Phantom feelings and winter blooms

I've heard lots of people describe the phantom feeling that you're still holding your baby in your arms, long after he is dead. I didn't have quite this experience. My arms felt achingly empty, instead. I remember trying to describe that feeling to Leslie immediately after Max died. I wrote in my speech for Max's funeral about wanting to 'chop them off' in order to make the physical aching stop.

I have experienced, though, the phantom feeling of still being pregnant, a number of times. Sometimes when I am lying still at night (it most often happens when I am sleeping over at work, for some reason) I feel the flutters in my tummy of Max's tiny tumblings. He's not there, of course, but at the same time it feels like he is always there. Six months after his death I still feel that he is a part of me, bodily. Whatever changes he has made to my body, none of which are visible to the human eye, have profoundly affected the way I carry myself and the way I feel about my own flesh.

The biggest change I've felt on a physical level is that my nervous system is not on high alert so much of the time anymore. Consequently, I feel anxious and agitated far less often than I used to even though I arguably have more reason to be anxious and agitated than I ever did before. It is as though the memory of Max has curled up like a warm, purring kitten on the complicated synapses that once fired out signals of fear, soothing and caressing them, and whispering to them that the worst has come; there's nothing more left of which to be afraid.

I feel that this part of Max's legacy. He has given me freedom from fear. He has anointed me with the essence of the brave; like an invisible sign of the cross planted on my forehead in something much like holy oil, that says 'I can bear it'.

And I can.

And I am.

And I will.

Yet I wonder if anyone can see the gifts Max brought me, or if I am their only witness? Who can see that I have changed? Do they like what they see, or do they shy away from me now as if I am a fraction of the person they once knew?

Freedom and fortitude Max immediately unlocked within me. Who can tell what other seeds he has planted inside to bloom on future days?

On the day of Max's six-month anniversary, a flower bloomed. On a cold, but sunny late-Autumn day, the Camelia we planted in honour of our baby produced it's first delicate petal, as soft as silk. The Camelia plant, you might remember, is said to express the sentiment of longing. And how I've longed for him this week, especially alongside the news of another baby boy born safely to a close friend.

I don't believe in heavenly signs. But how I wanted to when I saw that bloom! On that day! For a little while I rested with the image of my little boy sending his mummy a flower to assure me that there was beauty to come, on the coldest wintry days, when I least expected to find it.

Oh Max, was it you? Could it be you? A mother should always know where her baby is but I have no way of tracking your journey through the universe. You've evolved so far beyond my reach. I don't know how to get to you. But perhaps you know where I am. Perhaps you come, as some people might believe, and leave me pink, blushing kisses on the lily white petals of your special flowers.

Perhaps you will come again? And then again, perhaps you never did come at all. But that's OK, because your daddy and I know that you were once really here, on our plane, your heart vibrating with earthly energy alongside ours. We know that you stayed as long as you could, and now we want you to be free.

Just know your mummy will always be watching for you, as long as she lives. No one will know it, but when I am old and shuffling along the street on my way to the shops, I'll still be paying special attention to the flowers and trees here and there, searching for the very essence of you in every living thing I see or touch.

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.