Baby Lost Read online

  Sunday, 21 February 2010

  Seven weeks. Seven times seven. 49 bare little squares between us and her last heartbeat. 49 days later I can walk, I can go to the toilet by myself, I’m even contemplating going back to work. When people told me that time would heal, I didn’t realise that all this healing also takes me away from her—our ship is sailing on without her. I’m still not sure I can let go. I know she’ll always follow us; no longer as a living passenger—maybe as a gull we can see from a distance, who sometimes lights on the bow. Sometimes she’ll swoop in close and I’ll think she’s still with us, other times we might not see her for days at a time. I feel like my brain is a machine which keeps spitting out metaphors for this grief—(here I go again) one error message after another. It still does not compute.

  Even her birth date and death dates feel like a mathematical error. She died on the 27th and was born on the 28th—birth and death folded in on one another so that they come in the wrong order.

  My phone has mysteriously reset its own date and time to 9 a.m. on 1 January 2007. Imagine that—three and a bit years ago we were at a friends’ holiday house, greeting a new year. It feels so distant, but part of me knows it wasn’t an idyll. It was an ordinary life. I still have moments of that and I know the moments will come closer together with time.

  14

  Histopathology

  When my dad had visited me in rehab, he’d brought little offerings to make me feel better: a newspaper clipping about the zoo, little sachets of miso soup, a small posy of violets. And, one day, a pomegranate. Everything about it was exquisite. Once my visitors had gone home for the day, I held it in my hand—a crimson magical orb. It felt too beautiful to cut up.

  The next morning, I was just waking up when one of the catering ladies brought in my breakfast. She asked how I was and, as I struggled to get a sentence out of my pasty, still-asleep mouth, she sighted the pomegranate on the bedside table. ‘This! Good antioxidants! Very good for your healing!’ It was both an admonishment and a command, but kindly ones, so I was happy to comply.

  I’d eaten a pomegranate before, but never dissected one like I did that day. The process of cutting into the fruit and cracking it open felt like some kind of brutal surgery, the seeds bleeding into my fingers. I peeled away chunks of pith and peel, at once leathery and delicate—football red on the outside and a soft cream on the inside. Row on honeycombed row of translucent seeds were lodged into the pith like teeth in gums, each compartment veiled from the others with a filmy rose–yellow silk membrane. I prised them out one by one, and took photos of all of it: the broken scraps of peel, the membrane, the seeds. Here was something that, even when split apart and broken, only revealed more beauty.

  A few days after I was released from rehab, and could join Rima and the girls in our new house, a pomegranate tree was delivered. It was a gift, in Z’s name, from dear friends who lived overseas. It stood, green and hopeful, on the porch as the summer days and weeks wore on—hot and dry. I feared it would die there. I almost willed it to die there, and then was torn by guilt at the idea that I could kill my daughter’s memory in plant form. Nonetheless, we waited.

  At first we were waiting for the placenta. I wanted to bury those cells that belonged to both Z and me underneath the tree. Our midwives at the hospital had dutifully saved the placenta. The histopathologists at the hospital were holding it, after having examined it to confirm the cause of Z’s death. I had to look up what histopathology meant. It was from the Greek: histos ‘tissue’, pathos ‘suffering’, and logia ‘study of’—the study of suffering tissue. The histopathologists had not met Z or me, but there they were, making a study of our suffering by examining the bloody organ that had joined us; at least, until it came unplugged.

  When I tried to follow up the placenta issue, we were invited to a meeting at the hospital. The people there put on their understanding faces, and made ‘Sorry for your loss’ noises. The doctor seemed horrified by our predicament. The placenta had been treated with formaldehyde, making it toxic. I imagined it floating in a jar and asked, ‘Does that mean you want to keep it?’

  ‘No, no, but it has to be disposed of as medical waste. Not so great to plant in your garden, especially if you want to grow food there.’ It was a very long way of saying, ‘No, you can’t have it.’

  The doctor carefully watched us absorb this information. I wasn’t sure what she was expecting; perhaps a hysterical grieving woman screaming, ‘Give me back my placenta!’ I was tempted, but didn’t have the energy for staging a revolt this time.

  There were pragmatic considerations too. If I went leaking this grief all over the place every time I was triggered, I’d be a big mess. We’d had to live with what had happened for over seven weeks now and were weary of it. It was not a surprise anymore; this was our banal, everyday horror. ‘Forgive me,’ I wanted to say. ‘Forgive me if I don’t seem as shocked and as saddened as you—the person who has just heard this awful news. Believe me, we still feel it, and there are plenty of moments when I turn a corner and bump into a new aspect of the horror and feel the shock all over again. But most of the time we have to keep a lid on it, for our own sanity. To mix metaphors, we can’t keep picking at our scabs just to demonstrate our wounds.’

  I remembered going to see a dear friend, F, maybe a week and a half after her brother’s funeral, when we were both in second year at university. I was distraught—for her, at the thought of losing my own brother, and at the idea of death itself. Her calm surprised me, and now it made sense—that weary familiarity when you’ve been wearing grief for a while, so that it begins to feel normal, when you’ve cried all you can for the moment.

  So, by that time the fight had gone out of me. The poor histopathologists; I think it was probably quite odd for them to have the owner of some tissue they had preserved and examined show up and demand it back. From then on, we were no longer waiting on medical bureaucrats but on my own battered ability to make decisions and to dig a hole.

  The drought had killed a small tree in the front yard. It stood, unrepentantly ugly, between our bay window and the front fence. I didn’t know what kind of tree it was. Much as I liked the idea of a garden, gardening itself was still something I thought old people did. It was nearly March by the time we started digging the tree out, when the Preston clay was at its hardest. I threw the pick at the ground, over and over again, carving out the rough outline of a circle around the dead tree. The arc of the pick swinging up, the rush down and the ‘thuck’ of contact, the sheer solidity of the earth, was a relief. I didn’t need to weep, or think, or speak. Just dig. My convalescent limbs were sore and sweaty from the work. I took a long bath with some luxury bath powder my sister had given me for Christmas, just two days before the accident.

  The next day I carried bucket after bucket of cold, milky water across the porch and out to our hole. I gave the dead tree a relaxing bath in my second-hand bathwater. The clay held the water almost as well as the enamel bathtub. The digging, to my regret, had to be postponed while the water level slowly soaked lower and lower until I braved the mud and worried away at the dead tree’s root system, carving away the stiff mud. My dad and, occasionally, Rima took turns, but I was alone for the last bit, when the tree developed a tantalising wobble, like that of a loose tooth. Even then, it took nearly an hour for it to give way with a satisfying crunch, the small dead tree suddenly lurching, so that it looked more dead and more out of place than before. Remembering what it was like to feel strong in my unfamiliar, resurrected body, I lifted it partway out of the hole before calling for help.

  It left a crater in the front yard; a crater I tended lovingly with clay-breaker and compost, before we finally eased the sickly looking pomegranate tree into the hole. Promptly upon arriving in its new home, the tree dropped the rest of its leaves for autumn, leaving us to wonder about its survival until spring. Miraculously, come August, there were tiny red buds. Having eschewed the colour red for autumn yellows, our little pomegranate tree wo
re red for spring instead.

  I would prune the miniature roses at the front of the house, making a tiny posy to bring inside, and then carrying the loose petals and dead flowerheads over to the pomegranate tree. I would sprinkle the petals at the base of the tree, giving it a composting carpet of pink, red and yellow–gold–pink. It became a ritual. It was a chance to have a natter with my beautiful girl, to feel the leaves brush at the side of my face like small hands. I miss you, my little love. I wish you were in the house, being loud. I would kneel in the front yard, chatting to a pomegranate tree. I was okay with being the crazy grieving mother of the neighbourhood if it meant I could chat with my daughter. Or maybe they thought I was just a very attentive gardener?

  15

  Proof

  Things are moving towards ‘normal’. We are all home from hospital, I’m walking unassisted, there is talk of returning to work. One day, we grab the mail on our way out of the house to have coffee with an old friend. I tear an envelope open and can tell from the feel of the paper that it is not a bill. This is thicker, watermarked paper, like that of a bank cheque or a passport page. When I stare at it, I can’t tell whether it is just my eyes or whether the colour of the paper changes softly towards the centre—from creamy white to pinky cream.

  Here is my name, and Rima’s; here is the name we chose for her and her date of birth. This paper certifies me as a ‘mother’, and certifies Z’s birth; that she was here, a human child, even if she never drew breath. Part of me wonders why they produce these certificates. Is she ever going to need it to get a passport? To get her driver’s licence? Will we ever need it to enrol her in school? No, this certificate is for us, to make us feel better, to offer administrative proof of our child’s existence. A child was here. She must be recorded.

  On paper, I am a mother, but there is no pram here; no noisy, squirming baby. I feel like one of those flat felt figures we had at kinder. You can peel me off this situation and stick me onto another. It makes a soft ripping sound as you do it, quieter than velcro. Here is my picture-baby, here is my piece of paper. I love her so much, but she’s now my two-dimensional child—stilled, flattened out on the page like a rare flower. I didn’t dream her three-dimensional little life, she was definitely here (right here), moving and being. But all the remaining evidence I have of that fact is unsatisfying.

  The next envelope I open is an overdue fine from the library: Sheila Kitzinger, Rediscovering Birth. We have to go, to move on; we’ll be late for coffee with Aron. I fold these pieces of mail together, and worry that I’ll mix them up or lose them—confuse the proof of my daughter’s existence with a library fine.

  •

  About a month after I’d been released from hospital, my dad and stepmum decided to take me to see the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra because, as my dad put it, ‘music is good for the soul’. They could tell my soul needed all the help it could get. In some strange cosmic joke, the first piece was Fauré’s Pavane—one of the pieces we’d played at Z’s funeral. It was on a classical music CD that Rima liked to play to my pregnant tummy.

  After the funeral, the CD player had stayed with me in intensive care and then in the trauma ward, and I played that CD over and over. It drowned out the sound of my weeping, and somehow the weeping felt less pathetic with a majestic orchestral backing track. There in the concert hall, shiny program on my lap, the same notes from the trauma ward came flooding back at me, live and properly oceanic. Silent tears wet my cheeks, and my dad squeezed my hand.

  •

  Reinstating ‘normal’ meant we needed to buy a new death-machine (ahem, car), and get it insured. We’d received a ‘Bereavement Payment’ from the government—they don’t call it the ‘Baby Bonus’ when your baby dies. With that, and the money from the insurance payout from the old car, we could afford a much newer and safer car, with enough airbags to demand their own collective noun. A cloud of airbags? A reassurance of airbags? I was sulky about paying good money for another car when the last one had stolen our child from us. I was less angry with the human error and thoughtlessness that had caused our accident than I was with these dangerous machines, and the extent to which we were reliant on them and complacent about their propensity to kill us.

  Still, in order to see family, and get to and from the shops and various medical appointments, we needed a car. Back in the trauma ward, I had made a rule for myself: that my decisions would be led by what my family and I needed to heal and recover, not by fear or shame. So, even though the thought of driving still gave me the shakes, we started shopping for a new car.

  My dad took us on expeditions to inspect cars, carefully navigating so that we didn’t need to travel along the road that had been the scene of our accident. We avoided the car yards full of four-wheel drives and the sense of queasy doom they gave me. And, finally, we found something—a creamy-white station wagon with plenty of airbags; auto emergency braking; and, best of all, a GPS system with a calm and reassuring voice. We called her Pearl, as though having a humanised name for our car could somehow immunise us against the risk of another accident.

  Each person I spoke to as I called around getting insurance quotes had to ask whether we’d had any previous accidents in the past three years, ‘regardless of fault’. I would tell them, ‘Yes, we had a serious crash, just in December. A four-wheel drive came onto the wrong side of the road and hit us head-on. Yes, the car was written off.’ Inevitably, they said something like, ‘That sounds awful. I hope everyone was all right?’

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so would usually just say, ‘Mostly,’ in a tone that (I hope) firmly communicated ‘Do not ask me any more about this’. If they did ask more, I blathered on a bit about broken knees, ribs, spleens, liver, etc etc. That made them uncomfortable enough.

  I didn’t say, ‘No, we are not all right. My baby daughter died.’ I wanted to be correct and accurate and honest, and I wanted our loss acknowledged, but I had to make a number of these phone calls, get a number of quotes. My composure was stretched thinly enough already. I had functions I needed to perform before disintegrating into a weepy pulp. I couldn’t go there; not for a flipping insurance quote, not with someone who would only know me as a voice from a call-centre shift. I couldn’t risk the random responses the truth might evoke.

  It felt ridiculous, shopping around for insurance when something like this had happened. Everything felt ridiculous, flippant. To continue to live and breathe was a mean joke. I didn’t realise I could become so bitter. I didn’t really know the meaning of it. But bitter and interesting I could handle, maybe; bitter and boring—trapped in this repetitive, ongoing grief—was much harder.

  Even with our new car in the driveway, I hadn’t yet brought myself to drive again, let alone lay my hands on a steering wheel. A week later, my brother came to visit, and I asked if he wanted to see our new car. We got in, and he shifted the passenger seat back to make room for his long legs and reclined the seat. I laughed. When he was still living at home, you could always tell when Jeremy had borrowed my dad’s car by the ultra-relaxed seat. I got into the driver’s seat so I could turn on the stereo and show him the GPS, and, somehow, just like that, I drove him around the block.

  •

  In the heady, queasy days after that positive pregnancy test in June 2009, I’d started a blog, calling it ‘Sesame seed sized dreams’. Rima and I had lain in bed and looked up images of a five-week embryo. At that stage, it was just three layers of cells forming into a neural tube and, all up, approximately the size of a sesame seed. I liked the tangential connection with Lebanese food. Tahini (sesame seed paste) is a basic ingredient of many dishes, and sesame seeds appear whole in many other recipes, particularly in zaatar, a mix used on the pizza-like manoushe, which was one of our favourite weekend breakfasts. I knew that we still faced about a 25 per cent miscarriage rate, so I wasn’t about to start building big dreams on this tiny wisp of life within me. Or maybe I was, but I wanted to hedge my bets.

  The blog docu
mented the slightly nervous, ridiculous and exciting aspects of being pregnant: having a sizeable bust for the first time in my life, and having to find maternity bras to contain it; strange pregnancy dreams; the frankly bizarre, but wonderful, sensation of feeling someone else’s hiccups within your belly. The blog also enabled me to connect with other ‘rainbow’ families—mainly, lesbian mums—across Australia, the US and UK. Those of us at a similar stage of pregnancy gravitated to one another, wanting to hear how others were faring with the discomforts, dilemmas and delights of building a new human being within your entrails. Knowing that each week of pregnancy was moving us closer, not just to the birth, but also to our move interstate, I was also delighted to discover online a thriving community of Melbourne rainbow families, some of whom would become long-term friends online and in real life.

  When I put up my ‘what happened’ post telling the awful news of our accident, my demographic shifted within days. My post had been linked to on ‘Lost and Found Connections Abound’, a blog aggregator for those experiencing infertility and pregnancy loss. Some of my regular commenters on the blog left their shocked condolences, never to be heard from again. I was sad but I sympathised. If I had been the one who was still pregnant, I would probably have felt awkward and unsure of what to say. Others moved closer, hearing, empathising, and sharing their own experiences of grief. Of those local to Melbourne, a few offered practical support, creating a depth of friendship that I am still grateful for, nearly eight years on. And in my new demographic, I found a whole ‘baby lost’ community struggling to make sense of babies dying, and of their own role as bereaved parents.