Matryoshka
On the one-month anniversary of the accident, Rima and I were at the doctor’s again. Our GP, Kelvin, was our new best friend in Melbourne. We’d picked an inner-suburban clinic that friends had recommended as LGBTI-friendly. None of the lesbian doctors we asked about were taking on new patients, so we reluctantly made an appointment with one of the male doctors. I presumed that he’d be expert on sexual health and drug interactions, but perhaps not so comfortable dealing with ‘women’s issues’—and we had plenty of those.
At the first appointment, though, Kelvin didn’t bat an eyelid. He sat and listened as we gave him the matter-of-fact version of the accident, paying compassionate attention, but not reacting. Then he offered help with the pragmatics of referrals, prescriptions and insurance certificates. He quickly became expert at summing up our story in a sentence or less; and navigating the bureaucracy of the three hospitals we’d had to deal with, as well as the government insurer who covered all vehicle accidents. This time, he was on the phone to the histopathology department at Royal Melbourne, on the Trail of the Disappearing Placenta.
Not much of Z’s birth had gone to plan, but the one request the midwives had thought they could help with was to keep Z’s placenta, so that we could bury it under a tree. A tree with a transient body part buried under it was a lousy substitute for a daughter, but it was something. Or it would have been, if only we could convince the histopathologist to give us back the placenta.
While Kelvin was on the phone, Rima found a set of nested matryoshka dolls in the toy basket. She looked at me, opened the first doll, and made her goofy ‘Surprise!’ face as she pulled out the next doll, making me smile. She opened the next and the next. There was surprise all the way down, until, ‘Ohhhhh’—sad face—when the last, tiniest doll could not open. The last of the line. My silent giggle turned into a sad face too, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to be that doll.’
On my next trip to the doctor, I discovered a hobby shop within hobbling-on-crutches distance, and bought several slabs of balsa wood and a small set of tools, so I could start whittling my own morose matryoshka set. The first and biggest doll was not a doll at all, but our car post impact, the front driver’s corner crushed in. Our car had been a Nimbus, a puffy little white cloud of a station wagon with Tardis-like properties. I hollowed out four spots inside, for Rima, Jac, Jas and me, and made small dolls for each of us. And then I hollowed out my own rounded doll, and made a tiny one to fit inside. It was harder than I’d thought. My whittling skills were pretty ordinary and the balsa did not behave as I expected it to. It was probably the wrong kind of wood. But there it was—a chunky wooden approximation of our wrecked car, with us wrecked inside it, and our daughter, the most terminally wrecked of all, inside me.
I made a little black-bordered birth announcement card, with an open matryoshka doll in one corner, the two empty halves leaning against one another. She had a sweepy fringe like mine and a chubby tear rolling down her cheek. In the opposite corner was a tightly swaddled dark-haired babushka baby, long eyelashes resting on her cheeks. A thick black border connected the two. We had the cards printed with Z’s name, weight, length, date of birth and a message in the centre. I had grand plans of sending them out to all the friends and family who had visited, helped and sent us cards, flowers and love, but every time I got out the list, I only managed a few before it all just felt too, too sad.
My Aunty Connie came to see us. When I was eleven, and her son was thirteen, he killed himself with a handgun—whether by accident or not, we’ll never know. She was blunt. ‘Your life is split now,’ she said. ‘There’ll always be before, and …’, she sighed, ‘… after.’ I imagined the bit in between as a gaping chasm, so that reminders of before felt like stranded relics, completely irrelevant and alien in their new setting. Not only my clothes, and our things as we gradually unpacked, but even songs on the radio. Books did not pass through my hands without me flipping to the front to find the publication date, so I could work out if it was a naïve resident of ‘before’, or a wiser, sadder survivor of ‘after’.
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
I visited the dentist this morning to have my front teeth repaired. They’d been chipped in the accident, when my jaws banged together like a nutcracker puppet. I’m usually one of those strange people who quite likes visiting the dentist, but today, holding my mouth open and seeing the dentist work above me, I was suddenly back in the ER, clothes sliced off and my body pinned down to the spinal board like a prize butterfly in a neck brace—a disinterested observer to the workplace that was my body.
Now my teeth are dulled again—the sharpness of chipped edges no longer catching on my tongue. I feel dulled too—shell shocked. The bomb has gone off—a good seven and a half weeks ago, and I’m still stunned, staring into space.
If I were a chimpanzee in the zoo, today would be the day I would spend with a blanket on my head, occasionally hitting myself (and others, if they came near) with a small tree branch. The equivalent human behaviour is staying in bed and eating 70% cacao chocolate, while listening to 90s grunge pop. Friends have made mixtapes for us—I played these and made my own lists to include the lyrics which echoed around my head about the ‘saddest summer ever’ and ‘help I’m alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer’.
After the dentist, we went back to the hospital to meet with the same bow-tied obstetrician who had told us Haloumi had died. It was as though the movie was over and we were chatting with one of the actors on how the movie played out—reflecting on the motivations and plot, the ‘makings of’.
I feel slowed. I still don’t get it. There were women walking out of the hospital with babies tinier than mine. Living, breathing babies. Some with less hair than mine, some with more. Where is my baby? Where is she? Why can’t she be here in my arms? Why can’t we be fussing over her carseat so we can take her home? I know these thoughts are not productive, whatever that means. I still want to know. I was that close to having a living child in my arms.
I dreamt that I was at Z’s memorial service again, but I was riding a child’s ride-on toy. It was too small and whenever I stopped moving it would slide out from under me and ignominiously dump my bottom on the ground. A work colleague was there and remarked, ‘Oh Hannah! So good to see you getting around!’
In another dream, I was cutting rosebuds, each with a dead rosehead in the centre. In another, I had to walk through a pool of shining wet eels, a dark slithering against my skin. Things were lost, landscapes disoriented, obstacles stood in my way. I had another baby and she lived, but I couldn’t remember her date of birth. Was she Z’s twin? Or had another whole pregnancy elapsed within seven weeks?
The other night I dreamt that I walked into a Victorian terrace house. A slick-looking bloke put his hands together in greeting: ‘It’s already started but what I’d suggest is that you join in with the group upstairs.’ I could hear voices raised and chairs pushed across the floor in the room above. Before I could climb the stairs, he caught my sleeve: ‘The scenario is—it is 1939 and you are requested to go on a secret mission to get sixteen European leaders to sign a pact undermining the Treaty of Warsaw, pre-empting it and giving them an out.’
It didn’t make sense to me. I felt foolish—I didn’t know enough to ask a meaningful question.
‘The main obstacle is this Austrian bloke who wouldn’t sign because he’d been circumcised.’
‘Circumcised? What did that have to do with it?’
‘He objects to the subterfuge. He wants it all out in the open. We need to convince him …’, he looked at me meaningfully, ‘… that this is the only way’.
I wanted to ask why, but he’s gone, and there are stairs I must climb.
It is chaos upstairs. I’m frightened. I know this is pretend, but it feels like a very serious sort of pretend.
I was still waking at 4 a.m. most nights. The sadness would ball up in my stomach so much that I wanted to throw it up, to get it out of my system so I could somehow go back to the land of ‘before’. I could see now the appeal in imagining things like this as being punishment by a vengeful god. Once you are punished, the balance is levelled and you can’t be punished again for it—apparently even God operates under a concept of double jeopardy. But if it’s not punishment, if it’s all random universal cruelty, then it could happen again at any time, and to anyone I love.
Sunday, 21 February 2010
Seven weeks. Seven times seven. 49 bare little squares between us and her last heartbeat. 49 days later I can walk, I can go to the toilet by myself, I’m even contemplating going back to work. When people told me that time would heal, I didn’t realise that all this healing also takes me away from her—our ship is sailing on without her. I’m still not sure I can let go. I know she’ll always follow us; no longer as a living passenger—maybe as a gull we can see from a distance, who sometimes lights on the bow. Sometimes she’ll swoop in close and I’ll think she’s still with us, other times we might not see her for days at a time. I feel like my brain is a machine which keeps spitting out metaphors for this grief—(here I go again) one error message after another. It still does not compute.
Even her birth date and death dates feel like a mathematical error. She died on the 27th and was born on the 28th—birth and death folded in on one another so that they come in the wrong order.
My phone has mysteriously reset its own date and time to 9 a.m. on 1 January 2007. Imagine that—three and a bit years ago we were at a friends’ holiday house, greeting a new year. It feels so distant, but part of me knows it wasn’t an idyll. It was an ordinary life. I still have moments of that and I know the moments will come closer together with time.