The real face of grief
6 weeks ago my 14 month old son Archer died in his sleep. Over the past 6 weeks I have read countless stories (possibly every story/blog/forum on the internet) looking for ways to help me cope, searching desperatley for answers, a magic cure to make the pain go away, just to find someone who feels the same way I do.
Throughout the stories I've realised that people tend to avoid going into too much detail about their 'behind the scenes' experience. They simply skim the top. They say how they feel and how it has affected their lives but I couldn't find one thing about how the real greiving happens. Maybe it's taboo. Maybe no one wants to read it because it's too painful. Maybe it's inaproppriate. I don't know. What I do know though is there are so many different layers of greif you have to deal with when you lose a child, layers that I am still in the early stages of unravelling and the one single thing, that even gave me a glimpse of releif (if you could even call it that) was having a mother, in pretty much my exact situation reach out to me. We sent essays to each other over facebook one night, and every single detail, every inch of heartache, every crazy thought - we could truly say to eachother "I know exactly how you feel" and even if the feeling only lasted for a few hours, i truly felt like I wasn't alone.
I write down everything. Through my first pregnancy i wrote about every detail, and throughout my daughters life there are countless pages of milestones and things she has accomplished. For some reason i never wrote as much about my second pregnancy, maybe I was too busy, but now obviously, I wish I did. Unfortunetly, all the writing I will now be doing about my son will only memories.
If just one mother who is experiencing the pain I am currently feel reads this, relates to it, let's out one single sigh of releif and feels less alone, even if for a few minutes maybe that will help me with my greiving process also.
The real face of grief is not the 5 seconds it takes to post a photo and a caption of the person you miss on Facebook, it’s the behind the scenes that people are lucky enough to never have to witness.
It’s the images of the morning it happened. As the weeks go by your brain unlocks more and more horrible memories one by one. It is the screaming, the yelling & the image of his face in your head that you will never be able to forget – and you will never forget.
It’s the screaming & yelling at the paramedics because they're telling you they're going to try and revive your baby just to calm you down, even though you both know that it is far too late. It's remembering the urgency and pain in your husbands voice as he woke you up that morning.
It’s the policemen guarding your baby’s bedroom and placing evidence stickers around the room like a crime scene. It’s your baby’s belongings being removed from your home in brown paper bags and detectives questioning you about every single aspect of your life, mere minutes after your baby has died. Tell me why the fuck is you knowing my email address so important right now?
It's being too afraid to go into the room and see him before they take him away because you don't want that image of him in your head - and then it's the horrible regret that you didn't hold him one last time in his own home.
It is the sense of panic days after, where all of a sudden there is this fiery urge to be with your child and then having to hear words like “coroner” “morgue” and "autopsy" when you ask to visit your baby. It's driving to the city to be in the same vacinity as your baby while they perform an autopsy because the thought of him being alone is heartbreaking.
It is holding his cold little hand in yours, rubbing it and holding it between your hands as tight as you can to try and warm it up – because that’s what you do as a mother, if your child is cold, you make them warm. After a while, his hand did start to warm up and for a moment, i closed my eyes and pretended that he was OK.
It’s leaving your child with a bunch of strangers. They may have been kind enough to dress him up in a little onesie, place him in a bed and rug him up underneath some blankets but it’s knowing full well that when you leave he is put back into a cold fridge and back to being just another number. You will never know the devastating pain of having to leave your child behind.
It is the guilt and ‘what ifs’ that eat you alive. What did we miss? Why did I go out that night? What if we had taken him to the hospital? What if I had checked on him a little bit earlier? Was there anything that could have been done to prevent this? He had a fever, maybe it was an ear infection or meningitis? He did have that rash a few weeks back? And once you are done with all the obvious ‘what ifs’ you move to the totally ridiculous ‘what ifs’
I bought him a new blanket a week before, maybe he suffocated? Maybe he was bitten by a spider? What if he was too cold and got hypothermia? What if he ate one of those mushrooms at the park that day and was poisoned?
You have to wait around 6 months for an autopsy report to come back. 6 months.
We have already been told numerous times that although they may find something, the chances of them finding out what happened are quite slim and that “some babies just die” Can you believe that? Some. Babies. Just. Die. It's selfish to say, but I wished that the results would come back as "inconclusive" or "no known cause" because the thought of something coming back that we could have prevented - is just not bareable.
It’s the sleeping all day just so you don’t have to think about it anymore and the hoping that maybe you won’t wake up the next morning either.
It’s the hours spent by the side of your little boys cot remembering the countless times you tucked him into bed at night, and more importantly the mornings you woke him up. It’s holding your hands through the bars of his cot over the last place you saw him alive praying to a god you don’t even believe in to bring him back.
It’s laying in bed and holding a pile of his clothes, smelling them every 10 seconds just to feel a little bit close to him and it’s your heart breaking when as the weeks go by those clothes start to lose his smell – realising you will never smell him again.
It’s the moments you turn on the washing machine, or turn the TV down because you think “shit, I hope that doesn’t wake Archer” because for a split second you forget and think he is just in bed asleep and then you have to remember all over again.
It’s seeing other mothers with their babies and feeling mixed emotions of both envy, jealousy yet also relief that they will never have to feel this pain.
It’s the moments you feel like an absolute crazy person because sometimes you put a nappy on a teddy bear because you miss changing his nappy, or when you pack his blue dinosaur bag with nappies, his drink bottle and a change of clothes – because you miss packing his bag. I have bargained for just a few more moments with him, i've begged for it to be me instead of him. I shit you not I have even closed my eyes really tight and tried to go back in time.
It’s wrapping a cold urn in a blanket and reading it a book and then it’s placing that urn in his cot and tucking it in for the night. Kissing it before leaving the room in the exact same way you would as if he were alive.
Its realising that all the cliché, lame and utterly crazy things bereaved mothers do in movies are absolutely true.
It’s feeling so relieved that you didn’t wipe down his highchair from the day before, because it’s still covered in food. I will never wipe down that high chair. It is dirty and sticky, covered in the peach he ate from the day before.
It's the strain it puts on your relationships. I have read that after you lose a child you will cling onto your remaining child and never let them go. You will become over protective and never let them leave your side. I have been the opposite. I have distanced myself from my daughter as she is a reminder every day of the little boy I lost. Seeing her sad, seeing her react to situations, hearing her say “I wish this never happened” and “I just want Archer back” is just too unbearable. She now thinks that babies dying is a normal occurrence.
She is now terrified that she too is going to just go to sleep and never wake up. She constantly asked if her skin is the right colour after seeing her brother blue that morning. She told me that if your heart isn’t beating you have to push on your chest and count – after witnessing her daddy perform CPR. I can’t make sense of this, how can a 6 year old?
It's the tiny things that you took for granted. There are so many little things you will do with your children that you think are insignificant, you won’t realise how significant these moments are until they are gone.
It's the "Firsts" and there are firsts of everything. The first time you eat without him, the first time you do the school drop off, the first food shop, the first coffee, the first load of washing you do without his clothes, the first car ride – first are everywhere. Every tiny thing you do, no matter how small brings sadness because you are doing it without him.
It's people praising you for being ‘strong’ or 'inspirational' They say these things because they don’t see behind the scenes, because if they did they would see that I am merely clinging on by a thread, my head is barely above the water and infact, my whole life is now an absolute mess.
It's people avoiding you like you have the plauge. We know why they do it, they just don't know what to say. If it happened to someone I knew, what would I say? I would only know what to say now because I am in this situation. When my bosses dad died, before i went into work that day i almost had a panic attack because i was so nervous about what to say to her. "Do i acknowlege it?" "Do i ignore it?" "will it make her cry if i bring it up?"
Don't ignore it. Don't let someone in horrible pain walk past you without you even saying a word. Don't let them think the death of their beloved child is something that is not worthy to bring up. If you say "i'm sorry" or if you mention his name, fuck yes I'll cry - but i'd rather cry and have him acknowledged than be ignored. It's been 6 weeks and I have had one mother at school drop off acknowledge me. She simply came up to me, with tears in her eyes and said "I just don't know what to say" and she hugged me. Thank you to that mum, because her hello's everymorning, really do make school drop off just that tiny bit more bareable.
In a few weeks it will be 2 months since Archer has been gone, and on the outside 2 months is quite a long time, people probably think a lot of healing and moving on has happened in that time. But on the inside, 2 months still feels like yesterday.
Every year we will have to celebrate his birthday without him. Every Christmas his stocking will be out but it will be empty. Every family event for the rest of our lives will be missing someone. As we watch the children around us grow all we get to do is imagine what our little boy would have been like.
Losing a small child is not a situation where you can sit back and think “he had a good run” and remember all the good times he had. You can’t sit around with friends and have beers and remember his long life and all the cool things he did, because he only had 14 months of life – not only do you mourn the memories you have, you mourn the memories you will never have.
In the first few weeks after he died, I selfishly thought “if you were going to leave me, why couldn’t you have died in the first few weeks of life so it would have hurt just a little less” and then I put a question to myself… if you could have the choice to never have Archer, never have known him, had a different baby that lived a lifetime and forget this horrible pain, would you choose that? Or would you choose 14 months with him? And I chose the latter. I chose 14 months of pure joy and happiness, 14 months of a messy house and hand prints all over my walls, 14 months of a naughty little boy who would whinge everytime I took something off him or told him ‘no’, 14 months of him smashing the TV with the broom, slapping the rabbit and eating rocks from the back yard.
I would chose 14 months of Archer and deal with this pain for a lifetime.
today I promised my son I would find a way to make him proud, a way to help others, a way to make my life mean just that little bit more and to raise a family he would be proud to be apart of - because he is always a part of our family.
Rejoice in every, tiny thing your child does. Those bad days you have, where your child stresses you out so much that you put them to bed early just to have a break - spare a thought for the mothers who no longer get to put their children to bed. Take a deep breath, put down the dishes, hold off on doing the washing for a few hours and hold them tight, or read them a book, play blocks with them - in honor of the mothers who no longer have that chance.
