Repetition

Still the same. 

Still without you.

Mutterings

It is nearly five years now since Georgina died.

Like a slow tide, the grief that once turned me outwards now drives me inward.
Towards silence.

Jessica progresses. Sometimes slow. But steady.

"What did you say my darling? Try again?"
She repeats herself.
I fail to comprehend.
She sighs wearily.

We both stare out of the window or at one another in the rear view mirror, communication impasse locking us in place.
Toilet training grinds onwards into the middle distance.
Her kind eyes, her patient hands.
We will try again.

Reuben grows.
He issues orders, my tiny emperor.
Mildly unbelievable boy.
The unlikely child who did not die, who was not ill.
He looks like me, grey eyes, prominent ears.

Of the first (third) child, little mention is made.
The silver disc around my neck with her name engraved dangles, tarnished.
My naive expectations of kindness and comfort set aside, both for others and for myself.

Another baby kicks inside me. Just one. A girl or so they tell me.
Already bigger, already older than one of her sisters will ever be.

I imagine the flickering fused eyelid, the thin hand.
But not for too long as I cannot bear to.
I talk of her as though she will be born on her due date and live.
I do not claim her as the fourth child.

I stay quiet.
On the whole.

All's Well

After nearly five years, the words have dried up.
Nothing left except a heavy heart that shifts inside and aches.

Surfacing from sleep, a voice sings to me.

'And though death draws near, I've nothing to fear today.
As the colours they fade, the colours they fade away
All's well . . . all's well.'

A voice that sounds certain. Sure. Quiet and dignified. Seeming to echo through time, at one remove.

A song inspired by Dr. Edward Wilson, who was the chief scientist and artist on Scott's doomed expedition to the Antarctic. The lyric is based on a letter he wrote to his wife, as he realised that he would soon die.

Dr. Wilson believed that everything that happened to him was part of God's divine plan. He repeatedly used the phrase 'all's well' in an attempt to convey this in his final letters.

I wonder.
A death that was avoidable, freezing, lonely. Only a matter of miles away from safety and life.

I wonder.
Georgina's death seems so strange and senseless.
To half form a little body only to cast it aside.
Every narrative I spin to myself frays apart at the memory of the blood running out of her tiny mouth, the laboured breaths, the little hands that squeezed.

Two deaths. One remembered by some. The other forgotten. Except by me.

But it matters very little how I think of it. In truth.
I can fight with it, I can howl at it, I can curse and spit and swear.
I can cry and think it unfair.

It remains there. Implacable and suspended.
In a time that I cannot alter.
As cold as snow.

Perhaps I should just attempt to believe that 'all's well.'
To let some of that quiet dignity seep into my tired old heart.
Maybe if I said it frequently enough, whispered it to myself in the night, I would come to believe it?

All's well.

You can hear the song here

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 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?