Growing up

I read an article in a broadsheet about three weeks after Freddie died, by a lady who had lost her third baby.  She explained how she had grown up as a result of the death of her daughter and how, right up until the catastrophic event and even with two other small children, she had led a charmed, carefree existence with her husband.   At the time, her blunt observations on her own grieving and ultimate maturation, made bereavement sound like an unending terror at a time when I was desperately looking for hope.  She described how she would drop news of her stillbirth into conversations with unsuspecting randoms and how alienated it made her; how she walked along streets sobbing openly and how cold life became.   The article was saturated with blue; the meaning of her daughter's name, the description of a rapidly distant New York in winter, the sadness and bleakness of her tone. This all horrified me beyond belief.   I didn't want to lose myself, I didn't want life to become a echo of the three colours trilogy; drenched in pathos.  But this IS how things ultimately are; when one has stopped fighting and wrestling with such dark thoughts and accepted they are household furniture.  They belong to your child and your child belongs to you.

After Freddie died there has been a loss of innocence and a sense that we've finally become the grown ups, after trailing in the wake of them for so long.   We now feel aged like a battered leather chair;  weathered perhaps.    We have observed profound and undeserved death in our arms.    We have watched life leave our child and we can never laugh with the same sense of joie de vivre again.  From the point where Freddie died onwards we have become the last gateposts between beginnings and ends and we bear the weight of responsiblity for it.  Freddie has aged us, like all children should and left us better parents to his siblings.  But we inhibit a more sombre space now, knowing life at it's cruellest.   We trust nothing, we suffer no fools, we raise a cynical eyebrow whilst holding on to each other tightly.   We look back with envy at such casual hopes and dreams when all we wish for now is existence.