Baby Lost

by Hannah Robert

  I’d slept fitfully, resisting further consultations with Dr Google on molar pregnancies and what they could mean, and furious with myself for taking my work for granted, for letting these medical dramas cloud my work. Where my body had felt slowed for weeks, as the possibility of the new pregnancy leached out of me, now I was suddenly taut with tension. Nothing concentrates the mind like threat.

  I bounced up the lino steps two at a time, silently punching out the lines of my reasonable email to my boss from the afternoon before. As I touched my hand to my office door, my mobile rang, and I answered it with the same efficiency. It was Penny.

  ‘You have a nephew!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have a nephew—he was born at five-fifteen this morning!’

  I let myself into my office, locked the door behind me, and stepped over to the window. ‘Oh, Pen, wow … wow.’ I looked at the calendar. I knew Penny’s due date was any day now—I’d been on stand-by to be there at the birth for her and Kent. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for the birth—did you call me? Did everything go okay?’

  ‘Yes; it was all too late, and then too quick, to call you. It was intense—the worst bit was being separated from him for an hour while I waited on a trolley for a doctor to come and do some stitches. I was in a hospital gown, and didn’t have my glasses, and I think they forgot about me. I had to go wandering up to the nurses’ station to see what was happening—half-naked, blind as a bat—and then they sent me back down to the birthing centre for the stitches, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, love; ouch. That’s not good. But you’re back in the birth centre now? Can I come in and see you? And meet your son—your son—oh, wow. I’ve got to see my boss at nine, but can I come right after that?’

  ‘Yes, come! Is stuff okay with your boss?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah; it’s all okay. I should be there before ten.’

  Gratitude rushed over me. He was here, he was okay, and he was a boy. I could love him, and I could congratulate Penny and Kent wholeheartedly, clean of the sadness and conflicted feelings that I feared might have come with a baby girl.

  And, despite all my brokenness, I met with my boss, apologised for missing the seminar and negotiated my workload. Then I drove over to the same hospital where we’d had Z’s last scan, a few days before the accident, and met my tiny new nephew, awash with love for him and his parents, and the honour of being his Aunty Hannah.

  That night, with two seemingly impossible things already under my belt for the day, Rima and I went with friends to a Melbourne Comedy Festival show, and I laughed so hard I bumped my front tooth on the seat in front of me, chipping the cap the dentist had so carefully used to repair my teeth after the accident. My laughter morphed first into sobs at another thing gone wrong, but then into a deeper laughter that stretched the entire space between the utter devastation and sheer ridiculousness of my situation.

  26

  Tsunami

  On Easter Friday 2011, I got a call from V, a mutual friend of Karin and Ned, our friends who had lost their baby son, Albie, just six months after our accident. They were still living in Paris, Karin was pregnant again, and their baby was due any day now.

  ‘Hi, Hannah, just wanting to let you know that Baby Esther was born yesterday,’ said V. Before I could squeak my congratulations, she added, ‘It’s not good news, though, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh.’ My brain started moving in circles—how could this not be good news?

  ‘There was a lot of blood when she was born, and she’s needing a lot of help to breathe. It is really not looking good.’ V wasn’t teary, just solid and serious.

  I had a lot of questions. I had so many happier possibilities that I needed to put forward—‘Sometimes babies just need some help to start breathing, I guess?’—only for V to gently pack them away.

  Karin and Ned’s parents were flying to Paris to be there, and to meet baby Esther. Even I could join the dots. They had to meet her while they could, because she was a very ill little baby.

  ‘I’ll keep you posted,’ said V.

  I asked her to pass on my love, and tell Karin and Ned that I was sending all the good thoughts I could muster. I put the phone down and wept.

  I dug through my knitting things. I found a silky-feeling navy blue alpaca yarn and a hot pink wool of similar weight, and cast on. I was furious. Furious with myself for tossing our dear friends into the category of those lucky people whose seemingly effortless pregnancies rubbed salt into our own painfully unsuccessful attempts to conceive.

  Back in October 2010, in the same week that Karin had told me she was pregnant, two couples in our Thursday night SANDS (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support) group had given their own glowing news, along with the ongoing trickle of Facebook announcements. I’d started to think my psychologist was also pregnant, and, after having to cancel a number of appointments due to illness, she confirmed my suspicions. Penny had also let me know that she was pregnant. Her news stung a little less because she had grieved Z with us. Our loss was hers too, and her news was our good news.

  Nonetheless, it was starting to feel as if everyone but us could get pregnant. (Apparently, there is a made-up term for this state of mind: preganoia.) I didn’t say anything to Karin (how could I?), but in my own head, a small, resentful voice muttered and felt betrayed, as though Karin and Ned had skipped the baby queue. I hadn’t wished them ill, but my heart had closed a fraction, and refocused on my own misery.

  As my knitting needles worked their way around—pink, navy, pink, navy, pink, navy—they repeated my mantra: Please let her be okay, please let her be okay, please let her be okay. Please, I implored all the gods I didn’t believe in, and the universe I’d sworn at for the last fifteen months, please let something biblical happen—‘and on the third day, she breathed on her own, and resumed normal brain activity’.

  We spent the long weekend around the house, in a state of suspended animation. I was supposed to be marking essays but found myself staring out the window or reading the same line over and over. I gave up, and just kept knitting.

  On Easter Monday, V rang again. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good news. They took Esther off life support this morning, and she died in Karin and Ned’s arms.’

  I shuddered.

  ‘Oh no. Oh, V, no! That is just not bloody fair. For fuck’s sake.’

  V was quiet. I didn’t know how many of these calls she had to make that day, how many times she’d already had to calmly tell this news, to be on the other end of the phone making it real over and over again. I apologised. I asked more questions.

  My fingers pressed into the points of my knitting needles, while we touched on funeral plans (they would bring her home, to be buried with her brother). I hung up. The beanie wasn’t finished yet. If I’d knitted it faster, would she have lived? If I’d been a good enough friend to have knitted it before she was born, would she have been okay? I was reading Joan Didion, and knew that this was magical thinking, as was my fuzzy presumption that pregnancies and living babies could be doled out on the basis of an orderly queue. But that didn’t stop the hypotheticals whizzing faster and faster around my head.

  If losing one baby were enough to break you, what would losing two do to you? To survive losing two in a row was inconceivable. But Karin and Ned were not in a lonely category all their own. Of course, there were women like my great-grandmother, who, I knew, had mourned three babies and one six year old—heartbreakingly normal for turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Melbourne. Now, when I looked at the black-and-white photos of her, I saw not just weariness but sorrow and strength. I was dimly aware that women living in other decades and in countries with poorer health systems had much higher infant mortality statistics than ours, but until now I had failed to imagine properly the babies or the mothers embedded in those statistics.

  The only other person I then knew to have lost two babies was my friend Jude. In a friend’s Newcastle kitchen, she had given me mates’ rates haircuts. After our accident, she got in t
ouch on Facebook to offer her condolences and disclosed that she’d lost two babies in a row to stillbirth. Her son and daughter would have been twenty-nine and twenty-eight. She and her then husband lived in a small town at the time, and after the second stillbirth, her husband had to visit all the local shops and tell everyone, so that she could go to the shops without people asking, ‘What did you have? Boy or girl?’

  More than a year out from losing Z, I was barely hanging on by my fingernails. I tried to extrapolate my loss, to multiply it by two, and then fast forward several decades, but I still couldn’t see myself ever becoming as Zen, as kind, or as genuinely funny and cheery as Jude. If I lost another baby, I imagined, I would spontaneously combust. But Karin and Ned didn’t combust, and it wasn’t for any lack of love or feeling for their children. Their ability to keep breathing, to continue moving through time and space, and even to find the headspace to ask how we were going, blew my mind. ‘Freaking superheroes,’ I thought. But also beautiful human beings. As Karin and I kept up our correspondence, my desperation to fix things for them, to magically knit it all back together, ebbed away. All I could do was respond, bear witness to their grief, and let the conversation move lightly between picking colours for baby-sized caskets, knitting, funeral arrangements, our ongoing IVF saga, and laughing about weeping on public transport and the horrible realness of burying babies.

  Somewhere in those conversations, my idea of a ‘fair’ or fixed amount of grief and misfortune got washed out to sea. I knew Karin and Ned well. They are two of the most generous, open-hearted and hilarious people I know. If anyone deserved a living child, it was them. The fact that their universe had been destroyed not once but twice was irrefutable proof that life was not fair. My fantasy that there was some kind of balance sheet, or someone out there to add up the columns, was gone, swept away like the fragile bit of debris that it was.

  Just six weeks before, we’d watched the 40-metre waves of the Tōhoko tsunami sweep across the Japanese countryside, insensible to the homes, farms, nuclear power plants and 18 000 people in its path. We’d sat agog, awed by the power, the destruction, and, God forbid, the beauty of the ocean. Not only were my fantasies of fairness now dissolved, but also my tenuous idea that we could map everything into categories: good/bad, happy/sad, fair/unfair. It wasn’t just the ocean that could be both indescribably beautiful and heartbreakingly destructive, that simultaneously fostered life and wrought suffering and death. When I looked closely, I reluctantly had to put more and more things in that awesome/devastating category: human relationships (including parenting), technology, cars, food, substances, law, democracy, nature—in short, anything that mattered. There was no ‘safe’ zone, there was no unmediated ‘good’, just a whole lot of awesome/devastating chaos.

  That didn’t mean I accepted it all, or that I was indifferent to whether it came out as heads or tails, awesome or devastating, in any particular instant. Of course, I had a preference. Of course, I still prefer peace to war, love to fear, alive to dead, fairness to injustice, friendliness to cruelty, safety to harm. But I recognise these as my preferences, not universal truths.

  I would have understood if Karin and Ned had become bitter, with the manifestly unfair hand they’d been dealt. But they didn’t. Instead, Karin’s mantra was See beauty, see beauty. That meant all of it. The devastation, the grief, those short hours of holding our dead babies in our arms, were just as tender and beautiful as the prettier, smoother stuff I’d previously taken as beauty.

  27

  Earth and sun

  Late July 2011 found me in Queensland for a conference. After all the molar pregnancy drama, the tests had come back negative, and I could happily put the 4-litre urine containers in the recycling and move on with IVF. Two unsuccessful frozen embryo transfers later, the grinding greys had returned. There was no date to look forward to in the calendar—we were already throwing everything at Project Bump, and getting nothing back. After refusing to miscarry a ‘blighted ovum’ in March, my body seemed to have gone into a sulk or lost interest. In May and June, there hadn’t been even a whiff of a pregnancy symptom.

  Saturday, 23 July 2011

  There’s a special art to running through crowded city streets. Speed up, sideways step, watch for a gap. My heart expands to knock at my ribs and nearly bowl over the people in my path, until I’m all heart—messy, beating, puffing and suddenly seeing all these messy human hearts around me. A woman sees me running towards her and fear blanks across her face briefly—she looks wildly behind me, her own steps a little quicker. I have a good reason to run—I don’t want to be late for my osteo appointment, but I feel like I’ve just woken, as though my blood is reaching cells that have been slowly greying.

  Things have been really grey lately. Everything is a big effort. I’m kind of embarrassed to write about it because this kind of sadness is dull. I bore myself. It’s as though I’m stuck at the bottom of a big hole in the ground. Poem by poem, I’m digging myself out, and I know from the voices of loved ones which way is up, but I can’t really pretend to be anywhere else at the moment. I have to make reluctant friends with this situation.

  So what are you trying to tell me, deep dark hole? To stop dreaming of the stars (and one particularly bright little star)? That my slow-crafted words will come to nothing? That I am one and the same as the slippery grey-black clay on every side of me? Come on, hole, teach me your lesson and then we can be done. I’m not going to be bullied into silence and self-pity. Enough of that.

  I’m not at all prejudiced against holes in the ground—in fact, my daughter lives in one, as do many of my favourite trees, earthworms and root vegetables. If dirt is my destiny, then bring it on, dirt. Show me your microbes, let me remember what dirt smells like, let me feel the grit of it between my fingers.

  Time moves slowly under the earth. Things are hidden, processes work slowly but powerfully. Minerals are crushed, underground rivers carved, liquids percolate drip by drip, continental plates grind past one another millimetre by millimetre—all monumental changes occurring at a pace measured in centuries rather than minutes. What else is down here? Things unwanted or forgotten, buried and mourned—so many things lost and wasted which are slowly being turned back into the earth itself. Nothing goes away down here, but is slowly transformed, releasing water and nutrients to feed patient tree roots, or our lawn. This is where rivers are born. Nothing flashy or spectacular, just cold humble earth.

  Dear hole in the ground, that’s what I’d like—some of that persistence, slow elemental momentum. The ability to slowly work through this sad stuff with earthworms and use it to grow something good.

  •

  After tears and long conversations with friends who were IVF veterans, we went back to our doctor with a proposal—to stop the frozen transfers of two-day embryos and start again on a new protocol, of growing the embryos to blastocyst stage (about five days), so that if they made it that far, they’d have a stronger prospect of success. Our doctor was willing, and so we were all set to start a stimulation cycle in July, until I realised that the egg pick-up dates would have conflicted with a conference I’d agreed to speak at. A few months before, frustrated from all the waiting and delays, it would have been unimaginable to put fertility treatment on hold. But now, it felt like a small assertion of control over the process. I was more than just a pincushion; or, at least, I was a pincushion with things in her life other than the IVF process. And as wonderful as it would be to become pregnant again, to try our hand at parenting a living child, I didn’t feel the same desperate grasping for it as I had before.

  Rima didn’t join me on the conference trip, so I was alone in what turned out to be an enormous apartment—and the biggest chunk of solitude I’d had since those weeks in hospital and rehab. The unfamiliar Queensland sun streamed loudly into the bedroom and woke me; a revelation after becoming accustomed to dark Melbourne mornings. I laid a towel on the floor and began a sun salute, relishing the uncluttered space and lifting my face to t
he morning light.

  Even with eyes closed, the light made everything glow. And I missed it when I folded at the hips for Uttanasana, to bend my knees and lay my hands flat on the floor on either side of my feet. I felt the sun again when I stepped my right leg back into a lunge, then brought the other leg back and dropped my hips for cobra pose, indulging my face in the sun’s warmth; only to miss it again, when I lifted my hips and dropped my head for adho mukha shavasana (downward-facing dog). And it occurred to me that this was exactly the pattern of things—alternating between time with your face to the sun, feeling exalted; and time facing the darkness, feeling humbled. Day and night, life and death, love and loss. And my job was not to chase one or the other but to move freely between the two, to honour both and to keep breathing all the while.

  •

  I had been waiting for a happy ending for this book. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my story here, in what I’d thought of as the ‘waiting place’ between one (silent) baby and the next, hopefully more noisy, one. But this ‘waiting place’ is all I have right now—it’s all anyone has when they’ve lost one baby and are hoping for another. There’s no fast-forward button we can push to speed through to the ‘good bits’. And even if there were, I’m less and less sure I would have wanted to push it. As painful as this grieving has been, it is mine, and it connects me to my daughter, as well as to everyone else who has suffered loss.

  In that dark year after our accident, the thing that made me choke with fear and sadness was the idea of no more Z. I thought, ‘That’s it. My whole relationship with my daughter was over and done with before it had hardly started.’ Thirty-six photos, some inky footprints and handprints, a tiny amount of ashes, and a drop of her blood on a blanket my mum had made; the countable, finite remains of my child. It wasn’t enough, it would never be enough. It was such a sad, awful, unfillable hole of ‘no more’ that, to live in this world, I had to close that drawer, to look elsewhere for the ‘more’ I needed.