The charnel ground
With the intensity of the first anniversary of our accident behind us, January felt like a relief. I would still look at the date and know that a year ago on that day, I was transferred from ICU to the trauma ward, or transferred home from rehab, but these were dates I was familiar with, here on the ‘after’ side of the river.
I’d decided to sign up to staff one of the January camps held at Somers, where Z’s ashes were buried in the bush chapel—partly (if I were honest) to spend some time near her. We were starting our first IVF cycle, and I would wake up early with the summer sunrise, swab my soft belly with alcohol and watch the needle push against my skin, then pop through. It felt momentous. I’d had so many objections to IVF, to the artificiality of it—making your ovaries swell up like cantaloupes, only to be, yes, harvested. But months of flying back and forth to Sydney to meet our donor to conduct inseminations (or asking him to fly down to Melbourne) had been complicated and ultimately fruitless, and I was terrified at the thought of another Christmas with no living baby.
Most mornings, I snuck out to the beach and to Z’s spot, to touch the sandy earth and bring her a little flower or a washed-up shark egg. And, after all the rushing about of the past year, it felt like I finally had time to think properly, with a good beach to do it on.
One of the things I had found hard about the idea of being ‘in the moment’ was the fact that some moments are awful. If you completely focused on that particular moment, wouldn’t you drown in the sheer awfulness of it? Wouldn’t it be too depressing to survive it? Wasn’t it better to just edit those moments out? I had one particular opportunity to test run this theory, because there was quite clearly one moment I would have loved to cut away from the fabric of my life—the moment of impact and everything it set in motion. It couldn’t be undone, I understood that, but was it really a moment to focus on?
What if I had taken that moment, where I was sitting in the wreckage—trapped, bleeding and so afraid that the car next to us would explode—and let my fears and hopes dissolve, so that I was no longer being tugged forwards into a better or worse imagined future? What might I have experienced right there? With hindsight, I could have been present for the last moments of my daughter’s life. She was doing the hard work of dying while I was fervently wishing I were somewhere else: in an imaginary future where she was okay.
When Rima tried to call me into the moment and asked me, ‘Can you feel Haloumi moving?’, I was so angry. I stubbornly wanted to avert my attention, to avoid the uncertainty. I look at this now with tenderness. It was a futile denial, like when a cranky three year old holds their hand up so they can’t see you. I didn’t want to be engulfed by fear, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything other than fearing or hoping. I couldn’t imagine that I could just sit with the huge, frightening uncertainty of the situation; that I could treasure a moment with my daughter when it was possibly her last.
I thought that by denying the possibility she might die, I could magically save her by force of hope alone. I know there is no way I could really have known what was happening with her, but I wished I’d been a bit more present for those last little beats of her heart. Instead I was demanding something of her she could no longer do. (Please, Haloumi, please be okay. Please be okay, my little one.) I’d sworn off regret, because I didn’t think dragging myself into the past helped either, but perhaps there was something in this idea that even the worst moments deserve attention.
It seemed odd to me that such an awful, traumatic moment could also be such a precious one. But it rings true with my other experiences—with the preciousness of seeing her little, still face, and the pride I felt in labouring for her. And, bizarrely, this realisation that paying attention to a moment couldn’t make it any worse—and, indeed, that running away from it (into fear, hope or denial) could cause further suffering—made me feel calmer in my grief. I finally felt as though I were learning something from all this grief: that I didn’t have to keep grasping for some kind of solution; that I could sit with this discomfort and uncertainty; that I could feel something impossibly painful and still experience it, be alive to it.
On the last night of the camp, all three hundred or so of us filed into the darkness of the bush chapel, and, with the native creatures noisily putting themselves to bed around us, I held a torch and told my story.
This is my daughter’s first big camp. She’s not in any of the grouper huts, or in the staff huts or tents. She’s here, in the bush chapel—her ashes are buried just between the altar and the bush.
I was eight months pregnant with her when we had a head-on collision with a Pajero. She died on impact from a placental abruption. Apart from that, she was a beautiful, healthy baby with a tiny bruise on her right eyebrow. I was hospitalised for three weeks with a broken knee, broken sternum, lacerations to my liver and spleen and various cuts to my legs, arms and head.
In the last year since the accident, I have had to do the impossible every day. I have planned my baby’s funeral from an intensive care bed. I have learned how to walk with a broken knee. I have held the people I love the most while their hearts are breaking and there was nothing I could do to fix it. And every day, I live, while she is dead.
For a long time I was desperate to escape my grief—I thought there would be some ‘solution’ to it, a time when I might feel some ground under my feet again. But like it or not, this is the nature of being a human being. We know that we are fragile, and we know that we will all die, but it all seems pretty theoretical until you lose someone you love. It seems impossibly cruel that a baby could die when we loved her so much and we hadn’t even had a chance to see her open her eyes. But, this is what life throws at us—impossible miracles like babies, and impossible losses.
And while I now know there are no guarantees, this is what gives me a little peace—that what we have experienced is not a terrible aberration from the good life that we are all entitled to, but that the sadness and wretchedness of grief is part and parcel of the love and inspiration I still feel for my daughter.
I have been reading When Things Fall Apart by a Buddhist nun called Pema Chödrön who puts it this way: ‘Inspiration and wretchedness are inseparable. We always want to get rid of misery rather than see how it works together with joy. The point isn’t to cultivate one thing as opposed to another, but to relate properly to where we are.
‘Inspiration and wretchedness complement one another. With only inspiration, we become arrogant. With only wretchedness, we lose our vision. Feeling inspired cheers us up, makes us realise how vast and wonderful our world is. Feeling wretched humbles us. The gloriousness of our inspiration connects us with the sacred elements of the world. But when the tables are turned and we feel wretched, that softens us up. It ripens our hearts. It becomes the ground for understanding others.’
And this is the strange thing. As this loss has carved my heart out so painfully, I’ve also felt an intensity of joy beyond anything I felt before—often mingled together. Where I thought this pain would crush me, it has transformed me, and by feeling it, and gently observing it, rather than trying to escape it, my heart has expanded beyond my imagination.
It was a relief to let the words out, to make visible my grief. It was all true—there was a new intensity to everything. It was like the rawness where my knee had healed up; the nerves were still not quite sure what messages to send, so they sent them all in loud capitals. As much as I wanted to be okay with the awful moment, to ‘lean into the sharp points’, as Chödrön would say, I still wanted to transform it into something, to make it worthwhile—to tack on a happy ending. Hope still had its hooks in me.
•
In January 2011, I flew to Cairns to visit my mum. It was as hot as Melbourne but stickier. The first night I slept in Mum’s swag outside her campervan, an arc of tent pole holding the mosquito netting away from my face. At one point in the night, a possum investigating my bed woke me up. I fumbled with my tiny torch—I was pretty sure it was a possum. All the same, the next night I slept alongside Mum above her campervan’s cab.
I was still reading Pema Chödrön and was struck by her description of the hospital emergency room as the ‘closest thing to a charnel ground in our world’.1 I had a vague, gory idea of what a charnel ground was—a place where human bodies were left to decompose—but it made a weird sort of sense that a charnel ground would be an ideal place to meditate on the nature of death and impermanence. Indeed, it felt like my body had been the charnel ground—housing the dead, being sliced open, pieces of chipped bone and fluids being discarded. So many people, laying their hands on me, holding me together, slicing me up; gory and sacred all at once.
Jen, one of my midwives, had visited us at home in Preston a few weeks after I was released from rehab. She wasn’t there in any official capacity, just to say hello and pick up the plastic container that she’d given me in the trauma ward, complete with its big wedge of homemade rhubarb and strawberry cheesecake.
‘You’re looking good,’ she said, coming onto the verandah.
‘Much better than when we met in the ER, I bet,’ I said.
‘Yeah. You were looking very grey for a while there; you’d lost a lot of blood.’
‘From the liver and spleen?’
‘Maybe, but I think it was mostly from the abruption. When the surgeon did the incision for the C-section, there was blood everywhere …’ She winced and smiled. ‘On the walls, on us—bit of a horror-movie scene!’
And we laughed, because this was my squeamish body producing horror-movie effects that made seasoned midwives wince. Yet, her reaction was not horror or disgust for my charnel ground of a body—just a pragmatic bearing witness, a tenderness.