Grief Journal : I Will Always Wonder Who You Would Have Been: Pregnancy, Infant, Baby, and Child Loss ~ 6x9 College Ruled Notebook

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My doctor’s phone lay on my chest playing “Rescue” by Lauren Daigle as I faded off to sleep. I can’t even begin to recount how well we were cared for by my medical team and the love we felt there. Our whole world stopped as doctors saved my life, my body fought, and we said goodbye to our beloved daughter. RELATED: God Actually Does Give Us More Than We Can Handle Todd, P. (2016). Future contingents are all false! On behalf of a Russellian open future. Mind, 125(499), 775–798. July 19th would have been Gummy’s birthday. I was already scheduled for a C-section and had much anticipation for my summer baby. I keep calling Gummy a “he” because after the miscarriage, the doctor asked me if I would like to hold “him” one last time. She saw him up close. Gummy was a boy. Part of me will always wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t said too much too soon, if I’d played it cool for a little longer, if I’d controlled my emotions the way you did, if I had just waited a few weeks before telling you how I felt. Maybe I could’ve made you stay. In sum, if future contingents presuppose the existence of a unique actual future and no unique actual future exists, then it would be inappropriate to continue to wonder about them if we learn that there is no unique actual future. Following Todd’s extension of the Russellian analysis of non-denoting definite descriptions, it would be inappropriate to continue to wonder about them because learning that there is no unique actual future involves learning their true, complete answer. If we instead adopt a Strawsonian analysis, it turns out that the questions that serve as the contents of our wonderings about future contingents are unsound, and in coming to know this, we ought not wonder about them. So if future contingents presuppose a unique actual future and no such future exists, once we accept this, it is no longer appropriate to wonder about them.

It will be the case that o is F at t iff a true, complete answer-at- t to the question Is o F at t? is that o is F at t. In addition to Thomason, I include Macfarlane ( 2003, 2008, 2014) under this label even though he adopts a Relativist account of future contingents. The reason I include him under the label of Supervaluationism for the purposes of this discussion is because the question we are considering is whether it is appropriate to wonder about a future contingent before the occurrence of the event described by the future contingent. Macfarlane’s account relativizes truth of future contingents to a context of use and a context of assessment. The truth-value of a statement about the future is arrived at by supervaluating over all histories that include the context of use and the context of assessment. When the context of assessment coincides with the context of use, the truth-conditions for an utterance will be the same as the Supervaluationist truth-conditions, and so, to the extent that I think that Supervaluationism faces a problem regarding wondering about future contingents at the context of use, these problems apply equally to MacFarlane’s account. Making truth of future contingents relative to context of use and context of assessment is intended to accommodate retrospective accuracy judgments: judgments after the event described in the utterance has occurred. Will’ here means ‘will definitely’; ‘It will be that p’ is not true until it is in some sense settled that it will be the case, and ‘It will be that not p’ is not true until it is in some sense settled that not-p will be the case. If the matter is not thus settled, both these assertions, i.e. [It will be the case that p] and [It will be the case that not p] are simply false...(Prior, 1967, 129).One might respond “But isn’t there an asymmetry between the past and the future? Isn’t the past fixed and the future open? So, shouldn’t there be an asymmetry in wondering about the future versus wondering about the past?” I agree that there are various asymmetries between the past and the future, and some underlie an asymmetry in mental attitudes, but it is not clear that there is such an asymmetry in our wondering whether attitudes. Relief, regret, anticipation, and fear are all plausibly temporally asymmetric attitudes. For example, if Susan regrets not sending Mia a card for her birthday, and then learns that Mia’s birthday is not until next month, it is inappropriate for her to continue to regret not sending Mia a card for her birthday (even if Susan knows she is bad about sending cards and knows she will not send her one next month). But wondering whether doesn’t seem to be temporally asymmetric in this way. The following three considerations support the conclusion that wondering whether attitudes about future events are much like wondering whether attitudes about past and present events. The first is that in the case of temporally asymmetric attitudes like relief and anticipation, learning how we are temporally related to the event in question has a significant impact on the attitude. This does not seem to be the case for wondering whether. We can wonder whether a particular event occurs without knowing (or caring) whether the event is in our future. Discovering that the event lies in our future does not appear to affect our wondering whether attitude in the way that it does with other temporally asymmetric attitudes like relief and anticipation. Suppose Wanda wonders whether Serena Williams wins the 2021 US Open. Due to her preoccupation with other things and the disarray of the tournament calendar due to Covid, Wanda is unaware of whether the 2021 US Open has already taken place. Finding out that the 2021 US Open hasn’t happened yet does not alter her attitude of wondering whether Serena Williams wins. It would be entirely appropriate for her to continue to wonder whether Serena Williams wins were she to discover that the 2021 US Open hasn’t happened yet. In contrast, it would have a significant impact on her attitude of anticipation of the event: learning that it hasn’t happened yet may lead her to adopt an attitude of anticipation towards the event. I learned through all of this that I was not alone. I felt like I was the only woman to ever suffer a miscarriage. I was a failure. I let my child down. I couldn’t do the one thing right that a woman’s body was designed to do. I tried to do everything right, and still it wasn’t good enough. I was ashamed. Embarrassed. Guilt-ridden. But I learned that miscarriages are more common than you think. The sonographerstarted to speak apprehensively, describing various things she could see, and then she delivered the news I already knew,"but unfortunately I can't see a little heartbeat there today, I'm so sorry" I looked at the screen, the perfectly shaped littlefoetus, but no tiny limb movements, silence, stillness, it was there but just floating in the darkness.

For the life of me, I couldn’t fathom why God would make this a part of our story —we aren’t strangers to hard, but this was beyond any comprehension. How else might the Supervaluationist explain the appropriateness of wondering about future contingents? Interestingly, for a Supervaluationist, betting that the sodium-24 atom will decay tomorrow is not the same as betting that it is true that the sodium-24 atom will decay tomorrow. Footnote 35 Given that (NA24) is a future contingent, a Supervaluationist would be foolish to take the second bet. What about the first? Given the nonequivalence between \(\upvarphi\) and \(\upvarphi\) is true, what if we take my wondering to be not whether it is true that the sodium-24 atom will decay tomorrow, but rather whether the sodium-24 atom will decay tomorrow? Given the Supervaluationist account of future contingents, would wondering be appropriate in this case? I wanted to write this as a tribute to the child that I lost. He existed. He was real. He is not something to hide or to be ashamed of. He was mine. And he had a name. Gummy. The sentence structure I wonder [X] is declarative. The X is usually a noun clause that is the object of the verb wonder.It may seem that if at moment m it is sensible to wonder whether A, then it must be that either A is settled true at m, or that A is settled false at m. More generally, it may seem that if one is to be able, at m, properly to raise the question whether A, then A must be either settled true or settled false...No matter how things eventuate, the question posed on Monday, “Will there be a sea battle tomorrow?” will be answered. If there is a sea battle on Tuesday, then we may say, “The answer to the question is definitely ‘yes’.”; while if on Tuesday there is no sea battle, then we may say, “The answer to the question is definitely ‘no’.” We should therefore not reject the Monday question as badly posed. It is perfectly correct on Monday to say something like “We cannot yet provide a settled answer to that question, but must wait and see” (Belnap et al., 2001, 176). I was wheeled into surgery surrounded by the most amazing and compassionate team we could’ve ever asked for. Thankfully, I went on to have 2 more beautiful, healthy children. Little did I know that my miscarriage was just the beginning of a very difficult journey. I could write a book on the struggle and turmoil that would be the next part of my efforts to expand my family! But it was all so very worth it. I am not looking for a pity party. I am doing ok. But I do want to break the silence, I want to speak for those women that are experiencing this pain right now. They should not have to feel alone or unjustified in their sadness. I knew in these moments that grieving the loss of our daughter would be soul-crushing, but I had to make it home to our three babies and my husband. I had to.

Gummy would have turned 4-years old in a few days. I wonder what he would be like. What would he would look like? I think of the life he would have had and who he would have been. He is not just a memory. He was my son. I was his mother. I was his mother from the moment I found out about him. Knowing you are carrying a life inside of you is a bond like no other. If you’ve ever lost a child, and you have no babies on this earth, you are still a mother. The world may not know it, but you do. I will always consider myself a mother of four. 3 on earth and 1 angel baby in heaven. Three days prior to that life-altering decision, I was admitted to the hospital with stroke-level blood pressures that sent everyone into action and panic immediately. My condition was a mystery to the doctors for a few days while I underwent every scan, test, and lab under the sun to figure out why I was so ill. After days of this, my incredible maternal-fetal medicine doctor came to me with her theory, but it took a little more time for everything to unfold because what she told us was so unfathomable, rare, and heartbreaking. I was essentially carrying an undetected twin pregnancy with a complete molar pregnancy alongside our growing Maya. Barnes, E., & Cameron, R. (2009). The open future: Bivalence, determinism and ontology. Philosophical Studies, 146, 291–309. F \(\upvarphi\) is true at m iff for every h that contains m, F \(\upvarphi\) is satisfied at m in h.

Part of me will always wonder if it was just me, if it was all my head, if whatever we had was nothing but my imagination or a dream that felt so real. Part of me will always wonder what happened to you, why you turned into someone you’re not, why you brutally rejected someone’s love and why you stopped yourself from falling. Maybe I could’ve been everything you were looking for.