A little background...

I wrote this in a "baby names" topic on a Bulletin Board earlier and thought it might be a good idea to copy and paste it onto here so as to elucidate a little about Jaia, our daughter who died shortly after birth in June 2003: -

I can't help but love my late daughter's name. When I was pregnant in 2003 we'd decided Jake Robert Thomas (all my family have 2 middle names) for a boy, and Tegan Angel Rubina for a girl, all the names except for Jake were after people that were special to us: -

Jake was just cos we liked it, couldn't find a family name we wanted to use as a christian name.
Robert (my husband)
Thomas (my grandfather)

Tegan (after my friend Tina Egan who died) it means beautiful in Welsh.
Angel (her daughter, another good friend who was partially responsible for hubby and I meeting)
Rubina (my oh so precious nan. Couldn't use Ruby as my oldest friend had already named her daughter Ruby much to my chagrin).

I gave birth to my daughter on June 25th 2003 after a very quick labour and as I looked at her I realised that it wasn't Tegan, after setting my heart on the name it just wasn't her.

20 minutes after she was born she died. We spent all day in a mixture of grief and burning to give our daughter a name and I remembered I loved the name of a lady I had gone to a pre-natal aquarobics class with. Her name was Jaya (pron. Jae-a) and I remember scouring the internet after meeting her and stumbling across a more beautiful version of her name - Jaia (rhymes with liar without the "r"), coincidentally it meant the same thing as Tegan, which came as something of a random surprise. Initially we decided against Jaia on the grounds that we wanted to name our daughter in loving memory of my friend Tina Egan.

In the short time that our daughter was alive before the umbilical cord was cut we had an amazing telepathic experience together. Rob, the midwife and myself understood that there was a problem and we had already called an ambulance and were waiting for it to arrive.

Rob was understandably worried but Jaia was telling me she was okay, she wasn't hurting and she wasn't scared. She was so peaceful, and as I looked at her I knew she was a very old soul and it wasn't the first time she'd been here. She was reassuring me that everything was as it should be and not to worry. I didn't know that her fragile little body was fighting for it's life but I did know that she was at peace.

Nothing will ever change my mind from the fact that you and your baby can communicate without speech when you're still attached, and I'm almost certain that if things were meant to be different we'd have been well tuned into each other anyways. Rob and I spontaneously visited a statue of Buddha the day after Jaia's funeral and I sat down in front of him quietly, just taking it all in. I'd not been there long at all and someone or something other-worldly said to me; "Jaia came to tell you that Tegan's not ready yet." I'm a firm believer in the fact that sometimes things are just "meant to be", and although it doesn't make it hurt any less, it helped me to accept it a lot easier.

After the funeral I was talking to a very wise friend and she asked me why we chose Jaia, and I told her. Afterwards she then went onto explain that she had (unknowingly) been named after a Goddess of Peacefulness. I think her name chose her, and it was every bit as beautiful as she, my Jaia Angel.


Fast forward to now, and Jake Robert Thomas is a very heathy, very happy 18 month old spirited toddler with a wicked sense of humour who'd never have been here so soon had Tegan been "ready".