Baby Lost

by Hannah Robert

  What I hadn’t imagined was the feeling of my soul tearing in two as I tried to hurtle away from her. It was an impossible choice: to go back and sit at that point in the road where she disappeared, or to move on. In that linear frame, it was either backwards, towards death and sorrow; or forwards into life and good things, but away from my child.

  Specifically, the ‘more’ that I was looking for was to get pregnant again. I was so sure it would happen. I don’t think I had really let go of feeling pregnant. This was my pregnancy and I would finish it, even if I had to mourn a daughter along the way. As I had danced uphill, waving my mardi gras pompoms, tenaciously pregnant, it had felt like forward motion. In spite of everything, I would move on. Now that we were moving, I could feel gracious about the pauses along the road the IVF process had imposed, even though I’d been impatient at the time.

  But when I’d unwrapped the parcel from the Women’s Hospital, with its generic ‘you’re diagnosed’ letter, something broke in me. I thought, initially, that it was my sanity, that I’d finally popped a crucial cog and I’d be completely broken. But what was broken was my idea of a future without her—a future where that empty space was filled by another, living, baby. A molar pregnancy meant having to wait at least six months to a year before I could try to conceive again. And maybe this wasn’t just the pause button; maybe this would mean Z was my only child. Just having to think about that question made me stare very hard at the train tracks while I waited to cross at the level crossing.

  The molar pregnancy diagnosis also gave me plenty of time to think. I was scared that if I really looked hard at my grief for Z, if I opened that drawer, the big, sad black hole of ‘no more’ would suck me in and swallow me whole. Because there was no solution to it. There was no way my logical brain could think a way around the big, stark reality of no more Z.

  I had been holding my breath for so long waiting for another baby that I wanted to vehemently push each babyless minute past me and away from me—just throw it away. As long as there was some prospect of another pregnancy to look forward to, I could mark a date in the calendar and set my eyes on it, hold on for that date, even if it were shifting away from me cycle after cycle. But now I no longer had that option; at least until I got the all clear on the molar pregnancy front.

  I was furious with myself for being tricked by my own body, with that duplicitous bundle of non-baby cells, and with everyone and everything. I came closer to psychiatric-hospital madness than I ever wanted to come. This was not the quiet, weary disinclination to continue existing that I’d seen in my mum and had glimpses of myself. Instead it was a crackling-hot rage, to smash up myself, my situation and anything in my path. Most of all, what broke was the hoped-for Hannah, who I’d been preparing my life for, who had everything in order but who never seemed to arrive, despite my best efforts. Hoped-for Hannah’s baby didn’t die, she didn’t need IVF, and she could choose when she got pregnant, while managing a glittering career. No wonder she was so infuriating. I had hoped so hard and for so long that to smash up those hopes felt like it would break me. But, in breaking, I also exhaled, and felt what it might be like to live without hope dragging me forwards into an imaginary future moment. Exhausted with my own drama, I lay on the floor with all that sadness, and we breathed and looked at one another. And I breathed in all the scary things that a molar pregnancy might mean: not knowing whether I could get pregnant again for six months, a year or ever; chemo; having to do stupid 24-hour urine tests and carry 4-litre plastic containers of my own wee into the Women’s Hospital every week. And I breathed out, because I wasn’t there yet, and every second standing between me and a 4-litre urine container was a precious, precious thing.

  Breathing in an uncomfortable spot like that can be hard, but I’d had lots of practice at it by then. I take great pride in the fact that when my brother and sister-in-law (both dive instructors) took me for my first-ever ocean scuba dive that January, I used less oxygen than either of them, despite freaking out underwater about how to clear my mask. It’s not a remarkable talent—breathing—but it is a useful one.

  It surprised me to find that if I didn’t run away from the awfulness of my situation, I could breathe into it, explore it, feel exactly what it was like to be mother to a child who has died. This was different from being mother to a hypothetical Z, who would have been this-many months old by now, or to a hoped-for new baby, who I might conceive sometime in the future. Like it or not, neither of those babies was in my life now. All I had was Z. In that space, I thought to her, ‘Well, my love. I wish you hadn’t gone and died. But there’s not much you can do about it now.’ And in the spirit of parents whose kids have been conscripted to the army, I thought, ‘I wish you didn’t have this job (being dead/being “one with the universe” or whatever it is that baby souls do after they die) but I still love you and I wish you’d send me a postcard or call me sometimes.’ Then I felt silly, because there was her star, which was always there twinkling at us, and the camellia tree, which burst into bloom just when my heart was breaking, and her pomegranate tree, and her roses, and the leaves in the river in Cairns, and slow-moving clouds, and the sea at Somers, and the bird noises in the bush chapel where her ashes were, and I realised I was being a pretty demanding mama.

  It dawned on me that I actually know Z better now than when she was born. And if somehow my knowledge of her, and love for her, has expanded, then there is more Z. She is still growing, she is finding her feet in the world, even if I don’t (in the way of all parents) really understand what her job entails. It isn’t how I wanted my daughter to be in the world, but I know now that whatever she is doing is important, because it is important to her, and therefore to me. If I just keep demanding that she fit in with what I need (which I know she can’t do anymore) then we will both feel awful, and maybe I’ll miss seeing what she can do. I wish we’d had more time together in the conventional sense, but I can’t be churlish about it, because it isn’t her fault. And if I want to love her exactly as she is, then I have to be open to receiving her little hippy-style postcards of brightly coloured leaves and odd cloud formations.

  I have a better sense now that part of my job in parenting Z is to trace where she went when she died—to resolve for myself where her little soul went, so that I can keep loving her and learning about her. When you prepare for parenthood, they don’t tell you that you may need some existential philosophy. But I think that is one of my main tasks for Z. And, as far as I can tell, she is here in this world. In fact, she is in the process of reconnecting me with the world I felt so lost in after the accident.

  For so long after the accident, everything felt wobbly, groundless, precarious. I was terrified about setting up rituals, in case I made promises to her that I couldn’t keep: a grave neglected over the years, a name unspoken. But that was back when I thought of time as a line, and of our grief as a spot fading in the distance.

  In those months after the miscarriage, something big shifted, so that I felt more settled with my grief. Where before, when I had heard people say that Z would ‘always be with us’, I would nod and vaguely agree; now I genuinely feel as though she is always with me. She is not stuck in the past, not defined by the trauma of the accident or the delicacy of her newborn form; nor trapped elsewhere in a ‘heaven’ that I don’t believe in, or a far-off future moment of reunion. Instead, I carry her and my grief for her in my heart, in my cells, and I find her everywhere I go. She is woven into things right here—in the clothes and jewellery I choose each morning, the leaves of her pomegranate tree, the starry night, the little words I say quietly to myself and to her. I no longer have to choose between embracing her and being here in this life because I can exist now as her mother; as someone partially constituted by her and the love we still feel for her. I don’t have to choose between life and death either, because they too are intertwined. She skips between both, playing on and around them, as though on a giant Möbius strip.

  There’s still sadness that she’s no
t here in the fleshy, noisy way of other children, but I recognise that as my own small sense of not getting what I want, rather than as any failing on her part. The sadness at losing her and the joy at having her as my daughter have become stitched together, so that I can hardly tell which is which. It’s specific to her, and my love for her, rather than being measurable as happy or sad. So, I’m still a bit of a weepy mess, but in an alive way rather than a broken or depressed way. This is what it means to love a dead child. You can expect nothing back in return. Yet, in accepting this, I feel like she has schooled me on living and dying.

  It sounds trite to say, ‘I feel more grounded now,’ but I mean it literally. My child, flesh of my flesh, is buried in the ground, and so that ground is part of me too. When the soles of my feet touch the earth, I say hello to her, I tell her where I’m going. At first she was localised to that particular spot, but the rain has leached her essence and the worms have exchanged her particles, so that now I’m not sure exactly where she is—which means she exists everywhere, in a state of possibility.

  Slowly, my sadness for having no more Z in my arms—and in our house, in her fleshy realness—is mingling with wonder that I can still get little peeks of her. I was walking to the shops the other day and it hit me that she might have been walking with me by now. I suddenly thought, ‘Here; this is where her little hand would be, tight in my hand. Walking together.’ And I could just about feel her chubby fingers, the softness of her skin, and could suddenly feel both the no more and the more at the same time. I love you exactly as you are, my darling girl.

  •

  I feel surprisingly sane, for all that has happened. I think it helped to give myself permission to go insane with grief when I needed to. Just small bits of mundane madness: smelling roses and muttering, I love you, my little one, into their centres, naming our new car and bestowing her with magical protective powers. And is that really insanity? Or just permission to feel the full range of human emotion—to refuse to pack certain emotions off to the loony bin?

  As for my desperate searching for a solution to my grief, here is my answer: there is no answer (sharp intake of breath) but you are infinitely more capable of surviving and, indeed, flourishing in this groundless state than you give yourself credit for (exhale). This groundlessness, this suffering, this feeling that your heart will explode and that this is unbearable, is about as normal as it gets, and you are, in fact, able to bear it, even when it doesn’t feel that way. If you can stop trying to escape long enough to pay attention, you’ll notice that not only are you bearing the unbearable, but what feels monumental and unchangeable nonetheless does change moment to moment; sometime subtly, sometimes radically. Even the mountains are not static. The shifting ground beneath us will take away everyone we love, but it will also (eventually) end all suffering. This suffering doesn’t mean that something is broken or wrong with you—this is the state of being human, of being a fragile living thing. This is what it feels like to be stretched between being born and dying.

  Part III

  RIPPLES

  28

  Both my babies

  When I was in the depths of grief, it seemed as though all the books I could find on perinatal death traced a similar narrative arc: baby dies, sadness ensues, then the birth of new baby restores faith in life, the universe and everything. It’s a nice framing device, babies as bookends with the grief neatly contained in between. My own experience was more unruly.

  Hearing all those ‘happy ever afters’ just felt cruel—particularly when we were trying so hard to replicate the formula, with no success. In that babyless space, I had to find something else. Mostly, it was a willingness to experience and sit with the things I wanted to run a mile from. I am now old friends with grief. I treat it with a healthy respect. On some days, it is still enormous and crushing, but at the same time has become ordinary—we fold it up with our washing and rinse it out when we brush our teeth. When I laugh, I want to know that her little cells are laughing within mine, and that when I see something beautiful, it is all the more beautiful because it feels like she is a part of it, and all the more heartbreaking because she is not here to see it.

  If you are not yet in a state to hear about subsequent children, stop reading here.

  •

  This is our happy ever after. Three IVF cycles after the miscarriage, we got some good news. There was a positive pregnancy test, a scan with a heartbeat, and then, in May 2012, a beautiful baby boy, Ali. We still can’t believe our luck. He is, as a dear friend puts it, a ‘cube of joy’. Often a cube of joy that doesn’t want to go to bed, or put his pants on, but a cube of joy nonetheless. He is reassuringly robust. He bellowed the moment he was born, and continues to be—which is a comfort to me—a noisy sleeper. I hope he lives to tell his own story. That sounds a morbid way to think of your child (and, indeed, the thought of losing him makes me weep regularly) but it also gives me some perspective and sharpens my gratitude for him.

  I have to be honest here. Having another baby did help. As the grief settled like muddy water in a jar, I could see there were different components of differing weights within it. The specific grief for our specific daughter was sedentary, solidifying at the bottom. It is with us wherever we go, it has become part of the ground underlying everything else. I am still heartbroken that she is not here, that we will never know what she would have been like as a schoolkid, as a big sister. But the grief for not being a mother of a living child—the hankering for the ephemera of tiny socks and small seashell ears, the patting and the rocking, playing peek-a-boo, making the train-cake—I have been slowly and happily pouring away since the wintery Monday afternoon when Ali emerged screamingly alive.

  And while Ali is the happy ever after to our story, as always, the story has taken some unexpected turns. Rima and I have separated—mostly for reasons pre-dating our accident—but we remain friends, and co-parents to Ali and the girls. Our universe has fractured again, but no one has fallen down the chasm this time. And there is a freedom in calling a truce, and in deciding to stop pacing through the old dance steps that sent us round in painful circles.

  Thursday, 28 June 2012

  Ali has changed so much already since he was born. Even within 24 hours of his birth, his head was no longer the soft squished newborn head, and the cord which was so plump and pulsing at his birth was quickly drying up and turning into a belly button. Too many tiny changes to catalogue—new skills, new habits, growth in every direction. He’s now over a month old, and yet his birth still feels so close—the surprise of having a living baby hasn’t worn off yet for me.

  And it hit me that this is what being a parent is, to bear witness and care for another human being through their most intense period of growth and change—where their existing self is constantly slipping like mercury through your fingers, becoming a new baby, a new little person every day as they grow and change. As much as I want to grasp onto who Ali is this very minute, I know that this current version of him is just a snapshot—that he is the process rather than the minute by minute product of himself.

  When I had that thought, it made me cry because I’m only just starting to grasp how much we missed out on with Z. Does that mean I completely missed parenting her, because, by the time I held her in my arms, she was still—she was not going to grow or move anymore? I felt lost for a moment as her mother. But not only did I love her through the constant transitions and growth of pregnancy—from a tiny cellular possibility to a kicking, hiccoughing, nearly six pound baby—I also loved her and held her through that other big transition, from life to death. I was there surrounding her as her heart slowed and then stopped as we sat in the wreckage, but I was also there after she was born, holding her as the living warmth ebbed away from her body and her little soul stretched away to begin its travels.

  I asked Rima the other day whether she thought Z could hear my dad singing her a lullaby when he held her after she was born, and she said, ‘Yes, the soul hangs around for a while, a
t least a day—that’s why we stay with someone who has died, with their body for the first day.’ That second transition—from someone you love whose heart has just stopped beating, to a cold body—has always frightened me a bit, thanks to all those cultural phobias of dead bodies and deterioration. There was a moment on the day we spent with her, when I had slept briefly and I woke and asked to hold her again, and the cold on her cheeks was noticeable. I knew we didn’t have much time with her—that the little baby soul we loved so much was mingling back into the atmosphere and gradually relinquishing the atoms of her body back to the elements.

  I look at all the beautiful cards and gifts that family and friends have sent congratulating us on Ali’s birth, and it feels so unfair that Z got condolences instead. It will always be unfair. But now she exists in a state beyond fair and unfair. And to hold her as she crossed into death and to love her even all the way into death was all I could do as her mama.

  Last night I dreamt that I was out shopping with Rima and the girls. We were in a toyshop, and Z was with us—she was a curly-headed toddler about fifteen months old. One moment she was looking at toys in our aisle, and the next I asked Rima where she’d gone—we couldn’t see her anywhere. We were searching all over the shop, calling out her name, and when it was clear she wasn’t there, we ran out to the street and were looking for her. I saw Rima run across the road and I was so scared that I’d see her pick up Z from the road—I wanted to find her but please god, not on the road, not hurt or killed.

  Then a tram came, and I realised it was our tram home. I felt compelled to get on. In my head all sorts of arguments were tested and rejected—maybe she would know it was our tram, maybe someone took her on it. I had no idea, but I just needed get on that tram. Somehow we were now looking for both Ali and Z. I stepped up onto the tram, searching—and there she was, running into my arms. I hugged her to me and breathed her in, simultaneously looking around for Ali. ‘Who found her?’ I asked. ‘Was there a little boy with her?’ I asked. Some lanky teenagers sitting opposite waved at me to indicate it was them who had found her. They pointed and there was Ali—himself but a toddler only a few months younger than Z. I drew him and Z in—a solid little person in each arm—sobbing with relief. ‘Oh my babies,’ I cried, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I took my eyes off you!’