Tsunami
On Easter Friday 2011, I got a call from V, a mutual friend of Karin and Ned, our friends who had lost their baby son, Albie, just six months after our accident. They were still living in Paris, Karin was pregnant again, and their baby was due any day now.
‘Hi, Hannah, just wanting to let you know that Baby Esther was born yesterday,’ said V. Before I could squeak my congratulations, she added, ‘It’s not good news, though, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh.’ My brain started moving in circles—how could this not be good news?
‘There was a lot of blood when she was born, and she’s needing a lot of help to breathe. It is really not looking good.’ V wasn’t teary, just solid and serious.
I had a lot of questions. I had so many happier possibilities that I needed to put forward—‘Sometimes babies just need some help to start breathing, I guess?’—only for V to gently pack them away.
Karin and Ned’s parents were flying to Paris to be there, and to meet baby Esther. Even I could join the dots. They had to meet her while they could, because she was a very ill little baby.
‘I’ll keep you posted,’ said V.
I asked her to pass on my love, and tell Karin and Ned that I was sending all the good thoughts I could muster. I put the phone down and wept.
I dug through my knitting things. I found a silky-feeling navy blue alpaca yarn and a hot pink wool of similar weight, and cast on. I was furious. Furious with myself for tossing our dear friends into the category of those lucky people whose seemingly effortless pregnancies rubbed salt into our own painfully unsuccessful attempts to conceive.
Back in October 2010, in the same week that Karin had told me she was pregnant, two couples in our Thursday night SANDS (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support) group had given their own glowing news, along with the ongoing trickle of Facebook announcements. I’d started to think my psychologist was also pregnant, and, after having to cancel a number of appointments due to illness, she confirmed my suspicions. Penny had also let me know that she was pregnant. Her news stung a little less because she had grieved Z with us. Our loss was hers too, and her news was our good news.
Nonetheless, it was starting to feel as if everyone but us could get pregnant. (Apparently, there is a made-up term for this state of mind: preganoia.) I didn’t say anything to Karin (how could I?), but in my own head, a small, resentful voice muttered and felt betrayed, as though Karin and Ned had skipped the baby queue. I hadn’t wished them ill, but my heart had closed a fraction, and refocused on my own misery.
As my knitting needles worked their way around—pink, navy, pink, navy, pink, navy—they repeated my mantra: Please let her be okay, please let her be okay, please let her be okay. Please, I implored all the gods I didn’t believe in, and the universe I’d sworn at for the last fifteen months, please let something biblical happen—‘and on the third day, she breathed on her own, and resumed normal brain activity’.
We spent the long weekend around the house, in a state of suspended animation. I was supposed to be marking essays but found myself staring out the window or reading the same line over and over. I gave up, and just kept knitting.
On Easter Monday, V rang again. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good news. They took Esther off life support this morning, and she died in Karin and Ned’s arms.’
I shuddered.
‘Oh no. Oh, V, no! That is just not bloody fair. For fuck’s sake.’
V was quiet. I didn’t know how many of these calls she had to make that day, how many times she’d already had to calmly tell this news, to be on the other end of the phone making it real over and over again. I apologised. I asked more questions.
My fingers pressed into the points of my knitting needles, while we touched on funeral plans (they would bring her home, to be buried with her brother). I hung up. The beanie wasn’t finished yet. If I’d knitted it faster, would she have lived? If I’d been a good enough friend to have knitted it before she was born, would she have been okay? I was reading Joan Didion, and knew that this was magical thinking, as was my fuzzy presumption that pregnancies and living babies could be doled out on the basis of an orderly queue. But that didn’t stop the hypotheticals whizzing faster and faster around my head.
If losing one baby were enough to break you, what would losing two do to you? To survive losing two in a row was inconceivable. But Karin and Ned were not in a lonely category all their own. Of course, there were women like my great-grandmother, who, I knew, had mourned three babies and one six year old—heartbreakingly normal for turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Melbourne. Now, when I looked at the black-and-white photos of her, I saw not just weariness but sorrow and strength. I was dimly aware that women living in other decades and in countries with poorer health systems had much higher infant mortality statistics than ours, but until now I had failed to imagine properly the babies or the mothers embedded in those statistics.
The only other person I then knew to have lost two babies was my friend Jude. In a friend’s Newcastle kitchen, she had given me mates’ rates haircuts. After our accident, she got in touch on Facebook to offer her condolences and disclosed that she’d lost two babies in a row to stillbirth. Her son and daughter would have been twenty-nine and twenty-eight. She and her then husband lived in a small town at the time, and after the second stillbirth, her husband had to visit all the local shops and tell everyone, so that she could go to the shops without people asking, ‘What did you have? Boy or girl?’
More than a year out from losing Z, I was barely hanging on by my fingernails. I tried to extrapolate my loss, to multiply it by two, and then fast forward several decades, but I still couldn’t see myself ever becoming as Zen, as kind, or as genuinely funny and cheery as Jude. If I lost another baby, I imagined, I would spontaneously combust. But Karin and Ned didn’t combust, and it wasn’t for any lack of love or feeling for their children. Their ability to keep breathing, to continue moving through time and space, and even to find the headspace to ask how we were going, blew my mind. ‘Freaking superheroes,’ I thought. But also beautiful human beings. As Karin and I kept up our correspondence, my desperation to fix things for them, to magically knit it all back together, ebbed away. All I could do was respond, bear witness to their grief, and let the conversation move lightly between picking colours for baby-sized caskets, knitting, funeral arrangements, our ongoing IVF saga, and laughing about weeping on public transport and the horrible realness of burying babies.
Somewhere in those conversations, my idea of a ‘fair’ or fixed amount of grief and misfortune got washed out to sea. I knew Karin and Ned well. They are two of the most generous, open-hearted and hilarious people I know. If anyone deserved a living child, it was them. The fact that their universe had been destroyed not once but twice was irrefutable proof that life was not fair. My fantasy that there was some kind of balance sheet, or someone out there to add up the columns, was gone, swept away like the fragile bit of debris that it was.
Just six weeks before, we’d watched the 40-metre waves of the Tōhoko tsunami sweep across the Japanese countryside, insensible to the homes, farms, nuclear power plants and 18 000 people in its path. We’d sat agog, awed by the power, the destruction, and, God forbid, the beauty of the ocean. Not only were my fantasies of fairness now dissolved, but also my tenuous idea that we could map everything into categories: good/bad, happy/sad, fair/unfair. It wasn’t just the ocean that could be both indescribably beautiful and heartbreakingly destructive, that simultaneously fostered life and wrought suffering and death. When I looked closely, I reluctantly had to put more and more things in that awesome/devastating category: human relationships (including parenting), technology, cars, food, substances, law, democracy, nature—in short, anything that mattered. There was no ‘safe’ zone, there was no unmediated ‘good’, just a whole lot of awesome/devastating chaos.
That didn’t mean I accepted it all, or that I was indifferent to whether it came out as heads or tails, awesome or devastating, in any particular instant. Of course, I had a preference. Of course, I still prefer peace to war, love to fear, alive to dead, fairness to injustice, friendliness to cruelty, safety to harm. But I recognise these as my preferences, not universal truths.
I would have understood if Karin and Ned had become bitter, with the manifestly unfair hand they’d been dealt. But they didn’t. Instead, Karin’s mantra was See beauty, see beauty. That meant all of it. The devastation, the grief, those short hours of holding our dead babies in our arms, were just as tender and beautiful as the prettier, smoother stuff I’d previously taken as beauty.