This is my story of our family. In some ways it’s a story with a neat beginning and ending. Then in other ways it’s not. Here’s one way of telling my story. My name is Lourda and I have 3 beautiful children, 1 boy and 2 girls. Healthy happy kids. A beautiful family. A neat story.
Then there’s the other story. This one is invisible, unknown and probably one day forgotten. Because I’m also a Mother of four 8 week old babies. How to tell this story?
It’s a tough one because even though our law is insistent about the importance of unborn life, my experience is that when early life is lost naturally no one considers it important. No one considers it to be a child. Or that this child has a set of parents that are grieving.
Miscarried they said. I say what a stupid word. As if they were accidentally dropped. Absentmindedly put down. As if I didn’t put enough effort into carrying them.
And here’s the thing. There is nothing to see. Nothing to hold. Nothing to show people. No pictures. No hand prints. No coffin. No names. No gender. Nothing. Like wisps of smoke. Fragments of breath. A whisper. A promise of life. Here and gone.
There, there, sure you’ll have another one.
Once I ingrained the details of each loss into my memory. One thing they all shared was that I knew with absolute certainty from the first faint line on the test that they would not survive. Maybe a little communication from the life inside me. Warning me not to relax.
I’ve allowed my fierce grip on the details to loosen over time. Just so I could keep on going. Now I can’t remember which ones I saw heartbeats for; which one a co worker told me I caused by my lunchtime run, or which one a family member said was caused by breastfeeding. I remember which two I had operations to remove. But I mix up which left me weak and grieving outside the Coombe, trapped by Obama’s motorcade and whether that was the same time a kind Anesthetist held my hand as I lay crying on the table waiting for her to drug me to sleep. For both I remember the cripplingly lonely walk to the theater. Fragments of details from scans. Stark words, “Your womb is empty” .The sense of dread sitting in the early pregnancy unit. Disappearing from work on sick leave. Research on causes. Friends that dropped everything for a coffee and others that dropped out of my life. All blended into a blur.
Now the only thing I hold close is their due dates. Random numbers that never evolved into their true significance. Dates that should be a cause for celebration every year. Now I simply have a silent toast and the day slips by as usual.
There we have it. Never born. Only held as memories forever in my heart. These little whispers of life that just me and their Dad were lucky enough to hear.
And that, is our story.
08/10/11;
21/12/11;
23/09/12;
23/03/15.
(With thanks to Marta O Leary Art for the image with this post)
