This time last year

This time last year I was living my dream on the French Riviera. Well, maybe not quite my dream, but as close as I will probably ever get. My ideal would be living there amongst the literary heavyweights of the early twentieth century. Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Parker, Evelyn Waugh - all of them escaped to the Côte d'Azur for one reason or another, spurred by favourable exchange rates, the climate, and just because it was a very fashionable thing to do. All I could muster was two weeks in the place that had so long before captured my imagination. I was to spend my mornings studying French at the Alliance Française de Nice and my afternoons wandering around in the stunning, plentiful Spring sunshine.

la port de Nice

Nice is no longer, I suspect, what it used to be. The Promenade des Anglais (known by locals at 'la prom') is predictably touristy, but not overly so at this time of the year. I was in Nice for just long enough to get to the point where I felt at home - so comfortable that I could have seriously contemplated staying permanently! The Nicoise (if that's what they're called?) are quite friendly, and I became well known at my local boulangerie each morning (and assisted politely when my French faltered!) I had a favourite supermarket and I'd even been asked on a date (remembering Leslie was at this time reliving his own bachelor days in Italy!)

How the locals get from one end of la prom to the other

At this time last year our lives were filled with such promise and so many exciting plans for the future. We knew we wanted to try for a baby when we got back to Melbourne, and were really aware that it might therefore be a long time before we had the opportunity to travel or see the world in that same carefree capacity again. For two weeks I pretended I was living another life - that I belonged in Nice, and on some days, that I never had to come back!

In a beautiful gothic cathedral by the seaside, the Basilique-Cathédrale Sainte-Marie et Sainte-Réparate de Nice, I lit a candle for the little soul I hoped would become my baby, wishing him or her health, happiness and a speedy journey. I could not have known how soon after that my long-awaited child's flame would go out. My baby was surely never meant for the dark, only for the glorious light! When and where did my wish, my dream, get tangled up with such a cruel destiny? Who deigned to grant my heart's desire and then snatch it away?

Baroque magnificence nestled by the seaside

Inside the Cathedral

The candle I lit for my much-wanted baby to
show him/her the way to my heart

When I look at my photos of Nice I see somebody I used to know. I don't, any longer, see me. I was not a mother then. I did not know grief. I was under the mistaken impression that I had finally come into the happiness and love that I deserved, and I was of the naive belief that there might be more to come.

Happily soaking up the sun by the pebbly seaside

I was so afraid when we left home for two months that something awful would happen to my loved ones while I was so far away. I never once considered that something more awful than I could ever have dreamed up for them would end up happening to me so soon after our return.

My darling Max is everywhere in my memories of this trip - the thought of him, the dream of becoming his mother. No wonder I look so happy.

In March 2011, on the trip of a lifetime, I contemplated the future. In March 2012 I contemplate it again, but with such different, indescribable emotions. 2012 is an empty year for me. I feel absence everywhere. It's in the expected places - the ache in my arms, for example - but in unexpected places too - the expression on my face, my aspirations. any plans I may have had for my future have been robbed of their meaning and possibility. I grieve for those things too - for the promise of a life of substance instead of the empty pleasures, which I feel will be the only kind I ever experience from now on.

One day I will go back to the Cathédrale Sainte-Marie and light a brighter, longer-burning candle to light the way back to me for my baby. I will find him there as easily as I will find him anywhere, for that is where the thought of him began. I hope my baby is resting in the light of his mother's hopeful smile there; that he knows nothing of the pain and heaviness of my heartbreak at his passing.

Contemplating life near the choppy waters of the Mediterranean Sea