Sometimes saying thank you is the last thing that trips off the tongue – especially if you are or were like me someone who grieved so hard I couldn’t see past it to the people who were helping me.
Despite my recoil from this world into the cocoon of my apartment in my parents’ house I have to tell of the amazing kindness of those closest to me that ultimately saved me. Every person helped in a different way, some of those ways I could see and understand at the time and others it’s only after looking back that I can appreciate their support and what they did for me.
What is clear to me is the unfailing love of family and friends, the unwavering support from those who hold you dear and tight when there is nothing else to be done is the silver lining to this tale.I don’t know if I can ever say thank you enough, but I’ll try by at least detailing a few key people’s efforts here.
My mum was a rock that I clung to in the storm. She held Evie when I could not and took on the grandma duty of taking hand and foot prints for us, alongside Evie’s other nanna. She guided me through the difficult decisions of planning the funeral, took the burden of worry away about what was going to happen to me – I just had to exist and do the next thing she told me was on the agenda. I mean who wants to plan their baby’s funeral? Well, me if someone’s got to do – I’m her mum; but I needed my mum to hold me through it all too and she did so splendidly. She held me and talked nonsense with me to calm me down after a breakdown a few days after Evelyn died which resulted in having to be injected with a strong dose of Diazepam.
I often recall something my mum told me on the day of Evelyn’s funeral, she said, “remember this day will pass, it will not last for ever and you will live through this day”, words I clung to through the second hardest day of my life and for many months to come.
She listened when I questioned everything and offered her thoughts and opinions, and even though she thinks very differently to me she was most gentle.
Thank you x
A hug says a thousand words
My sister, Rebekah, despite being pregnant herself, was devoted to me and helped me with the distressing physical trials of losing a baby. When my milk came in with no hungry mouth to feed she helped me to stop the leaking milk with such care and compassion, the memory of which will stay with me for the rest of my life.
She somehow put aside her own challenges connected with her pregnancy to be my comforter and confidant. She put herself in my shoes and understood the pain as if she had lost a baby – she had lost a baby, her niece. To this day she is my best friend and supporter. I feel welded to her through our experiences of motherhood – neither have been easy – and feel eternally grateful and proud to call her my sister.
Thank you x
My friends Nicola and Katie were wonderful and were by no means the only friends that saw me through the most grave of times, but I wanted to send them a special squeeze. They would bring me and Matt cooked meals, listen to my endless tears and heartache and just hold me when no words would do. They have continued to be dear friends and are active in Poppy’s life too, which I love. Despite distance and busy lives of their own they have put me first on more occasions than I dare to remember…
Thank you xx
And finally to my dear husband Matt, who was unfailing in his love towards me. I truly felt his unconditional love for me during that awful time and I am grateful to him for supporting me in my worst moments. He saw me at my rock bottom, no veneer or cover up, he saw me at my most raw and most vulnerable and treated me with such tender kindness, it moves me to tears to remember. He effectively became my carer in the final months of Poppy’s pregnancy, such were my mobility issues. The toll of the physical damage done when they delivered Evie and the subsequent close pregnancy was a hefty price to pay for our dear girls – a price we both paid in different ways. Matt took it all on his shoulders, bearing the burden with a quiet stoicism that was admirable.
We got swept up in our mad fleeting obsessions that consumed us in the first months like buying coal and kindling to have endless open fires in our living room. We focused our efforts on transforming our daughter’s grave into a garden – Evie’s garden we call it. It now serves as the euphemism for her grave and most of our family and friends have adopted this way of describing her resting place. Buying plants and researching gardening methods, planning what would flower when and how to care for the plants kept us going through that first bleak winter without her.
He is my soul mate – we are forever entwined by our experiences – he makes me strong and allows me to blossom…
Thank you x
There were also the times that a complete stranger’s kindness helped me get through the day. To break the relentless battle between being honest to that so trivial question which serves as a greeting, “how are you?” Matt and I developed our own call and response. We’d ask each other how we were and each reply – “shit, you?” it felt so good to say the truth. Once I was asked this in a local supermarket at the checkout and I bravely said, not aggressively but plainly, “actually no I’m not having a good morning” and the lady behind the till so graciously replied, “Well sometimes we don’t, do we?” That simple exchange buoyed me up for the whole morning, the simple revelation of my turmoil in such a brief way was like taking the lid off a boiling pot to stop it running over.
The small and big kindnesses from family and friends have buoyed me up when I felt like my legs would falter, they helped me tread the water to stay alive. I have been loved fiercely, willed to continue my existence by my connections with these people who would not take quitting as an answer. I am humbled by other’s grace and understanding, humbled by their refusal to give up even when I had no fight left.
Thank you to you all and I’m sorry to pick out but a few stars but you are all very dear to me!
Until next time do what you can to find your smile – today I have found mine remembering the incredible kindness of others.
Talking about losing babies and babies dying is not a conversation topic that trips off the tongue willingly and yet I am compelled by my own experience of losing my daughter to speak out.
It’s daunting to ‘go there’ in public, on a blog or face to face or indeed live on radio, but if I don’t who will? I want people to know what happened, not to give them the voyeuristic thrill of hearing a horror story that they can thank their lucky stars is not them but so it is not a secret, an isolating secret.
A few months ago I did just that on BBC Radio Oxford. I was a featured in an interview on the morning Kat Orman show and I talked about how I lost Evie in quite some detail. It was harrowing to talk about it in the immediate environment of radio but I did it to raise awareness about the suffering parents go through and to promote my new support play group Rainbows.
The group is for parents in the Oxfordshire area who have lost children but also have living children. To all intents and purposes it is a normal playgroup but everyone there has paid the highest membership fee going – they have lost a baby. It means talking about ‘it’ is on the table for discussion alongside potty training and soft play. It allows parents the space for all their children to have equal share of their attention – they can watch their living children play while talking about the children they lost. It makes us normal and in in the majority rather than the silent demographic.
Rainbows – bereavement support playgroup
We walk among you, a silent demographic of parent mourners with no name – we are not widows or widowers or orphans, we have no tag to coin our loss. This only serves to drive us underground as it were. We continue our lives making the best of things, enjoying our other children who demand our immediate attention and thoughts; we hold down jobs, pay our taxes and contribute to society. We are like you but we are not the same as you. We carry a hidden scar and secret story that we constantly battle to keep at bay and from eating us from the inside out. It is precious this life we are all gifted to enjoy but one lived after the loss of a baby is a different life, a marked life but nonetheless precious.
Silent demographic of parent mourners with no tag to coin our loss.
This is what I wanted to impress on others – we need support even when we have what can look like a ‘normal’ full life.
The response from going on the show was overwhelming – people called into the station saying they had tears rolling down their cheeks as they listened to my story. Touched by hearing an account of loss similar to their own comforted them and their thanks for sharing made it all worthwhile.
Since this interview I have been on the programme again to promote the first meeting of the group which I can now say was successful! We had three families come along who were able to support each other while their children played.
Sands Awareness Month 2015
I am going on the programme again today to again raise awareness for my group – the next group is Saturday 19th July- and highlight Sands Awareness Month, where a concerted effort to raise the profile of baby loss and the support that is available to parents. I shall do my bit once more, lay myself bare for the cause gladly. If one person can feel comfort and not feel alone with their experience then job done in my book!
Please listen in to BBC Radio Oxford today at 12 noon when I discuss the days news with Kat Orman http://www.bbc.co.uk/radiooxford
We are by nature hopeful, indeed a sign of depression is the inability to be hopeful. By looking to the future and making plans for our good gives us drive and purpose. A life without hope is no life at all; it isn’t sustainable for long any way. My mum, a trained bereavement counsellor incidentally, described to me the idea of reducing my horizon down to what was manageable rather than being overwhelmed by the large expanse of time – the wasteland that lay ahead of me. It was such good advice for me and helped me survive the first year. I really couldn’t cope with looking ahead or planning much more than the next day – I had no hope. But slowly and surely I was able to put things in the diary a month or two in advance – little beacons of light to aim towards, to look forward to.
Time became a very bizarre concept to me and over 3 years on it’s only now starting to recover its former meaning where time is metered out with any steady rhythm. Now as I look back I can see my life is so much fuller now than it was in those first months. I have another daughter to focus and demand my attention, I work, I have social events with friends and devote time to my jewellery-making which I love. As a family we are able to make plans and decisions about our future that are for our good and benefit and we always strive to include Evie however we can.
Partly out of necessity and partly out of ambition for the best life we can have for ourselves and our living child we can stomach practical planning for a future with one child. It is the hard and harsh truth that we only have one daughter who has needs we can fulfil. Evie is safe now, out of harms way whereas our little two year old’s needs are very real. Who else will provide protection from running out onto the road or eating marbles and other sharp objects. With a heavy heart I know this to be true and the more time we are granted with our living child the more I can keep my mind in the realm of the living, in the moment and on the family I have here.
‘Time is a healer’
It is a very popular saying for all sorts of occasions and has been a sure inclusion on millions of sympathy cards for decades. It is often served as a great comfort to the heartbroken, the dumped, and the bereaved. Dished out as big slices of comfort cake to stuff into the mouths of the bereft to fill their emptiness and shut them up. It is easy to say and gives the impression of understanding without having to get into all the dirty details that might make that statement a little harder to swallow. It is also the greatest lie of them all.
For me Time has not ‘healed’ me in the sense of making me whole again, rather the initial gapping wound has been replaced with a painful scar I have learned to live with and bandage in such a way that it’s visibility is minimal. To me Time means that awful day has become a horror film I’ve now seen hundreds of times. I know when the scariest parts are, when to look away and when to make a cup of tea to avoid watching a life being destroyed. It means the initial mind-numbing shock has calmed and I am familiar with the plot to the point where sometimes I’m not convinced it’s my story, my life.
Time has made the events and experiences of that fateful day that play over in my mind into a vision from which I can step back. Time gives you distance from the hurt to see through the clearing fog and start to make sense of what happened to that beautiful life you planned. Something only time can show you is that you can survive something like losing a child. You can’t believe it when someone else tells you – you have to see for yourself what living on after your child’s death looks like. Only Time can show you that just as the world carried on the day your’s stopped that you too can pick up the pieces and keep going.
Time is however a tricky mistress. She warps and stretches out like a slinky or accordion making minutes last forever then she bunches up and rushes you through the days. Time is a finite resource that once spent cannot be given back; she does not care how well you used it or if you wasted it, she does not pause but is not indifferent. She leaves marks on the map of your life to show when certain moments are particularly important and allows you to zoom back to them whenever you wish.
Furthermore, she can tell the truth – allow you to take in facts and information about what happened that you could not deal with at the time. She can prove that you are strong enough to embrace life without your loved one(s) and can demonstrate the true kindness of others. She can teach you that you can bear to be happy and sad at the same time about the same thing, holding both sensations in your heart close to where all your children ultimately reside. Time can help you realise you are not defined by what has happened to you, show you that it happened to you not because of you; it can release some of the guilt and anguish and replace it with a softer sorrow.
She can also lie, lie terribly to you when you are vulnerable. She can tell you that in substitute for any concrete reason why your baby died it was your fault. She can trick you into feeling both a million miles away from your pain and then twist the knife in your heart to transport you back there in an instant. She can tell you that time past equals distance from your child; she can convince you that the further in the past your loss the further from people’s minds your loss is.
Time can make your love and bond feel like grains of sand which easily slip through your fingers no matter how hard you scramble to keep hold of that precious connection. She can cheapen your experience and file it under gossip >see ‘Salacious childbirth tragedies’ for more details. She can make you feel an outcast from normal parents, forbidden from ever tasting the sweetness of joy without the bitter after taste of grief.
In short, Time can be a bitch but she is also constant and dependable, she will always faithfully tell you how long you have been apart and can help you mark those milestones on levels that no words can express. She can keep your secrets and store your treasures safely for you to pick up and cradle at any moment.
Unitl next time, do what you can to find your smile
I wrote this poem about a week after after Evelyn died to be read out at her funeral. In the order of service it was under the banner of ‘gifts from Evie’s parents’. I sat on my bed and poured my heart out. I wrote it in one sitting and made very few changes or corrections. It felt like automatic writing that bypassed my conscious mind and came striaght form my soul. This really is the essence of me, all I had left to give my daughter…
Love Letter to My Girl
My darling darling girl
You are perfect, so perfect
You are me and you are your Dad
Together we were going to conquer the world.
My precious precious baby
You are beautiful, so beautiful
I yearn for you, to hold you close
To stroke your face and smile at you.
My dear dear little One
We were going to teach you everything
Impart to you the best of us
So you would be the best of us.
My lovely lovely sweetie
I am your Mummy, I will always be here for you
I am your safe place, your cocoon, your sanctuary
I promise I am yours forever.
My darling darling Evelyn, Evie
I love you with all of my being
I had you for such a short time
But I will treasure every second, I will never forget you.
My cherished cherished baby
I cannot believe you have been taken from us
I believe you are in heaven, safe and happy
Smile for us lovie, my Evie, my precious Evelyn smile.
The experience of losing my daughter has emphasised a trait I already had – perpetual introspection.
I always thought I knew who I was and where my place was in the world.
I thought I had a plan, a good plan, and I stuck to it. I have always done things the “right” way – the tick list of accomplishments ran: school, A levels, university; meet boy at 16, marry him at 23; get a job, support myself, have hobbies, friends and family… tick, tick tick. I never stepped out of line; not really, I tried to convey an appearance that I was perfect or at least trying very hard to be. And you can’t criticise a girl if she’s trying – right?
My self portrait
I had set my life up on the grand illusion that I was in control, of everything. I could make a plan and make it come true – I was my own fairy godmother and I was proud of that. I was proud to be able to hold my own in a room full of strangers, striking up a conversation with the ease of what I hoped was someone much older and wiser than me.
Overall though, I led a very sheltered life and had not really experienced much tragedy, on the scale of human suffering out of 10 I’d say it peaked at a 3.7. I merrily trundled along, I played my part well like a character in the play of my life, a play in which I directed, narrated and starred; yet for all my control I felt out of control most of the time.
Like my own puppet, I was both in the drama and watching the drama unfold; I watched myself in real-time and gave myself constant critiques, put-downs, evaluations, appraisals. I always analysed what I had said, not said, done, not done and how I appeared to others. Was I good enough? I must be good enough, but I don’t know how much that is and I don’t know what I should use as a guide.
My plumb line to measure up to was in negative contrast, rather than what I wanted to be it was a guide of what I definitely did NOT want to be – “stay away from being like that”; “you don’t want to end up like that do you?”; “why can’t you be more self-controlled?”; “you don’t want to appear out of control, fat and lazy do you?”… And so it went on, and on, and on.
My outer confidence was masking a much more self-deprecating, self-conscious girl trying to be a grown up but always feeling like a failure to achieve this image in my head. One of the main problems was that the image keep changing, morphing into a new picture of perfection every time I achieved something. In this way I was never counting my achievements, they passed in the blink of an eye, I missed them because I never stopped to look at them and cherish the hard work I’d put it.
Instead I always looked beyond into the distance, to the next horizon and challenge to keep myself motivated and not become complacent. A never ending treadmill of self-dissatisfaction and loathing was my norm, my constant and (I thought) my friend. I thought it was my ally to getting on in life. It constantly left me feeling low and under appreciated but it also spurred me on and that was a good thing, that’s how I got people to love me – surely?
Now all of this, I hope, sounds insightful and self-aware but in truth it has taken more hours of introspection and heart-ache than I ever wanted to donate to the cause of understanding myself better.
They say ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ and I’m sure there are other equally flippant adages I could whip out at this point that share the same sentiment. But they don’t really mean anything, I mean really mean something, until you go through something so life-altering and devastating that you can see where they might apply. By that point, of course, you are so far beyond the comfort of a few dry words that their meaning is useless anyway. For me, the rock-bottom, worst thing that ever happened was my baby daughter dying.
There I said it, no varnish, no fireworks or clash of symbols, just the solitary fact in a few words that is so mortifying, so disgusting an idea that its simplicity belies the full impact it has on me every time I say it. By saying it out loud it means it is true, it means it happened and not to a fictional person or someone in the newspaper – it happened to me. Little ‘ol me, who thought she was quite important in her own little world but was rather ordinary, like we all are really. Saying my baby died means that I know it to be true, even though every fibre of my being screams for it to be a lie, a grand conspiracy of mistaken identity.
In fact what I’d like – other than the obvious of Evie being alive and well and with me – is a scenario I like to indulge on occasion, I’ll share it with you now.
Many years from now I will be contacted by Davina McCall or Nicky Campbell from the ITV show ‘Long Lost Family’ saying my daughter would like to get in touch and find out why I gave her up all those years ago. Or in years to come a mysterious stranger will give me a plain brown envelope with details that will lead me on a quest to find my long lost daughter. In both cases she didn’t die but was taken from me at birth and now lives a life unknown to me until now. We will cry and hug and speak our disbelief but we will be made whole again, the injustice will be righted and all will be well…
Then I wake up and the yearning for that alternate life withdraws into the misty cloud of sleepy dreaming and I am left with the harsh truth.
A girl can dream, huh?
Until next time, do what you can to find your smile.
“Darkness exists to make light truly count…maybe your seed is a light in the dark, despite the uneven odds beauty lives from the earth”
These are lyrics from the song Uneven Odds by Sleeping At Last, a band I have discovered recently and these words have spoken to me so deeply I thought they would be a nice way to start my first, rather heavy – sorry – blog!
I know by the laws of physics or something it is a universal truth that you cannot have light without the dark and vice versa but it takes on a whole new meaning when you are thrust into the darkness and can only dream of being in the light again…
So how do you carry on after the worst happens? I’m just going to say it how it is…
When your baby dies it is horrific (in the proper sense of the word, not like ‘the traffic was horrific’). You feel as if a part of you has died – a part of you has died; you are crushed under the weight of losing your beloved child. The breath is knocked out of you as you reel with the news: this precious little one you have carefully nurtured for 9 months has lost their life. To go on after news like that, to even think about the next step simply feels obscene.
For me it was the apocalypse, it was that devastating, and it got me wondering if others might have felt similar when they lost their babies. But trying to find people who are happy to be frank, open and honest about such a personal, socially taboo subject is difficult. Now I do love a good chat and a cry, it helps me process things and work out how I feel. But for others in my position it can be an overwhelming prospect to express their pain. Also it doesn’t help when those around them are terrified when faced with a grieving parent, having nothing to say when they tell of their loss. I wanted to write about how it feels when your baby dies, that embraces those who have suffered loss and enlightens those who have not. Maybe this is how you carry on?
The only problem with talking about how you feel when your baby dies is that it’s rather depressing, sad and rather a conversation stopper. Now that may seem a little obvious and I may appear trite, making light of a tragedy, but I assure you I’m really not. In fact I’m deadly serious (every pun intended) about trying to look at this subject with honesty and dare I say hope – I want to normalise this experience. I need to feel normal again even though I have lived through this experience.
Thankfully it is a minority that experience this but there are still 17 families in the UK and countless thousands (maybe millions?) across the world who lose their babies every day – every day! It is such a horrifying thought that it is unmentionable in polite company to discuss pregnancy or neonatal loss. We are so blessed in this country and have so much and yet babies die every day – it just doesn’t add up. We cannot reconcile the medical superiority we enjoy and the loss of precious little humans that cannot fend for themselves; to our human sense of justice it doesn’t make sense, and we like things to make sense.
So how then do I let you into my world and share with you my darkest time without you crying your eyes out and vowing never to read this up again… or have children? I think with honesty you can’t go far wrong when it comes to talking about your feelings. I am not here to offend or judge and hopefully not be judged; it’s just sometimes admitting what’s going on inside is enough to help those suffering feel a little lighter.
Having just said that let me tell you there were definitely many times in the past 3 and a half years when I would have said there is no “light” side to my experience – no redeeming features that could justify what happened and explain it away. Now over 3 years on I still agree there is no reason why it happened, I do not believe it was done to me to teach me lessons, it was not fate; but rather I see it as an awful tragedy that befell me, my husband and our beloved daughter and there are many ‘life lessons’ and ‘home truths’ that I have discovered as a result.
However, I will never say, “I’m glad this happened to me because now I’m more understanding of other people” or “this experience has made me a better person so some good has come out of it”. The end does not justify the means. This will never be made clear to me, it cannot be fathomed, I will never know why my daughter died through the process of being born and I will not know in this lifetime my daughter – Evelyn.
I figured the best way to give you an insight into the little world of me was to just spill the beans on my thoughts and feelings by remembering events and situations that I have gone through over the past three and a half years. I wrote some poetry, oh yes eat your heart out! It just seemed to help me express myself better than prose, so I’m going to included that too. I’m going to try to take you through my decision and experience of getting pregnant for the first time and then how I struggled to come to terms with losing such a loved and wanted child.
I also want to try to convey some of the challenges of being a mummy again. This time I got to keep the baby and mainly felt like I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. Believe me grieving and parenting is a heady mix that is intoxicating and can make you go rather light-headed with just one sip. It’s going to be rough in parts, especially when I take you through what happened on “the day” but stay with me, don’t stop reading, because I hope you will see there is hope. I hope you will see there can be light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just when we’re in the tunnel you don’t know how long it’s going to take and you’re all in the dark – which is no fun, no fun at all.
Until next time, do what you can to find your smile again.
onesforsorrowtwosforjoy 