Baby Lost Read online

  Worse, what I had thought was the whole wall was only one particular bit of it, because I’d been standing so close. I took a step back and blinked, and there was the wall; higher and wider than I could see, with no edge in sight in any direction. ‘Right. Wall. Wall as far as the eye can see. Shit.’ I thought of cartoons of people imprisoned for life, carving lines in the wall to mark the years, finishing with a skeleton leaning back against it.

  Now that I could amble up the road to the library by myself, I decided this was my project. Surely others had scaled this wall before, or found a loose brick, a secret door. I would research my way right over this wall and away from it. ‘Stillbirth’, I typed into the catalogue. ‘Neonatal death’. ‘Grief’. I ordered books from neighbouring libraries, I waited for parcels of books ordered online. Tell me your secret, I whispered desperately into their dust jackets, how do I fix this? I had started researching and reading with the thought that I would find an answer, that I would ‘get religion’, or hear the secret from mothers who had somehow been ‘healed’ after their child’s death. This was what kept me going: the thought that there was a way through, that there was an answer to all my sadness out there somewhere—a key, a secret formula. I worked on it like it was a maths problem. I followed each line of reasoning carefully, and tried not to cry when they all led back to another spot with a good view of the wall.

  I found three main answers. The first was boring old Time. Fat use that was. I needed to fix this pain right now! What was I supposed to do—put myself into a deep freeze until the requisite amount of time passed and I could wake up feeling human again? ‘Time’ did not involve me doing anything; it was beyond my control. The second answer I didn’t like either, because it suggested that, actually, this grief wasn’t fixable. Rather, it was me who would have to adapt to it and learn to live with it in time—taking me back to my objections to answer number one.

  The third wasn’t exactly presented as ‘the answer’, but I surmised it from the fact that every book or story I read about perinatal death featured a subsequent child. Here was a nice, practical solution: have another baby. And while I couldn’t guarantee results, this was the only option I felt I could actually do anything about. I knew, of course, that one baby couldn’t replace another, that Z would always have a special place in our hearts, but I wanted a child I could parent, in the earthly, messy way of living children. I was impatient with the slow repetition of my grief. I needed a sweetener, a happy ending, resolution of the narrative. I stopped writing and went into waiting mode—waiting for a happy ending on which to finish our story.

  •

  I was at the Korean jewellers in a small arcade in Preston, handing over a small ziplock bag containing a fine, but heavy, chain. The woman opened the bag and laid the chain on a velvet board, poking it into a line with one little finger. This was the spot where the ambulance officer’s scissors bit, snapping the gold chain between their silver blades. The chain had run like a rivulet into his cupped hand. And, in its place, he negotiated a foam and plastic neckbrace behind my head, and velcroed it into place, careful not to catch my hair.

  The chain had been broken for seven months now. I explained what happened, and that I’d like it mended but with a small gold heart to mark the mending spot. ‘I was in a car accident—they cut my chain—our baby died.’ It was enough for her to get it and she gasped, ‘Awww!’ and put her hand on mine. ‘Awww! We will make you happy!’

  •

  Happy and mended is what we wanted, and so, after waiting the minimum six or so months recommended by the obstetrician, we were in hot pursuit of the one thing that we imagined could deliver that state: a positive pregnancy test. But before we could have a shot at pregnancy, there was paperwork to fill out, and administrative hoops to leap through—police checks, child welfare record checks, applications to the treatment authority to import the frozen sperm from New South Wales to Victoria, counselling and consents. Many of these hoops we had already jumped when we started the process in Sydney, but because each state had its own fertility treatment laws, we had to repeat our efforts in Melbourne. When we explained our story and Z’s loss, the staff apologised but there was nothing they could do.

  In the calendar, we’d circled August as the month where we could leap from the grief roller coaster onto the trying-to-conceive roller coaster; or, better still, perform some Evel Knievel feat of riding both roller coasters at once. August was the month that had been pulling me forwards, getting me through. We had diligently submitted all our paperwork; arranged for our donor, Jorge, to fly down from Sydney for repeat counselling; submitted to blood tests both for me and Rima. But when day one of my cycle arrived, and I called the clinic to work out the treatment schedule, I discovered that our euphemistically titled ‘samples’ had arrived from New South Wales, but without the requisite paperwork and without the requisite tests having been carried out on them. We carefully packed up our hopes and bundled them into the diary for September. By then, the tests would have all been carried out and we’d be able to press ahead with an insemination.

  Sunday, 29 August 2010 Inside-out Day

  Friday was the 27th—eight months since our accident. I was trying to figure out why it felt so much harder than seven months. We were in Singapore at the seven month mark, and somehow felt like we were ‘on holiday’ from the grief. I’d just given my conference paper and we had a little holiday ahead of us. I felt close to Z, but the grief felt distant, smoother. Eight months isn’t half a year, it didn’t make sense for it to be any harder than seven months. The answer was so obvious it took me a while to realise. She lived eight months in my belly, and from now on she would have been dead longer than she existed. I spent eight months gearing up to be a mother, and then the pendulum swung back, and I feared that my whole pregnancy has now unwound—that I’m back to where I started. We’ve now spent more time grieving her than I was pregnant. Babies that were conceived on the night ours died will be born soon.

  I dreamt last night that someone was giving away a baby car seat and pram for free, and Rima and I were discussing—is it too soon to start buying baby things again? I woke, and she’d had a very similar dream—that we’d won baby things in a competition, and were toying with the idea of bringing them home.

  Maybe this means we are ready to start again, to push the pendulum back in the direction of hope.

  •

  September arrived, and with it, dire test results about our frozen sperm samples. The same samples that had given our Sydney fertility doctor cause to wax lyrical about their vitality and motility were, when defrosted, only 7 per cent motile. The freezing process, it seemed, had turned our little Usain Bolts into Grampa Simpsons. I wasn’t giving up, though, and continued to call the clinic—even with lousy odds, could we still go ahead with an insemination, if for no other reason than so that I could feel like we were doing something? While the rest of the country was waiting to see whether Julia Gillard would be able to form government after a hung election, I was waiting for a phone call from our clinic.

  When the phone call came, we eked out a little more hope. We would be able to go ahead with an insemination, but first we needed to make an appointment with the doctor, so she could explain in person exactly how lousy our chances were. I was happy to leap through another hoop, but when I called to try make the appointment, we found she was booked out for another four weeks.

  It felt like torture by bureaucracy. No matter how many people I called or how many times I trotted out our sad saga, I couldn’t speak directly with any of the people who could change the decision. I knew there was something a little unhinged about my desperation, yet still I left messages for our doctor, both at her clinic and at her private rooms, furious that the one thing I’d been surviving for over the past eight months could be derailed by something as trivial as appointment availabilities. I was ready for a miracle, any moment now. I thought I could hope it into existence. I was furious with these delays. Don’t you know you are standi
ng between us and our miracle baby!

  Sure enough, an appointment magically opened up, and the next day, Rima and I found ourselves face to face with Dr No-Sperm-for-You. Yes, she knew how important this was to us, given our recent loss. Yes, there was sufficient sperm. But no, we couldn’t have it—not for a clinic insemination (because of the low motility) and not for a take-home insemination (because our donor had not specifically consented to that at the time of the donation, back in 2007). There would be no September cycle. Our consolation prize was a medical certificate. Given our history, she was willing to class me as medically sub-fertile, and therefore eligible for a Medicare rebate on IVF and ICSI treatment—something she would recommend, given the low motility of the thawed sperm. It was as though we’d taken our old Commodore to the mechanics for repairs, only to be told, ‘This one won’t work again, but we’ve got a very nice Mercedes we could sell you.’ I didn’t want a Mercedes, and I certainly didn’t want IVF; not if there was still a chance we could conceive via simpler means.

  I moped for a while, but sparked up after a message from our donor that he was going to be back in the country in October, and was willing to make a fresh donation for an at-home insem, just as he had back in May 2009. There would be an October cycle, regardless of the pronouncements of Dr NSFU. The hope that we’d stretched back like a rubber slingshot, from August to September to October, could finally be released, catapulting our hopes into movement. Dear Universe, it happened once. Please let it happen again. I just wanted that feeling of small knees and elbows tapping out a message, that warmth and potential. I wanted to finish the story this time—not with a memorial service, and condolence cards and a small amount of ashes falling through our hands, but with a new little voice crying, and baby eyes that opened and moved.

  By the time we flew home from Sydney after an October weekend of turkey baster-related activities, the broad beans I’d pushed into the dirt in the cool, weepy days of April were towering with flowers and ripening bean pods. We made our first harvest, slipping the bright green beans from their pods and wishing the fecundity might rub off on us too.

  Tuesday, 26 October 2010

  It’s day one again, and even though it is the first month we’ve tried since losing Z, it still feels like Groundhog Day. As philosophical as I can be in my head about percentages and buying our lottery ticket, flipping our coin and whatever stupid metaphor you want to use, I’m still crushed because I’m a dirty hope addict, and I really did think something miraculous might happen.

  20

  Heartbeat

  There was a day when my heart started beating again.

  Once I was back at work, Penny and I signed up for a Thursday night beginners yoga class. We’d both done yoga before, but this was a back-to-basics approach—a careful and precise dissection of all the familiar asanas and the movement into and out of them. The teacher was a former dancer; tiny, delicate, but exact and rock-solid. I’d come to know and love the sun salute as my five-minute wake-up routine for the early mornings when I took the 4.30 a.m. train to Newcastle for work, back in the misty land of ‘before’. It shook the zombiness of deep sleep from my limbs. I could shower the night before and I could eat breakfast on the train, but without those five minutes of yoga I couldn’t gather the wakefulness to put clothes on and get out the door.

  But now we took apart each step of the sun salute and pored over the mechanics, cleaned each component, moved and oiled it, and then slowly started reconnecting the pieces. We found the moments within the cycle to inhale into—opening, stretching—and the ones that need an exhalation, pushing with our breath, as well as with our muscles, to exact an alignment, to create momentum, to press our palms into one another or the floor, and release into a deeper stretch. It took us eight weeks of classes to complete the cycle, to return to an upright stance, hands in prayer position, bodies warm from the movement.

  ‘Press each point of your fingers and palms together, like mirror images,’ the teacher said. ‘Let your thumb bones press into one another and let the knuckles cosy into your breastbone, so you can feel your heart beating.’

  I did, and there, against all expectations, was my heart—knocking warmly against my thumbs. Big, hot tears spilled out and scorched down my cheeks.

  This is my heart. My big, noisy heart, which kept banging on as Z’s small, fast one slowed and then stopped. The enormity of that engulfed me, with anger, that my heart could so callously continue, and thankfulness that it did; that its familiar beat held her and sang to her as hers faded. And there was surprise; that I was, indeed, alive—that, despite the massive impossibility of continuing on without my child, my heart just kept on at its work, wearily, faithfully, persistently.

  •

  As I re-engaged with my PhD work, in reading my way back into the literature on DNA paternity testing, I came across a mention of a biological phenomenon called maternal-fetal microchimerism—the persistence of fetal DNA within the mother’s body for decades after a pregnancy. These were not just fragments, but whole new stem cells. One study found fetal cells replicating within the mothers’ bone marrow over fifty years after their children had been born. In mother mice with liver disease, fetal cells were found to ‘contribute to the repairing process’.1 Tears dripped onto my keyboard. Z’s cells were right here—pumping through my heart, replicating in my very marrow—and may very well have helped heal the liver and spleen lacerations I had sustained in the crash.

  The question that had been dogging me, of where Z went; what if I could answer it literally? Rather than having to decide on a spiritual story for her, in some religion or other, or imagine her in a heavenly elsewhere, what if I could trace the different elements of her—physical and psychological—here in this world? What if she literally still existed in all of those places? As a memory in my brain; as dark and light specks of ash in the sandy soil at Somers; as a fragment of DNA still replicating in my cells; or as small units of energy, unleashed in the heat of her cremation and still bumping their way through the universe? I had half-expected that, in the wilds of my grief, I might find God. What I hadn’t imagined was that I could find solace in science.

  There was something about the persistence of atoms and energy that I found comforting. Heaven, perhaps, was not a separate elsewhere, but a continuity in elemental form—a photon sparkling on water, or a molecule transforming from dirt to food to living thing and back again.

  21

  Making the judge cry

  Rima and I had made a deliberate decision after the accident not to invest too much in the criminal proceedings against the driver who caused our accident. I’d seen enough in my time as a litigator that I didn’t expect a lot in the way of resolution, let alone healing, from the court process. That work lay elsewhere.

  All I’d seen in the moments before our accident was the four-wheel drive. Like a drunk at a party, it had bumped up against a sedan travelling alongside it in the next lane, before lurching directly into our path. I’ll admit that I wasn’t fond of the large, petrol-guzzling vehicles before our accident, but afterwards, that dislike transformed into something else. Just walking past the bulky frame of a four-wheel drive, I could feel my shoulders tensing, my teeth clenching, and the sight of one on the road triggered tears and an open-mouthed horror.

  On a windy September day, I armed myself with two of my oldest and dearest friends and attended the Commodore driver’s committal hearing. Unusually, the defendant’s lawyer wanted to cross-examine several witnesses, including me. We arrived early at the Office of Public Prosecutions building and were seen into a waiting room. The solicitor handling our matter warned us, ‘We’re not sure if the defendant’s solicitor will turn up’; there was some confusion about whether he’d ceased acting. The waiting room had a large, opaque window that faced the street, and blurred figures of people walked past while we sat turning pages of magazines, as if that would make time move faster.

  The solicitor returned with a smile. ‘Okay, we’re on—look
s like he’s showed up, after all.’

  I grabbed awkwardly at my bag and fumbled for my phone, and we were bundled into the hallway. We joined the other solicitors and police officers in that small space, and one of the men put out his hand to me and introduced himself.

  I smiled politely; it was a familiar name. ‘Oh, hi. You’re one of the police officers I spoke to on the phone?’

  ‘No, no. I was driving the Pajero.’

  His words moved through my ears and solidified like ice through my bloodstream. In the eight months since the accident, I’d gritted my fear in my teeth in order to get back in a car, to cross a road, and, finally, to drive. But I still couldn’t see a four-wheel drive without flinching. I knew intellectually that he wasn’t at fault, that he was as much a victim of this accident as I was. My body and some older, more survival-related part of my brain, however, only knew what it had experienced—the sight of several tonnes of Pajero hurtling towards me and my family, and the bone-breaking, placenta-tearing sensation of impact.

  ‘I just wanted to say I’m so sorry.’ He leant in for a hug.

  I felt myself recoil, and then try to correct it. ‘Oh.’ Pause. Gulp. Breathe. Remember that I need to respond. ‘You were hurt too. How are you going?’

  ‘Not so good. I haven’t worked since the accident.’

  Somehow, we were able to fill the space between us with words again, but he’d felt me recoil. And I’d pulled away from another human being at the very moment he sought my forgiveness.