Things-I-Love-Thursday: Apple Store

A very unfortunate thing happened this week. The hard-drive in my beloved MacBook died and went to heaven, unable to be resuscitated despite the expert help of a very clever Genius as the Doncaster Apple Store.

It was an unexpected death, but one that made a lot of sense afterwards given that my computer had been operating at less that its optimum capacity for a couple of months now. Almost every day I was dealing with the spinning rainbow wheel of death, which would cause everything to freeze. The only solution to this was to constantly force re-start the whole system. This is very annoying and unless I'd been saving every application I was using, often meant I would lose all of my open tabs and data.

The data from my machine was unrecoverable. That's the worst part of a hard drive malfunction. Did I have everything backed up? Well, what do you think? No! I did have the most important things backed up, though. Over the summer I had uploaded all of my photos to Picasa web albums, so precious had the ones of Max become. Thank god for that. Of course all of the content of this blog is safely uploaded to Blogger. I can't imagine how devastated I would be if I'd been recording this journey only in Word documents or something. Also, my thesis is backed up in a few different places, which was also a blessing.

I have lost all of my music, bookmarks, and other random content, however. 

Let this be a lesson to us all! I have now downloaded the Google Drive, and have upgraded my operating system to OSX Lion, so that I can access Apple's iCloud and have all of my data backed up all of the time!

So that's the bad news. The good news is that I was able to get a new hard drive without having to replace my entire computer, and I got to spend a fair bit of time in the Mac-lover's paradise known as the Apple Store, where many pretty, happy, shiny things exist to make you believe that anything is possible, if only you had the right equipment. 

The store at Doncaster Westfield is a wonderland, albeit filled with far too many customers at any given time. I had a headache after I'd left from the sheer noise from the store, but I could understand why everyone gets so excited while they are in there. I could easily imagine how your credit card could just slide out of your wallet and over the counter to procure the latest shiny gadget. In my case this would be an Ipad.

We briefly toyed with the idea of replacing my laptop with an iPad, given that we have two other computers in the house already. The main thing that stopped us from doing this was the storage capacity of the iPad (which is very poor if you are using it as your main device, and not just as an addition to your computer) and because I use my computer mostly for word processing. You can get Pages for iPad, and you can attach a wireless keyboard to it, but I think it would still end up being inferior for that kind of work. Perhaps, if we'd had to pay for a brand new computer, we might have more carefully considered it, but as it only cost a few hundred dollars to get a new hard drive, we decided I would stick with Mr Macbook until we were unable to get any more life out of him at all.

Getting assistance at the Mac Store is fantastically easy. You can make an appointment with a Genius by using the Apple app on your iPhone, and when you arrive the app automatically checks you in so they know you are there waiting. I found all the Genius nerds to be incredibly friendly and knowledgeable. They were mostly boys and mostly had lovely sensitive boys names like Nick and Daniel, and they all had lovely soft hair and fuzz-free faces. Did I pay far too much attention to what the Genius nerds looked like? Well, yes. But given that I ended up with Leslie I must be a bit partial to the cult of the nerd, so that should be understandable.

There were quite a number of toddlers in the store who were going to town on the demonstrator iPads. They knew a thing or two about what they were doing, which was quite incredible to watch. Toddlers aren't supposed to have much in the way of fine motor skills but these ones were pinching and swiping and tapping like professionals.

I did manage to leave the store without making any extra, impulse purchases, but there's so much I could have bought! And so many nice young boys I could have taken out for lunch!

You'll be pleased to know that my laptop, with its new hard drive, is running like a dream. No delays, no freezes, just plain sailing computing, which is how a Mac should be!

The beginner's goodbye

Friday was for me a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day - at least the second in a row. I had my usual weekly appointment with Melanie where I sat for an hour and as usual asked her a barrage of questions, between tears, that I knew very well she did not have the answers to. I ask her the same questions every single week, like I imagine a gold fish would. And she patiently explains to me, every single week, that she doesn't know. That none of us know. The questions all relate, broadly, to a single theme. The theme is, simply: why?

I am so experienced in asking why that I have a thousand synonymous ways of posing the question. Sometimes I think I am asking something else entirely, but always, it can on some level be reduced to that age-old toddler's lament of 'why, why, why?' Why my son? Why that day? Why are we even here? Why do we bother living when we know that we must die? Why do people keep wanting to minimise my loss? Why didn't I take more photos of him? Why didn't I spend more time with him in the hospital? Why didn't I undress him and commit to memory every inch of his little body? Why can't anyone help me? Why can't I remember? Why can't I forget?

Those are just the big questions, of course. They are the umbrellas under which hover hundreds of tinier, but no less distressing, 'whys'. Why do I still have to put petrol in the car? Why must I feign happiness at the news of other people's pregnancies? Why must they keep on announcing to me their pregnancies? Why I am so hungry? Why am I so tired? Why is my kitten continually pissing on all of my belongings?

Those are daily, run of the mill 'whys' I have to deal with all the time, and they are perhaps more draining than any of the existential ones I could pose to you.

Melanie and I often discuss books. She reads about as voraciously as I do. We read a lot of the same things. She told me she had just read The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler, which gently probed many of the same questions we'd been discussing. Such is the size of my unread bookshelf, and my obsession with purchasing books online, that I didn't realise that I'd already bought a copy of this same book. I got it out when I arrived home, and I sat and read it in one sitting. Yes, it spoke to me. A simple, kind of suburban, domestic, homespun narrative, typical of Tyler's novels, that dealt with some of the biggest, and perhaps most absurd, of life's questions.

The defining question of the book, I suppose, is what it means to be dead - both for the dead person and the loved one left behind. Aaron, a 37 year old editor, loses his wife in a freak accident when an oak tree crashes through his sun room, causing a heavy old Sony Trinitron television to fall on her and flatten her chest like a tack. There's humour in there too. If only, Aaron desperately laments, they'd decided to buy a flat screen TV, which would have been significantly lighter and less chest-crushing. For a time, all of his thought space is taken up with seemingly comical, but in fact very serious questions like this. I can relate to the peculiar sense of reasoning Aaron engages in ('If we had had a flat-screen TV, would Dorothy still be alive?'); it doesn't seem at all peculiar to you when you're trying to figure out what the hell bomb just went off in your life. Aaron's first thought is about the TV, but he doesn't stop there. Would she still be alive. . .

If her patient hadn't cancelled. Then she wouldn't even have been home yet when the tree fell.
Or if she had stayed in the kitchen instead of heading for the sunporch.
If I'd said, "Let's see if I can find those Triscuits," and gone out to the kitchen to help her look, and then sat with her at the kitchen table while she ate them.

'But no, no,' he says. 'I had to stomp off in huff and sulk in the bedroom, as if it had mattered in the least that she'd refused to settle for Wheat Things.' It is the absurd unpredictability of life, the realisation that such a small, domestic trifle as a misplaced packet of biscuits could have such profound life or death consequences, that leaves Aaron in a vicious cycle of trying to make meaning from the ultimately meaningless. The novel asks: how do you make sense of a loss caused by a convoluted series of entirely unnecessary and preventable events? And Aaron answers that you don't, and that the worst part of this is that you are doomed to just keep on analysing the minutia, looking for that split second or that tiny action or word that could have stopped the disaster in its tracks. If only you'd realised what it was all adding up to. If only.

The question of what it means to be dead takes on a whole new meaning when Aaron's dead wife, Dorothy begins appearing to him many months after she died . The opening line of the novel is just undeniably wonderful and illustrates how, when you're mired in grief, everyone else seems like they're mad because they're not complicit in your 'reality'. You feel like you're the only one in the world who's actually truly alive - electrically alive, and that everyone else is just a plastic soldier or something, looking the part, but not really participating in your war. Aaron narrates:

The strangest thing about my wife's return from the dead was how other people reacted.

He has already confronted a thing he thought impossible - the loss of his wife - so I guess it doesn't seem much of a stretch to accept that something else as implausible as her return could happen. "Put yourself in my place," he says.

Call to mind a person you've lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening upon that person out in public. You see your long-dead father sauntering  ahead with his hands in his pockets. Or you hear your mother behind you calling, "Honey?" Or your little brother who fell through the ice the winter he was six, let's say, passes by with his smell of menthol cough drops and damp mittens. You wouldn't question your sanity, because you couldn't bear to think this wasn't real. And you certainly wouldn't demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you'd been feeling that one touch was worth giving up everything for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.

Dorothy appears increasingly as time goes on and Aaron is constantly struck at people's refusal to acknowledge that Dorothy is there walking right alongside him. They

pretended not to recognize either one of us. They would catch sight of us from a distance, and this sort of jolt would alter their expressions and they would all at once dart down a side street, busy-busy, much to accomplish, very important concerns on their minds. 

Ah, I thought, when I read this: the contagion of the bereaved. I recognise that. I've felt it myself at times. Though no one has knowingly avoided me on the street, plenty have done the exact same thing in pretending nothing has happened or changed when they do see me, instead babbling on inanely about their kitchen renovations and designer bench tops, which is insulting and absurd in equal measure. Though I'm not accompanied by the corporeal presence of my dead baby in my dealings with the world as Aaron seems to be with Dorothy, I might as well be sometimes for the extent to which people fear conversing with the acutely bereaved. That's what Aaron's saying, too, I think.

Aaron feels like he and Dorothy are the only two people really alive

The novel deals in beautiful descriptions of what I suppose you could call the acute phase of grieving: the numbness and disbelief, the inability to sleep, the well-meaning platitudes forced upon the bereaved by every neighbour, workmate and acquaintance, the thousand casseroles with cute notes attached that end up on the doorstep, but it also really poignantly deals with what happens as time passes and those same people expect you to "get over", "find closure" or "move on" - "all those ridiculous phrases people use when they're urging you to endure the unendurable". Aaron describes it like this:

The casseroles started thinning out and the letters stopped. Could people move on that easily? Yes, well, of course. New tragedies happened daily. I had to acknowledge that. It seemed heartless that I should think to go in for my semi-annual dental checkup, but I did. And then I bought myself some new socks. Socks, of all things! So trivial!

As time passes, Aaron says that 'more and more often I could hear my sister thinking, It's too bad his wife had to die, but was she really worth quite this much grief? Does he have to go on and on about it? There's that pressure - real or perceived - to stop holding people back with your sorrow. Sometimes it feels ever-present. But the desire to see you 'healed' is often a selfish one, borne out of compassion fatigue, or guilt, or perhaps a person's own suffering at watching someone they love suffer so.

But, of course, time is meaningless to the grief monster. Even when Aaron thinks he is over the worst of it, seeming 'unknowingly to have traveled a little distance away from that first unbearable pain', there's some mornings he wakes up with in a panic, thinking he hasn't heard from her in a while, before he has to realise all over again,

Oh. She's dead. And it wasn't any easier than it had been at the very beginning. I can't do this, I thought. I don't know how. They don't offer any courses in this; I haven't had any practice.
Really, I had made no progress whatsoever.

While for the most part Aaron feels like "the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It's still there, but the sharpest edges are . . . muffled, sort of", every now and again he lifts a "corner of the blanket, just to check, and - whoa! Like a knife!'. He says, resignedly, I'm not sure that will ever change."

And does it change? Well, I don't want to entirely spoil the story. I'd like you to read it for yourself, and tell me what changes, and what stays the same for Aaron, and by extension, what we can hope for all of us who have lost a dear loved one and can't bear to imagine what the future may hold.

Poem on the death of an infant

Here is the second poem I mentioned in my previous post. 

A Funeral Poem on the Death of C. E. an Infant of Twelve Months

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784)

THROUGH airy roads he wings his instant flight
To purer regions of celestial light;
Enlarg’d he sees unnumber’d systems roll,
Beneath him sees the universal whole,
Planets on planets run their destin’d round, 
And circling wonders fill the vast profound.
Th’ ethereal now, and now th’ empyreal skies
With growing splendors strike his wond’ring eyes:
The angels view him with delight unknown,
Press his soft hand, and seat him on his throne;
Then smiling thus. “To this divine abode,
The seat of saints, of seraphs, and of God,
Thrice welcome thou.” The raptur’d babe replies,
“Thanks to my God, who snatch’d me to the skies,
E’er vice triumphant had possess’d my heart,
E’er yet the tempter had beguil’d my heart,
E’er yet on sin’s base actions I was bent,
E’er yet I knew temptation’s dire intent;
E’er yet the lash for horrid crimes I felt,
E’er vanity had led my way to guilt,
But, soon arriv’d at my celestial goal,
Full glories rush on my expanding soul.”
Joyful he spoke: exulting cherubs round
Clapt their glad wings, the heav’nly vaults resound.

Say, parents, why this unavailing moan?
Why heave your pensive bosoms with the groan?
To Charles, the happy subject of my song,
A brighter world, and nobler strains belong.
Say would you tear him from the realms above
By thoughtless wishes, and prepost’rous love?
Doth his felicity increase your pain?
Or could you welcome to this world again
The heir of bliss? with a superior air
Methinks he answers with a smile severe,
“Thrones and dominions cannot tempt me there.”
But still you cry, “Can we the sigh forbear,
And still and still must we not pour the tear?
Our only hope, more dear than vital breath,
Twelve moons revolv’d, becomes the prey of death;
Delightful infant, nightly visions give 
Thee to our arms, and we with joy receive,
We fain would clasp the Phantom to our breast,
The Phantom flies, and leaves the soul unblest.”

To yon bright regions let your faith ascend,
Prepare to join your dearest infant friend
In pleasures without measure, without end.

On seeing a deceased infant

As I guess is the domain of the life-long literary scholar, in my grief I have turned to literature for comfort, as well as curiosity. I have begun to think about how dead or dying children have been portrayed in literature throughout the ages - to reflect on what I already know about this theme in nineteenth-century fiction, like that of Dickens, and to seek out answers to what I don't know, which is a lot. During my reading, I've come across a couple of lovely poems, which I want to share here. I'll come back to my research in another post, at another time, after I've read much more widely. But here is a poem. The last stanza made me cry.

On Seeing a Deceased Infant
By William B. O. Peabody (1799–1847)

AND this is death! how cold and still,
And yet how lovely it appears!
Too cold to let the gazer smile,
But far too beautiful for tears.
The sparkling eye no more is bright,
The cheek hath lost its rose-like red;
And yet it is with strange delight
I stand and gaze upon the dead.

But when I see the fair wide brow,
Half shaded by the silken hair, 
That never look’d so fair as now,
When life and health were laughing there
I wonder not that grief should swell
So wildly upward in the breast,
And that strong passion once rebel
That need not, cannot be suppress’d.

I wonder not that parents’ eyes
In gazing thus grow cold and dim,
That burning tears and aching sighs
Are blended with the funeral hymn; 
The spirit hath an earthly part,
That weeps when earthly pleasure flies,
And heaven would scorn the frozen heart
That melts not when the infant dies.

And yet why mourn? that deep repose
Shall never more be broke by pain;
Those lips no more in sighs unclose,
Those eyes shall never weep again.
For think not that the blushing flower
Shall wither in the church-yard sod,
’T was made to gild an angel’s bower
Within the paradise of God.

Once more I gaze—and swift and far
The clouds of death in sorrow fly,
I see thee like a new-born star 
Move up thy pathway in the sky:
The star hath rays serene and bright,
But cold and pale compared with thine;
For thy orb shines with heavenly light,
With beams unfailing and divine. 

Then let the burthen’d heart be free,
The tears of sorrow all be shed,
And parents calmly bend to see
The mournful beauty of the dead;
Thrice happy—that their infant bears
To heaven no darkening stains of sin;
And only breathed life’s morning airs
Before its evening storms begin.

Farewell! I shall not soon forget!
Although thy heart hath ceased to beat, 
My memory warmly treasures yet
Thy features calm and mildly sweet;
But no, that look is not the last,
We yet may meet where seraphs dwell,
Where love no more deplores the past, 
Nor breathes that withering word—farewell.

Six months in a leaky boat

Thursday 24th May, 2012, marked six sorrowful months since my beloved baby was born.

That I'm still living and breathing is something I could not have imagined possible in the beginning.

That my body, which created him, could go on functioning, though he could not, is something that both troubles and amazes me in equal measure.

Surely, that I am still here despite my gaping, immeasurably septic wound, is evidence of how driven and intent our bodies are for survival. Yet, this same instinct of self-preservation was of no use to little Max, whose body was not strong enough to cooperate with the desperate wishes of his parents, his family, and his friends, who prayed, even if they didn't believe in prayer, for his survival.

Why does it take 40 weeks for a baby to develop and grow in readiness for life on earth, but the space of less than 24 hours for the same system that so magically kept him alive to systematically deconstruct and expel him, without explanation, from the very place he was supposed to be safest?

If we can cure cancer, and turn the clock back on AIDS, and give someone a new heart, liver or face, and if we can rocket into space and map our every whereabouts with mysterious, all-seeing satellites, and if we can restore hearing to the deaf, and manufacture cars that tell you how many kilometres you can go before you run out of petrol, how can we not save the life of a 23 week old baby who seems just as healthy and 'complete' as any full term baby, but who is just a little on the small side?

How can we allow the death of a baby whose life had not even begun, who never even got to open his eyes and see his mother's face, when we strenuously defend the right to life of the most hardened, evil murderers?

How can we expect a mother of a desperately-wanted baby to go home from the hospital without him and start her life again as if nothing had ever happened; as if she were still the same person she ever was, with the same hopes she ever had?

We don't know how we can, but we do.

And six months after that, when we ask her how she is, we expect her to be able to say 'not bad, thanks, how are you?' whether she really means it or not, so we can stop feeling bad that our own lives have gone on while hers is suspended in a time she thinks she still might be able to get back to, if only she tries hard enough.

Why can't she be happy for us when we announce our own happy pregnancies or births? It's not all about her, we think. We want her to be interested in us again, in our own domestic ups and downs, but she just doesn't seem to care. We can't say the right thing, so we don't bother saying anything at all about that unfortunate baby boy anymore. We instead talk to her about how we know someone, who knows someone, who had a miscarriage or a stillborn baby, and who went on to have more children, and who was happy, and how shouldn't that give her hope for the future?

And after all, we think to ourselves, although we'd never say that it out loud, was he even a real baby anyway? Plenty of people lose babies - what ever that deeply mysterious process means or entails - and move on. Why can't she? Except that we've never seen a baby at 23 weeks gestation, heard him gasp for air, and felt his tiny heart beating with frantic gusto, so perhaps we think that somehow he was a less valuable to lose than our own animated earthly babies, whose deaths, after being undeniably, publicly, alive, would be so much more devastating; would be a much more legitimate trauma.

We continue to gaily announce our joyous pregnancies and births to her, often with little regard to how she might receive the news. Of course we tell her how blessed we feel at the miracle of our baby's healthy birth, lest she think we are ungrateful, and perhaps to assuage the guilt we feel at our good fortune. But she doesn't hear gratitude in our voices, she hears relief that we did not suffer her unfortunate fate. She hears that for some reason we think God chose to bestow specific blessings on us but she decided to leave her out of it. It might not make sense now, we tell her, but one day it will. Things always happen for a reason.

But she knows they don't. That's an elaborate lie we tell ourselves in order to better endure our sufferings. The earth does not have a master plan. And even if it did, why should we, inconsequential dots in a sea of humanity, expect to rate a mention in it?

We talk to her occasionally and think she seems more hopeful, and brighter of voice, and we're relieved that we might get to stop thinking of, and talking about, dead babies soon. But all the while, as she listens to us talk about how she should be hopeful for the future,  she still doesn't accept that she's not even pregnant anymore. She still wears her maternity clothes in the vain hope that one day she'll look down and see that they're still filled out after all, that it was all just a terrible dream.

For she's spent six months in a leaky boat and she still doesn't believe that the life she once dreamed of is sinking further and further to the bottom of the ocean as each day, week, month passes. Every day, when she wakes up, she starts slowly and surely bailing out the stinging, salty water all over again, just keeping afloat, with the cruel glimpse of dry land in the distance, but no way of knowing if she'll make it there, or even what she'll do if she does.

Six months after her baby is born, this tired mother closes down the tens of tabs on her internet browser, on which she's spent so much time comparing the merits of various infant cremation urns from around the world, and chooses one, which she ships with the help of a friend in America.

It arrives, and it is the one she took six months to decided upon, but she suddenly loathes the sight of it. The brass teddy bear on the front looks garish and zombified. The finish is a little too shiny. The wood stain is more reddish than it should have been; too bright and gaudy. It's got a chip on the corner obtained during the perils of international shipping. It is flawed in ways the boy whose ashes it will carry never was; never could have been.

She could buy every single cremation urn from every single crevice of the earth, and none of them would be worthy of holding her perfect child. There is no suitable way to keep his remains that befits his beauty, his delicacy, his innocence, except to wrap them in his baby blanket, tuck them under her arm, and never let them go.

As the six month mark passes she feels she's come so far. And yet sometimes it feels like six months is nothing at all. That she's still at the beginning, with so far to go.

On Miscarriage

You should read this haunting, lyrical piece about a miscarriage - perhaps the loveliest, but most upsetting I've read.

I found it because I was thinking of what it must be like to experience a miscarriage. Recently I participated in a focus group at SANDS, which reviewed the infant death literature they provide to newly bereaved parents. In a follow up email, the facilitator who was in charge of creating the new booklets, emailed me to ask if, perchance, I'd also suffered a miscarriage, as she was having trouble finding women to give feedback on their miscarriage brochures. I didn't take offence - she was just asking what was from her perspective a pragmatic question, but it made me wonder about why she thought I might have been a likely candidate. Perhaps she thought I was more likely to have given that I'd had a baby who died? Or perhaps she didn't think that through at all, but was just trying to get her brochures finished on time.

At any rate, I never really feared miscarriage when I was pregnant with Max, although I knew from everything I'd ever been read or told that it is quite common in the early stages of a pregnancy. I was relieved when I passed the symbolic 12 week mark, though, I guess. Except I now see how pointless that so-called magical milestone is. Women are encouraged not to tell anyone they're pregnant before this time because the vast majority of miscarriages occur within the first trimester. I have two problems with this. The first is that this implies if you did lose a baby it's something shameful that you wouldn't want people to know about. The second is that it produces this kind of false reassurance that if you get through the first trimester with no problems then it's smooth sailing from there in. I had no idea my baby could up and die half way through my pregnancy for no good reason. I really don't think we should perpetuate this myth of certainty. It's not fair, and most importantly, it's not true. Yes, you're less statistically likely to lose your baby after the first trimester, but you're certainly don't become magically less immune to the possibility.

Leslie and I have wondered how we would cope if I were pregnant again and had a miscarriage early on. We can't help but think about it. It's like Heineman mentions in the article: you kind of assume that you're destined for the trifecta - miscarriage, stillbirth, infant death - when you've had one of them happen to you and you know for sure now that your name is on at least one, and maybe more tickets in the dead baby lottery.

The dead baby lottery: when you're the winner

It upsets me to think about miscarriage because it makes me think of people, like the writer of the article I mentioned, alone and afraid losing their baby at home. It makes me feel sick that a small fetus might be accidentally flushed down the toilet. It makes me angry that mother's who miscarry don't get any official recognition that their baby existed (in fact, you get no recognition of your baby unless they are over 20 weeks gestation, which is a baby who is undeniably human and perfectly formed at that stage).

I hope I never have to find out what that feels like.

I hope that the dead baby lottery is like a pass-the-parcel game at a children's birthday party, and that the music isn't allowed to stop on you if you've already had a turn - just so that it's fair for everyone.

But it's not fair for everyone, is it? Some people, like Heineman, will experience the loss of multiple babies. Others, who perhaps take reckless risks during their pregnancies, or who are not fit parents, will continue to get to keep their babies, defying any sense of the rationality and reason we assume operates in our world.

There's no rationality and reason at all, though, really. There's no such thing as your 'fair share' or 'taking it in turns', or 'lightning doesn't strike twice, or 'you've suffered enough'. 'There are no rewards for being a good person, or for doing the right thing, despite what every parent, teacher or church will tell you to the contrary. There is just randomness and chaos; a universe in disarray, in which we are but the smallest, most inconsequential inhabitants. It's catch-cry is 'shit happens: don't take it personally'.

Grief reactions

Today on Daily Life, Sarah Wayland writes about grief survivors - people who have suffered unimaginable losses and who, despite all their feelings to the contrary, have survived and gone on to create new meaning in their life as a consequence of their experiences.

This idea of resilience in the face of tragedy is very inspiring, and I agree with Mal McKissock (the co-Director of the Bereavement Care Centre) when he says that the majority of people who've suffered a traumatic loss manage to keep moving forward, even if they don't want to, however I do think the concept of resilience is much more complicated than how the article presents it.

Wayland asks the important question of how realistic it is to assume that people can choose to react in a resilient way when faced with loss, but never really answers it, except to say that attitudes toward resilience are complicated by issues of time. Resilience in the fact of tragedy is encouraged and celebrated in the longer term, as with the stories of Ingrid Poulson and Bruce Morcombe, she suggests, but is perceived as strange or abnormal immediately after a loss, in the period we associate with intense grief and sadness.  

The article acknowledges that there is no 'right' way to grieve - a message that I am keen to promote. I am glad to find the media engaging with issues of bereavement, but time and time again the things I read do leave me wondering what people who are suffering and not coping, particularly long after a tragedy, think when they read these things. While they're told on one level that there's no 'right' way to grieve, it is the constant promulgation of what I like to call 'happy hero' stories that tell them on a on another level that their grief is 'wrong'. The constant reporting of 'hero' stories tell those people, however unconsciously, that if they haven't been able to move on, or integrate the experience in their lives in psychologically pleasing ways, or if they give up or fall apart or otherwise spectacularly destroy themselves, that they are somehow less remarkable or that they are failures.

In actuality, to still be walking and talking and breathing after suffering a tragedy of the magnitude those mentioned in the story have, is, I think, to have already surpassed expectation. Can we not also acknowledge the battlers? The ones that might never be able to recover or re-frame their experience in positive ways? The ones for whom making it to the shower on any given day, or opening the blinds, is every bit an achievement as returning to work, or running a foundation, or marrying again?

I consider myself to be very fortunate in the amount of support and assistance I've had in rebuilding my sense of self, and my life, after Max died. I still feel as if I've taken only a few steps down the road to resilience, but I know I have the capacity for it. I feel hopeful that I will be courageous enough to try for another child, and on some days I am able to see beyond by grief to witness a glimpse of what the future may hold. I am acutely aware, however, that for some people all of this seems about as impossible as spacewalking to the moon.

One of the most powerful things about a recent episode of Insight I wrote about, which dealt with grief, was its inclusion of people for whom life has not begun again in earnest, but who were crippled with grief, sometimes years after the loss of their loved one. We hope that the bereaved can find peace and hope again, of course, and those who have should be rightly celebrated. But let us also acknowledge those for whom the road ahead seems as bleak and as impossible as it did in the first days after their loss. Let us not forget the courage that it takes for them to just wake up every morning with the memory of their traumatic loss so fresh in their head. That's resilience.

How is grief today?

I made a new friend this week, someone with whom I seem to have a lot in common. We are both lapsed PhD students, and were sent on somewhat of a blind date after being put in touch by my thesis supervisor. We had many helpful conversations about our PhD journeys, but it turns out that along the way we have each experienced the profound grief of losing a loved one; in her case a boyfriend, in my case a child.

Speaking to someone who has had to face death head on is something I don't get to do very often, as most of the people I know are fortunate, as I was until recently, to be still naively unaware of death's very real and pernicious impact. Also, not everyone who has lost a loved one embraces grief and opens themselves up to its ravages as I have. Some people I've known have, conversely, let grief shut them down, and consequently you get the sense when talking to those people that they don't really want to be fully present in your experience either because your very visible and unapologetic grief perhaps threatens to make them reflect on the feelings they've very carefully and deliberately locked away in the unconscious recesses of their mind.

To talk to someone who was willing and able to share, and reflect upon their own experience of grief, in all its messy realities, was so valuable. Sometimes strangers, I've found, are willing to sit with you as you describe your suffering in a way that people close to you find it too difficult and painful to do. We discussed a lot of things that seem to happen when you are mourning someone who has died: the distorted sense of time that messes with your mind, your inability to focus or concentrate on anything, the sense that all about you is fleeting and temporary, the sleep disturbances, the pools and pools of tears, the tumult of emotions that oscillate from the very internally experienced emotions of  regret, guilt, and disbelief to the very external experience of anger and bitterness and injustice.

During our two-hour conversation I felt, powerfully, heard.

In a follow up email this very wise woman asked me the simplest yet most thought-provoking question: how is grief today? The question is an evocative one, and in four simple words, that anyone can utter, does a number of really important things. It recognises that grief is something that stays with you all the time, even on the days when you're back at work and wearing a smile, and thinking of the future, in short, on the days when most people think you've 'recovered'.

Secondly, it recognises that grief is not one experience, but an umbrella term under which a person has many experiences, both physically and emotionally. On some days grief feels like a heavy burden to shoulder, and one you're keen to get rid of, and on others it feels like a badge of honour you carry on behalf of your loved one; that your grief will ensure their immortality.

The question also recognises that grief occupies its own very real space - it is personified by the question very accurately as either a companion or an appendage. As time goes by, you are able sometimes to put grief away as you would a favourite book on a shelf, having memorised and internalised some parts so that it is always a part of you, and having the other parts bookmarked and archived somewhere discrete and separate to you, but which you can visit or call upon at any time. As time goes by I've noticed that grief becomes more malleable - you can move it around, put it down, look at it from different angles, change its face, or bathe in it. You begin to learn to wield it and tame it and direct it, though of course sometimes it still rears up like an angry beast, pins you to the floor, as asserts its authority. It's just that it does so less often.

So, how is grief today? It's anxious, mostly, and interfering with my sleep by intruding in the form of horrible nightmares in which various members of my family die painfully and I am unable to stop it. It's not that these dreams are new - anxious nightmares of being abandoned are really my thing. I used to have a recurring nightmare that I was on a ship with my family and one by one they all drowned, whilst I ran around trying to save them, and always turning up a moment too late. It's just that those dreams are scarier now that I'm very conscious of the fact that any one I love really can, and one day will, just up and die, despite any intervention on my part. Confronting Max's death means I can no longer sooth myself with platitudes such as 'it was only a dream, just a silly nightmare' because I know that sometimes the stuff of those nightmares does emerge in your waking life, and is all the more frightening because you know yourself to already be awake.

Grief today is also dragging and exhausting in a way it hasn't been for at least a couple of weeks. I haven't moved from the couch today. I feel sat upon by something very heavy and suffocating, and it is not my cat. I can't seem to muster the energy to do anything except nap on and off, which is in contrast to the active, busy way I've managed to get things done recently. I feel that I may be coming down with something, but I also know this is probably not true and that this exhaustion is all just a part of the cycle to be endured.

Often grief is quiet and insular, as it is today. It makes me unable to tolerate any noise and unwilling to talk to anyone if I can get away from it. It craves silence and inactivity, and on those days, when all else is quiet, it is ever present in its guise as intense sadness and regretful reflection.

Today grief forces me to huddle under a blanket and sink into the soft furnishings, where I'll stay until it comes tomorrow with a new face.

Things-I-Love-Thursday: Audible

When I was pregnant with Max last year I was so sick that I couldn't do anything. The seriousness of my nausea and vomiting will hit home to you when I tell you that I could not even read - the one thing I can usually take comfort from no matter what I'm going through. So much time spent in bed, so many potential reading hours wasted. I am one of those people who gets genuinely upset when I realise how few books one can manage to read in a lifetime, even though I get through a lot more than the average person, so to reflect on lost reading time is an actual tragedy for me!

I wish I'd known this time last year of the wonderful invention that is Audible. Kate told me about it recently after hearing of its advantages on one of the many podcasts she listens to as she walks her dog. Audible is basically an online store that lets you subscribe to buy audio books, and it is a wonderful, exciting find!

It's 'reading' for when you can't actually read. Such as when you are driving (lord knows I've tried), vomiting, in labour, or simply when you have your hands full of cake, which I know is a problem we all face.

Audible's audio books aren't just a substitute for actual books, though. The pleasure of being read to is one that is rich and valuable in itself, and regrettably rare when you are an adult. I find nothing more soothing than being read to, although I can't remember the last time someone in my actual life did this for me. Just saying, the position is open for volunteers!

I'm clearly an aurally-oriented person as even in general life I am very sensitive to people's tones of voices and accents, for example. My first download from Audible was over 40 hours worth of Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (unabridged), read by a professional voice actor which a gloriously pommy English accent. Sometimes I love listening to it so much that it lulls me into some kind of reverie and when I emerge I realise I've missed two chapters of plot happenings. In the case of Our Mutual Friend this is quite problematic as it is a book I have been trying to get through for about five years, to no avail. I thought listening to it in audio form was the answer, but it seems I'm doomed never to find out what's really hiding in Harmon's dust heaps.

Audible is a subsidiary of Amazon, so it is no surprise that the breadth of its offerings is quite impressive. According to Wikipedia, Audible holds over 100,000 titles, which is a hell of a hours spent in boring car trips that can now be spent productively. And it's not just the classics that are catered for. You can get all the latest bestsellers, including The Hunger Games, which all the school children are talking about. Kate's first purchase was Tina Fey's autobiography, Bossypants, read by none other than Tina Fey herself, which is reason enough to buy it in my opinion. I don't know how often authors narrate their own work, but I like it. I've recently downloaded Toni Morrison's Beloved, even though I've already read it, just because Toni Morrison has narrated it herself. I feel there must be something extra to get from a story when it is read by the person who dreamed its rhythms, and I can't wait to listen to it.

Audible have a number of very attractive membership plans (and no, I'm not being paid to say this), and you can sign up to a special free trial as a new subscriber, after which they offer you three months at half price, which is the deal I am currently taking advantage of.

So, get ye to Audible and download yourself a tome for your next road trip, I say.

And to finish, here is a very interesting article I recently read in the New York Times about the pleasures and sorrows of reading in the car. Enjoy!

Baby loss blogs

When Max first died I scoured the internet looking for the stories of people who were also going through this pain. I found a lot of information on neonatal death, and quite a lot of news stories of babies who had miraculously survived, but googling (is that a word?!) did not bring up much in the way of blogs or personal stories, which is what I desperately wanted to read. I needed to know that someone else had felt like this - that it wasn't going to kill me, or perhaps, that it would. Either way, I needed to hear from someone who had been there.

I was generously given copies of two books of stories written by bereaved parents, Our Babies Have Died and Baby Gone. Both books were helpful in their own ways, but neither satisfied my need for absolute detail. I wanted a 'how to' guide. I wanted it to be called Death for Dummies. I wanted to know how people live this experience every single day and I wanted it broken into specific subheadings, with clearly defined page numbers I could mentally flip through whenever I encountered a situation I did not know how to manage (which has pretty much been constantly since Max died!).

For example, I wanted to know exactly what they did when they woke up in the morning and had to remember all over again that their baby had died. How could they ever eat breakfast again with that kind of sickness in the pit of their stomach each morning? I wanted to know how they coped when they went to the supermarket at 10am and saw aisles full of women wheeling their babies around blissfully ignorant of the knowledge those babies could be snatched away from them in an instant. I needed this minutia because although I know a lot of people who've been/are pregnant, not even a single distant acquaintance, friend or relative of mine has had a baby die at birth. At least none that I'm aware of. I still can't believe those odds, you know, that I have been the only one out of every single person I've ever known to have drawn this fatally short straw.

Since then I've done a lot of reading (that's an understatement), and I've been thankfully led to some blogs written predominantly by mothers who have lost babies under a variety of circumstances - miscarriage, stillbirth, SIDS, prematurity. I'm sure there are many more, and I'm always on the lookout for them, but there are a few I read regularly that really resonate with me. They inspire and inform the thoughts that I record here and encourage me to believe that every lost baby's story is worthy of recording, and that our voices as bereaved mothers, and those of our babies who will never be able to speak for themselves, deserve to be heard.

One thing that has amazed me in general is how eloquently many of these mothers write of their experiences; how they never run out of words to express how much their baby is loved and missed, no matter how much time has passed. Many of them have, fortunately, gone on to have other babies, and the most beautiful part of that is watching them learn to incorporate their lost babies into their new families, and witnessing how they navigate through the grief, guilt and uncertainty to parent another child. It is not bittersweet to read of the daily updates of their babies, despite being without my baby, because I know they've been where no parent should ever have to go. They know. And they are all the more present for it, living in the moment. That's how I want my life to be, and I work towards this every single day.

Reading about the intimate details of other people's lives like this is, of course, confronting. Sometimes it is uncomfortable. But always, it is valuable. I don't know any of these women personally, but at the same time I know so much about them and their innermost thoughts and feelings. It's a weird paradox. Mostly, I follow their blogs as a silent witness. I'm not a commenter or a participator in online communities, usually because anything I could possibly have to say seems so trite in response to the outpouring of a person's heart and soul. I know this is silly because I know they probably feel like me and would just like to know they are being heard; that their words are having an impact and making people think and feel.

Sometimes when I am reading these blogs I feel selfish because at the moment I am not sharing my blog with the world, but have only invited a handful of people to read it. I feel like the least I could do is offer an insight into my own heart in return for the privilege of seeing into theirs. One of my friends mentioned to me that it sometimes it feels voyeuristic reading my blog - to have this window into my soul and to not be offering any kind of return communication, and I guess it is strange to be part of what is essentially a one-way conversation. This has made me think that I should make an effort to respond to the blog posts that move me or affect me, to let the writer know that their words have been received. And so, with that spirit, I encourage anyone reading my blog to shout out and let me know that you're reading. I think the building of a community in this way is one of the greatest things that good blogs can do.

I did make the effort to personally contact one blogger a little while ago, and I'm really glad I did. Tam, from Nearly Not Quite wrote this amazing post a little while back that I stumbled across after someone in one of my Facebook groups posted a link. Tam might as well have reached into my heart, pulled out the words, and dumped them on the page, so much did she express exactly how I felt. It was uncanny. I felt compelled to write and tell her how much her post had meant to me, and how much it had helped me make sense of so many thoughts and feelings. She took the time to write me the most beautiful reply, full of reassurance and advice, which I have kept and printed so that I might look at it often. She's getting quite a following and rightly so. She has the ability to take insights from own her own very personal experiences and turn them into universal stories. It's a real gift. Tam's beautiful daughter, Ariana, lived for four sweet days, and her impact, as you can see from Tam's blog, has been profound and long lasting.

Tam's email came soon after I had dealt with a couple of really negative, aggressive reactions to the piece I published on MamaMia the week of Max's due date. Although I had received such an outpouring of support that far outweighed those minor negative reactions, it was of course the judgmental ones that have stayed in my mind ever since - the accusations of my friend, especially, that have caused me so much distress. I asked Tam for advice. If we are to grieve with everything we have for our own sake, and the sake of our relationships and our future children, I asked her, how did she think we should do so when the very expression of that grief is subject to the judgment of some who are simply unable or unwilling to empathise with our sorrow?

I didn't expect her to have the answers, but I really needed to pose this question out loud: do I keep these powerful feelings and experiences to myself in order to protect my heart, or is it my responsibility, if I can, to share them so that others can feel less alone? This is a question that I'm still grappling with, and that I have no easy answer for.

Tam's response, however, was so thoughtful, and so encouraging, that I asked her would she mind if I shared parts of it here. In response to these questions from a total stranger she gave so much thought and so much feeling.

She wrote:

I am no expert on grief. What I will tell you though is that I believe with all of my being that there can be no worse loss than the death of a child. There can be no relationship more sacred, no bond more precious than that of a mother and her baby. To have that torn away is hideous. Grief doesn’t permit hiding. If you try and limit your grief, if you try and dress it up and make it more tolerable for those around you, you will drown in it. 

In the past 2.5 years we have lost many, many friends. When Ariana died I promised to myself, to her and to my husband that I would feel her loss as deeply as she made me feel it. For all the days of memories I was missing out on creating I was going to grieve her – my daughter, she deserved my grief, my tears and my howling rage.  

Regardless of public opinion four days didn’t give me less to love and mourn, rather four days gave me an entire lifetime void of the milestones and hopes and dreams. Is that not worthy of the depths of despair? Only six months has passed by since your wonderful son Max passed away. ONLY. SIX. MONTHS. And as you approach his due date, as you face your friend and her newborn, as you face the rest of your life without him – Only six months has gone by. I would expect your grief and emotion to be extreme at this point.

I could have just kissed her at this point. Though I didn't do it consciously, I had also made a commitment to Max that I would feel his loss as deeply and profoundly as I could. I had promised myself that I was going to take every emotion and feeling Max brought to me and wear it proudly and courageously, no matter how ugly it was, for it was part of the legacy my baby left me. I've written before of my feeling that grief and despair at someone's passing is just another manifestation of your love for them. And what about love is there to be ashamed about, no matter how it is expressed? My answer is nothing. Nothing at all, except that some expressions of love are less socially acceptable and others for a variety of (usually selfish and short-sighted) reasons. You only need to look at the government's response to the issue of same-sex marriage to realise this.

Tam assured me that there was no right way to grieve and no formula to follow, and that it was not my responsibility to temper my grief so as to avoid offending others through my expression of it. 'You can't do this wrong,' she said. 'Sure, people will tell you you can, some will suggest you are, but you, only you can know the journey you are taking'.

She was right in saying that publicly acknowledging the gamut of emotion that follows the loss of a baby leaves you open to attack, but she was also spot on when she wrote that:

those friends who know your heart will stay. They will give you the space, they may fall back a step or two while you ride the waves of grief, but when you think you’re going to drown you’ll see them on shore, and that will center you again.

That sentiment could not be more true, and the image of my closest friends waiting patiently on the shore for me brings tears to my eyes. I know it must be hard for you to watch me drowning, but thank you, thank you so much for not jumping in to save me, for not forcing me to swim against the tide just because it's too uncomfortable for you to bear witness to this suffering. Thank you for just watching lovingly from the shore and letting me swim as deep in this sea of grief as I need to, and for trusting that I am strong enough to come back up for air. That is the ultimate kind of love - to simply bear witness along my journey and wait upon the sand with a towel to dry me off when the stormy sea spits me back out. That's all I want.

Blogging gives me a way to share the intimate details of this journey with you, and perhaps one day with others. You can see some very strong and courageous young women sharing their stories on the blogs listed below. I think you'll benefit greatly from reading them. And do let those girls, and me, know that you're on our pages listening to us speak our babies' names.

Oh, and please let me know if you have any blogs to add to this list. I'd be happy to add them, and even happier to find new ones to read.

Cora's Story
Dear Stevie
Still Life with Circles
Nearly Not Quite

Contacting SANDS

Just after Max died, my friend Leah, a midwife, sent me a package of information and brochures from SANDS, an organisation that provides miscarriage, stillbirth and newborn death support. It was so helpful and I am so grateful that someone knew where to turn on my behalf. At that stage I had no idea that other people's babies died like mine did, let alone that there were organisations that provided support and information for people just like me.

I received their brochure 'Your Baby Has Died', as well as a book of stories told by parents whose baby had also died. The brochure had so much helpful information, although much of it I wish I'd known earlier in the hospital when I still had time with Max and could have used their ideas of how to create more memories, for example.

I can't get that time back again, no matter how much I try, but I knew that what I could do was make a contribution that would help other parents to access the right information at the right time. I contacted SANDS a couple of weeks ago to volunteer my time, in any capacity they might need. It took me a long time to work up to contacting them. SANDS also provide counselling and support, although for some reason I never felt comfortable contacting them for that kind of assistance. What I feared most, I think, was making the initial phone call. What do you say when the person answers the phone? How do you begin the conversation with a stranger that your baby has died?

I really wish I had have called earlier, though. I contacted them by email to express my interest in volunteering, and shortly afterwards a really lovely lady called me back to talk. Although the purpose of our conversation was to work out how I might be able to help, we ended up just having a really nice conversation which was so helpful to me. I can't say how much it helped to talk to her, and to hear reflected in her words all the things that I am thinking and feeling. This lady's daughter died seventeen years ago, and still she was able to speak about her baby girl as if it were yesterday. So much of what she said resonated with me and I found it immensely comforting to hear of how her little girl is still so much a part of her life, even after such a long time has passed.

I was particularly interested to hear what she had done in the intervening years to make sure that her daughter remained a part of her life, and how her grief and love for her baby had changed over time. After her baby died, she did have another baby - a son who is now a teenager. She told a beautiful, although heartbreaking story of her son's relationship with his older sister. He was about three and a half when he really began to comprehend that there was another baby in the family; that the photos were not all of him. She spoke of how she and her husband always answered his questions, which grew over the years, with honesty, but how it did not really hit her son that he would never know his sister until he was around 12 years old. At that age, I guess, children begin to see themselves as independent people and begin to think about their place in their families and in the world. She said that at this age her son began to want to spend a lot of time at the cemetery, and that he would just sit at his sister's grave and weep as he figured out his own way to make his sister a part of his story, of his life. This was a really powerful image, I think, which illustrates that the impact of our baby's life, although it was brief, is a lifelong one that everyone in our family will carry with them now and into the future.

In terms of what I could do to help SANDS, it was timely that they are in the process of reviewing all of their brochures, with the aim of streamlining the information that is available in different states. On Friday afternoon I went into their offices, along with another bereaved mother, to offer some feedback on the brochures in their current form, and some suggestions for how to improve them. I brought the perspective of a newly bereaved mother to the conversation, and the other woman the benefit of having four years 'experience'. It was a really helpful experience, not just in terms of having the fortunate opportunity to have my voice count, but also in realising how much of what I think and feel is common amongst others whose babies have died, even under different circumstances. The other woman's baby was stillborn at 41 weeks, which was a very different situation to mine in many ways, but we seemed to have experienced so many things in common. Though in many ways her life had moved on - she is now parenting two beautiful living children - I could tell that part of her was still back there, in 2008, blank faced and numb and wondering what on earth has happened to her life. I found it very reassuring to talk to her, to nod and smile, and agree with so many of the things she said, but it also made me realise that the longing I have for Max to come back will never go away. That it will be a part of how I mother any future children, if I am lucky to have them. She was so kind, and gave me her email address to get in touch. I think I will, but I'm also conscious of not wanting to be the needy and annoying new bereaved mother on the block. She must already get that so much.

One of the brochures they wanted our particular help with was the one intended for family and friends of a person whose baby has died, which I think is really, really important. Dealing with other people's actions or inaction, religious beliefs, judgements or well-meaning but offensive platitudes not only compounds your grief but is exhausting. On the other hand, there are so many small gestures and words that have the capacity to make such a big difference, if only people had some experience or direction to lead them in their responses. For me, this blog has been a valuable way of me letting those people close to me know what I'm going through, but for some people their friends and family must be even more so stumbling in the dark. Resources for friends and family are therefore so valuable in making sure that bereaved parents get the support they need from the people closest to them.

Some of our quotes will go into the new brochures, and I'm really glad I had the chance to help. Until the new brochures come out, there are lots of resources on the internet about what to do when your friend or family member's baby dies, including information on how to deal with your own grief. Here are some good sites that really 'get it'. Please, if you have time, read them. You just never know when you'll be able to help someone, or point them in the direction of something that will.

http://www.glowinthewoods.com/how-to-help-a-friend

http://carlymarieprojectheal.com/healing/how-family-and-friends-can-help

http://www.bearsofhope.org.au/friends/For_Family_Friends

http://www.sidsandkids.org/wp-content/uploads/SIDSFamilyandFriends.pdf

Things-I-Love-Thursday: East Melbourne

It's coming up to almost a year since we bought our house here in the not-so-illustrious neighbourhood of Heidelberg Heights. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My best friend's house in mere streets away (although she remains in Canberra, painfully absent from it), it's close to shops and hospitals (a real selling point) and not too far from the northern suburbs of North Fitzroy, Fairfield and Northcote where I wished we could afford to buy a house. In other words, it was a good choice for first home buyers who didn't really have much of a choice.

Our new house in Heidelberg Heights

We were excited to have our own place and were on a post-European-holiday high when we bought it. Little did we know that our move would co-incide with me falling pregnant, and an horrific case of morning sickness that had me almost bed ridden for the first four months of our residence here. Needless to say, my relationship with the new house, and the new unfamiliar neighbourhood, suffered immensely. I was so homesick for our lovely, darling little flat in the much more civilised and exclusive pocket of East Melbourne. Like someone tossed out into the ocean, adrift on the seas with no land in sight, I mourned for my old home. I cried for the glossy life we'd lived in the city almost every day. This house was cold and empty and unfamiliar. The neighbours on one side were aggressive, alcoholic no-hopers instead of passive-aggressive, immaculately groomed investment bankers. Nothing was as it should be. I thought we had made a terrible mistake.

The move was the first in a series of things that would go ever so wrong for us during 2011, as you are all well aware. When I was pregnant with Max my uncomfortableness with the new house got to the point that I could not be here during the day on my own anymore. I'd wander aimlessly around Melbourne, sometimes just sitting in my car and crying, trying to pass the time until Leslie came home. Of course, much of this was symptomatic of the antenatal depression I was suffering at the time, but for me it was all linked into the relocation. Something was just not right.

I remember very vividly driving home from the hospital on the morning Max died. It's the part of the experience I remember most of all. We pulled into the driveway, our lives shattered, and with no idea what we were expected to do next. We came inside, dropped everything in the doorway, and collapsed into the shower, and then into bed, from where I did not think we would ever get out. In the time since I'd left home the day before, until the time we arrived home without our baby, something had changed in my relationship to the house, though. I suddenly felt that this was home. Since that day, I haven't had any of the mixed feelings towards the house that characterised our first few months here. I have settled into the neighbourhood, and while of course I'd like to be living somewhere much more fashionable, I'm very proud of the little home we have made together, and I enjoy tending to it, and the yard we are fortunate to have.

I still always think fondly of East Melbourne, though, and sometimes wish that I could snap my fingers and be right back there, minus all of the heartache and grief we have endured since we left. We held Max's memorial service back in March in the park around the corner from where our flat was. It reminded us of happier times. Exclusive inner-suburban locales can do that to you. The miserableness of well-to-do people seems to be hidden much more comfortably behind closed doors rather than played out in the front yard, as it seems to be done in our new street. I wasn't afraid of our neighbours there, I could get anywhere I wanted to be within ten to fifteen minutes, I had Fitzroy Gardens and the city within walking distance, and beautiful tree-lined streets to take me there. Yes, it was an arcadian Melbourne paradise.

I don't know whether it is the place itself, or the happy, carefree life we lived there, that gives me such a strong connection to the idea of East Melbourne. We had a gorgeous art deco era flat that was cosy and light, and sunny. I had my own little study nook, and due to its small size we were only ever a few steps away from each other, which is, as Leslie will attest, just the way I like it. I like to sit in my favourite chair and see all my favourite, loved things all around me. I don't like empty rooms and long lonely hallways that lead to out-of-the-way kitchens and bathrooms, which is why tiny one-bedroom flats have always quite suited me, with everything I love within arms reach.

When we moved to our flat, Leslie was living only a few doors up the road in a tiny bachelor pad, and I was living in Alphington, another lovely pocket of the inner-North. I fell in love with the flat the first time I saw it, and Leslie was determined to make sure we could get it, offering them many months rent in advance and hassling the estate agent every day after we applied to make sure she knew how keen we were.

Home sweet home in East Melbourne

We moved in on 1st December 2009, and the first thing we did was put up our new Christmas tree. We were so excited to be making a home together. That night is one of my happiest ever memories.

There's not much to dislike about East Melbourne, except, of course, that it is prohibitively expensive to live in. We could not have afforded to rent anything more than a 1 bedroom flat, and had absolutely no chance of buying into the area, or anywhere near there. I do hope we can retire there, one day, when I've written many best-selling novels and Leslie has revolutionised the internet in some way!

In the meantime I look back on our time there with great fondness, and some sadness that this happy part of our life is over.

A heartbreaking parallel

I was heartbroken over this story about a gorilla whose little baby had died. In this picture accompanying the article, which is almost too painful to witness, she holds her little one in absolute disbelief, shock and desperation and its demise. It is one of the most beautiful, and yet distressing images I've ever encountered.

All too easily I can relate to the feeling her blank face so tragically conveys. The one that goes:

what's happened?

what's wrong with my baby?

please, somebody tell me what's the matter!

what do you mean, dead?

he can't be dead, he's right here, look. . . LOOK!

I read, a few months ago, that the most stressful and anxiety-provoking act in human existence is the separation of a woman from her newborn infant. The article* said that the response to this, which is an overwhelming combination of panic, rage, and distress, is one which humans share with most of the animal kingdom. This shared experience is shown so evidently in this image.

The photo of the mother gorilla and her baby reminded me all too much of this photo, which I simultaneously love, and loathe to look upon.

I don't recognise myself in this image. I still don't believe that this shattered woman, looking helplessly at her dead baby, is me.

It is confronting for me to look at.

It makes me wonder what devastation the photographer witnessed in capturing these raw, honest, images for us, and what she did with those feelings she witnessed.

It makes me feel exposed, but still I look at it constantly, trying to get back to that moment, back to Max.

Poor Peppy's terrible week

My dear boy, Peppy, ended up hospitalised yesterday in what proved to be a very stressful day for us all. Throughout his life, Peppy has experienced recurrent episodes of cystitis and threatened urinary blockages. Often these have been brought on by stress, but sometimes they also come out of the blue. He tends to fall ill with this at the change of season, when the cool weather begins. I've been told this is quite common, although it is no less unexpected when it happens again.

He has been diagnosed with Feline Idiopathic Urinary Tract Disease and for a long time was on a special diet to help with these issues. However, he has also developed some pancreatitis, which seemed to worsen on the diet for his urinary issues, so instead he was switched to another special diet to cater for his sensitivity. Over the last few years it has been a fine balance of getting his diet right, and making sure he stayed at a good weight so that the chance of his body undergoing any stress was lessened.

Since Sebastian arrived Peppy has not really been that stressed, but he has gotten fat. Unless we are constantly around to monitor the two of them they insist on wolfing down each other's food. This is not so bad for Sebastian, as Peppy's diet can't hurt him, but Sebastian's food is a kitten growth formula that is very high in fat, and also very tasty (apparently). We can't help but think that this episode of cystitis has been brought on by his increase in weight, and are at our wit's end in terms of figuring out how to deal with the constant food stealing issue!

Peppy had lots of blood and urine tests in the hospital and they also found that he had elevated blood sugar levels, indicative that he might be developing diabetes. This was very scary to hear, as Peppy's brother, PK, had diabetes from the time he was a very small kitten and it proved impossible to manage or stabilise. Tragically PK was euthanised after over two years of sickness, and I have never forgiven myself for saying goodbye to him. When I heard that Peppy might have the condition I was understandably upset and frightened for his future.

The vet undertook a fructosamine test, which is designed to show the pattern of his blood sugar levels over the preceding three weeks. The preliminary results of this test are good. His blood sugar levels are elevated, but are not at the point where he needs to be treated with insulin. The vet is hoping that he has had a transitory diabetic response as a result of the underlying urinary condition, or that his blood sugars were spiked by the stress of being hospitalised. We have to collect a urine sample from home to do some more tests, but I have my fingers crossed this will resolve now that he is happy at home.

Peppy is on some pain relief and anti-inflammatory and anti-spasmotic medication and seems much more comfortable than he was yesterday or the day before when he was feeling unwell and straining to go to the toilet.

I am very proud of him as he made sure to tell us that something was not right. He used Sebastian's litter tray in the living area, which he never does, so that we could see he was struggling to go to the toilet. He also followed us to the laundry to show us in his litter tray, also. He is such a clever boy for being able to communicate with us so well. Peppy and I have always been able to understand each other in this way, which is why I've always been lucky enough to catch his cystitis early enough to be treated. Untreated, cats can experience blockages of the urethra which can kill them in a very short period of time.

As usual, Peppy was in the very capable hands of The Cat Clinic, this time with Dr Sally Coggins, who is gorgeous and warm and very clever. Peppy loves her and was happy to stay with her for the day.

Dr Sally from The Cat Clinic

He is now safely home and receiving lots of love and affection to aid his recovery. He has to go back to the vet on Monday to check how he is going, and I am keeping everything crossed that the cystitis improves and that his blood sugar problems resolve.

Please keep my little Peppy in your thoughts and send him lots of loving get well vibes!

A mother's day thank you

I could never have imagined spending my first mother's day without my child.  It was not supposed to be like this. I still don't understand why my baby has gone. Sometimes I still don't believe it to be so. 

And so, on Sunday, I imagined what it would be like had Max been here in my arms. He'd be smiling by now, able to recognise his mum and reach out for her. I kiss his chubby hands and let him kick his feet against me, as he did when he was still safe in my tummy.

I must make up memories of him all the time like this as the real ones I have are in very short supply. In my mind, when Max was with me, I cried with gratitude for my baby instead of from grief, from exhaustion instead of despair. I have him with me every moment in my dream life, and I am so happy there.

I worked on Sunday and no one there wished me a happy mother's day, despite me having to listen to countless others enjoy having the sentiment expressed to them, as they were asked if they'd been pampered or enjoyed their day. This is because those people 'out there' who are not close to me and who do not understand the gravity of Max's death do not consider me a mother. They do not know how real my son was. They don't seem to comprehend that he was a living, breathing person that I gave birth to but rather some invisible 'pregnancy loss' that they perhaps think just disappeared from within me like a puff of smoke. 

That's how misunderstood infant death is. We have no cultural imagery of baby loss to call upon. No matter how many times you explain what happened, those listening usually draw a complete blank, unable to take even the idea of it, let alone the reality, in.

How I wish everyone could have seen him and to have held his little body so I would not have to feel like my son did not exist. 

Thank you to everyone who thought of me on Sunday, in acknowledgement of my role as Max's mother. Thank you especially to those few special people who sent me messages to make sure I knew that I was on their mind. It meant more than I can say. Truly.

And to those who are reading this who also experienced their first mother's day without their precious babies, know that I feel with you your broken hearts and your shattered dreams. May you always remember, and be reminded by those you love, that:

Every mother counts.

Cultures of mourning

Over the last six months I have spent a lot of time thinking about the way we approach and acknowledge death, and the social and cultural practices of grieving. This stemmed in part from my knowledge and interest in Victorian mourning practices. As a literary studies PhD student I have spent many years engrossed within the history and culture of nineteenth-century Britain. Victorians were obsessed with death and customs and practices associated with the dead, the dying, and the bereaved, were enormously important. They were surrounded by it. Most people died in their homes, too, so the practice of dying, caring for the dead, and mourning their loss was a normal part of domestic life in a way that our modern-day culture would find morbid or grotesque.

Complex codes of mourning were observed, particularly by women, for over two years following the death of a loved one, especially in regard to what they wore and where they went at different stages. The Victorians also collected many trinkets and keepsakes to remind them of their loved one and to stay connected to the past. Perhaps the most famous mourner of all was Queen Victoria herself, who stayed in mourning for over forty years after the death of her husband, Albert. Her home was kept exactly as it was when he died, and it is said that she had a servant lay out his clothes, change his bed linen, and bring warm water for him to shave with. In photographic portraits she also always ensured there was a painting of her husband displayed prominently alongside all of the other family members - her way of keeping him in the family.

I am very interested in learning more about the culture of mourning as I make sense of my own response to Max's death. It is my belief that our culture deals unsatisfactorily with grief for the sheer reason that we are no longer exposed to death when we are growing up. Our culture of emotional stoicism, and our reluctance to show our vulnerability, means that those who do suddenly find themselves bereaved have a very hard time finding the time and support to do so. The pressure - real or perceived - to pick yourself up and 'get over' it is immense and only serves to compound your grief and make you feel like a nuisance or burden to those people 'out there' who are made uncomfortable by your sorrow.

The way we approach the death of babies is obviously something that particularly interests me at the moment, and I will come back to it as I read and think more about it. I read this article in the New York Times about the way miscarried babies are mourned in Japan and it was fascinating.

The author, who herself had suffered a miscarriage, found a whole cultural practice devoted to paying respect to these lost babies, or 'water children' as they are called. Even aborted babies are given a solemn send off and blessed in the Buddhist hope that the baby's spirit will have another life; that it will come back in another time to come. It's a really beautiful thought.

I lived in Japan for a while a few years ago and I actually remember seeing some Jizo shrines, although I had no idea what they were at the time. I wish I had bothered to find out, although I wonder how much I would have appreciated their significance at that young age, with so little personal experience of loss.

A Jizo shrine near Tokyo

That's the lonely thing about having your baby die. Unless it's happened to you, you really can't comprehend what it could possibly be like. And, as the article also mentions, our society is largely and sometimes unapologetically silent on the grave and confronting matter of baby loss. That it's not until your own baby dies that people begin to reveal their own stories of miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death. In my own small way, I plan to do the best I can to change this. I will forever speak Max's name; forever surround myself with evidence that he was here and he was mine. I wish we had some solemnised and symbolic ways of mourning our lost children like the Japanese so that we baby-loss mums felt less invisible and misunderstood in our grief.