Northern Michigan Voices is a series by 9&10 News reporter Olivia Fellows in which she interviews a person in the community about a story from their life. Everyone has an interesting story to tell and we want to give you a voice, Northern Michigan! To submit your own story pitch, see the bottom of this article for more details.
In this edition, Olivia speaks with Big Rapids parents Katie and Ben Brooks, who shared their experience with infertility treatments, child loss and their outlook on finding grace in grief through parenthood as they raise their 3-year-old twin daughter Avalynn.
Hear from Ben and Katie on how their experience with infertility treatments and later the death of their son Linkin in-vetro impacted their lives, and how they are determined to honor his life and help other parents in sharing their story.
Disclaimer: This story does include clinical details that may be difficult to read. Reader discretion is advised.
Q: Tell me a little bit about yourselves individually and then a bit about your background as a couple.
BEN: I’m from the Morley Stanwood area, and we met in college at Finlandia University. It took basically a whole semester of communicating with a friendship, we would hang out almost weekly up until hockey season started for her. I knew I had liked her pretty early on, but she had said that she had like a boyfriend back at home, so I didn’t press the issue but we talked nonstop.
KATIE: I think we just started hanging out and got closer and closer. There were some, let’s say, bumps in the road, and we started dating, probably a month later. After graduation, we moved down to Metro Detroit where I’m from. I grew up on the east side of the state in Lake Orion. We’ve been together since 2010 we got married in April 2014. I’m a Family Preservation social worker.
BEN: I went through some jobs that I had started a career working at DISH Network, and then we moved into our house in Big Rapids and it was basically kind of like, “All right, well, let’s start a family,” and then that’s where all the trials started. I think that’s what we want to share, that part of our story including infertility troubles, problems, heartbreak and successes, obviously, with Ava. The main thing is to let people know that they’re that they’re not alone. There are a lot of families that deal with this, and not every story is a happy story, but for a lot of them, there is light at the end of the tunnel and there is some hope.
Discovering infertility challenges
Q: Please start wherever you feel most comfortable. What can you tell me about your journey to parenthood?
KATIE: I don’t like calling it a success story or not, because just because you don’t end up with a child doesn’t mean that your journey wasn’t successful. There are two different sides of infertility, obviously with male infertility and then female infertility. They don’t teach you about any of that stuff growing up, so it was kind of like it hit us pretty blindsided.
At the time, we were just basically not preventing having a child anymore but not tracking the ovulation and really trying to see when we could have a baby. Then, I noticed that my period just kind of stuck. I went several months without having a period, and I just had convinced myself that I was pregnant, even though tests were saying no. I thought, “I’m young, I’m healthy, I’ve never had any issues there should be no issues.” This was, 2014-15 and I just don’t feel like I heard a lot about infertility in general.
Finally, we went to the doctor and they said, “No, you’ve never been pregnant, go and do all this further testing and see what’s going on.” A little backstory of it is, my mom actually did struggle with infertility as well. She and my dad tried for four or five years even, before they got pregnant with my sister. They struggled for a long time and then had a bunch of kids, three in a row.
Early on, my mom also got sick with a super rare condition. It was obvious throughout college, and we knew we wanted to get married kind of young because I wanted my mom to be a part of it because our time was very limited with her.
So, we started doing all the testing of things and spent thousands of dollars on stuff, everything came back fine. He (Ben) did a sperm count test, and that was also fine. I had two ovaries, a fine uterus and no blockages or anything like that. Because it had been so long, I think it had been nine months or so that I had not had a period, they prescribed us this medication called Clomid. It helps a female ovulate and gets their eggs to a point where they can be released and fertilized. It’s hormone-based, so you go a little crazy. It’s pretty intense, but we never had success with that.
We started tracking ovulation with basal body temperature stuff and I would take the ovulation test kit to track my cycle, and we never had a positive ovulation. We tried that for six months, and it was a short-term medicine because it’s hormone-controlled. It actually becomes dangerous if you take it for too long.
We were then referred to a fertility clinic, and the next test I had to go in for was a hysterosalpingogram and I was under anesthesia, and they shot dye through my fallopian tubes and into my uterus just to make sure that there were no blockages that couldn’t be seen from an ultrasound.
That came back clear. Everything was fine. They did tell me I likely had polycystic ovary syndrome which no one had ever told me I had a diagnosis for before. By then it had been almost two years since we started the process of trying to get pregnant.
Basically, there are a couple of different forms of it, but mine specifically was a form where my eggs would not get mature enough and they would turn into polyps so it’s basically a fluid sac. My eggs were never getting released to be able to be fertilized by sperm and antique refinement and so they turned into cysts but were not painful cysts. They would just re-form each cycle and repeat the process.
The next step they told us as an option was intrauterine insemination. With that, you usually take injection hormones and the cost of that kind of stuff was ginormous. We weren’t sure we could afford it, because we had already at this point probably spent $10,000 on testing.
Insurance doesn’t cover any part of any of that testing, because it is all for fertility and not for health. Furthermore, I work for Catholic Charities West Michigan and any kind of reproductive health is not covered by a Catholic organization for health care. Later, they prescribed me a medication called Promara, which is a secondary infertility treatment that works better than Clomid, supposedly.
I think I had taken about a month of it, and this would have been January or December of 2015, then in January of 2016 Ben’s dad unexpectedly passed away, and so we were in the middle of this crazy fertility journey and our world shattered.
It was a very unexpected, sudden thing. I remember going to his family’s house that evening, and his uncle said — and it was so innocent, it really was — but it was probably the most painful thing I’ve honestly ever heard. He said, ”God, I really wish that your dad got to see you be a dad.” Ben and I got up, and I left and I walked out because that is all I ever wanted.
There’s the infertility, and then there’s the shame that comes along with it. At this point, I knew that I was the problem. You try to not feel like that, but it’s really hard not to. We’re talking 2016 and I don’t feel like they talked about it, even my OB didn’t really ever say anything. The fertility clinic didn’t say anything to us. It was just, “This is just what is going to happen for you, here’s a support group or here’s this to look at,” but there was not any kind of genuinely comforting support on it.
Ben and I then had a conversation where we said “This tragedy just happened, do we want to continue with this now? Do we want to reevaluate in a couple of months?” Ben said “No, I want to be a dad. I want to do this now.” So, we continued with the medication for the next six months. I had a little bit of success with that where I would have some positive ovulation, but we never got pregnant.
As you can imagine, when you lose your dad unexpectedly it’s a lot. He was going through a lot of grief, and that really challenged our marriage. Then we had the grief of infertility, so we were just kind of like numb and not in a great place in our marriage.
Nine months later, my mom passed away in September of 2016. My best friend, my support, my everything — passed away. That obviously brought so much more grief, and we really couldn’t afford anything it felt like. The first time we just used savings and didn’t take out any loans, every penny that we got we put towards fertility treatments.
We got to a point where it was like, “I don’t even want to be married to you anymore, this is awful.” We did not know how to communicate, we did not know how to handle our own grief with our parents or how to support each other. Neither one of us was being a good spouse, we would just fight and bicker.
Finally, through my work, we did this program called encompass and it gave us free therapy. I told Ben he could choose to show up or not, but either way, I’ll have my answer where this marriage is going. Turns out, he showed up and we did three or four sessions and got some good information out of it. We eventually got to a point where we said, “We can do this.”
We started making choices that worked and tried to be smart financially. I think that that’s a whole other side of the infertility journey that people don’t talk about, the financial stuff really is still impacting us to this day. Everything had gone towards having a kid. when it’s all done, said and done, I feel like we’re somewhere between $35,000 to $40,000 that we have spent to become parents.
We ended up getting referred to a different therapist after that short-term one, and we saw him both together as a couple and individually. I will still say, that saved our marriage.
Pregnancy and child loss
KATIE: After we decided to continue the treatments, I continued to get more cysts because of COVID-19 and at that point, it got dangerous to continue to take so they referred me back to the fertility clinic. We revisited the intrauterine insemination option talk and started our first treatments in January 2020.
We both turned 30 that year in February, we’re a week apart from each other. We had a 30th birthday party and I was already on injection meds, and they weren’t working so I needed to get more. They’re hundreds of dollars, and you order them through a fertility company. We were out in Grand Rapids and they changed my dose and told me to go on it for longer, and the package didn’t come in the mail and we were mid-cycle. You can’t just miss a day,
The next morning, I had to go to the fertility clinic office and they had some in stock at the office and were able to give me that until mine came in that day. We did that finally with some success of follicles that were turning into good eggs, and then we were able to do our first intrauterine insemination trigger shot.
With that, you have a 12 to 24-hour window when your egg is going to be released and so you plan the IUI during that time. They tell you to have sex 12 hours before you take the shot and 24 hours after so that you can have the greatest chance of getting pregnant during that time.
Around 10 days later, I took a pregnancy test, and I did not want to see what it was until we were both home from work for that day. I was so excited, but I hid it from myself and Ben out of that shame aspect and fear of it potentially not being positive.
Especially in a female’s mind, I knew when my body was changing. Every single thing was so calculated that I knew it all. One big drawback was that it takes away that want to be organically intimate with your partner and turns it into a job and a chore.
BEN: I asked her to try to not tell me as much as she didn’t have to with when she did things and the timing, because you still want to have some romance in your relationship. You’re down to dates, times and hours when you have to do this. It doesn’t feel spontaneous. It doesn’t feel like you’re connecting on that intimate level of romance.
We knew when this was supposed to happen and wanted to allow ourselves to be surprised at least sometimes during this whole process, because nothing else is a surprise.
KATIE: Yes, and to continue the story we have three nephews who live locally who we go to sports games for and we knew we couldn’t wait any longer that day before leaving to go to one of their games. That whole day, Ben didn’t know I had taken a test, but I did. We got home from work and I told him I’d taken one and we set up a phone to record our reactions, and that test was positive. after our first IUI, we had a positive pregnancy test for the first time in six years of trying.
We cried, we screamed, all of it was just such a whirlwind. After we said, “All right, well, let’s go to this basketball game and pretend like we’re not pregnant.”
BEN: But, we decided that we would have one person that we would each tell before we did the big family reveal.
KATIE: Oh, yes. For me, my friend Jolene from college had also struggled with infertility and was actually pregnant during that time. She ended up having eight miscarriages before she had a healthy full-term pregnancy, and then she used IVF. She was a great support for me throughout all of that so I was able to tell her before we told everyone else. Ben had his friend, Andrew, that he was able to tell.
That evening, we did tell his brother Patrick and our sister-in-law Brandy at the basketball game, and I was also able to tell Ben’s mom. Then later on, we went down to see my family in Detroit and were able to surprise my dad, my sister and my brother with the news as well.
That Monday, we had our first ultrasound, and at the time we were six weeks pregnant and had done all of our blood work to test HCG levels and things like that. All of this was during the COVID-19 pandemic, so for most appointments, Ben couldn’t be in the room with me, which was hard. He was in the car and I could FaceTime him so he could see stuff on the screen.
At the appointment, it was confirmed that we were pregnant but that our baby did not have a heartbeat at that moment though that wasn’t uncommon, because we were only six weeks pregnant so measurements on that baby were a couple of days behind. They told me in there that there was a high probability that I could miscarry because, again, you know exactly when you could have gotten pregnant so if you’re measuring behind that early, that there could be something that did not fully form and that pregnancy would not be a viable pregnancy.
They asked for me to come back at week seven to have another ultrasound and kind of see how things were. I left the office and I was so upset that they even said the word miscarriage. We were both super dismissive of all of that because we felt like it couldn’t even be a possibility. This was our baby. We saw this baby, it was moving, you could see it clear as day.
We went back at week seven, and it was COVID-19 times and Ben again could not be in the clinic with me, and the baby had grown. The baby had a heartbeat, and we got to hear our first little baby’s heartbeat, which is a sound that no parent will ever forget and is the most magical thing in the entire world. The baby had grown but was still developing slower than they thought.
We were told there was a really high probability of a miscarriage, and they wanted us to come back in again to monitor it. I went into the appointment at eight weeks, and Ben, once again, couldn’t be in there. I told them I’d started bleeding, and I already knew what this meant. They did the ultrasound and they confirmed that that baby no longer had a heartbeat and that I would be miscarrying that child.
They told me that they would give me a call in a few days, and I would be able to determine which route I wanted to go to fully miscarry. I called work to say I wouldn’t be there that week because I needed some time, and they were super supportive.
By the next day, I was miscarrying at home. They tell you that it is like a mild period, that you’ll experience cramping and some blood, but it’s nothing non-manageable or anything like that, and that is the farthest from the truth. that is also one thing that I really would like to give a real experience on because you are in labor.
You’re an active labor. Your body is contracting. You’re just not dilating, because your body doesn’t need that force and pressure to have a full-size baby, you know, giving birth.
It was during the pandemic, so I was already isolated as it was. Ben was an essential worker, he worked at DISH Network at this point in time and was needed because people needed internet services.
I just remember laying on the couch and crying so uncontrollably and not knowing what was going to happen. I was in so much pain. I asked my friend Jolene if my experience was normal because I felt like I was dying and I felt like I should go to the hospital. She told me she knew just how awful it was but that it did sound normal to her.
The doctors also tell you that you wouldn’t be able to tell when you are passing your actual baby, that it would just be like a normal period that you would have some stuff, and that’s also not true. I actually knew exactly when I did pass our child. I remember being in the bathroom at home alone, and just looking down at this wipe and recognizing this is a baby. This is my baby in my hands right here. It’s not supposed to be and wondering, what do I do?
You flush it down the toilet, but that didn’t seem like that was something that you’d want to do to your first child after everything that you have been through. But you also don’t want it, like it was just such a mind-(expletive). You just wash it down the toilet and go back to crying and fetal position and not knowing what to do.
That is also not something that anybody should ever not be prepared to have to do. Doctors should educate you on what is happening to your body and what is going to happen, and support you because of the mental health struggle that you have through infertility, the anxiety, the depression, the out-of-body experience when you are disposing of a child that you so badly wanted.
After that, because of the pandemic restrictions, we couldn’t continue treatments. At that point in time, they did not know how COVID-19 would affect pregnant women, for one, and also, you had to hit certain criteria to be able to continue. People who had a limited time could continue because they had far less hope than we did. We still had, and we still do have, a lot of ability to have a healthy baby and so we were thankful for that.
I’m very thankful that we had a little bit of time with COVID-19 to kind of reset. In June 2020, we were able to resume treatment cycles. I had another cycle and it went very well and I had three follicles with more likely to grow. I had to sign paperwork that said that I was okay with potentially having multiples, and I knew the risk of having multiples was elevated because of the medication and with the IUI. When we did that, unfortunately, it did not end in a pregnancy, which happens.
An IUI really only gives you a little bit higher percentage of getting pregnant than doing it naturally, so I did not get pregnant. On our third IUI cycle, we took out a loan because we had exhausted our savings and everything a second time doing all of this.
I had a great response to medication that next time, I think I was only on four days of hormone medication before they told me I had follicles. I had one follicle that was mature and one follicle that was likely to grow, which gave us two shots at a pregnancy.
Fast forward 10 days after the procedure, we took a pregnancy test that morning and I was pregnant and that line was very profound. When I went in for the ultrasound, as soon as the doctor went to my uterus I saw two gestational forms. I was like, “Holy (expletive) we’re having twins.”
I knew it was a possibility, but twins just seemed unrealistic and like it wasn’t going to happen to me. It wasn’t going to be my thing after all of this. We told our close family and friends, but we did not share it with everybody. I did share once I had miscarried, but I wanted this journey to be different.
I hated that, I really do, looking back on it. I think I just naively didn’t share with people, but I really wish I would have because people didn’t get to share in the joy and us having a baby. People only got to support us through our sorrow and I think that all babies need to be celebrated.
We went to surprise our family that it was twins, and everybody lost their minds like it was the coolest thing in the entire world, because it was. I was terrified at that point but I was super excited. Ben was very excited, he had always wanted twins.
BEN: When we found out it was twins after all we’d been through, that’s when the tears set in for me. After that, we had to start preparing.
KATIE: Later, we go to the six-week ultrasound and it is all great. There were two healthy heartbeats. Here’s baby A, here’s baby B. They’re growing right on track. Everything is amazing. You are discharged from the fertility clinic and you go to your regular gynecologist. Having twins in general does cause a high-risk pregnancy, so they typically say at some point you’ll be referred to a medical maternal fetal high-risk doctor, but we didn’t need that at the time.
It was probably like week seven, and I absolutely knew I was pregnant. I was sick every day, all day long. It was miserable. It was awful for almost three months.
BEN: Yeah, she did lose a lot of weight because of the nausea. We also were prepping, buying two beds and you start registering for your things that are twin-related. You start planning for twins.
KATIE: We had the nurse write down the genders in an envelope so that we could be surprised. We had a gender reveal party for baby A downstate with my family, and then the next weekend we had a gender reveal for baby B with Ben’s family and our friends up here. We had only known one gender for a week so we were surprised with them. Baby A was a boy and baby B was a girl.
While we did get to surprise people with the twins, we still wanted to celebrate every moment of this that we could with our family. When we went back for week 24 for an ultrasound, when you have a single pregnancy you don’t have this many ultrasounds, but with twins, they’re looking for a lot more because it’s high-risk.
We had had the same ultrasound tech for multiple visits at this time, and we started building a relationship with her.
BEN: At this point, I’m asking 1000 questions because this is all weird to me, I’m a guy, so I don’t know everything that can go on and I’m just asking all the questions. They can tell so much from these scans to know if there’s a problem or if your kid has a high probability of having a disability or malformation. We kept watching her measure, measure and measure both babies.
KATIE: All of a sudden, as she was measuring her demeanor changed. Looking back, we didn’t immediately notice it because we were already on cloud nine. She told us she would be right back and left to get someone else, and I felt like something was wrong. We got pulled into another room with a different doctor who then told us that baby B didn’t have a heartbeat and had stopped developing around 22 weeks. Our whole world shattered. That was on December 8, 2020.
At that point, we knew that I had two separate gestational sacs and two separate placentas and so anything that was happening with baby A was not going to affect baby B. The only thing to have been concerned about was if my body decided to try to go into labor because it could sense that I had a deceased baby in my womb. They had told us to look out for early signs of labor and go home and that was it.
We had obviously gotten so far along, we were trying to figure out names. We knew the boy’s name we had always loved was Linkin, but we had differences in how we wanted to spell it. After we found out he was the baby that had passed, we decided that was it, Linkin would be his name. His middle name is Thomas, after my dad.
I had a very healthy rest of the pregnancy, which is like a miracle in itself. I think that that was really a point in time where I found my faith again. I just was praying every day and constantly that I would be able to have this other baby. We decided to name her Avalynn, which means a beautiful breath of life. We just felt like that was so fitting to kind of see what really she had to have been through. Her middle name is Claire, which is after Ben’s dad, who had also passed and they just kind of worked perfectly together.
Before she even knew anything she was growing alongside somebody for so long, and he was moving, he had a heartbeat. He was kicking her, he was doing all those things, and all of a sudden that stopped. She kept getting bigger, and he kept getting smaller.
The birth process
BEN: We had tons of appointments, a lot of emotional appointments because you see maternal fetal medicine every month and then our OB every month. then we had to do non-stress tests when we got later into the third trimester. It was constantly nerve-wracking.
KATIE: You just sit there in a room and you listen to your baby’s heartbeat, and there’s nothing that beats that sound. There’s absolutely nothing in the world and I recorded it every time. We have recordings of both of their heartbeats. I listen to it all of the time, whenever there is stress or anxiety, I listen back to the heartbeats. It’s so magical, I’m glad I recorded them.
One minute, you’re fine, then you’re not. You’re just trying to learn, navigate and process. We feel very blessed to have been able to know early on that we were only going to come home with one baby because there are lots of people that go to the hospital expecting to and have to do all of that at once, and then come home with a newborn and don’t have any warning when they lose a child. While it’s not easy by any means, we at least could prepare as best as we could. Before the birth, we were trying to ask questions about what happened, can we hold him and what can we do with his remains? Everyone was giving us rather random answers.
BEN: It just depends on the body. There were so many things that were unknown because it was such a rare situation. They didn’t know how to what to expect.
KATIE: Genetic testing is another important aspect of it, and we decided not to do genetic testing because we felt that whatever came we would deal with it. After Linkin had passed, Ben was okay never knowing what happened. I was not I wanted to try to find out an answer, just so that I could have a little bit of peace of mind.
We eventually decided that we would try for genetic testing that is not covered by insurance. I think it was $1,500 that we paid, and ultimately could not figure anything out because he had been passed for so long that because it is blood work from me his cells were still, and still are even now, present in my blood but not enough to be able to do any kind of testing and figure it out. With genetic testing, at the end of the day, it is a complete personal preference with each family.
They allow for induction at 39 weeks, but especially because it was still considered a multiple pregnancy. So I was scheduled to be induced on the evening of April 1 and we were due April 6. I was off work the whole night and felt like I was just having Braxton Hicks contractions, and was uncomfortable. I had just had a dilation check and was not dilated. Ben said we should go to the hospital but I chickened out because I didn’t think it was that dramatic.
Later on, Ben told me I needed to make up my mind about going to the hospital.
BEN: At the time, I was leaving at like, 5:30 in the morning and I had to drive to Grand Rapids and I wasn’t going to drive all the way back so I needed her to make that choice before I left. I was happy she decided we would go.
KATIE: The day when we went to the hospital for the birth, I tested positive for COVID-19. I was tested because I was set to be induced, and because of protocols we were not able to have any visitors and were not able to leave our hospital room. We knew that going in that morning we couldn’t do all of that stuff.
BEN: I remember when they hooked Katie up to the machines and the nurse asked what her contractions were like, and Katie told her they were pretty erratic and she didn’t know how far apart they were and didn’t think she was really having that many. She turned the screen towards Katie and she said “Oh, honey, you’re having a whole lot more than you think you are.” It was such a funny situation because I’d almost always known Katie had a high tolerance for pain. It turns out she was basically in full-blown labor, with contractions around two minutes apart.
KATIE: Because Linkin (baby A) was smaller, Ava (baby B) pushed him out of the way. Ava became baby A, which means they are the closest to your cervix. When I went to my appointment earlier that week, that’s how they were situated. Ava was first and Lincoln was up top. Well, for also funsies, they switched spots. And so I was in full-blown labor, not dilated though with Linkin, and so I was about to give birth to him and my body was not prepared to give birth to a full-size child.
They came back in and said to us that we could try to have a natural birth and pass Linkin and then see what my body does, but it could land an emergency C-section because if my body tried to have Ava she could get stuck.
BEN: The doctors couldn’t find Linkin, and he was obviously way smaller and kind of hidden at this point because he had shriveled back up. That’s how they explained it, that he essentially shrivels up. They told us Ava could try to push him through, and then Ava could come but with her pushing on him, but you could end up with her sack breaking and that causes crazy things for Ava like being in there without the safeness of her gestational sac and a lot of other little things.
We ended up going with a C-section, and during that, they literally lay her on a table and she couldn’t move. it’s so weird because you could just see her body was moving because they’re in there and it’s surgery. I’m sitting there and I’m dad so I’m cool, but for her, they’re just doing stuff and her whole body is just shaking and moving around and then all of a sudden they hold up Ava.
KATIE: In that moment, both of us just started crying with happiness because of the journey and everything that had led to that point. Then I quickly started with the after-birth stuff like skin-to-skin and breastfeeding Ava. It was a whirlwind.
After the C-section, I felt that I specifically wanted to see Linkin and hold him, but Ben was kind of unsure. I told my doctor, “If you think that this is something that I’m not going to want to see I trust you and you can make that call.” We ultimately decided we wouldn’t see him, but after I had given birth they came in and they gave us this little purple box that had a bear in it, and they made some bracelets that had Linkin’s name on it. They were also able to get foot prints of his also.
We got that stuff, and then they just handed me this paperwork and on the very top of it it said stillborn registration. I’m just like, could y’all have given me a little heads up of what you’re about to bring to me? I don’t know if I would have felt like this regardless of the situation, but it just seemed so routine. I just think that there’s a better way that our hospital systems can support these parents who are just experiencing this, especially with the mental health side of things.
BEN: The nurses were great, they were great about educating us about the risk. I think they’re respecting it and understanding of that side of things, but there’s no preparation for the parents with what happens after. I felt like it was more the doctors who made us feel a little rushed and somewhat stone-cold. The nurses were super connected and emotional. They were good about it.
After the birth
KATIE: We didn’t know a lot of that and we had one social worker. Probably the last month of pregnancy when I was at the doctor’s office, they called me on the phone. It wasn’t even like an in-person visit or anything, and they asked me if I knew about options and I told them no, I didn’t know anything. They told me I just needed to identify a funeral home and let them know if we wanted his ashes, but all of a sudden we’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what we have never done this.”
I think, especially because I’m a social worker, I was able to recognize that’s not okay. They were supposed to be supportive of us in this. They ended up finding ones that were close by us, and then let us choose them once we were at the hospital.
From there, I filled out the paperwork of stuff and gave it to them, and then they handled the funeral kind of arrangement stuff. We did choose to have him cremated, and we have his ashes. I felt they really could have just done a better job of supporting us through that process. One thing that you have to know too is you still have to pay for the cremation and funeral services for your dead child.
We walked into the funeral home with a newborn baby, they could tell that she was just born and that they knew, obviously, that we were picking up a baby. The first time we got to hold our son was in a bag on the way home from a funeral home. I do feel like it was the hardest thing just knowing we were driving up there and it was like, “This is not how this should go. This is not how anybody should have to deal with anything.”
When we went to pick up Linkin’s ashes at Daggett-Gilbert Funeral Home in Big Rapids, they were really kind. When we went to pay they told us, “You owe us nothing. We’re so sorry.” The lady there was super great.
There were a lot of things that we did to honor Linkin. We had maternity pictures, we made signs that said “Sometimes not all twins walk side-by-side, sometimes one has wings to fly.” We also did newborn pictures that honor him showing their connection, as well as got a book for Ava that’s called “The Story of My Twin,” and it says Linkin Thomas and it tells about their story growing together and that he’s still with her in many ways through her. It’s what’s called a lost book. It’s from a UK-based company that makes kind of like custom books for these unique situations.
We also celebrate what we call “Linkin Day” every Dec. 8, where we collect donations from family and friends and donate it to a charity in his honor. This last year we did a diaper and clothing and baby item drive, and I think we got over 2,000 diapers and 2,000 wipes donated to Life Resources in Big Rapids.
At Christmas time, we pick a local child, a little boy that would be Lincoln’s age, and we do an Angel Tree for him and purchase items for the tree. We always want to make it a new child every year.
I’m working on plans to start our own nonprofit called Linkin Community to kind of help people through infertility, pregnancy loss and also just through parenting in general. It is a journey, whether your story is like ours and difficult, or if it was a different kind of difficult or if it was sunshine and rainbows. Parenting is not and people need that support too.
They always say it takes a village to raise a child, but there are so many people who do not have a village, and we believe that it is our purpose and God’s purpose to have this story in our lives to help others. We just want to support people, children, families and anybody who wants to become a parent should always have that opportunity. If they need a little bit of support, we got them.
Q: Is there anything additional that you wish more people knew about infertility challenges and pregnancy loss and how it affects parents emotionally, physically and mentally?
KATIE: I think that there is a lot of wrong things you can do to support a friend or a family member through it, and so truly, the only right thing to do is say, “I am sorry, and I am here for you,” in whatever capacity that means for you. Each individual is going to have their own capacity of what they can give to others, but everybody can at least say, “I am sorry.” Don’t try to say, “‘At least you have a baby,’ or ‘It’ll happen someday just keep trying.’” Those statements are so unintentionally harmful, and it’s not that easy. Don’t say “‘Just have fun with it,’” because for many families it is not fun.
BEN: I agree, and saying things like “Practice makes perfect” or similar things, they’re unintentionally harmful things that you’re saying because you’re trying to make light of the situation. Just validate the person or family that’s the biggest thing. To say, “I’m sorry that you’re dealing with this.”
From my standpoint, the other half of it is don’t compare it to your own experiences. Don’t introduce, or interject yourself into their loss and problems. Some people would constantly put it towards their own experiences, and that’s not helpful. My story is my own, I will have my own feelings towards it.
KATIE: Giving people the space to have the feelings that they want to feel, and sitting with somebody in that uncomfortable silence. You shouldn’t know what to say. I really hope that most people don’t know what to do in these situations, but there is a lot of harm that you can do by just not acknowledging them.
In general, you should never ask people when they are going to have kids, how many kids they’re going to have and when’s the next one coming? We get that now.
Truthfully, right now, we’re dealing with secondary infertility, and so we would love to have another child. It terrifies me to even try to go through that process again but I also do believe that we are great parents, and we want to expand our family.
he financial cost, it has changed our entire life of what we can do. We have to be so mindful of every single thing, because we spent between 35-$40,000 to have the child that we have, and we’re still paying for it, in lots of different ways. Honestly, that’s a very low amount of money among people spend that have struggled with infertility. We’re in the middle ground of treatments with the IUI because we had success on two out of three IU eyes, that’s a great success rate.
There’s a there’s a lot to it. We have always been outspoken about our journey, everybody has. We are an open book. We will always tell everybody what is going on, what we went through and what we’re going through but people still feel the need to kind of like make those comments.
One in probably two to three pregnancies end in a miscarriage or a stillbirth, I really do believe that that number is a lot higher, and sometimes there’s not really any great reason for it, it just happens.
You’re not alone if you’re experiencing this and there are limited resources, but there are definitely some resources in Michigan that can help connect you to other people even if it’s just a Facebook support group or something where you can talk with people who have also experienced it.
Q: Were there any resources, whether they were clinical or, like you mentioned, Facebook groups or similar platforms that were helpful for you guys as you were going through this?
One foundation that we connected to ourselves with was the One Wish Foundation, based out of Lansing. They are actually currently only operating through the end of this year, and they are merging with another foundation called Chosen Infertility Group, and both of those help the financial support of people pursuing IUI, IVF, surrogacy and adoption.
Some of the foundations that we donated to include RESOLVE, Chosen Infertility Group and The Fertility Center. One of the pages I follow includes “Things I Wish You Knew - Real Life After Baby Loss” at @_thethingsiwishyouknew on Instagram.
We still do feel so blessed that we were able to bring home a child, and that’s not everybody’s situation. I cannot really imagine going through all of this and then coming home with no baby.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share regarding how the experience impacted you as a person?
BEN: I will say a lot of the support groups were a lot for moms. There was really almost nothing for me as a dad, and you’re dealing with loss. It’s hard to say, but you’re dealing with loss in a different capacity because mom’s connected a whole lot more because the baby’s growing inside of mom. But dads get excited about being parents too. There was almost nothing for me, so I think what happened to me more than anything else was the depression. I dealt with depression pretty brutally, even through Ava’s first year with us.
Therapy was okay and it did deal with some things, but it felt like there was nothing for dads that deal with the loss. What did help me realistically was when we started going to church. I found my faith, and that turned my complete world around.
KATIE: I do feel like with any group that I’m in and any information I read, it’s always talking about the isolation part. If we could help bridge that gap, would be super helpful. I also like to remind people that October is International Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. You can to wear pink and blue in support. We tend to be advocates for all of that stuff.
I don’t know all the answers. I don’t have all the answers, but I can at least share with you some space. We do a lot of advocacy work on a local, super community level base, but I would really love to expand that to Mecosta County, Osceola County and then eventually more of West Michigan and Michigan. would love to just create a support network for people. It’s so important.
Q: Are there ways that this experience has changed your perspective on parenthood, and if so, how?
KATIE: Once you become a parent, you definitely have a different purpose and a different outlook on life and everything is for that child. But when you have hoped and prayed and been through heartbreak and almost lost your marriage over it, you’ve lost friends over it and you’ve isolated yourself your whole personality has changed. You really do put everything into what you have and the gratitude for God for allowing you to become a parent and guiding you through still the difficult times, you just appreciate every day and moment a lot a lot more.
Ava is an extremely sassy, hilarious individual, and we embrace it. I’m not here to dull her. I am not here to tell her “You’re supposed to be this way. You have to be perfect.” We’re kind, that is our motto. Our family is kind. It doesn’t matter what we are doing, or what our situation is it’s the Brooks family is kind and we support each other.
As long as it fits into that, we let Ava kind of do her thing. We’ve waited seven years to experience becoming our own family and so we embrace that. We try to do everything we can together. We just want to be with her and experience the world through her eyes. This is everything to us.
BEN: From my standpoint, I think you become more intentional. I think because of loss, you are more intentional with every moment that you get. Use that time with your child to be intentional, and use the time for being together. That first year I missed a lot, I really had essentially three nights to be with my daughter at first before I was able to find a regular 9 to 5 job and have more time. For me, it’s about being intentional about those things and finding that time.
KATIE: I’ll live in a box with these two. That is our family, and that is what we do. It’s just reading books with her, or going outside and playing together, going on a walk. We like to do a lot of community events and stuff, and just kind of find our roots. Big Rapids is a great community to raise a family in, and there are a lot of positives here and things to do, and we just really embrace that.
Our church community, we go to Res Life in Big Rapids, that is home like that is more home. It is a beautiful, beautiful church. Everybody is welcome. Everybody belongs there, and everybody loves everybody that’s in there. We love to raise our child with God and a church community that supports her and loves her, and we had her dedicated when she was a year and a half old.
We’re just doing our part to be a community, with what we have here.
BEN: I really do want people to know that they’re not alone. if somebody through reading our story or whatever else wants to send a Facebook message, to reach out and share what they’ve been going through or they need help, we are willing to have a conversation. We will try to help.
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