Drive

I have often wished that I worked closer to home. I went from working ten minutes walk away from my front door to over thirty miles away. So I have the best part of an hours drive to work in the morning and the same on the return journey. It is mainly motorway so it is not particularly interesting or taxing to drive. Sometimes it is hard to stay awake at the wheel.

It is a strange time. Spent doing nothing productive and yet unavoidable. A kind of enforced 'sit and think' time. Even when I would rather not have it. Of course, part of my brain is fully occupied with controlling the hurtling chunk of metal that I sit in. But the rest is free to roam.

I'm frightened of silence these days. So I put the radio on. Even then, I frequently find myself driving down the motorway crying. I wonder how many of us there are. In all those cars charging past me. How many of us have tears running down our cheeks, which we try to wipe away clumsily with one hand, all the time trying to ensure that we don't hit the car in the front? Sometimes I try to peer in. To find a fellow travelling mourner.

The radio murmur has it own little triggers.
The phrase 'strangled at birth.'
Discussions about medical ethics.
Snippets of news related to pregnancy or miscarriage.
Some poor member of parliament who found himself telling us all about his wife's recurrent miscarriages in an attempt to defend himself from allegations regarding his sexuality.

One evening this week there was a story on the news about an elderly woman who died at the grand old age of eighty nine in the seaside town of Torquay. What nobody had really known about her, until after her death, was that, at twenty three, she had been a secret agent in occupied France. She was found out, captured and tortured by the Gestapo and wound up in a concentration camp. She had survived but kept her secrets to herself. Nobody had known about this lady's past.

She had been due a pauper's funeral but, instead, was buried with full honours. As befitted her.
The closing sentence of the item was "You will never be forgotten, addressed to a lady none of us really knew."

Inevitably, I suppose, I thought of Georgina's funeral.

My mother used to say that the old mourn more at funerals than the young.
That they have a cumulative effect and that, at every funeral, you mourn again for all those that came previously. I used to think that was awful, that humans couldn't even take a few hours to mourn specifically for one individual but that we had to take out all our own little individual griefs and superimpose them on the one we were supposed to be  mourning currently. Seems a little disrespectful somehow. But that is why we are human. Those ties that bind us to the dead may stretch and strain but they never snap. Those threads only go slack when we go to join those who go before us I suppose.

I'm not entirely sure of the date of Georgina's funeral.
It has merged into that blur of after.
We wanted to have her buried initially. We live within walking distance of a children's cemetery and I wanted her to be buried there. But they wouldn't take her, the cemetery is full.
And so she was cremated.

There were two mourners.
The service was taken by the hospital chaplain who had blessed her days earlier.

I remember waiting outside the crematorium. We weren't sure where to go. We walked around the gardens.
There was a path around the edge of the building and this was edged with places to put flowers. Each slot had a name. And there was her's.
Baby Georgina W----.
That appellation. That 'Baby' nearly undid me. At once so tender, so gentle. My baby. Baby.
And simultaneously, so dismissive.
Only a baby.
Not even her full name. Georgina Jane.
Just Baby Georgina.
And there are those who would argue with affording my daughter even that status.
Other people being cremated that day did not have a qualifier prior to their names. Old Man Joe Bloggs. Middle Aged Woman Sarah Brown. Because they didn't need any clarification.

We hadn't thought to bring flowers for her. We didn't bring anything. The place where her flowers were supposed to lie was bare. Just like the space her life should have occupied.

The slot next to Georgina's was also a baby.
As we walked into the chapel, another couple walked out. Like walking into a mirror.
As we passed them, I wondered if we looked as destroyed as they did.

We sat down. Georgina's coffin was at the front. As there were only two us at her funeral, the chaplain told us to come and sit right up by the coffin. And so we did.

The three of us, my husband, myself and the chaplain sat around the white box that contained our little girl.

I remember that I wanted to open the coffin. That I wanted to pick it up and run away with it. That I wanted to fall to my knees and cuddle it.

But I didn't. I just sat there and cried.

There was no music.
There was the funeral service for a child from the Alternative Service Book.
I didn't say anything.
My husband didn't say anything.

Sometimes I regret Georgina's funeral. I wish she'd had choirs and horses and doves and hundreds of mourners.
I wish her mother had wailed and pulled out her hair and thrown herself on to the coffin.
I wish that there had been somehow . . . more.

Because she lost her life.
Life is a strange state. But it was all I had to offer. It was all I hoped to give her. I don't know anything else.

I sometimes wonder about the process of cremation. I wonder what the inside of the ovens look like. I wish I hadn't left her there, in the chapel. I wish I had walked down to wherever they were taking her, stayed with her.

I have a vision of flames burning my daughter's body away. But I don't suppose it works like that.

Sometimes I think Georgina's funeral was right. In a horrible way. Right.

Sparse, short and sad.

I miss her.
I miss her so very much.
My baby.
Georgina.