The death of a child adds a layer of complexity to many aspects of grieving. A parent’s instinct to protect. Pride. And above all the desire to surround your child with love. My unspoken was the pain. To the precious few who I allowed to bear some of the pain with me, nothing was left unsaid. To others, I filtered and edited and spoke only of love. I needed people to see beyond the perception of tragedy to something bigger. To those powerful moments that had anchored our souls to each other.
The girl I was in this photograph, someone who disliked exposure and struggled to speak for long at her own wedding, disappeared altogether during those 55 hours with Oliver. I can trace the moment back to a decision taken the first night.. listening to the whirr of machines & watching his chest rise and fall.. to grab a notebook, write my heart out and invite 30 friends to watch us hold our son in our arms and celebrate his life. It wasn’t about me anymore. It was about something I valued infinitely more. I was raw, exposed, half way between ecstasy and agony. Irrevocably changed. But so in love. This set the tone for the support we received, an outpouring of positivity for our son that buoyed us up when the waves of grief pushed us under.
The first time my father met Oliver, his first words through tears were “this is unbearable for you”. I couldn’t accept this totally; it was the truth and yet so far removed from my feelings of as a proud parent. It was the point at which I recognised that a duality existed for myself but not for others. I felt in some way that the grief was my burden alone to carry. Perhaps I hoped that it would soften over time and that if I kept Oliver’s memory separate from the darkness we were experiencing it would somehow sustain me.
This also explained my reluctance to talk to strangers. I didn’t want to deal with an awkwardly felt negative reaction to Oliver and I knew that I didn’t have the hours it would take to describe all that he meant to us in the middle of a shop. My rehearsed answer was to say “no this is our second, we have a son already” before swiftly moving the subject on. Follow up questions made me feel like I was tiptoeing through an unwanted dance of social awkwardness. I felt resentment towards anyone who persisted “so where is your son today?” as I knew that I would respond with raw honesty, and that the conversation would immediately turn to pity, a projection of tragedy and a stranger’s tears on my shoulder which never me feeling like I had fully honoured Oliver.
Now that the pain is softer and the love just as strong, I am more comfortable with being able to openly articulate the co-existence of all the feelings that child loss entails, pain and love, light and dark. Although Oliver still teaches me to always tip the balance.
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