Whispers from Billy and Samuel

I walked outside with you this evening. Into the dark, damp grass beneath my feet, grainy stone.
Cool air whistling into my lungs, inflating, ribs lifting, heart contracting.
Moon ponderous in the sky, waiting for introductions to be made.

Even here, in the dull British suburbs.
No pear tree or dark roses.
The Moon waits for a small child with wide eyes.

But I have no year-old child to carry out. Not in any world.
Only a weary thirty three year old body, tattered, to raise a blood shot eye aloft to your fat expectant whiteness.

My arms are full of imaginings, gathered to myself.
The soft, sweet heft of a child never-to-be.
The phantom weight settles comfortably into nerve endings, the old habit of making solid flesh from  air, the repetition of yearning that has altered their branchings and signals.

I wish that you could see her, old Moon.
I have carried her outdoors to be introduced, the nothingness of air shaped into limbs and lolling head.
My daughter, never in need of a tattered blanket.
Neediness is not in her nature.

You look blankly at a woman turning nothing into her shoulder.
No introduction necessary.
This is already familiar.

But, just briefly, I look through the eyes that might have been yours.
My daughter, tiny creature, with a mouth that never made any small cries.
Just whistled breaths.

Your eyes.
Wide.
Borrowed by your mother, to look at the Moon anew.
To make my cries seem small.
And I twirl about, clumsily, drunk with light and wishes.

***

whispers from here and here

Time

It's early in the morning of the Reuben's second birthday. The house is quiet, calm grey light filtering into my kitchen window. The presents are wrapped, the food prepared.

Time rattles past. In a whirl of computers and spreadsheets, children, meals, strangely vivid dreams that leave me unsettled. Until there is no time left. I mean to read and write but there is nothing to say and no time to write it down in. Intentions dry out and blow away in the wind, desiccated tinder-like stuff.

"Play me the song about shooting," Jessica demands. I look up. Disconcerted. What the heck? She wants a song about shooting? Have I been playing her a song about shooting? Argh. Neglectful, bad mother.

After about ten false starts, I finally tumble to the fact that she wants the track 'Titanium'. We dance around together, slightly grimly on my part. Shoot me down but I won't fall. I am titanium.

I swear that she has more titanium about her than most. But not me. I'm more like . . .  a marshmallow. Easily squished.

***

Reuben is slightly suspicious of the entire birthday celebration. He squints his eyes at the presents and fuss. Not certain what is happening and not sure whether to trust in it. I am so protective of this child, his scant hair, his wild emotions, his stumbling words.

***

Five years this summer and I am sad. Not angry, not devastated.

There is no fire left. Only a small, cold sadness that sits in my throat like a smooth pebble. Or perhaps it is merely the scar of where that stone resided, my throat permanently scratched by a memory of what it once contained.

Sadness accompanied by flashes of blinding happiness. Throat, eyes, brain. None of which seem to work in their old familiar ways. Photoreceptors all bent out of shape, throat etched with a reminder of something that is long gone, brain all fried and fuzzy. But, eventually, this will be the old familiar way. I've had a seventh of my life to adjust already. That proportion may well increase. If I'm lucky.

An icy wire running alongside my spinal column, a pebble, something cold and metallic in the palm of my hand. Something that even a multiplicity of metaphors could never quite capture.

And yet it is nothing special or unusual. Except in the context of the specificity of the link.
Me, my daughter, Georgina.

***

Occasionally she resurfaces. Sometimes I drag her up, through the years. Never can quite understand what prompts my actions on these occasions. Sometimes it just tumbles out, before I've had a chance to make a decision.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," a colleague says kindly. "Just goes to show that you never know what other people have been through."

And, later, a back handed compliment, "but you've a lovely figure . . . given that you've had two children."

***

Time.

I'm scared, yes I'm scared. 
That like the wind takes a leaf from a tree, time will take your love from me. 

That time will take this strange, dead-end love away from me.

Ashes

Nobody in real life will really understand this.

The house next door to us caught fire this evening. I was taking the kids out of the bath and suddenly heard a lot of swearing from my husband in the room next door. He burst into the bathroom and said, 'get the kids dry and out of the house now!'

I didn't really understand what was happening but I could tell that he was scared so I grabbed a load of towels and wrapped them up. When I was standing outside the house, I saw that the fire next door was taking quite a hold. I handed Reuben to a neighbour because I had to go back in.

An off duty fire fighter was there, telling my husband to close the windows. He told me not to go back in. I garbled at him that I had to get my daughter's ashes, that I was sorry and I knew it didn't make any sense as she had already been burnt but that I couldn't let it happen again.

I must have sounded completely insane, sufficiently insane to frighten him out of my way anyway, as he stepped back. So I plunged back up the stairs, into the wardrobe, grabbed Georgina's box and dashed back out again.

My neighbour said that she understood, that she would have gone back for the baby box too.
She doesn't know about Georgina. She doesn't know that I am the sort of person who goes back into a burning building for ashes.

All those people filming with their mobile phones, filming me triumphantly emerging with a box of ashes. I'll probably pop up on youtube somewhere, emerging from my front door as next door's car port explodes, happily clutching my white memory box.

Unfortunately for the house next door, it's a bit of write off.
Ours is smelly but just fine.
And the only ashes are those in the wardrobe.

Scrapings

'I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe that there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.'

Roger Ebert, I Do Not Fear Death

I lunge for the radio, like something about to drown. It is, frequently, the only source from which anything even vaguely resembling sense emerges.

I hope it may be like that. That Georgina's life was just a brief slip from one contentment to another.
An ignorance to a release.
I'm sorry that she didn't have any gifts or memories.
Very sorry indeed.
But who needs a little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower?
Maternal love, a sister, pain, years, days.
Everything, in the end, is surplus to requirements.

In the kitchen I try and relate this minor revelation, the slipping, the comfort, a brief display of my own little souvenirs.

"Oh God, do you ever talk about anything that isn't SO heavy."

The pot is slammed down. I retreat.

****

I do talk about things that aren't heavy. I play a lot of Candy Crush, squishing boiled sweets into the hereafter with the help of my trusty companions, striped, wrapper and bobbly (as I call them). Crunch, crunch, squash. It's a cheery world where lives are reallocated after a certain period of time and, no matter how badly you tie up, you can always start again. I'm sure that is part of its appeal.

****

'Now the news has arrived 
From the Valley of Vail
That a Chippendale Mupp has just bitten his tail,
Which he does every night before shutting his eyes.
Such nipping sounds silly. But, really, it's wise.
He has no alarm clock. So this is the way
He makes sure that he'll wake at the right time of day.
His tail is so long, he won't feel any pain
'Til the nip makes the trip and gets up to his brain.
In exactly eight hours, the Chippendale Mupp
Will, at last, feel the bite and yell "Ouch!" and wake up.'

Dr. Seuss, The Sleep Book

Things seem to take a long time to reach my brain these days. Participating in the research group is a little like picking a scab or poking about with your tongue in a rotten tooth.

I had a discussion about medical professionals who are involved in the handling of withdrawal or withholding of life support from very young infants. They don't really receive much training in what to do or what to say.

I remember one of the nurses with us when Georgina was dying, it was her first death. She tried so hard, to be professional and to keep asking how I was during the rest of the time that Jessica was on the neonatal ward. I never really thought that it must have been hard for her too, that she was just a young girl. When you land up in a world where you have to hand over the person you love most entirely to the knowledge and competence of another human being, you want to forget about their frailty. Angels or demons or wizards. Anything but human, prone to fail, prone to mistakes.

I have this discussion about how the conversations and action immediately surrounding the death of your child can have long reaching ramifications into how you feel about that decision and that experience many years down the line. I feel calm, I don't cry, perhaps it's easier here where nobody is flinching as they've all sat waiting for babies to die. Checking breathing and listening for heart beats.

Then, a couple of days later, the pain obviously finally reaches my brain. Through all the numbness and   'I don't think about that's and 'la la la la la, I can't hear you's and 'level 65 of Candy Crush MUST be defeated' and 'MUST just carry on going' and all the other crap that accompanies the process of living, living, living, on and on and on.

It still hurts. Somewhere underneath all of that.

Once more I'm crying in a supermarket aisle. I hide amongst the reduced items. It will pass. It always does.

*****

This is a song that has haunted my life a little.
It is a much loved song from my youth and reminds me of both church as a little girl and of the smell of artificial smoke machines and stale alcohol.
It was a song sung by my little sister's best friend at her wedding.
It was the song that I played on the way to Georgina's funeral.

Turns out that the original track, prior to all the re-mixing and jiggling that made up the version that I know best, was recorded for a video only documentary about an obese man who was trying to lose weight.

Somehow that seems right.

This song about an obsese man and the Chippendale Mupp and technicolour facebook games and small souvenirs of the Eiffel Tower all jumble together and form a strange, beautiful, horrible trap. Where the more I try to extract any meaning whatsoever from the mixture of objects, no matter how close it seems to lurk beneath the surface veneer, the more entangled I become.

I wonder what it is like to be where she is, where nothing is required.

Perhaps it is best simply to wait. For contentment.

And, in the meantime, hit me with it.
Song recorded for obese guy. Prop me up a little will you?

Abnormality

"You do realise," she says, examining me like a particularly gruesome specimen dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, "that this isn't normal."

I smirk. Normal was lost to me, slipped through my fingers and left the building, nearly five years ago.

I'm not normal.
It's not normal to write a secret diary on the internet for nearly five years about a child that lived for three days. And quite a bit of other stuff that would probably be better off left deep inside my head.

Hell, she doesn't even know about this place.
Imagine how I would suddenly plunge down her normality scale if she did. The floor would swallow me up and there I'd be dangling off the bottom, clawing up by my fingernails, the truly strange and crazy clinging to my ankles.

"No. I suppose it is not, exactly, normal in the grand scheme of things. But it wasn't something I planned."

She doesn't realised that I, kind of, disagreed with her. Sneakily. Smirkily.
Maybe I like it down here.
Off the scale.

Think that my scale is just a whole lot less finely gradated than hers.

***

The way that I am. She thinks, because I cry a lot, that I am sad.

But my incessant crying is just a release. From anxiety, from bewilderment, chaos, feeling overwhelmed.

I slither about. Seeking out broken things or sad songs. Sentimental turns of phrase. Sickly sweet facebook memes that make my teeth curl and my eyes water.

Because crying doesn't really hurt anybody. I'd sometimes rather smash plates or hit walls.
But crying is quieter.
The sweet thick cake of emotional expression as opposed to the thin, quick alcohol of anger.
Subdued. Cautious. Risk averse. Maternal.
Cover me up in a layer of fatty cake and tears.

"I'm worried that you are going to miss their childhoods," she says.
And I want to laugh. Because if there is one thing I'm pretty certain I shall not do, it is that.

No sleepwalking past these.
I am forever shocked to find beating hearts that thump and pump inside chests, I stick my ear flat, flat, flat to hear blood swooshing and valves opening and closing.
I try to listen to their hair growing through those thin, warm scalp that smells so sour.
I am forever invading personal space, checking, checking, checking, re-checking.
Are you still alive? Are you still alive? Just checking. Hopefully not in a sinister way?
I seem to need a little reassurance.

The hands that try and swat you away, the thick skull that batters your nose and makes you howl in indignation and pain, the utter exasperation of your twenty third attempt to get out of the door on time being scuppered by a dirty nappy and a missing flask.

The glory, the revelling in it, of being alive, of glances and punches and sighs aimed at you and your own slow, adult, lumbering stupidity.

Their brilliant dashes, their vividness, those creatures that are, somehow, linked to you but you have entirely forgotten how and why. Or even who you were in the first place. Something put here to look at them perhaps?

I don't know quite what it is that I am doing.
Apart from trying.
Trying my best. Cack handedly I'm sure. Imperfectly I'm sure.

But I am not missing anything at all.

Or slightly less than most. I'm aware. I'm aware.
Of all the strange good fortune that is mine. How little I deserve it.
How suddenly it might all be ripped away from me. My little thin blanket of comforts.

And, after that, who wouldn't need a good cry. It's that or explode.
So that's why I cry, after all this time.

Name one thing about us two anyone could love
We roll out the red carpet
When rotten luck comes down the road
Five four three two one
Watch for the flash
Something here will eventually have to explode
Have to explode

Small consolations

I have volunteered to be a parent representative on a research group examining difficult decisions made in neonatal units. Our first meeting was today.

I caught the tube to London Bridge. Alongside the moving walkway was an advert offering free life insurance for new parents. £10,000 during your baby's first year of life.

For a moment I was non-plussed. Offering to ensure your newborn child from birth to the age of one for free and advertising the payout. With such jolly lettering? With cartoon rattles and nappies?

Then I tumble. It's the parents. It's the death of a parent that you are taking out insurance against. Not the baby's.

Of course.

***

We talk about palliative care. About how it should not be something wheeled out at the final pass. It should be integral to the lives of every extremely ill or premature baby treated in ICU. It should be the default, set to gradually fade away when everything goes according to plan and the wind blows in the right direction.

I think, perhaps, that this should be the case in adult medicine as well. Under certain circumstances. Although I do not give voice to this as it outside the scope of this meeting.

I do believe that as we will all, inevitably, die, it might not be a bad idea to set our minds to that final horizon. That palliative care should start at birth, the process of reconciling yourself to your own mortality. Why should it always be the feared and awful last resort?

Because palliative medicine is not about admitting defeat, throwing your hands up in the air and saying, "we did everything we could." End of life care can be a more active process than that, focused around comfort and privacy.

We talk about the conversations that we had with our children's consultants. Those difficult decisions that were taken.

Sometimes these aren't formal. They aren't in private rooms, they aren't with both parties fielding all their resources. In my experience, the truth comes out late at night, when everyone feels a bit frayed, when nobody is at their best. The final formal agreement might be clear and amiable. But it has usually been hashed out long beforehand.

In snatches of conversations on the ward, in corridors. In pleas and denials.

The conversation rumbles on, nearly five years later. I'm one of the lucky ones. It is a privilege.
To have had Georgina's death handled in the manner that it was.
To be able to discuss these matters and to hope for a change.

***

Then I bathed myself in light.

I went to an art gallery, on my own.
Because I appear to like superimposing disorientating experiences upon one another?

Light Show at the Hayward Gallery. Art installations made from light. Solid light. Light bulbs that replicate moon light. Endless churning cubes. Water fountains frozen in time by strobe lighting. Monochromatic worlds where everything appears red. Or blue. Dark places that you have to edge around, feeling your way along on the walls. Hoping not to stumble.

I eavesdropped.
On conversations about being an intern.
How not to waste your life doing something you find boring (ahem) or how working for free was slavery (ahem) which are nice dreams but I couldn't help emitting a cynical chuckle. Which I fear may have been overheard by one party.
On what other visitors thought of the installations.
On a mother talking so charmingly to her daughter that I wanted to tell her how much I had enjoyed her story about the dinosaur and how wonderful she was.
I remained silent.

I thought about the decisions that I had taken.
Hoping to be purified, hoping to be justified.
And my eyes were burnt away by the lights.

The Unquiet Grave

I went to listen to Kate Rusby sing on Friday night.

If you've been reading for a while, you will know that I love Kate Rusby. I've posted many of her songs here over the years. Her album, Awkward Annie, was probably one of the pieces of music that I played most frequently whilst I was pregnant with the twins. It makes me smile that the girls might have heard her voice singing during the short time in which I was pregnant and they would have been able to hear. I picked Awkward Annie up once again after Jessica had been transferred to special care and I could play music on the ward - one of the very few advantages of MRSA is that you get to have a biohazard sticker stuck to the door of your private room and you can play music.

There is one song from that album, Daughter of Heaven, that I can hardly bear to listen to as it reminds me so of my sweet girl. I tried to play it once in the car and even my husband, not known for sentimentality, asked me to turn it off as he couldn't stand it. I've played it occasionally but only for her birthday and for one other little girl that the song reminds me of.

I went to hear Kate Rusby sing, with my younger sister. I left the children sleeping.

She has such a beautiful warm voice, two little girls and a handsome husband who plays guitar on the stage with her. It would be easy to be jealous but she is so kindly. And I try not be envious these days.

I was a bit worried that she might sing Daughter of Heaven and I would end up in a mess.

She didn't sing it.
But she sang a different song that resulted in the same, sorry mess. And the sweet, kind, warm fingers of my sister's hand pressed against mine. Because she knew what I was thinking of.  What I am always thinking of.

As I cried in the still darkness of the theatre.

It's a song called The Unquiet Grave.

And there is only one unquiet grave in our family and only one mourner who cannot stop mourning. There is one person who, wherever you take her, whatever you talk about, whatever transpires.
Goes back to a grave.
A small grave.
With one set of footprints around the edges.

I'm sorry that I will not let you sleep, my sweetheart. My dearest daughter.
Because I don't want you to be in a grave, unquiet or otherwise.
But it is so. Well now . . . you are not actually, in truth, in a grave as your body was cremated.
So you are ashes.
Which is as good as a grave.
Just as final.
You still must leave.
And I must leave you.

So turn in.
Turn in my sweetheart.
Turn into your grave.
Because you must. The world is not for you. I am not for you.
I wish that it were otherwise.
I wish that so very much.
With all my heart.

Until I turn in myself.
Until I turn into my grave.
And leave this world.

Perhaps to join you?

I miss you.
I always will.

I love you.

How pleasant is the wind tonight
I feel some drops of rain
I never had but one true love
In greenwood he lies slain
I'll do so much for my true love
As any young girl may
I'll sit and mourn all on your grave
For twelve months and a day

The twelve months and a day being up
The ghost began to speak
Why sit you here and mourn for me
And you will not let me sleep
What do you want of me sweetheart
Oh what it is you crave
Just one kiss of your lily white lips
And that is all I crave

Oh don't you see the fire sweetheart
The fire that burns so blue
Where my poor soul tormented is
All for the love of you
And if you weren't my own sweetheart
As I know you well to be
I'd rend you up in pieces small
As leaves upon a tree

Mourn not for me my dearest dear
Mourn not for me I crave
I must leave you and all the world
And turn into my grave

Traditional ballad
Thought to date from around 1400