Three Years

Max would have turned three years old today. Back then I could no more have imagined three years passing than I could have 3000 years flying by, so excruciating was the passage of each hour of each day in the months after he died. But here I am and three years have passed. So much life has been lived in those three years, but so much life has also been lost, too.

I’m not sure what the milestone of Max’s third birthday means to me right now. I’ve never known what to ‘do’ with this day. Celebrating, as such, doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. He never lived to see a single birthday and the day he was born was the most traumatic of our lives.

At the same time, however, we desperately want to celebrate Max for the amazing little baby he was, and the wonderful little boy he would have grown to be. We want the day to be special and reflective and full of love, but we don’t want to dread it for the pain this reflection inevitably bring us. No matter how we look at it there’s no plan that sits comfortably with us. I think this is because what we really want is for him to be here to enjoy his own birthday with us. Everything always comes back to that impossibility.

This year, rather than load ourselves up with pressure to make the milestone of Max’s birthday somehow ‘meaningful’, we’ve made tentative plans to make it a special family day where we do something nice together that’s out of our normal routine. Last year we went to the Aquarium with little baby Alice in our arms. This year we may brave the zoo, although there’s always a lot of little three year old boys at the zoo, and that also makes it hard.

Even in these three short (but long) years I’ve found that the significance of these kind of milestones has changed, which makes this year different, too. In the early days of my grief I clung to every significant event and anniversary as a landmark I could use to distinguish the painful flow of one week to another. His funeral, his one month anniversary, receiving his birth certificate, collecting his ashes, finally reaching his due date and then his first birthday - those things gave me a timeline for my grief and a long list of to-do’s that brought meaning to my days. None of them were easy - far from it - but they were things that promised to keep Max real and present in my life as I learned, slowly, the very painful lessons of how to let him go.

After Max’s first birthday these milestones stopped cropping up as often. Then I realised that I wasn’t keeping track of the calendar so much waiting for the 24th and the anniversary of his birth to roll around every month. I no longer dreaded Thursdays (the day our world fell apart). Things were changing. There were no more speeches to prepare, no more cards to write, no memorials to plan or get-togethers to arrange in his memory. What then, I found myself asking, was left? Of him? Of me? At times it felt like by letting go of these formal opportunities to mourn him that I was losing him all over again. The expanse of time that lay ahead of me, without him, was so overwhelming and I often felt that I was sinking under the weight of this ‘forever’. Max’s time was gone but I did not know how to make him a part of my life that was to come.

That his time has passed - that the world will never again pause to pay this little lost boy his due - is a realisation I’ve had to revisit numerous times since he died. That I will never, ever see him again still seems like such an unbelievable, absurd concept, no matter how many times I turn it over in my brain. The permanence of it all still brings me to my knees when it strikes me afresh some mornings after I awake - the realisation that I will never again get the chance to hold him and love him as I long to do.

Three years on and I can say that I don’t need milestones, birthdays and anniversaries to call to mind my baby boy.These days are special on the calendar, but they’re always strangely devoid of feeling when they finally arrive. It’s the rotating roster of not-anything-special-at-all days that really do you in. Maybe I hear a mother call out to her son, Max, in the supermarket and for a split second look up, expecting to see my Max. Sometimes I’m just driving along in the car not even realising that I’m crying, or sometimes it will hit while I’m in the shower on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Grief is unpredictable, like life.

Lots of people along the way have told me that time is the great healer - that if you put enough of the stuff between you and your tragedy or trauma it won’t hurt anymore. This sounds like a nice romance, doesn’t it? It is a lovely way to comfort someone in the depths of grief who thinks they won’t survive it. The sentiment is well enough, but for me it has just been completely untrue.

Time doesn’t heal. It distracts and it distances, yes, and those can be really helpful things. But the passage of time is accompanied by its own special kind of torture in that it has taken me further and further away from the moment Max was mine. Time has made it harder to recall him as he really was and I have to turn to photos to fill in the gaps. Because of the passing of time I am often desperately trying to claw back memories that are threatening to fade - memories of how delicate and silken his skin was, what it really felt like to hold him in my arms, what I felt like when I saw my baby for the first time. It’s stressful to search in a panic for those memories, as if I can’t quite remember where I put them for safe keeping. It hurts and it makes me angry that I can’t even make the memory of him stay. ‘What kind of mother am I?’ I ask myself in those moments, and I can’t answer. I didn’t get the chance to find out what kind of mother I would be for Max. I’ll never, ever know.

I’m still trying, every day, to make a space in the world for Max - to tell people that he was here and that he mattered and that he was loved beyond measure - but it is not easy. People in general don’t deal well with death and none of us like to think much about the terrible things that might one day befall us. To talk about your baby who has died, especially, is the hardest thing to do, but by far the easiest way to clear a room. Meeting new people and anticipating their innocent, yet loaded questions ‘how many children do you have?’ or ‘is your daughter your first?’ can be excruciating, for both parties. But then, sometimes people surprise you...

Recently I got talking to a woman with a child Alice’s age while waiting for an event to start in the city. Those same questions arose, I answered as I usually do, and she simply replied ‘I’m so sorry. What was your son’s name?’. It was an amazing moment for me, and I’m so thankful for those very kind of people I’ve encountered throughout the last three years and brought into my life, as well as to the people who’ve stayed the course as I’ve fallen over time and time again in the roughest terrain. Those are my all-weather friends - more valuable and treasured than they know.

Each year that passes I hope I’ve found a new way to honour and remember Max. Each year I hope there will be more people who know that he was here, and who will understand the special impact he had on the world in his short, but significant life.

Three years on and everything is different, yet three years on and everything is exactly the same - I love him, I miss him, I wish he could come home.