Baby Loss Awareness: Fifteen years on….

So here we are, our sixteenth Baby Loss Awareness week since Joseph came into the world and, although I will always champion those who raise awareness, and strive so hard to do the same, this year words fail me. In all honesty I feel as though I have lost my way in the Baby Loss community over the years, painfully aware that fifteen years have passed since our hearts broke in two, knowing there are others whose losses are far more recent, far more raw, far more all-consuming than my own. Every single day I wrestle with the guilt of holding four healthy children in my arms whilst so many are still left waiting; conflicted as to where my place lies within this community when we are so much further down the line than those who shout the loudest.

The truth is, as much as I will always try to raise awareness, I struggle to share how we must change the dialogue when we are already reading from an entirely different script to the one I knew fifteen years ago. I struggle to shout about the need for more support when the services offered to bereaved parents feel abundant in comparison. I struggle to associate my own experience with the stories I hear now – where Mother’s give birth in sound-proofed rooms, babies are placed in cold cots, photographers capture precious moments, and family members and support workers flock to the sides of heartbroken parents. Perhaps selfishly, it simply acts as a reminder that in our darkest moments we were very much alone; that due to circumstance, and society, we navigated those moments just the two of us, two twenty six year olds, just falling apart at the seams.

And it reminds me, every single day, that my beautiful boy, our Joseph, is further away than he has ever been.

The sad truth is that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time and it can be difficult, and frustrating, to go back and re-visit my grief in those early days. I guess at the very beginning, when our entire world was turned upside down in an instant, my pain had been entirely surrounding the loss of our baby. My days were filled with the shock of it all, with anger at the injustice, with an agonising sadness at having said goodbye to a baby I had carried, and I had loved, for all of those months. My memories of losing Joseph were still so raw and yet so vibrant, the smoothness of his skin still so tangible, the weight of his body against my chest so close. I could literally close my eyes and remember the smell of his head as I nestled his cheek against mine, the way his little toes had curled inwards just like his Mama, the way those ruby red lips gently parted as I had showered them with kisses.

My pain was excruciating, both mentally and physically, it consumed my every waking moment and plagued my darkest nights. And for those first few months, and indeed those first few years, I had wanted nothing more than my baby boy back, never really considering that one day, I would want nothing more than my fifteen year old son.

In the years that followed I was hit by the stark realisation that not only had I lost my baby, and subsequently my marriage, but I’d lost an entire future that didn’t end with the milestones I had longed for in those early days – the first smile, the first steps, the first words. As the years passed by it soon became clear that the yearning for each of those moments would continue for a lifetime –  the first day of school, the first Christmas Nativity, the first time he rode a bike without stabilisers, beaming at the camera with a toothless grin. The first birthday party or play date, the first school trip or residential, the first day of straightening his tie for high school, for family weddings, for christenings of siblings he would have loved with all his heart.

What later took me by surprise was the crushing reality that there would be no end point to my grief, no finish line where the pain would lessen, no amount of happiness in the world that would ever take away from all we had lost. And realising that, and trying to come to terms with that, is an on-going battle that still torments me on a daily basis and there are moments, even now, when I’m still not sure how to sit with the enormity of losing my whole lifetime as I knew it.

Initially it was easy for me to think of Joseph and long for that little boy whose face I knew by heart – to look through his photos, cycle through our memories, remembering a baby I had held in my arms, albeit for such a short while. Missing a baby was agonising, no doubt about it, but missing a child, missing a teenager, missing a man, missing the father he may have become, feels outright impossible with nothing but my imagination to envision who he would have been. And gosh that’s hard to always wonder, to always question, to spend an entire lifetime missing someone you will never know, but who you knew, with every beat of your heart.

And whilst our world has kept on turning, and we have been blessed with so much joy as a family, I still live with the constant fear that on the happiest days of our lives, when I look around the table at the beautiful family I longed for all of those years, I will always feel disappointed that someone is missing. I worry that on the day Lewis marries the love of his life, no doubt looking handsome in his suit with his wife utterly resplendent beside him, I will break my heart for the best man who should have been there by his side. I’m scared that at the birth of my first grandchild, when I hold them in my arms, just bursting with pride and unconditional love, I will still be thinking of the grandchildren we might have had, and the Daddy he might have been. And I’m utterly terrified that in the final moments of my life, when my four beautiful children sit beside me, having hopefully lived a long and happy life together, I will look at the faces of the people I love the most and still find myself seeking out the one who is missing.

Every single day I ask myself how I can have everything I ever wanted right here in my arms, live a life that is so full and so happy and so perfectly complete, and still wish that things had been different? I question how I can feel such relief and such gratitude for the family I do have and still such a bitter sense of injustice for the family I don’t?

And maybe it turns out that I do have the words to share this year after all; maybe it isn’t about whose pain is the most raw, whose loss is the most recent, whose arms feel the most empty. Maybe it’s enough to share that I’m still very much riding the ripples of grief, still doing what I can to hold the broken pieces of my heart together, still feeling both happy and sad, both complete and conflicted, and still trying to work out how that can be.

Maybe it’s enough to tell you that fifteen years later, I am still just a Mum, who loves each of her children with all of her heart.

Still just a Mum, who misses her son.