― Victoria Hanley
I recite this quote repeatedly, each time trying out varied tones of anger, disbelief, distress. Try it, won't you? See for yourself its thousand different inflections.
The first time around it is desperate and breathless, trailing off at the end in a murmured ellipsis, the final thought of an eternity without your beloved just hanging into space where there is nothing more to come, nothing more against which to fight.
It has something of the bitter and reproachful, too. It's indignant and confrontational in tone. 'I loved you!' it roars. 'AND NOW YOU ARE GONE!' It shouts and wails in protest: 'how can you do this to me? How dare you go where I cannot follow!
Then, suddenly, it's meek again. It is questioning and confused. 'Now you are gone?', it asks, as if trying to make sense of the unfathomable. 'Where are you? How long will it be until I can see you again?' It is quietly resigned, if not accepting. 'Oh. Now you are gone. You're gone now.'
I feel Max's absence so painfully, so achingly today. It's as if no time has passed at all; as if someone had only moments ago taken him from me; as if I can still feel the weight and warmth of him in my arms. I rub my fingertips together, the fleshy soft parts which which I transferred kisses to his tiny, clammy lips, trying to get a sense of if they can still recall what his tender skin felt like. They can't. They don't. I have a moment of mad regret that I ever washed my hands after they had anointed him with all of my mother love. How could I have been so careless? How could I have let him. . . all traces of him. . . go?
Every part of me stings with longing for my poor dead baby. It stings, it bites, it burns. All of this a silent undercurrent as I go about doing whatever it is that people do after their only child is gone, and with him all hope of. . . well, hope itself.
In the quiet, in the stillness, in the intractable absence with which I am overcome, I realise for the hundredth time that I have none of the clothes he wore to bury my face in and weep. I was so confused that day. I did not ask to have them given to me. I own not a single thing he touched. How can this be? How can any of this be?
I have the same revelations over and over again. I had a baby once. I grew him and nurtured him and loved him and then they took him away from me. They touched him, they picked him up, and then they burned him to pieces and flung back at me in a box what was left.
Sometimes I blame them - the people whose job it was to prise him from my grasp. Perhaps he was not dead at all. 'Did you ever think of that?' I shout at myself. Perhaps they stole him away and made him so. Maybe he just needed a warm bath. I should have given him a warm bath. Maybe he just needed his mummy to help him wake up. I should never have left him with those strangers. What kind of mother am I? What if he'd just needed ten more minutes to prise himself from his baby slumber? What if he opened his eyes after I left and no one noticed? How can I ever know for sure?
My baby. My baby. The days are so long, so sad, so cold without my baby.
And I want all of the things, the stuff, the collectibles. I want the hospital cot and the sheet they laid him upon. I want the room where he was born roped off and preserved exactly as it was that day, blood and tears and all. It's all his. It's all mine. I want it all back. I want that day again. Even if he has to die. Even if I have to leave him. I want to live it again, and again and again. I would do it better next time, I know I would. I would not forget so many things. Eight months ago I didn't know how to have a dead baby. Now I do. Let me do it better. I'm pleading. Whoever or whatever you are that led me here, won't you at least let me have that?
All of my worldly connections with my baby have been severed like gangrene limbs, and like missing limbs those connections send out phantom signals suggesting that their missing part is still there, only just out of reach. If only I could get to him I could pull him back, bring him home, lay him down, and love him. I just want to love him. Oh, please, let me have him, and hold him and love him.
Thinking of, wishing on, pining over, longing for my little baby, Max, who is gone where I cannot follow, no matter the ways I try.
Oh god. Oh J. How do you do this? How do you put words to these feelings. I had all these feelings. I STILL have these feelings. But in nearly four years, I've never managed to articulate them like this. I too have wished for her room to be roped off, never to be used again. I too have wished for a do-over. I'd relive that day a million times over, even knowing the outcome, to get another chance to hold her and to get another chance to do all the things we didn't do. I never looked at her toes. Her baby butt. I never let anyone else have photos with her. I never.... oh so many things.
ReplyDeleteI'm crying on my lap top.
xo
I must just know lots of words for saying what is in my heart, maybe. Perhaps I was born with a vocabulary for suffering. If so, I'm definitely in my element right now!!
DeleteI want to say sorry for making you cry. But more so, I'm just so sorry that all of these things have been true for you too. I'm both comforted and mortified when some one else's experience mirrors my own...comforted that I'm not alone, and mortified to know that some one else has suffered so.
I have these recurring thoughts that I could better handle having a dead baby if I could just have a do-over of the day; so that I could at least get having a dead baby 'right'. I also feel mortally offended that some other woman is giving birth to some other baby in the only room in the world where Max was alive. That eats at me. It feels as if the room should be mine to protect and grieve in, or to smash up and demolish if I see fit.
I didn't look at Max's little bottom either. We didn't put a nappy on him. That has also kept me awake at night. What kind of mother doesn't put a nappy on her baby? I want to ring the hospital and yell like a maniac: WHERE WERE THE GODDAMN NAPPIES?!!
There's so much of him I don't remember looking at. I also wish Leslie had his photo taken with Max, just the two of them together. I'm not sure why that didn't happen. You are right when you say there are so many things. . . and the list is always in the back of your mind, ready to jump out and haunt you with regrets when your mind is mired in sorrow. xox
So many regrets, no do-overs! It is tragic how we have to make choices when we have no mind and we are fumbling with unknowing on how to deal with tragedy. So many wishes. We did what we could in the moment. We tried our best in the moment. The guilt and regret weigh against our hearts and remind us of how our mind failed after our bodies failed our baby... Before I birthed Camille. I was laying in the hospital bed wondering if they had made a mistake. If I gave birth maybe she would be alive. I was due, and every contraction of my uterus felt as if she were moving inside me. A mean sadistic joke as I waited to birth a dead child. I'm sorry for the missing that comes back tearing through your heart today. It can be so overwhelming.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Renel. It seems like a tragedy upon a tragedy that we have no way of knowing how to best deal with what happened, practically speaking, until a long time afterwards, when it's all too late. I know that we shouldn't blame ourselves. Each of us did the absolute best we could under circumstances in which no one in their right mind could be expected to operate. But I can so relate to those 'what ifs' weighing on your heart. You describe so aptly the way the missing comes 'tearing' through my heart. It leaves fleshy wounds in its wake. I know you know it too xx
DeleteOh, even four years later, I do so wish that I could have those days again. So that I could fix her more firmly in my mind, so that I could tell I loved her and how proud I was of her just one more time. And, yes, I would also like to check that there really wasn't any chance, no chance at all, they she might have survived.
ReplyDeleteIt's all just so, so hard. When I was pregnant with R, I had a check list in my minds of things that I would do, if he died. But I'm sure that, even though I know how to have a dead baby, there would still be regrets. Because it could never, ever be enough.
I've concluded that we did the most important thing that we could do. Which was to love them. We loved them the entire time they were alive and we loved their little bodies after they had left them and, if there is anything left of them now, we love them still. I hope they knew it and I hope they know it. I loved her with everything I've got and I've tried to be content with that and to make peace with those days.
I certainly still have that strange phantom limb, perhaps it is just to do with being their mothers? Sometimes I worry about whether she's hungry or cold or what she is up to. That sounds insane. I think it is just part of my brain that loves her and worries about her. Just like I do my other children.
You are so right that it would never be enough, no matter how prepared or experienced we were. Impossible goals in an impossible situation in an impossibly short amount of time and impossibly unimaginable circumstances. Sigh.
DeleteI don't have anything to compare this 'phantom limb' to. I don't know if that is what other mothers feel for their children, or whether it is just what a mother of a dead child feels for the soul that has moved beyond her reach. I really hope I get to find out one day. I hope so much...