Persistence of vision

I hadn't realised that, nearly eighteen months after the fact, I would still be so very preoccupied with the events of 2008. Thinking about the final months of that year takes up so much of my (admittedly rather limited) brain that there currently seems to be little room for anything else. Not good when you have a job that entails being able to concentrate for extended periods of time. Wonder when they'll notice that my attention span is now hovering at around the minute mark?

I have good intentions. I sit at my desk, telling myself that today will be different. Today I will be a productive employee, I will take pride in my appearance, I will remember to brush my hair before I go to work, I will smile, I will click up and down to the printer, I will type and email and call, I will staple documents together, I will annotate graphs neatly, I will check my spreadsheet formulae actually do what they are supposed to be doing instead of some weirdo calculation entirely of my own invention.

I will not go and hide in the ladies room, sit on the floor and cry.
I will not press myself against the door of the cleaning supplies cupboard in the furthest cubicle from the door and sob to myself 'but she was here, she was just here a minute ago.'
I will not run away from pregnancy news.
I will not go and look up Georgina's death record in the database.
I like to look at it sometimes, it's one of the few things I have.
A document. A trace. Of my eldest daughter's existence.
I will not sit and stare at her name, at my husband's name, at my own name.
I will not sit and debate with myself whether the information listed as contributory factors to her death could have been altered, could all be some kind of mistake.
There it is, neatly tidied away.
A place I never thought it would be, purely on the basis that I was responsible for maintaining the database containing that information. Here lies the final document of Baby Georgina W, carefully uploaded to this electronic mausoleum by her mother.
I thought that, simply by the act of importing data into that store, I could protect myself from having to upload the details of my own child's death.
Because that would be too cruel wouldn't it? Apparently not.

Causes of death
(i) pulmonary insufficiency
(ii) extreme prematurity at 23 weeks gestation and 750 grams
(iii) renal failure
(iv) twin pregnancy

I fantasise about simply deleting her record out. Firstly, so that nobody else in the office could look at something so sacred to me. Secondly, perhaps she'd come back. Just perhaps. Perhaps I'd hit delete and there she'd be. In my arms. Looking at me with those blue eyes. Just as though it had never happened.

I try. I try and I try and I try to be normal again.
But.
But my eyes slip off the surface of the here and now. As though it is too shiny, too insubstantial, to slick with new to hold my gaze. It can't keep my attention.
My eyes slip off to the right. They are always snagging on something just outside my field of vision, just out of my sight, that flickers and jumps. They are always searching for that place, where I lost her.

I sat at my desk this week, lost in that parallel place. A place just slightly to the right, out of alignment, accessible only to those whose eyes and minds are permanently fixed elsewhere.

I realised I couldn't remember what happened when Georgina's heart stopped beating. I sometimes wonder if that is why I think of that time so often. Because it is a strange mixture of things I remember with heart stopping vividness, the exact shape of her chin, the blue of her eyes, the split in the skin on her leg, the angle at which the blood dripped out of her mouth when they removed the ventilator, the purple of her bruises, in strange juxtaposition with an absolute and utter blank. There are hours and hours which are unaccounted for, which just evaporated alongside a substantial portion of my heart, on the 29th of August 2008.

I tried to remember. I wanted to call my husband and ask him questions. How long did her heart take to stop beating? Who was holding her when it finally stopped? Which nurse came to check? Was her consultant in the room?
But that would not have been the sort of phone call I would want to make in the middle of a working day.
It is not the sort of call I would like my husband to receive in the middle of a working day.

So I sat and pretended to work. But really I was trying to remember.
My poor mind whizzed around and around and tried to find the answers. How could I forget?

I still can't remember. But I have had a few details filled in.

It took, he estimates, about half an hour for her to die.
She was stronger than they suspected.
I held her.
He said that I held her for a very long time.

I remember the next part.
I washed her. The water wasn't warm enough.
I dressed her. The clothes were slightly too big.
The hat had a stupid, incongruous pom pom. Like a clown's hat.

My poor little clown with her bloody mouth.
My poor, beautiful little girl.
I don't know how I could ever have let you go. My girl. My girl. My sweet girl.
I remember looking and looking and looking at her and thinking that I would put her down and never pick her up again.
That I would put her down and walk out of the door.
And I wouldn't go back.
Because I didn't think that I could do it twice.

And so it goes.

I live in a strange half world when I'm not with my surviving daughter. She brings me back. I owe it to her. I owe it to her sister. To try and be my best for her. Not to say that I always am but I try.

But otherwise I inhabit a peculiar half life that is just a step or two to one side of the one where the majority of people appear to pass their time. That flimsy, garish place that I just can't seem to get a hold on any longer.

In that strange place. Where time stops and starts and writhes forward and backward as though it is alive.
That tiny place that I obsess over and think and think and think about. Until I have worn a groove in the floor, in my brain, even in this strange blog place. I feel as though surely even the electronic stuff this place is made from must be wearing very thin with this. I bore myself, this inability to think about little else. I pace back and forth, repetition, repetition, repetition.
Trying to find that magic elusive point at which I can still save the day, the month, the year, the rest of my life, my husband, Jessica, myself. I'm sure I can save us all you know. If only I can find that moment when I should have done something different.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of another of this place's shadowy occupants, hurrying along.
I know they are there.
In that gaze that seems to gaze out at another scene entirely.
In that laugh that sounds just slightly wrong.
I try to catch their eyes but they hurry away, turn back inside themselves.
Back to their own version of a neonatal intensive care unit and a slowly, dying child.
Back to their own preoccupations.
Back to whatever vision of their own persists when they shut their eyelids.


My mother told me that children are the crown of life.
They are.
I was waiting for the happiest day of my life.
And it was.

'You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years.' 

I'll miss you for another twenty-nine years Georgina.
And another twenty-nine times twenty-nine.
I miss you so.