Anniversaries

Today marks the first anniversary of the loss of our second baby boy. And six days ago it was the third anniversary of the loss of our first baby boy. I went to the cemetery where our boys' ashes are scattered and spent time at their memorial, bringing with me a couple of all-weather toys to put in front of it, along with the plants my husband had put there. It was a blazing hot, beautiful day, totally incongruous with the significance of the event. It was bizarre, standing there, thinking that about four and half years of our lives, almost all of our married life, has been taken up with heartache, each one arguably worse than the previous one. It's not something we were designed to withstand.

In a way I'm glad we've got to these anniversaries. While I want to start putting it behind me, drawing a line under things, I don't know if such a thing is possible, or at least, I realise I'm not in control of my feelings over any of it. As I've said once before, I'm sick, if not bored, of my existence on Planet Dead Baby. It's a place far, far away from Planet Earth, where the scenery is an unchanging grey, lunar landscape. And it's a planet with a population of one. Me. But perhaps I'm accepting this is where I have to stay for the foreseeable future.

Part of me is very discouraged by the realisation that possibly the only true source of release (but not the solution, by any means), is another baby - live of course. At least you have to spend most of your day focused on this new baby rather than on your dead ones, as I do now. The bloggers at From Under the Weeping Willow, Stillborn StillStanding and Knocked Up, Knocked Down have gone on to have new babies, and for the last two at least, they have stopped feeling the need to blog any more, which I'm enviously interpreting as a reflection of their 'happy ending'.

I was off work for seven months following our last loss, and to be honest, looking back now, the whole period is a blur. I wonder what I did in that time. Some people could manage to circumnavigate the globe several times given that amount of time, but for me, just getting out of bed and getting dressed was an achievement. It took me that long to pick my broken soul up off the floor and be able to put on my office 'face', but going back to work did not mean that everything was now fine. Far from it. Furthermore, it's the sort of experience that sorts out your friends and family into those who genuinely care about you, and those who are the fair-weather type. At least I now know who is who.

The Endgame

By now, I hadn’t been sleeping well for weeks. I’d been waking up almost every night between 3am and 5am, tossing and turning, finally getting up to pace round the house, eventually going back to sleep again until the alarm went off at 6.30am and I headed back to work.

I was exhausted, and my memory and concentration were suffering. We wondered over and over what could possibly be causing this. There was nothing we could find in either of our family trees which pointed to cases of congenital mental or physical disabilities. Was it in my environment? Was it mobile phones, wifi, pollution, that piece of soft cheese? What had we done to deserve this nightmare?

A final MRI, carried out at 28wks, showed that the brain's mantle was thinner than it should be at that stage of gestation. This, we were told, was a sign that aside from the ventricles squashing his brain, the brain wasn’t developing properly regardless, and even if they could drain the fluid after he was born, he was going to have brain damage.

Overall, our to-ing and fro-ing went on for 9 weeks before we made a decision. We again decided, extremely reluctantly, to end the pregnancy on the basis that our baby would likely have a very poor quality of life, compounded by the fact that he was probably being afflicted by some sort of genetic condition which would put him at the ‘severe’ end of the disabilities scale.

I knew what was coming. I knew in going down the road I was about to go down I was choosing insanity – a just punishment for taking this abhorrent decision. I was once again given a little pot with a pill inside and a glass of water. I took it. We returned to the hospital two days later and once again I lay down in the ultrasound room. I knew that once the consultant put that needle into my stomach and into my baby that my soul would die with him, and there would be no coming back. We asked the consultant to take one last look at his brain, but the black mass had again grown since we’d seen it last, and there was little brain visible on the screen. He put the needle into my stomach, through to our baby, and put him to sleep forever.

A fateful decision

It's 2007. What could be more delightful than to decide to begin a family? We’d been married a year, we had good jobs, we’d got the house, the cats, and the husband had even warmed to the idea of starting a family.


But three years down the line, writing this as I am in October 2011, I can confidently say that this has so far turned out to be the worst decision of our lives. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d scream to the old me – ‘’Don’t do it!!! You are happy, you have your sanity, you love life, don’t ruin it!’’.