By Alexa Spencer | Word In Black

(WIB) – “Why can’t you save my son?”

Xaviera “Zay” Bell questioned every doctor at the University of North Carolina’s maternal ward the day she gave birth to her son, Xander. Most responded, “There is nothing that we can do.” A head nurse practitioner looked at her and said, “I know you want to be a mom, but this is not the way to do it.”

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Born at 21 weeks and 6 days, Xander was an 11-inch micropreemie weighing 15 ounces. Doctors said if he lived, he could be deaf, blind, and unable to walk, but he was perfect to his mama.  

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“‘A disabled child is worse than a dead child? Is that what you’re saying to me?’” Bell says she asked the nurse.

She was forced to watch her son take his last breath on the first day of his life — April 25th, 2018. 

A Need for Relatable Resources

A day after Xander’s birth and death, Bell was sent home with a cardboard pastry box full of documents, including a “damaging” book about child loss. On the cover, a white mother’s heart-shaped hands wrapped around the feet of white baby. Inside, unrelatable scenarios filled the pages.

“This is the craziest thing I have ever received in my life, because it was a compilation of all these stories, and some of them looked like children getting killed in car accidents,” she says. “It was just not relatable to me.”

Bell spent days searching for books to recommend the hospital give to women of color, but didn’t find any titles specific to Black women. So, as she navigated the loss of Xander, she stepped out on faith and wrote her own.

“The Mourning After: The Personal and Professional Effects of the Black Infant & Maternal Health Crisis” is an anthology and a resource guide for Black moms and their advocates. The two-part book features 30 personal stories from mothers, policy experts, and birth workers.

Bell’s goal is for the book to be handed out in hospitals to Black moms who experience infant loss.

A Common Experience

Bell says doctors repeatedly ignored her concerns about feeling cramps and pressure and advised her to take vitamins. “Just take a Flintstone tablet,” she says she was told. 

Then she went into premature labor. “If they had taken me seriously, that’s something that could have been caught early on,” she says. 

Sadly, her experience is not uncommon. 

Black infants have the highest mortality rate compared to other races and ethnicities in the United States. The year Xander was born, 10.75 out of every 1,000 Black infants died before their first birthday. The rate increased slightly in 2022 to 10.86 out of every 1,000 live births. In both years, the mortality rate was over twice that of non-Hispanic white infants.

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding infant loss, it’s a vulnerable time for mothers emotionally and mentally. They may feel anxious, depressed, or like their world no longer makes sense.

“When you lose both of your parents, you’re an orphan. When you lose your spouse, you’re a widow, but when you lose your children, there is nothing that defines that,” Bell says. 

Healing From Loss

When deciding where to start reading the anthology, Bell says, “It depends on where you are in your journey.”  For mothers who are healing from loss — no matter how long ago it was — reading the book front-to-back may be helpful. 

“I have met women on this journey that lost children 30 years ago and still carry that because they had no support,” Bell says. “I specifically put those stories specifically of loss in the front so that women know that you are not alone.”

Toward the back, readers will find practical advice, from what to do when breastmilk continues to produce post-loss to how to plan a funeral or ceremony — decisions Bell had a hard time navigating after losing Xander. 

The book, which took six years to produce, will later take the form of an audiobook and a documentary, Bell says. 

“The seed that I had to plant was a humongous sacrifice, but it’s going to produce an incredible harvest in this state, in this country, in this world.”