Longer than with you

Freddie, you were born thirty-four weeks ago.  In two weeks time we shall be on the cusp.  We will have been apart longer than we were together and infact already we are apart longer than I knew we were together - complex and difficult as that is.    I feel mixed up about this.  There are moments when I'm glad the passage of time has happened - I'm grateful for the element of new normality that has rebalanced my family, but then caught up in the torture of what should have been.  This morning I cried for a while thinking of the children you'll never have,  I mourned that for you - your entitlement to the richness of life.

The thirty-six weeks of pregnancy with you were fraught.  I convinced myself something terrible would happen and spent a rather embarrassing amount of time going to and from the doctors and fretting about mortality.  These days I have a rather philosophical outlook on our time - I'm a worrier - what happened was an awful coincidence.   I didn't cause nor predict your untimely death, I merely worried because I love you.  And now at the dawn of a new journey I have to recognise this trait within myself and surrender as such to fate.  I can be the best that I can be, I can protect your brother and sister to the best of my abilities and whatever else happens I accept that life is frequently unkind and unfair.  Freddie please don't take this to mean that you have taught me to give myself up to the Gods and accept cruel fate; in fact you have taught me to savour both good and bad.   Surrendering to sadness is as important as immersing myself in laughter from the belly.  Emotions these days are clear,  better understood and much easier to allow - I am in far less conflict.

And so worry not little one, our physical time together was shorter but your legacy is my lifetime and I teach your brother and sister your lessons.  I will never forget the desperation I felt to be with you, knowing what little time we would have.  When we united you gave me as much as you possibly could and I bow to you always for giving me the greatest gift of your company for those twelve hours.   I miss you endlessly.  You are my courageous little lion forever.

These are the things that I know

That without love, there is no grief.  Grief is acute and painful love which has no physical channel.   I always find myself overcome at watching human emotion - love and family predominantly.  If you ever want to see the essence of what it is to be human, go and sit at an airport and watch people be reunited.  I think that may have been the end credits of the film "Love Actually" but it's true - I've done it. Several years ago I went to collect some friends from Gatwick airport and I sat quietly for a few hours watching people.  I was moved to tears by some of the reunions.  That is what it is to be human.  To belong, to love, to feel, to need and to appreciate.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder, perhaps with the exception of warring ex partners.  Grief is the emotion of extreme physical absence of one that is loved.   With Freddie I was in love; without him I am painfully and wildly in love.

What have I learnt about myself since January?   That my love is powerful... That life is fleeting.... That life isn't about happy ever afters, wads of cash or a pimp car (I can't deny I would turn any of these down...) because when one or all of those disappear - life still exists and you have to find new meaning.  I've never believed in happy ever afters as such - I'm far too much of a pessimist for that, but I did think my darkest days were behind me, I've learnt that we walk into darkness - the unknown, so try and live for the light in the here and now.  Make plans, have dreams, be excited but take stock every day of what is good right now.  I go back to something my wonderful friend taught me about listing even the smallest pleasures day by day.
Above all else love.  Just love. Love your friends, your family, love as much as you can because it's all we can do in the end.

Diluted

My blog has been getting increasingly dark as this week has progressed.  It seemed to start out in the early days as determination to not be defined by this awful tragedy and has now become everything defined by tragedy.   Inevitable I suppose.   I can't blame myself for naivety and shock at the start.   Just like being a parent for the first time,  with all these hopes and dreams and ideas,  you gradually unpick it all to find out what the real you is as a parent.   In fact I'd say this is true of any child you bear.  I had so many ideas of what kind of parent I'd be to Matilda and as time has passed,  I'm not quite the parent I thought I'd be - not worse,  or better,  just different.   The same applies for being a grieving parent.   I'm not the grieving parent I thought I'd be.  I thought I'd be gutsy and by now would be involved in some kind of bereavement work bringing a positive outcome to Freddie's death.   I'm not doing that,  in fact I'd say the last few weeks may have been some of the worst.   It's OK.   It's really ok to not progress,  in fact progression scares me and there has been a stubborness to my grieving of late.   A refusal to take a positive step because walking ahead has felt like leaving him behind.   I allow myself to waiver,  I allow myself to fail.   I'm still learning to mother him and it's so much harder without him here.

The blackness has temporarily been lifted.   I brought home a kitten yesterday.   I wasn't sure this was the right thing to do AT ALL.  I've been resisting this all week,  I bought kitten things and then didn't go to a viewing.   I sent Simon a heartwrenching email about what a failure I am because I couldn't even make up my mind about a pet; but then I saw a bigger picture.   I saw two children who didn't ask for such horror and desperately want some happiness and distraction.  My rawness and sadness is acceptable to a point because I firmly believe emotion isn't something to hide behind closed doors, however of late it needs diluting.   I began to imagine my kids in the future talking of how, after their little brother died mother was never the same again.  How she shut herself away, how the house became sad and lifeless.  This is perhaps just me being "histrionic", whatever, I felt they deserved some life back.  Tilda has been asking for a pet for a while and the time for them seemed right.  Strangely I found the act of bringing a pet home more of a moral dilemma than whether to have another child.   Up until the kitty was placed in her carrier I was wanting to run and hide.  Perhaps somewhere in my psyche I felt I was trying to substitute and knew that it wasn't possible, but I also felt this guilt at separating her from her mama.  I'm either a psychologist's dream or worst nightmare at present.

 As it turns out it's quite fun having a little playful ball of fluff.   Therapeutic if you will.  I still sit here worrying that I'm sadly trying to quench the insatiable thirst of loss - and by next week I'll have lost interest because it hasn't fixed the hole in my heart.  Then I remember it's not all about me,  my children have a new lease of life and new excitement and smiles.  And they deserve it, because life is just as much theirs as it is mine and Freddie's.

Dirty grieving

The hardest times are the ones that others expect are the easiest.  I remember feeling taken aback at Freddie's funeral because I didn't really cry and I remember laughing at the Castle afterwards at something and getting looks as though I was crazy or disrespectful.  But it didn't feel real, and it wasn't.  There were people around me, I had total love and support from those I chose for it.  Freddie wasn't far away and everyone focused on him.  I almost felt proud that everyone thought so much of him.   The hardest times are when life has continued. The kitchen still needs cleaning, relationships still need nurturing but yet this living is a function.  The hardest times are when you realise not much else is happening between the duty and the sobbing down country lanes in the dark.

This week may have been the hardest, yet I thought that about the week before and the week before that.  When there's just pure grief for Freddie it is almost a relief because the pain is real.  The rest of the tangles and traumas make little sense.  "Dirty grieving" is how my psychologist calls it.  When one is unable to grieve properly because of other mental distress.  Bounteous mental distress.  Where to begin there.  If I had a penny for every time I have sobbed "is it not enough to lose my son"....  The trouble is life is not as we believed the earth once was.  It is not simple or empty, static nor flat.  Life is a screaming avalanche of beauty, loss, laughter, tears, success, failure and ultimately death.  We can try to counter much of the negative aspects but even whilst locked in a cupboard and packaged in bubblewrap we still age and think and die.  What I suppose I'm trying to say is that I can't grieve Freddie at all purely when life around me kicks up the dust.  Work, whether to have more children on my shortened biological clock, mistrust in my body felt not just by myself, worry for ones family and so I drivvle on in total self pity.

The goal here is to grieve healthily - it's achievable of course.  I've spent the best part of a day compiling a leather bound photo book online, only to discover I've ordered it with a screaming typo.  My mother is "Mr mother"... And so begins another email argument where I have to pull the "poor me" card.  Poor me I really did double check the pictures and spelling three times over, I really am trying.  But you see that grieving has made me tired, and clumsy. I thought I'd spent so long looking but the loss has distorted my sense of time.  Some days eight hours go by and I realise I've only had a tin of soup and have stared at my phone, aimlessly trying to find ways of remembering a dead child.  Biodegradable balloon releases and the like.  Other days I feel alive again and time skips alongside me.  I start to feel like achievements are possible only for them to be undone by careless errors or reminders of other people's lives which are glaringly more normal and even more obviously less painful.  However the person at the end of the email helpdesk probably doesn't give a shit.   So that's another good day.

My psychologist tells me I have an issue with creating tabloid headlines in my brain which cause anxiety.... Given that I've just created a crappy day before its even started I'd say he has a point.

Semantics

One of the very first things you learn when you lose a baby is that there are NO WORDS.   People say this to you,  you feel it back.   Sometimes there is nothing.   No explanation which can trip easily off the tongue,  no articulation of what your poor brain is struggling with and no adequate description of the pain and suffering which winds so far into your future that the present is too terrifying to exist in.

When you log into Facebook and see another birth announcement shortly after a conversation when it becomes clear life is going to take a step away from new parenthood,  when you try and involve yourself in a project related to your dead child only to be reminded of the joy of those living ones.   That other planet which people exist on where they spend a lifetime taking a child for granted.  And so they should.  Every small child should occupy the surroundings of a parent.   Every child should be made up of atomic love.

There are no words to explain my juncture.   Bed negates the need to even try.  So I stay here a lot at the moment,  waiting for an epiphany of some sort.   The event horizon.   The dawn of new words.

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.

Heavy hearted

Baby boy we've been without you for a while now.  We function reluctantly,  your brother and sister keeping us going daily. You exist through them, through your brother's tender charm and kindness and your sister's exuberance and tenacity; the way she delights in saying your name and the insistence of drawing you whenever an opportunity rises.   I look at them and feel you nearby but it is like Narnia; you are through a wall of ice, a children's wardrobe,  through the parting of an ocean.  I know you are around but I can't reach you.   Some days it's too painful to look at my photographs, I can't acknowledge your passing because it renders me incapable.  I am trying to exist and then I remember what happened to us and I can't put a foot in front of the other.  The fear of never seeing you again.  It's like I left you at a shop in your pram and got home to the front door before remembering, it's like I've left the house and thought that I can't leave you on your own.  It's like I forgot to check that you are warm enough.  The nausea that comes with a feeling of panic - something might be wrong, but never having the dropped shoulders of relief.  Then the depths of despair that this is it, we've had our fill of your lifetime.  There is no more.

I manage most days to celebrate you through the sadness, to find a way to ensure thoughts of you are nourished and positive.  When I look at your now over studied photographs I manage to feel overwhelmed with pride at what a beautiful boy you are.  I manage to box away the jagged sorrow, the bitterness and turmoil that festers, I manage to lock it deep inside for most of our glorious moments.   Then I can enjoy you.  I'm like any parent who is busting to tell everyone how amazing you are.   But the days when I can't look at your face are the days that those darkest thoughts get let out on day release.  I've learnt to accept them, the unwelcome guests at my pity party.  I have to relinquish control, put on my hat with the big "V" and be a self proclaimed victim.    It isn't fair and it's ok to wail about it, but I won't let it consume me and I won't let it sully our relationship.  

I began to think about work today Freddie,  and it made me feel a little like the old me again, which initially felt good.  But the old me didn't have you.  I don't want to go back as if nothing has happened.  I don't want to be pitied by others, pitying myself is enough.  I don't want to walk back into work without giving everyone a lengthy and unasked for progress report on my baby boy.  I don't want to go back in without crying with acute separation anxiety and several calls to your nursery to check whether you're managing with a bottle.   I don't want to go into work without your dribble and mashed food down the back of my coat.  So it felt good to use my brain again until the darkness came and reminded me of how things should be. 

We miss you every second of our waking moments, and I dream of you in the gaps inbetween.   I'm learning to balance without the weight of you,  though my heart is heavier than us both.