sorry

It's hard to write about grief at four years out. Hard to know what to write here.

I want to tell you that you will never forget your baby.

I want to tell you that you will find a way to move on, grow about the pain.

I want to be the beacon of hope ahead of you, the woman with the life that has not collapsed around the dark matter of the dying star; that I was not sucked in and lost, heavy as the universe and destroyed in a hopeless inward swirling soup of moulten grief.

I want to tell you that you won't forget, that cosmic clutter and home grown atoms seared themselves into your soul and cannot be unwritten.

It feels wrong to write of present grief here. It feels wrong to write of recovery. It feels wrong to be either - healed or unhealed.

I missed my slot here last month. Almost missed it this month.

Grief hauled at me, made me unreliable. I chose to fail to prove that grief had me in its grip and prove that I had outrun it. But the truth is I couldn't feel it. I was numb. No words came. To write badly is the ultimate betrayal of my boy.

I'm held back and pushed forward by grief, by loss, by the bundle of boy in the paper flat pictures, the boy I grew quite perfectly who couldn't live without tube and wire.

You might imagine that pulled in all directions is unfathomable pain but it seems to bring nothing but inertia and dulled senses.

You don't need me, I told myself, because I am both then and now and neither is helpful. At four years out grief absorbed is of no more use than grief worn smeared upon my person and slathered, unwelcome, on every interaction.

Do you want to know that grief is just as painful 4 years on? Do you want to know that 4 years on I cry most often because his loss is so familiar that somedays I do not think of him at all?

Do you want to know you will forget? Do you want to know you never will?

That is my apology. Grief is endless and full of ends. Grief is circular, linear, long and short, impossible and easy, ever present and constantly receeding.

I'm sorry I wasn't here.

***

This morning my living son, born after, brought me Freddie's picture. We don't speak of him here. We are not a family of vivid gesture and outward remembrance. His photos live in my room and nowhere else. I have not wanted to make this youngest child one growing in the shadow of loss. I've never spoke of Freddie to him.

He asked us who the baby was, seemed to know that this was a baby who had not become a person he could place. And then, with uncanny understanding, he gestured to my candle shelf, to the collection of trinkets and gifts I have bought his brother.

"Baby Freddie all gone," he said.

Yes.

He's all gone.

No fine words can alter that.

4 years or not, it feels a giant of a thing to understand.

I don't think it is ever going to change.

What do you hope for as the days turn to weeks and the weeks turn to years? Do you have a sense of the resting place you grief should have? Or, how do you accommodate your lost baby or babies in your family? And how do you cope when others from inside or outside your immediate family, step outside your coping parameters?

the mother, the spectre and the bargaining crone.

This post is a reflection on my sense of self before baby loss and after and the effect that Freddie's death has had on that. I was a stay at home parent of young children before I had him and my life therefore revolved around the trappings of that life. There is some mention of how I was shaped by ordinary pregnancy and birth as well as infant loss. Please bear that in mind before reading if you are in a sensitive phase of loss.

Once it defined me, my knowledge, my experience, my hoard of stories, grim and detailed.

Once I huddled in gaggles of mothers and gossiped  - heartless midwives, empty threats of dead babies. I thrashed through birth trauma, postnatal depression, botched, unsatisfactory deliveries. My ill-used body, caught in the nets of a harried medical system that sucked me in, processed my heaving body, signed me out alive, with scant regard for my soul or sanity.

Those things, the worst that could happen, consumed the centre of my wounded being. All encompassing, damaging, poisoned.

All talked out, gradually growing around and through the pain, I became something new.

****

Once it defined me, my knowledge, my experience, my hoard of stories, gritted teeth and battles won.

Once I huddled in flocks of mothers engrossed in motherhood - failed breastfeeding, sleepless nights, babies born with challenges (I will not call them small, not even now) to be overcome. We loaded laundry and knew not the value of the little people in our care. The minutae of the tedium was our currency of connection.

I had no idea how lucky I was. I do not hold myself responsible for that.

And, all talked out, we grew, moved on. Stories rolled and rubbed and took on the sheen of a well fumbled pebble, soft, smooth, snag-less.

****

I became something new; lacking nonchalant patter, I formed an armoury of parenthood, my tales the scales of my skin. A persona grew, I became the mother people love or hate, who fought the battles, won and lost and emerged confident, skilled and with all the answers I needed. I believed in me.

I do not begrudge myself that confidence. It was good while it lasted.

****

And it all came tumbling down. In the screaming silence of the birthing room without a cry, I lost every opinion I had ever had about birth and babies. In the humming heat of SCBU, I lost everything I knew about parenting. I couldn't help him. I didn't know the language, couldn't do the procedures, couldn't choose when to hold him, might hurt him if I did.

No time to learn.

My outer shell smashed and washed away, all my conversation, all my wrath and passion, all my innocence and ignorance. I didn't know I had that.

****

When I lost my son, when I crumbled him to dust, consigned him to a memory, I also lost myself, my role, my place in society. A core was left, naked and bruised.

****

No one wants the baby lost mother. We are not welcome. We are the spectre - festering and infectious. Who would want my knowledge? It is tainted by Freddie's death, despite the four before him. I would run a mile from me. Who would chat to me about birth and babies, fearing to see me cry,  hoping that "please god, she doesn't mention HIM again!"? Who would believe my nappy choice might be right when I let my baby die? Who would believe I had knowledge about breastfeeding when I couldn't even tell he was sick before he lived.

I see the recoil even if it never comes. I see the blank weariness as they wait for me to find a reason to mention him. I see myself, hovering in their joy and deserved naivety, spoiling the thrill of the moment. I imagine myself tainting their hope, excitement. I imagine them making the opposite choice to mine, hoping to ward off the devil.

I cannot ever re-enter that world. I will distance myself even from my daughters when their time comes, hoping - irrationally - to not remind them of the brother who died.

****

So, crone like, my gift is to the girl I once was, to all mothers who never walk a harder path than tired out drudgery.

I will try not curl my lip at those with no reason to know better. I will not belittle them because their path has not been strewn with ashes and they know not that ashes can arrive in a tiny box with an etched brass plate. I will not deride them for a merry life with smaller hurts and smaller mountains to climb.

I envy them. I'm glad for them. With gritted teeth I will smile for them and the rose-tinted life they lead. I do not want them to know this pain. And I will barter my forgiveness of their lack of understanding for the gift of no future grief in this family.

If I could. If only I could.

How do you feel about the person you were before loss arrived in your life? Do you miss that person? Would you have that person back? How do you feel about people who have not experienced loss and their world view? Has it changed over time, have you become  more or less tolerant about ignorance of loss?

hard hearted

I am grown hard hearted you might say.

Grief - which might have softened me and uncovered my humanity - turned my core to stone, you might say.

If you did not know.

Sometimes I do not know.

I think of him, wait for grief to rise up and bubble to the surface, tears to come, grief to reassemble, manifest in the centre of my soul - but nothing comes. I wait to be strangled by the loss of him, for my arms to lift themselves up, shocked and empty from the lack of the weight of him. Nothing comes.

I try to write, show the world that still I miss him, that my whole self is changed and nothing will ever be the same without him but the words seem bland and empty now.

I miss that pain. I hanker for it. I ache, in a way I never thought I would for a bottle of grief to take out and tip up on my sleeve to sniff the scent of loss and feel it fill my nostrils, freeze my brain. I want to huddle, struck to stone by the loss of him, the utter total disappearance of my boy. I want to stare at photos and feel tears stream down my face, flicking away from them as child or husband strays to my side. I want to remember when there was no way to make it through a day without saying his name. I want to be back in the supermarket, telling a horror struck assistant over frozen peas that my baby died and so I can't cook a proper meal just now. I want to be folding baby clothes and finding places to hide them, cramming crates into a cupboard and forcing coats and blankets over them, tears of rage and hollow pain pouring down my face. I want to be in sunlight, the world dark around me, furious the world is spinning, wind is blowing, sea crashes and days continue. I want to hear his loss in every song on the radio, pick up every book to read and find a Freddie in the pages. I want to flinch away from baby aisle and pushchair, avert my eyes from bump and newborn, shut the computer in despair as another pregnancy is announced, another baby born.

But time has moved on. The days that sparkled with over bright reality, harsh and glaring and scraping the surface of my skin till I was raw and broken are gone. I felt everything then - and I hated it. Longed for it to end.

My life has grown to hold this pain, pushed it small, forced the grief and disbelief to a tiny molten core inside me, encased and covered by a crust I cooled and grew to cover it.

I can ignore the core. I exist around it, function, smile, talk of my children and skip a beat as I describe them, choose to keep him private. I have learned to slide my tectonic plates over the places where the fault lines are, pushing the broken, ragged places beneath a smoother surface. What was once a brutal landscape has softened, moulded, eroded away, grassed over, become old and gentle.

And if you saw me, you might think me heart hearted.

You might think I do not care. You might think I learned to live without him. You might think I had recovered.

***

I watched one night a story of savannah; the dusty landscape, parched and bare and half dead itself with bare branched trees, empty river, devoid of food or greenery. The smallest elephant in the pack gave up, lay down, stayed down. His bewildered mother, on her knees, tugging at him, lifting at him, trying to pull him back to life and her desperate moan, her grief, her utter helpless disbelief to lose him broke through all the defences I had built.

It was her moan that broke me. It could hardly have been more human. I do not think there could have been an ounce more pain contained in it, not if she had had words to say to us.

I cried for her. Gasping, wrenching, sobbing tears.

That's how recovered I am.

In the early days I had a million triggers; it seemed as if the world was determined to bring me down at every turn. The triggers are more subtle now and often unexpected and in a strange way I welcome them at times. What triggers your grief? Do you have ways to manage them, have you learned to accommodate them in your life or have you had to change to avoid them? Do you, like me, ever welcome them?

gone

Four years. On Sunday it will be four years since I held Freddie in my arms while he breathed slower and slower until I could gently feel his wrist, that tiny, purple-cold hand already turning white and know that I could feel no pulse, that he was gone. That eleven days of fraught love, fierce hope, fluttering joy and brutal instinct had subsided into a quiet room, still bed, arms that held.

I've tried to remember how to summon the tearing pain I felt back then, honour him in some way with eleven days of memories, quiet time, thoughtful words. Tried to find some way to make meaningful the loss of him, the hole of him, the whole sorry mess of death and destruction and all the ribbons of grief that have tied themselves around the feet and limbs of our family.

I could find gratitude. Friends have surrounded me in community this year, making daffodils for him, posting pictures of them from all around the world as they dance and shine and call a little baby boy to memory. Gratitude I can do. I can be grateful for finding gratitude.

I could find rage. Rage that when one of my children changes school next month I will have to find the words to explain that yes, it was four years ago, but she is still affected by her brother's death and that everything they learn about her must be tempered with the understanding that she has this loss in her soul. Rage that when people can't find their way into the mind of my youngest daughter, they have to remember that she locked up sadness and hid it inside herself and learned to be impassive when she was just five years old. Rage to see my false jollity hurting my biggest girls, old enough to know I'm faking, not worldly wise enough to understand why. And wondering if it means I'm okay in there, behind the jolly. I don't want that for them. Rage that all I can do on his birthday is try to smile for as long as the girls are looking at me, that we go the day without saying his name, that we laugh and make the best of it - so British are we - and then I look back at the photos in the evening and there is sorrow written across the face of the man I love. And he probably didn't even know it was there. Would probably say it wasn't there. But I know his face and I know it was.

I could find regret. Regret and resentment for a boy who had dark eyebrows and who never got to hold my face and utter the words his brother does - 'More! No! Here! Go! Again!' - that Freddie looked for me in need just once, when he crashed and they jerked him back and I saw him eyes wide and alarmed at the fuss and I was behind the mess of nurses and thoughtless registrar and couldn't ease him. Wasn't the person for the moment. I can find regret that four years have passed and family life is busy and sometimes the candles for each of his eleven days are not lit till late at night, resentment that his brother broke my thoughts of him by getting ill during those days and I had to wrestle my focus, look at now - not then - and I was angry at that. Angry at them both. At both my boys. Together.

I should be angry at them both for colluding to eat all the biscuits or for drawing on the wall, not because one is dead and stopping me from dealing with the others asthma and the other has asthma and is stopping me concentrating on the other being dead.

That's not how it should be.

But I couldn't quite find the babylost mother in all of that. She was missing.

Then the news arrived. A beautiful young woman lost. A daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife. Someone with it all before her, a family who had already suffered enough, a family broken to pieces from out of the blue.

And it all came back. I left the house one day and when I came back our world had shattered. A parent should not have to tell the world a child has died. Sisters should not sit, shell-shocked, asking again if this is true - how can it be true? How can life become death? No one who loved should have to pick up the pieces, carry on, make the best of it, fill the gaps, learn to smile again. Keep going because there is no choice and you cannot simply die along with them.

I can see them, in my mind's eye, just like I see every family who pitches into grief. The sofa still feels the same when sat on. Meals must still be cooked for hungry children. Deeds must be done, from the extra-ordinary horror of arranging a funeral, to the mundane of putting out the bin. Life stops and carries on and your head feels a million miles wide, light as air, deranged by the ordinariness of the bizarre.

One minute you are just a family and the next minute nothing will ever be the same again. Beyond pain, that other father said. And yes, I see the sense and madness in that. Losing a child is a place beyond pain and you learn to live there.

Four years. My boy should be four years old on Sunday. I've had long enough to know this happened to us, long enough to be back to happy days and a healed(ish) heart.

But he's gone - and I still do not really believe in it. Do not believe these four years have happened, that we've lived them and survived them.

Just... gone... just like that. Gone.

People talk about the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Is it a lineal experience for you or a cycle that repeats? How do you cope with your changing emotions? How do you cope with hearing about loss in the wider world since losing your child? Does it affect your emotions in anyway?

Letting Go

The water covers me on all sides. It is warm and clear in the afternoon sunlight. I am somewhere between the surface and the floor of the sea. Above me, I can see the soft tossing of waves, the sun poking and prodding around every crest. The sand below is perfectly white, and the sea floor takes on shapes and patterns among the rises and dips of the sand, on the rocks scattered about. The vastness and purity of it makes me feel like the sand must keep traveling farther down into the center of the earth, as if there were nothing else.

The hair on my arms sways in unison under the gentle currents. I am motionless underneath the surface, arms and legs floating listlessly. My eyes are open, staring out through the clear water without actually looking at anything at all. I am completely alone. There are no fish or creatures or reefs with life springing from them. It is beautiful, and desolate.

This is where I go to meet my lost daughter, the one who didn’t make it. This is where I go to sit with my sadness, where I allow the anguish and longing to settle on me, without judgement or care or distraction or hope. It’s here where everything is quiet, where all of the noise dissipates into the nurturing sounds of being submerged. I’m present down here, under the waves, in a way I can’t be above the surface. I feel half dead and relieved.

It’s here in this state of floating that I find her.

She appears before me just as I am, floating with her arms and legs outstretched in the clear warm water. The dark hair that covers her head waves from side to side. I stare at her perfect little eight pound body, the rolls in her thighs, the way her Momma’s cheeks swallow up her Daddy’s nose. I marvel at the size of her hands and peek around every nook and cranny of her body that I failed to look at it in the fourteen hours that I had her in my arms.

She is still dead before me, but she is here.

After three years of wrestling with the tragedy that took her life, there it very little in the way between us now. The anger is gone. The missing has eased. The preoccupation with my own fragile state no longer rules my waking hours. The fucked up ness of how she died has been analyzed and regretted with enough energy that I no longer have any left for it. I have thoroughly changed from losing her, slowly and completely, but even the changing seems to have run its course.  It is just us now.

I grab her naked body and pull her into my chest. With my hands and elbows and arms I pull as much of her flesh into contact with mine. Her head rests against the beating of my heart, her toes and feet push against my stomach. Her hands are clasped together under my chin and I kiss them.

I used to tell her in this moment that I loved her. That I missed her. I would sing her songs. I would say a thousand times over that I was sorry. But there are no words anymore, nothing left that needs to be said.

The two of us float together, embraced, a father and his daughter, under the surface of the vast sea, drifting aimlessly.

+++

For three years now, I have sat with my anguish. I have allowed grief to consume me in the way that grief requires us, without agenda or timeline or a set of rules. I have shaken my fists and thrown myself at the world and I have knelt down on my knees in brokenness and defeat. I have felt brave and wickedly vulnerable, the two feelings coming and going as easily as the wind. I have learned to live with that strange duality of feeling happy and sad in the exact same moment. I have felt the crushing blow of missing my daughter who can never return, how it makes you physically sick and short of breath. In the slow, arduous task of healing, my emotional, mental and spiritual state have taken on new forms and new meaning. I am not who I used to be.

I can feel the grip of grief letting go of me, like slowly pulling away from someone you may never see again. It comes with a certain level of fear and trembling, knowing how much my grief has tethered me to my missing daughter. In all these years of wishing the pain away, the irony now is realizing how much I will miss the pain.

I can feel the joy returning. There is a space in my brain again for new dreams and pursuits and adventures. There is a steadfastness in the present, a contentment that I never thought would be possible to feel again. I, too, am letting go.

+++

The sound of music tugs at me to come up for air. Our sacred moment is coming to an end and I close my eyes and hold on to her for as long as I can stay under.

It’s easier to stay with her, to forget about the future, to leave the world behind. There is fear up there, and chaos, and worse yet, the possibility of more tragedy. And yet.

I loosen my hold on her until she is before me again. I kiss her forehead. And then I let go and swim up to the sounds coming from above.

Life, awaits.

If you're in a similar place, how have you coped with letting go? Or perhaps this idea isn't even something to be considered? Is there a space where you go to meet your missing children?

In this being my last post for Glow, I want to thank you for abiding with me over the past three years, first as a place of refuge and now as a place of community. Peace and gentleness to all of you, wherever you find yourself these days.