joy. But that’s only the short version.