Baby's First Photo

Kathi and I are having another baby. The bub is due to arrive around mid-January 2011. It’s too early to know whether it’s a boy or a girl.

Pauses for audience applause.

We’re excited and anxious like other expectant parents and, since our twin girls Charlotte and Marianne died 18 months ago, completely terrified. But this post isn’t about our baby, our missing angels or our co-mingled joy and terror. There are other parents in the same situation – having a baby after a stillbirth or neo-natal death – who need to know that they are not alone.

We’re having a baby and we’re thinking about bub’s first steps, first words, decorating the baby’s room, and all the other common dreams which pass through expectant parents’ heads. I don’t want anyone to think that we’re not experiencing that happiness which only new parents can feel. But our situation is different to the average. This is our third child but hopefully the first we bring home.

Charlotte Elizabeth and Marianne Patricia were born premature a little more than 18 months ago and lived for 11 and 12 days respectively. They were taken from us after a battle, fought for an amazing length of time for such little people, against Serratia Marcescans. Kathi held Charlotte in her arms when we turned off her life support. The next day it was my turn to hold to Marianne as she died. We cremated them together in the one tiny coffin and keep their ashes at home with us.

Charlotte Elizabeth - Day 3

Marianne Patricia - Day 3

These events colour our current experience in several ways.

First, we’re grieving a-fresh the loss of Charlotte and Marianne. Going through this pregnancy revives the memories and feelings we went through two years ago. They are again as new and as raw as they were then. The equilibrium we’ve struggled to achieve in the last 18 months has been completely upturned. We’re sure we’ll find a new equilibrium in time.

This is perfectly normal.

Second, we’re terrified of this baby dying as well, either in utero or shortly after. We know now only too well that there is no such thing as a safe or a sure pregnancy. Even afterwards, if/when we bring baby home, nothing is guaranteed. Doctors, nurses, counsellors quote statistics to us but they do not re-assure. A 99% chance of success means nothing because that implies a 1% chance of failure. When you’ve been part of the 1%, all of those little numbers seem incredibly large and pre-destined to occur.

This is perfectly normal.

Third, we are so fucking angry. We’re still and will forever remain angry about the deaths of Charlotte and Marianne. (To the god/goddess/demon/spirit/etc who killed my girls, I will find you and fuck you up. Be warned.) We’re angry that we cannot enjoy the growth milestones of our developing bub. Each monthly or fortnightly ultrasound or other test allows us a brief sigh of relief knowing that our bub still lives. Then the fear creeps in again. The happy Hollywood image of the pregnant couple lying in a field in the sun wondering what their child will become is all but unknown to us. More often than not, we are cowering in the dark imagining how our happiness will be shattered this time around.

This is perfectly normal.

To anyone who wants to comment with platitudes about trusting that all will be well, about finding strength to enjoy this precious time, about the miracles of modern medicine,  just don’t. You don’t understand and I sincerely hope you never do. Please keep your advice to yourself unless you have a bodycount of your own. Support, however, is very welcome – we need as much of it as we can get.

To anyone reading this who has buried a child and expecting another, take some solace from knowing that you are not alone. Please get in touch if you need to talk to someone who knows the score. Your feelings may be different from ours. Your thoughts are likely to be equally as wacky as ours yet still perfectly sane.

Here’s some books which may help.

• Pregnancy After Loss: A Guide to Pregnancy After a Miscarriage, Stillbirth or Infant Death
• Trying Again: A Guide to Pregnancy After Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Infant Loss
• Journeys: Stories of Pregnancy After Loss
• Stolen Angels: 25 Stories of Hope After Pregnancy or Infant Loss

1. rational,
2. willing to solve the problem.

There’s a lot of really good information about on how to handle interpersonal or organisational conflict. You should learn at least the fundamentals in order to better succeed at whatever you turn your hand to. But there are certain triggers which should warn you that the other party won’t come to the party, as it were, whether due to entrenched belief, sheer bloody-mindedness or some manner of brain dysfunction, whether organic or drug-induced. In these cases, you will not be able to hold any kind of adult discussion about the problem. The best you can hope for is to get out of the situation with as little pain as possible.

So, look for these triggers, or ones that are similar, and act appropriately.

Trigger 1: Intentionally Malicious

“I hope your next baby lives. Otherwise you’ll oblige your family to attend another funeral not because they like you but just to be polite.”

There is no win situation for you here. There is no way to discuss anything rationally with this person. Surely, it is impossible that any rational human being can seriously think like this. The only logical purpose for saying something like this is to further the target’s internal suffering.

Appropriate Response: Cut all contact. No one has to put up with this.

Trigger 2: Lack of Basic Intelligence

“It’s been months since you children died. Why aren’t you over it by now?”

See the response to Trigger 1. These people are so devoid of basic human feeling or so emotionally stunted that there is point treating them as fellow human beings. There is simply no way you can get through to them on any level, let alone make them understand in even the remotest or most tangential manner what a world-shattering event you have been through.

Appropriate Response: Cut all contact. No one has to put up with this.

Trigger 3: Stunted Emotional Growth

“I had no problem getting pregnant with all of my children. What’s wrong with you that you can’t”

“You need to pray that god forgives your sins. Only then will he allow you to have a baby.”

See the response to Triggers 1 and 2. How any one can imagine that this is an appropriate comment (even if one believed it) is completely beyond comprehension. The idea that there may be a medical cause to your fertility problems is completely beyond them regardless of how many times you explain it. Although any persons who could say this deserves sympathy for leading such shallow and blighted lives, there is nothing to be gained from having any dealings with them.

Appropriate Response: Cut all contact. No one has to put up with this.

Trigger 4: Unwilling to Deal with Reality

“Stop writing about your grief on bereavement support forums. It’s so rude to talk about things which should be kept private.”

This one is much trickier to handle and requires fine judgement to know exactly which way to jump. For instance, you may think of using this as an opening into a discussion about the healing which can be achieved by externalising emotions and working through them. You may be able to discuss how important it is to know that others face the same difficulties as you and that you are not alone. You may be able to point out that by sharing your feelings you are providing the same service to others.

However, if you encounter this in combination with other triggers or come to realise that any education campaign you embark upon is going nowhere, you can be certain that you can never have an adult relationship with this person. These persons are so incredibly selfish that they cannot even admit that not all events in the world either a) revolve about them or b) match their tenuous grasp on reality.

Appropriate Response: Cut all contact. You don’t need the hassle.

Trigger 5: Just Plain Childish

“You said something bad about me. I’m going to tell everyone what you said so that they’ll all hate you too.”

Again, there is no win situation here. Although you may get some fleeting enjoyment from screaming “grow up, you dumb fuck!” down the phone, resists the urge. It only plays to their level. Most people grew out of this behaviour about the same time they grew out of kindergarten. This childish attitude is so staggering and so entrenched that nothing you can do will change it. Engaging with this type of grown-up baby sucks you inextricably into the black hole of their crazy.

Appropriate Response: Cut all contact. You don’t need the hassle.

While this list of triggers is not exhaustive, it should give you a fairly clear idea of the sorts of behaviours which signal a losing proposition for you. If two or more decades of living has failed to have any impact on them, what chances do you have? Realise that there is nothing you can do or say which can turn these sad and broken individuals into valid human beings and move on.

What triggers are missing from this list? Feel free to add them as comments.

Sunday: At training, I took part in the second in a series of lessons introducing Meyer‘s dussack fighting style. The wooden dussack was used both as a training weapon for single-handed fencing and as a cudgel carried by the town guard, particularly in eastern Europe. The style is very quick and reminds me a lot of sabre fencing.

Monday: Kathi and I were booked in for another frozen embyro transfer. Well, that is to say, she was booked in for the procedure and I just accompany her in order to look on dumbly and hold her hand. The embyro didn’t survive the thawing process so rather than let this opportunity go to waste, we asked for another to be defrosted. See below.

Tuesday: A bunch of mates came over for a couple of games of BloodBowl. Never in the history of Games Workshop has there been a 4-4 tied game. Yay. Also, I started a running program called Couch-To-5km in 8 Weeks in order to improve my stamina and maybe even lose some weight.

Wednesday: Kathi and I went back to the clinic for a frozen embyro trnasfer. This time all went well.That night at training, we had an introduction to medieval knife fighting as outlined in several historical treatises. This was tempered by one of the guy’s 20+ year long career in the military and his opinion as to which historical techniques work and which were merely advertising to fleece noble kids of their pocket money.

Thursday: I can’t actually remember Thursday at all. I’m sure I did stuff because I’ve put Hesiod’s Theogony on the finished reading pile and all the laundry is done. Also, I put in a second session of the Couch-To-5km program. (The next effort in this regard is due Saturday.)

Friday: Amongst other similarly joyful activities, I’ve scrubbed the mold off the patio roof with some disgustingly evil chemical goop. Now I hurt. A lot.

Anyway, that’s the must-dos out of the way and I can prepare myself for Charlotte’s and Marianne’s wold-have-been birthdays coming up on Monday. I’m taking Kathi out somewhere nice for lunch and we’re just spending the day together.

Right now, I need a coffee and I’m going to throw on the Sarah Connor Chronicles to see what they’re like.

It’s been nearly a year since my daughters Charlotte and Marianne were born and died and I’m still living very much day-to-day. I have no plans for the future. I can’t even realistically imagine me in any kind of future and that’s largely what this post is about.

Why post publicly? Definitely not as a call for sympathy. Unless you’ve held you children in your arms as they die, you just don’t get it and hopefully you never will. There are three reasons behind this post:

1. Knowing that other people may read this focusses my mind and sharpens my expression. Writing publicly demands that I give my ideas a clarity they will never achieve otherwise. This in itself may help me towards an answer.
2. This is my life and I like the idea that others know a little bit about how my mind works – but not in an emo “Heather is such a bitch,” myspace kind of way.
3. There are other blokes out there going through this who also don’t know how to handle it. If I show them that they’re not alone or trigger a new way of looking at things, my work here is done.

(The distant fourth reason is that someone out there in teh interwebs may actually have a clue about how I can deal with all this stuff.)

Back to the future…

There was a time not too long ago when I had a plan for my life without children. IVF is a gamble and I was always aware that the gamble may not pay off. I had an idea of what my life would look like, the kind of things I’d occupy it with, a sort of overview of how it would unroll. Kathi and I would always regret not having had children but we would always have the knowledge that we did everything we could have done to have kids. It was a fairly positive view of the furture, albeit tinged with sadness.

Then came my angels and I worked out a new idea about how my life would unfold. I now looked forward to all the joyous life events being a father entails: arguing with Kathi about who’s turn it is to be elbows deep in dirty nappies, avoiding the sword of damocles of twins demanding which of them you love more, trying to keep “daddy’s helpers” from undoing all my work in the garden, arguments about “you’re not going out dressed like that, young lady,” and even loading the shotgun to fend off the inappropriate boyfriends, etc.

Now that they’re gone, I can’t imagine life without watching living children grow up. Having had a taste of that life, I can’t find a way to go back to being happy with the idea of never having living children. But the reality is that this may never happen.

The result is that I live day-to-day. I find it hard to get excitied about anything. Most of my time is devoted to short-term goals such as going to fencing training, painting wargaming figures, reading trashy fifties hardboiled detective novels. All of these are pursuits of limited duration. Work is nothing more than a painful annoyance without which I know I’ll lose those things that make my life comfortable. There’s no long-term planning. There’s no “where will you be in five years time?” None of these things matter. I’m in limbo.

If I can’t have my girls with me and watch them grow and discover the world, the next best thing is to talk about them. I love talking about my girls, how they looked, what they did, what they could have become. The problem here is that they only lived for 11 and 12 days. They’re gone and the curse of the surviving parent is that I will never have new memories of them or new things to talk about. What will happen – and is happeneing even now – is that the once scalpel-sharp detail of my memories of my girls blur and fade and in the years to come all I will be left with is the memory that I once had two beautiful daughters and the shared (possibly confabulated) stories of them that Kathi and I tell each other.

Since we started back on IVF this year, one of the main points of discussion is the idea that if we get pregnant again, it almost certainly won’t be with twins. It may sound ungrateful but even if we have a baby in the future who survives more than two weeks, we’ve lost the chance of belonging to the special club of parents of twins. As we get older, the chance of IVF working diminishes. It may be that the brief lives of Charlotte and Marianne will be the only marks of parenthood we will ever know.

I really don’t know right now how to handle this. I can’t live in the past as that way lies madness. I can’t live for the future because a future without living children is just as horrific to contemplate as a future without the memory of my girls. That only leave me the now, the eternal present.

I make sure I keep up with my mates and keep myself busy doing things I know I used to enjoy: historical fencing, reading, roleplaying, watching movies, wargaming, coffee, talking crap with friends, passing particularly harsh judgements on idiots, etc. But these are all ‘now’ events. They have no future either.

While I enjoy all these activities and I love spending time with friends, I feel keenly that there’s a wall which separates me from them and prevents me from fully participating in the fun of whatever playful stupidity we’re currently engaged in. This stuff is nothing but actions to fill in the great emptiness of the now. There is no goal that they’re leading towards that I can see other then they prevent me from crawling into a bottle of either scotch or anti-depressants or both. Maybe that’s enough and all I should expect for now.

The problem is what comes next and what happens after that. These are questions that at this stage I can’t answer.

I find myself in this same state of ultimate chaos. I am a roiling cloud of undirected and undirectable anger searching for release. “I am become Azathoth, the destroyer of worlds.” I am terrified that unless I can find a way to turn potential energy into work, I will turn green and destroy stuff.

I’m really looking forward to the trip. I discovered last time, that I adore travelling. Kathi, however, was dragged around the world by her jet-setting parents when she was young and is largely over the whole experience. She’s looking forward to the shopping (of course) and seeing the Versailles Palace – a sight we missed last time around for reasons of timing. I’m looking forward to meeting a bunch of people I chat with on facebook and instant messenger and hunting down more traces of the the Templars in Paris and the surrounding area. If I’m lucky, I may even get to make a quick jaunt to the see a bunch of sites made famous by the 1944 US Airborne landings such as Ste Mere Eglise, the causeway across the Merderet at La Fiere and to visit the Cherbourg D-Day Museum.

This time we’ll take an apartment in Paris rather than staying in hotels. The hassle of cooking for ourselves is more than offset by the fun of negotiating a French supermarket (they group products in different aisle to us, those crazy baguette bunnies) and is considerably less expensive.

Hong Kong is a new location for both of us and it’s a bit of an unknown. We know that we want to lose money haggling in the markets, climb Mount Victoria and visit the enormous Lin Po Buddhist temple on Lantau Island.

The planning has been an interesting journey for us, not least because we are still struggling with the giving ourselves permission to enjoy the holiday. The recent catastrophe makes it very difficult to feel happy about anything. Each small moment of pleasure still makes me feel like I’m betraying the memories of my dead girls and hurts me like a knife in the heart. Kathi seems to have come to terms with this better than me and she’s now fully switched into research and planning mode.

Eulogy for Charlotte and Marianne Slee

Thank you.

The funeral will be next week and we’ve started contacting people to invite them to attend. It will be a simple ceremony; nothing elaborate at all. The purposes of the event is to introduce them, rather belatedly, to our family and friends and for Kathi and I to say a final goodbye to our girls. We don’t want to come out of the other side of this tragedy and have no one understand beyond the obvious why we mourn our daughters’ passing.

In the eleven days of Charlotte’s life and twelve days of Marianne’s life, we have seen (or thought we’d seen or imagined or whatever) that our girls each had the start and the makings of very definite personalities. Each would have been a handful in her own particular way and we find that we also mourn the loss of the ups and downs of parenting headstrong children.

We’re slowly coming to terms with the loss of our beautiful little girls and find ourselves missing the phone calls from friends and family that we know have been circulating around us. Feel free to contact us but don’t be surprised if we’re not up to talking much and we ask you to call back later.

She was also a victim of her immaturity and her eagerness to be born. The bacteria which only made its way into Charlotte’s gut penetrated further into Marianne. It crossed the underdeveloped blood/brain barrier and caused a ever-growing lesion in her brain. At the end, when she was removed from life support, she still fought for another 35 minutes of life to make sure that even though she was born a minute after Charlotte she lived a full day longer.

I miss them both so much. I’m glad I knew them even if only for 11 and 12 days. I’m so angry at the universe for inflicting this much hurt on Kathi and I.