The Ambassador

I had that call again.

A friend of a friend. Someone’s brother. A former colleague.

I shake my fist at Jimmy Stewart, because every time my phone rings an angel gets its wings, but it doesn’t seem so uplifting when the angel is a dead baby and you don’t believe in angels anyway.

I hope you don’t mind me getting in touch, I just didn’t know what to do and I thought of you immediately…

It reminds me that I am a denizen of a bruised nation with a missing population. We stand invisibly united under a knitted, never-used flag.

We did not choose to come here. We cannot leave, cannot flee. Yet we are dispersed. Grieving refugees. Missing a home we hardly built, earth we barely touched.

Another family crosses our border and we do not bring them casseroles. Or, y’know, we may bring them a casserole, but really we’re giving them some kind of painfully extended metaphor for what the next weeks/ months/ years will be. There is no silver lining, so perhaps a free casserole is the best we can hope for.

I feel like I should stand on something and proclaim:

Friends, Mourners, Undiscovered Countrymen…

But no one here wants a rousing speech, or maybe you do. I don’t know. We do not speak a common language, or share common customs. We hold different politics, different faiths, different aesthetics. We are connected, but only nominally. In reality, babylost covers an extraordinary diversity of experience. There are so many ways for babies to die. It still shocks me.

The friend of a friend. Someone’s brother. The former colleague.

I do not know what they want. I barely know what I want, truthfully. I want to make some weak joke: …something something DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY, am I right folks??!!

I am an undeserving emissary, chosen by default.

Yet I am your Ambassador.

And you are mine.

Have you encounterd a babylost ambassador? Someone who had walked the path before you and helped you navigate your grief? Who are they and what did they do that helped?

A name to every fixed star

I am reduced to tiny acts of motherhood: birthed her, held her, dressed her, burned her.

Named her. I named her.

I rubbed her name into my belly, whispered it to my bedroom ceiling: Baby. Hello baby. I think I know you. I think. I think. I think you might be Iris. Hello my love. Hello. Iris. Iris. Iris. Hello baby Iris.

I whisper it now and tap it out. She is letters next to each other, keys compressed in order.

I R I S

photo by mbecher

In Greek mythology, Iris was the rainbow. She brought water to the clouds and made the sky weep. She was a messenger goddess: tangible divine.

Iris makes your eyes pretty; soul’s window, shining iridescent. She’s purple and gold and upright in florists’ buckets, she’s blousy and overblown in an English country garden.

She’s a naked young woman running into the sea under a slate-grey sky, laughing, laughing as her friends  huddle on the cold sand in woolly hats and wellies. She’s an old lady with paper skin and a soft, powdery scent, peering at a vast, textured canvas in the National Gallery. She’s a bookish child with thick glasses and dimples, reading in the warm spot of her mother's bedroom floor.

She’s my dead baby. But she’s more real to some people than my living children. Others forget her for a time. But soon they remember.

When I say her name.

How did you name your baby or babies? 

Future Perfect

This post is brought to you by 80s synth chords and spaceships made from tinfoil and fishing wire. I'm wearing epaulettes. Yeah, they came back round. The president is a lesbian. I have a belt that makes me invisible. It's awesome. Errr... just trying to create a little atmosphere, folks. Sheesh. The point is, I'm writing from the future.

Today is four years.

Four years ago she died. Four years ago she was born. Four years ago time stopped. Life paused. She was still and so was the world. 

I didn't have the capacity to think beyond that room, that moment. There was no space for "next." And yet events continued to unfold and now I'm here in the future, and it is... different. It is not how things were going to be. It is so unfamiliar, this place.

Jess-that-was is no more. Life-that-was-to-be has not happened. And it's not bad. But it's not what I had planned.

But maybe this would have happened anyway. Maybe you would still have grown apart. Perhaps this was always going to be this way. You. Him. A tree. Some lemon tart. Two living kids singing Happy Birthday. A look exchanged. And then the turn away: Turn away. We are no more.

He blames today on then. I asked him once: where did it all go wrong? Did you ever feel content? And he recalled a time before she was born. He painted our new house for two small girls to grow in. He was so ready to step in to that life. 

But here we are apart. Four years on. There's one girl, one boy and one little jar of ashes. The same house, paint peeling. Looking out; looking beyond. To what?

Sometimes I try to see. I turn the tarot endlessly and hold my breath for Four of Wands, but normally it's just The World or The Wheel and I'm like yeah, yeah, brilliant, whatever, it's not the card I'd choose, but I'm sure I can twist it to mean something vaguely convenient.

And I think back to Jess-that-was, and all her wants, her hopes. Poor fool. She couldn't know the path that she would walk. Yet here I am, a fool again. The future unfamiliar looms, forever imperfect.

She'll not be there. And I still stand. No, I still walk. Towards... towards... towards...

A raygun and rehydrated food. A robot mixing martinis. A womb that's closed for business. And epaulettes, gold epaulettes. 

Do you think about the future? What do you believe it hold for you, now? 

One blushing shame, another white despair

We are in a cafe. I blush and stutter. I look through my eyelashes at our neighbours, laughing into their lattes. I murmur, fearing their ears.

We are at my house. I breathe in and unseal my lips in a tiny gesture of anticipation. We are friends, confidantes. You are unshockable in the presence of my grief and rage. But now I am aware of the couch we sit on, the bedrooms above us.

So perhaps it is better that we are in neither of those places. You are there. I am here. This is silent noise. You can adjust your features so that they appear neutral, impenetrable. No one need know that this is what you’re reading. Unless you blush too.

Because here is the thing, the topic, the theme, the issue, the matter at hand. Here is the subject of this post. It’s... it’s... it’s... sex after loss and there is no pretty or dainty or literary way to say it other than that:

Sex after loss.

And what a complicated and difficult subject to address. In grief you yearn. You yearn for a little body, a milky mouth, a tiny foot in the palm of your hand. Is there room for that other yearn, that other want? To need, to desire: they have different meanings now. And now sex becomes about another baby, or not another baby; about bodies that don’t do what they’re supposed to. Bodies mean pain, or sick, or tired. Bodies are small and covered in wires. Bodies are still and cold. Bodies are not the colour of your lover’s skin, but mottled and blue.

Some people are drawn together and some are wrenched apart.

We were wrenched apart, but still we came together. We wanted our baby and so we were naked in our nakedness. And so another baby came. But that is not a given for our kind. There is no guarantee of fertility or of the end result. The end result: the one that seemed so certain to me all those years ago as I stomped up the stairs of the sexual health clinic in second hand army boots, for condoms and pills and other armour.

We are all different. You might believe that my kind of sex neither takes its appropriate form nor serves its appropriate function. You might have stomped up stairs for the same reason I did, or you might find that abominable. You might have loved it, or not. You might have shared it with many people, or with one. It’s political, it’s personal, it’s universal, it’s fucking everywhere. There’s fucking everywhere. In the same way that in those early weeks after Iris died every woman was pregnant, every commercial was for baby paraphernalia, every goddam Facebook status update came with a fuzzy ultrasound photo. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, until sex WAS loss and its expression evidence of the distance between us.

I pause and exhale. My hands push in to my eye sockets. I wish we were in that cafe, or at my house, or better still at a bar with an infinite  line of tequila shots and a cute bartender, and I would shout ‘SEX!’ too loudly, and everyone else would blush,  and we would cackle instead of cry.

But instead you are there, and I am here, and now I have to ask: how was it for you?

Has sex changed for you in your grief? Why? How? In what way? Be frank, be euphemistic, be anonymous, be however you want to be, but please tell me.

And i, a gasping new-deliver'd mother

Gasp

I knew I’d be sad about death, when it came.

I knew grief meant crying and wistful storytelling; memories and missing things. The absence of something familiar.

I knew these things in the way I knew what the Prime Minister should do about the global economic crisis. In other words, I didn’t have a fucking clue. Just some opinions based on other people’s words.

Gasp.

It wasn’t like that for me, when it was time for me to grieve. Death was a womb, not a tomb. Her body was empty. She was a husk. My baby was a husk. So what’s to grieve?

There were no memories, no stories. There was only Everything. The infinite possibilities of her.

Gasp

Laundry was grief. It smelt like new. She never got to be new.

Fingernails were grief. They dug in to my palm. Feel this. Feel this. Feel for her.

Chicken dinners were grief. They could never fill me up

My laptop was grief. The ‘Home’ key came loose in my bag. I wept. I’d lost my home.

The 50 bus route was grief. I resented its normality.

A forgotten child’s glove ripped my soul from me on a January morning. It looked so lonely.

Gasp

Then I forgot to grieve.

 It made me sadder.

Does your grief surprise you?

The midwife wonder'd and the women cried...

Good Afternoon.

My name is Jess and I'm here to talk to you today about my experience of Stillbirth.

Before I begin, can I ask you all to stand up. Please stay standing if you have given birth, or witnessed the birth of your own child... Thank you... OK, now stay standing if you've given birth more than once? More than twice? May I ask how many children you have? How old are they? Wow! You have three children and you're studying full time to be a midwife! You're incredible!

OK, can you all stand up again. Stay standing if, as a Student Midwife, you've delivered more than 10 babies. More than 20? More than 30? WOW! How many have you delivered? 40-ish?! 44??!! How about you? About 40 too? Amazing! OK, please sit down.

I ask you these questions because I want you to understand where I fit in to all of this. I am not an expert on birth. I have been present at three births, and at all three I was the one doing the pushing. Of those three babies, one of them was stillborn. I am not an expert on stillbirth either. I don't know any statistics. I can't make professional recommendations. I don't have any official resources for you. What I represent is an opportunity... I stand here as a woman who has given birth to a dead baby and I am going to tell you my story, and her story, and then you can ask me questions. You can ask me anything, really and truly you can ask me anything. I promise - hey, listen! I'm brave! I can say vagina and everything! 

OK with that let's begin. On 15th May 2008 I gave birth to my second daughter, Iris. She died during early labour the previous day...

Photo by kevinwchu

The secret places of my heart are often visited by strangers.

I write them out in my best words and awkwardly proffer them to people from Missouri and Norfolk and South Australia.

I say them aloud. I turn my womb inside-out and speak its fleshiness.

Mutter, mutter. I conjure her. I create her. She appears, shimmering, then vanishes again into silence. 

She is an agreement between me and you.

She existed, didn't she?

Yes, yes, that's right, she did.

Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.

I defy Noel Coward.

She shall have a stage. She shall have the biggest platform I can find for her. 

All babies are teachers, but the dead ones have the best lessons.

Have you ever shared your story with a group of strangers, like the student midwives I spoke to last Friday? How was the experience for you? What do wish you they knew about delivering a baby that has died, or is likely to die? Do you have an answer to the question I've asked before, and I asked of them again: Is it possible to have a good birth, when the outcome is a dead baby?