Imani's Story
Imani Joi Smith
(12/27/2006 – 1/15/2007)
Picture yourself in a room; its walls are white and void of anything other than medical procedure posters. The buzzing of bright fluorescent lights provides the harmony line that accompanies the beeping melody of an electrocardiogram machine. Somewhere in the distance of your present consciousness, you hear the words, “there is nothing more we can do medically.”
All around you, a flurry of movement commences as Doctors, Nurses, Technicians, Respiratory Therapists, and Social Workers prepare. In a blur of white papers and signatures, you sign the forms that will stop any further life-saving measures. For the first time in the 19 days, since she was surgically removed from your womb, your child is placed in your arms. Here is the daughter you have known since the moment she was conceived. The memory of her kicks and rolls from inside comes flooding back to you as a stark contrast to the stillness that exists in this moment.
You bring her close to your body to embrace her, yearning for the skin-to-skin as the sound of your paper gown crinkles. You drink in the sweet smell of her baby’s breath, which is now shallow and labored. You hear the whir and click of a Polaroid camera, forever freezing this bittersweet moment of “hello” and “goodbye.”
You close your eyes and transport yourselves on a mental tour of all the places she will never get to visit. She has fought so hard through 3 open-heart surgeries; you tell her that it is ok to let go, and you promise that you will not give up when she is gone.
As you return to consciousness, back to the cold four walls of the pediatric intensive care room that has been your home for 19 days, she exhales one final wheezing breath. She is gone.
This was my reality on January 15, 2007, as I said goodbye to my daughter Imani Joi.
1 year after Imani passed, as I was clawing my way through my grief to gasp for air, I stumbled upon a Doula training in my area. Despite experiencing three miscarriages and an infant loss, I never envisioned myself working with grieving families.
As a single mom, who navigated having a baby who had a congenital heart defect while subsequently serving in the military, I felt unsupported and alone. I wanted a skill set that would allow me to support pregnant people in one of the most vulnerable times in their lives and to ensure that young single Moms didn’t feel alone while they were birthing.
What I was not prepared for was the realities of infant mortality and the ways that it would touch my life and the lives of my clients.
Five years into practicing as a Doula, primarily for families of color, I realized that there was an alarming disparity in not only maternity care but for infant and maternal mortality for my client population. I turned to my colleagues for guidance and was immediately met with shock and bewilderment that a Doula, who is meant to welcome a new life into the world, would dare broach the subject of death as it related to a mother or, even worse, a baby.
So many of my colleagues in the profession refused to acknowledge that pregnancy loss and infant death was a potential consequence that would touch the lives of their clients. This meant that their clients were not adequately prepared for the blindsiding freight train that is pregnancy and infant loss, and that felt unacceptable.
I began consulting with other like-minded Doulas who worked in different sectors of support, not just birth work, and from there, we created a network of Doulas under an umbrella now known as a Full-Spectrum Doula. A Full-Spectrum Doula encompasses all the better-known traits of a birth Doula: a trained professional who provides continuous physical, emotional, and informational support to a birthing person for every potential pregnancy outcome from early pregnancy through postpartum and bereavement.
My work directly with clients has also included countless phone calls to make final arrangements, listening to parents’ hopes and fears through the grief process, photographing final memories, and standing at the bedside of bereaved parents as they said their goodbyes to their children.
As I navigated my Doula journey, I began volunteering with a local pregnancy & infant loss organization as a Perinatal Grief Facilitator, I even trained as a Midwife.
These resources provided me with the tools I needed to advocate for myself on October 24, 2015, when I heard the words, “I am so sorry, your baby has passed away” during a routine 20-week appointment.
Despite my immense grief, I had the power to communicate my wishes throughout the labor & delivery process for a stillbirth, arrange for a photographer to encapsulate the final moments with our son, and prepare funeral arrangements; each step proved to be vital as I navigated the grieving process. The death of our son was the pivot point that brought me back to social work and led me to graduate school, but it was my experiences with BIPOC clients who experienced alarming rates of birth trauma that solidified my desire to work in the Perinatal Grief & Trauma space.
Imani’s Light is a culminating dream, born of grief, tears, doubt, education, patience, love, fear, and support. It is the blossoming whispers that were spoken to Imani as she took her final breaths.
It is Community. It is Freedom. And under it all it is Healing.