Dead, dead dead. . . still dead

How is it that I find myself taking my baby son to a funeral parlour at 10am on a winter's morning?

Because he is dead.

He is dead.

He is dead, dead, dead.

As dead as a doornail. As dead as a dodo. As dead as yesterday's front page news.

He went from cradle to grave in six hours flat. The dead go quickly, sometimes. So quickly, they leave. Even if there's time for a fond farewell it feels like they've slipped through your fingers just before you've finished your sentence.

For the second time I let them put him in a box and screw the lid on, tighter and tighter, until he's out of sight. He's a baby in a box. Sounds like some kind of novelty toy.

His brand new cot also lies in a box, waiting for the baby that never came home. It's a big box; unwieldy and impossible to hide in our small house. Much bigger than the tiny cube in which the baby lies crushed up and burned.

It's a pretty urn. As pretty as an urn for a dead baby gets.

I get it home and suddenly I'm incensed. It shouldn't be in my living room. WHY IS IT IN MY LIVING ROOM? Why? Fucking why?

I'm half inclined to smash it after all that. That's what I think of baby dust. It doesn't feel sacred. I don't know what's in there, but it sure as hell isn't my baby - the one with the soft, velvet cheeks and the tiny little mouth perpetually opened as if he were getting ready to coo to me the sweetest ever song.

I want to grind those ashes into a paste and plaster it across my face, and the face of every single person I know. I want them to know what it feels like to have dead baby all over you, as I will every single day for the rest of my life. I want to make some kind of mark on them, even the ones I love, so when I see them I will know that we are all in this together. A mark like we are the chosen ones, like the priest gives good Catholics on Ash Wednesday.

No one wants to hear this, but I picture my baby in the fire where they burned his precious infant body. I'm scared to put those images into words - the words are too, too brutal. Blistering, shrivelling, disappearing into. . . nothing. . . I wish I'd mummified him and kept him in a display case like the priceless objet d'art he was. He was a valuable original, impossible to reproduce. He was a masterpiece lost forever to us.

Ashes can't be remade into solid form, so he's not eligible for the much talked of heavenly resurrection. There's laws of physics, I'm sure, that could give me an exact answer as to why I can't make him whole again. I wish I knew them. Maybe then I'd understand.

He's dead, you know. Oh, my baby. He's dead. He's still dead, where once, for a few magical hours, he was alive. But now he's dead, dead, dead. My baby is bloody, fucking, dead.

Ashes to ashes

What do we do with our dead?

We get rid of them, quickly, out of our sight. Despite the fact that we have the means to preserve them these days, by way of refrigerated morgues, so that we might spend more time saying goodbye, we spend less time with our dead loved ones than we ever have throughout history. In the not-too-distant past, a deceased family member would be lovingly 'laid out' at home for a number of days so that visitors could come and pay their respects. Families could come to terms with a person's death while the body of their beloved was still under their roof to hold, and to cry over - to aid the expression of sorrow and grief. There's a tendency today, though, to act swiftly in the face of death, for reasons I can't fully understand. It is rare for the length of time between a person's death and their funeral to be more than a couple of days. When funerals are delayed for reasons of autopsy, or other complications, you hear people say how cruel this delay is - it's as if all anyone wants is to get the awful business over with, so as to more quickly move on.

I wish I hadn't felt that I had to rush to say goodbye to Max for the last time. I have so many regrets when I think of how the week of his birth and death played out, and one of my biggest is that I spent such a short amount of time with him after he died. His heart stopped beating around 4am, and we were home from the hospital by midday that day. I can't really say why. I remember being told at some point in the hospital that there was 'no rush' for us to leave, but I don't think I really processed that, or anything else much that was said to me at the time. We were sort of left alone in the morning in the room. The midwives who'd sat with us all night had gone off duty and it seemed like the new ones didn't quite know what to do with us. The obstetrician had seen me, the social worker had seen me and left us with a list of funeral homes. What were we supposed to do next? No one came to tell us. And we needed to be told. We were not in a state to be thinking for ourselves, and were certainly not capable of asking the questions I now so dearly wish we had. I think I said something to the new midwife, like, 'do we go now?' and she might have said 'if that's what you want'. I remember asking her if there was any reason why we needed to stay, and she said there wasn't, so I guess that was that. We gathered our things and we left. Just like that. One foot in front of the other, out through the corridor, down to the car park, and out into the cruel brightness of the world outside.

How I wish she'd said 'Yes, there is a reason you should stay. You won't be able to get this time back. Commit to your memory every molecule of his body. Drink him in while you can.' How I wish I'd stayed long enough for some of the shock to subside, so that I might have been more able to be fully present in the final moments I spent with him. I've since found out that I could have stayed there for days. He could have gone to the morgue at night, and I could have had him back each morning for as long as I needed to get used to the idea, firstly, that he was mine, and secondly, that he was truly gone. Until very recently, I've realised, I was labouring under the apprehension that Max was coming back. The finality of his death has taken a good six months to actually sink in. I think the resurgence of acute grief I've had the last week or so is part of finally having to accept that my baby is gone forever.

We left the hospital on the Friday, and Max was to be picked up by the undertaker on the Monday. Over the weekend I was overcome with the feeling that I wanted to go back to the hospital to spend more time with Max. I think they'd told us that we could come back at any time to see him. I remember talking to Leslie about it, but for some reason I think he talked me out of it, instead suggesting that we go to see him once he arrived at the funeral place. But when we called the funeral place on the Monday they said we weren't able to see him as he was being prepared for his funeral at another location. The chance to spend more time cuddling my baby had slipped away.

The last time I saw Max was at his funeral. We'd asked to see him before the service, and were given about fifteen or twenty minutes before everyone started arriving to say our final goodbyes. How do I describe what that was like to you? I cry as soon as I begin to think about it. Was I afraid? Strangely, no. I looked upon him in his coffin with such overwhelming pride. He looked so beautiful wrapped in his baby blue blanket. He looked like a sleeping baby in a cradle. My sleeping baby. Mine and Leslie's. Our baby. Except that his cradle had a lid. And there was someone there wanting to screw it on over the top of him so that he would not be able to see or breathe or hear. How could I let them do that to my baby? I remember thinking, for a split second, that this was my last chance to grab him and run. All sorts of things went through my head during that service. I imagined myself pulling him out of the box and refusing to let him go. I imagined sitting in the front pew clinging to my baby as hoards of people tried to pry him from my arms. I'd fight each of them off with my teeth and nails and feet. I'd grab whatever weapon I could lay my hands on to stab them or maim them or pluck their eyes out as if I were a wild animal. They'd have to tranquillise me and restrain me before I'd give him up. While all this was running through my head, though, I sad quietly, numbly, and did as I was told, just like the good girl I've always been. I didn't make a fuss. I didn't want to upset anyone by losing control. Instead, I just hurt myself by keeping it together, ensuring I would carry all of that desperation and rage fresh into the months that would follow. I have no outlet for it now, it just eats away inside of me like a cancer.

I should have wailed. I should have swore. I should have kicked and punched and pummelled my way out of there. At that stage I didn't even care that my baby was dead so long as I could just keep him with me. It didn't matter to me that he'd never breathe or cry again, like other babies, but he was mine and the whole world were asking me to nail him inside a fucking cheap imported wooden box and throw it in a fire where he'd be reduced to nothing but dust in my nose; carbon in the air. It was never a question that Max would be cremated. I've always been hugely distressed by the idea of burial under the ground, Leslie agreed, and I was sure that I would want to be cremated myself. But now, after his cremation urn has arrived and I'm faced with the task of taking his ashes to be poured into it, I find myself wondering if we did the right thing. I wonder if I'd feel better if I had a place to visit in a cemetery - a physical place, and a plaque that marked for the whole world where he was. But we didn't feel comfortable laying him to rest in a cemetery far away, surrounded by strange bodies, and my family don't even live in this state, so he wouldn't have had many visitors. I thought he'd be lonely there. Sometimes I wish that he was still in a box underground instead of reduced to ashes in a carton, though, so I could go under cover of darkness and dig him up with my bare hands, like the desperado I've become. Maybe I've watched too much Buffy in my time, but I can't help thinking there must be a way to get him back, like maybe if my tears touched the earth of his grave it would crumble and release him if he were buried there. But there's no way, even in TV, to turn dust into something solid, something whole. In my darker, madder moments, I wonder if in cremating my baby I denied him the chance to come back to life, as if I believed that such a thing were even remotely possible.

So many people have told me, comfortingly, that my grief will get easier with time, but I think that this is simply untrue. The emotional distance time provides from the acute trauma of Max's birth and death have certainly lessened the symptoms of the trauma (flashbacks, nightmares), but not of the meaning of his death itself. As each day wears on - and sometimes it really does feel like it's wearing, like old, rusty cogs turning a seized up old engine - the idea of dealing with Max's absence every day. . . for the rest of my life. . . seems so much more impossible to bear. It reminds me of when I was in labour, and I was at the end of my tether, tired and distressed and in pain. I kept asking the midwife when it would finish, and she told me that it would only be another half an hour, at most. That's the only way I could keep going on, knowing there was an end to the pain in sight. There was an end to the pain of his birth, but there is no end to the pain that his death has caused. What do I do with that knowledge? Indeed, what do I do, in general, now?

Tomorrow I'll go to work with Leslie so that we can go to an engraver in the city to have a brass plate etched with Max's details for the top of his urn. I keep coming up with all of these things to put on it, and Leslie has to keep reigning me in as everything I want to write won't fit. Unfortunately he knows this from experience, as it has taken two years for his family to put a plaque on his mother's grave, as no one could agree on the exact wording it should have - there simply wasn't enough space on the plaque for everyone to have the message they want.

As this blog has proven, there are simply hundreds of thousands of words I want to say to, and about Max. How we can be expected to come up with only 10 or 12 words to sum up his existence is beyond me. I am writing a book about him, and at the rate I'm going it will be my life's work. I simply don't know where to stop writing about him and talking about him. Perhaps I can't bear to stop. The silence in the space where he should be is already too deafening.

Here is the urn we bought from America, after much deliberation. Heartfelt thanks must go to the Stamm family, who allowed us to ship the urn to their US address, and who very generously forwarded it to us after we found out the company would not ship to Australia. The plaque we hope to have made will go on the top of the box. It's so hard to believe that this box is all that is left of my baby; that a piece of me, perhaps the most important piece, lies dead inside it. All of this is so unfair. It's so, so unfair.

Max's cremation urn