Dear Max, send us hope

Dear Max,

It's been six months since you left us, and still your daddy and I remain painfully in the dark about why we could not keep you. There is not a single day that passes that I don't recall to mind the delicate contours of your little cheeks, and that I don't try to re-animate you with sheer power of my mind and will.

Your mummy has discovered that she is stronger than she ever thought possible as a result of losing you, but she's still not powerful enough to bring you back. There's no one who can do that.

You brought us so many special gifts on the night you came, and the greatest of them all was enabling me to experience, if only for the briefest interlude, being a mother. It was a feeling like no other, and one I miss desperately. It's as if you awakened in me an instinct I'd only glimpsed up until now; one that I practice with other people's children all the time, but that I know will never truly be realised again until I can be a mother to my own child, in my own arms, where you should be, still.

Our perfect boy, you showed us how much love we have to share, and in your honour we want to keep on sharing the love you gave us. We'd like to open our minds and our hearts to a new baby; one who will never replace you, but who will instead keep your memory alive, and who we hope will bring their own gifts to help us heal our hearts, and who will share with us a sense of hope for the future.

Daddy and I feel so torn about our hope for another baby. We have to come to terms with so many things.  The most important of these is that having a new baby will never mean that you have returned to us. It will be an entirely different person we'll be asked to love and welcome into our family just as we welcomed you with all of your unique promise and potential.

We have to manage our guilt, too, which when we let it threatens to overwhelm. In some ways it feels as if even thinking of having another child is the most unforgivable act of disloyalty to you. I can't bear the thought that you might feel replaced or in any way less loved or valued as a result of our wish for a baby.

We also live with so much uncertainty now. We worry about choosing the right time to try again, even though we know more than ever that there's no such thing as a 'right' time; that everything that happens in life is an entirely random, unpredictable occurrence.

The uncertainty morphs into fear very easily when I consider that perhaps you were my only chance at motherhood and that I won't be able to fall pregnant again, or that if I do, that baby will die too. The fears escalate with barely the slightest provocation and it takes all of my will and energy some days to quieten them.

I don't know what it will mean to be pregnant with another child that is not you, and I don't know how my profound experience of anxiety and grief will affect that journey. I just know that it must in every way. Will you be with me on that journey, Max? Is that too much to ask of you?

I guess what I'm asking for is your permission, darling, to begin to hope again and to use the gifts you gave me in the best way I know how - in sharing them with others, especially with a brother or sister of your own flesh and blood.

I'll never know for sure if you give me your blessing. I don't even know if you are able to have thoughts and feelings anymore. But in asking for it I'm hoping to feel a sense of peace that will tell me that we are doing the right thing, and that this is what you would want for us.

Our love for you will never, could never lessen or change. You are as much a part of me, and your daddy, as is our own breath.

Max, we wish for hope. We wish for peace. We wish that you could let us know the sentiments of your own little heart, that beat ferociously as we held you in our arms.

With all our love,

Mummy and Daddy

HOPE