After the Loss, the Questions : Sudden Infant Death Syndrome took Lynne Trujillo’s 4-month-old boy. She, like others who have faced such tragedy, had difficulty deciding whether to have another child. Those in her support group find help in talking about the issue.

During the period when she was overwhelmed with grief over the death of her 2-month-old son, Lynne Trujillo thought she’d never want to have another baby.

When David, her fourth child, was born in 1981, she felt her family was complete. Losing him to sudden infant death syndrome left a void in her life that no other child could ever fill. However, about six months after she put David down for a nap from which he never awoke, Trujillo found herself yearning to give birth again.

“It wasn’t that I wanted to replace David,” Trujillo said, “but there was a hole in our family that his death caused that needed to be filled up.”

Trujillo, who lives in Irvine, went through four emotionally devastating miscarriages before giving birth to Diana on Dec. 8, 1985, one day before the fourth anniversary of David’s death.

“Something kept driving me,” she says. “When Diana was born, it was like my mission in life had been fulfilled. I really felt it was a gift. It was very healing.”

As president of the Orange County chapter of the Guild for Infant Survival, Trujillo often shares her story with other parents who have lost a baby to SIDS and are confronting the question of whether to have another.

“It’s an extremely difficult decision that we all go through,” she says.

At the guild’s monthly support group meetings, grieving parents are encouraged to talk about why this decision is so agonizing for them. (For information on the support group, call (714) 474-SIDS.)

Trujillo points out that in some cases, one spouse is ready to have another child before the other is, and that the conflict can place extreme stress on a marriage already shaken by tragedy.

Some parents need to be reassured that having another child doesn’t mean they are trying to replace or forget the one they lost. And many need help overcoming their fear that SIDS will rob them of their next child too.

SIDS is the leading cause of death for infants between 1 month and 1 year old, most often striking those between 2 and 3 months of age. Each year in the United States, it claims the lives of an estimated 7,000 babies who had shown no signs of illness when they were put to bed.

Medical researchers have not been able to determine what causes SIDS or how it can be prevented. But, according to Penny Stastny, a senior public health nurse with the Orange County Health Care Agency, studies show that the risk of SIDS--one death per 500 births--does not increase in families in which there has been a SIDS death.

Chris Elliott, a Fountain Valley resident who is vice president of the Guild for Infant Survival, says some parents who have participated in the support group have insisted, “I never want a baby in my house again.” However, most of the parents she has met through the guild since losing a 3-month-old son to SIDS in 1973 did eventually decide that they wanted more children.

Trujillo and Elliott agree that most parents know instinctively when they’re strong enough emotionally to nurture another baby, although they have seen some rush into pregnancy prematurely.

Trudy Fellbaum of Anaheim acknowledges that she would have been a “nervous wreck” had she been able to have another child as quickly as she wanted to after she lost her 3-month-old son, Tyler, to SIDS eight years ago.

Fellbaum, now 39, had been through nearly seven years of frustration--and countless consultations with fertility specialists--before she finally became pregnant with Tyler. After his death, she said, she wanted another child right away, but she now realizes that another pregnancy would have distracted her from the grieving she needed to do. “I’d have probably done a Scarlett O’Hara routine and said, ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow,’ ” she says.

Fellbaum and her husband, Hal, ended up losing the option that many parents coping with SIDS have. A year after Tyler’s death, Fellbaum had to have surgery to end a tubal pregnancy, leaving her unable to have more children.

She says she gave up on the idea of having a family because her husband did not share her desire to adopt. Fellbaum, who has several photographs of Tyler in her living room and still cries when she talks about him, keeps busy with her job and community volunteer work. “I’m always looking for outlets to make up for the void,” she says.

Elliott notes that a “subsequent baby” can bring a special kind of joy to parents who have lost a child to SIDS, but she says the guild’s peer counselors urge parents to wait six months to a year before deciding whether to have another child.

Parents who don’t give themselves time to grieve before their next baby is born may discover that they didn’t really want another child--they just wanted to bring back the baby they lost, Elliott said. Elliott said she has seen parents be disappointed when their next baby didn’t look like the one who died, and she recalled one woman who wanted another boy after she lost a son to SIDS and who then became hysterical when she gave birth to a girl.

Elliott says she has also seen women insist on having another baby before their husbands are ready.

Trujillo admits that she refused to give up when her husband, Richard, told her he did not want to have another child after David died.

“He said, ‘What if it happens again?’ He wanted a guarantee,” Trujillo recalled.

Trujillo managed--after considerable arguing--to bring her husband around to her point of view, and they both welcomed the daughter born after David’s death.

But not all couples are able to reach agreement on whether to have another child--or when. If they can’t agree, they should wait, Elliott says, stressing: “It has to be a mutual decision.”

That’s important not only to the marriage, Elliott adds, but also to make sure that, when the next child comes along, neither parent will resist bonding out of fear of another loss.

Another reason to postpone pregnancy after a SIDS death is guilt. Because no one knows what causes SIDS, most grieving parents agonize over what they might have done to cause--or how they might have prevented--their baby’s death. Elliott says those who are still in the “if only” stage “go through the pregnancy nervous and upset because they don’t have their confidence back as parents” and that they tend to be “absolutely paranoid” with the next child.

Elliott notes that parents with older children usually regain their confidence more quickly than those who have lost their first baby to SIDS. But those who attend support group meetings discover that even the most experienced, informed parents have a tendency to be overprotective with the child born after a SIDS death.

Trujillo admits that, even though she had three healthy older children, she was as overprotective with Diana as a parent can be because “I couldn’t stand the thought of losing her the way I lost David.”

She placed her daughter’s crib next to her bed and kept a monitor strapped around the baby’s chest 24 hours a day for nearly seven months so that she would be alerted should Diana stop breathing.

There was no medical reason for Diana to wear the monitor; its purpose was to give Trujillo peace of mind.

After Diana was born, “I became a very light sleeper,” Trujillo says. “And there were times when I’d come to the door of our bedroom and freeze, thinking something was wrong. Then I’d go in and shake her.”

She says Diana’s first birthday was a milestone for her. “I felt if she could make it through one year, she’d be OK. I think I relaxed after that.”

However, she adds, she kept Diana’s crib in her bedroom until the child was 4 years old.

Knowing how difficult it was for her to keep her protective instincts in check after losing a child, Trujillo says she has a lot of empathy for other nervous parents who express their fears at SIDS support group meetings.

She tells them to keep trying, but not to berate themselves when they are unable to stop their fears from dominating the rational side that ruled before they faced the tragedy of SIDS.

“A SIDS death changes us. Nothing’s the same,” she says. “You don’t look at your other kids the same way. You treat life differently. When a SIDS baby comes along, you think, ‘I took a lot for granted.’ ”

Elliott also felt her life had been irrevocably changed after she lost her son, Michael, to SIDS. But when she and her husband, Dick, adopted a baby about five years later, she vowed she would not be like the parents who were so fearful after a SIDS death that they’d bring their next baby to bed with them every night and wouldn’t leave the child with a sitter.

“That’s understandable, but at some point you want to get past that,” she says. “You’re never a normal parent after walking in and finding your child dead. But you can be as normal as possible. You have to have some faith that things will be all right.”