… and was woken by a call a little after four a.m., that awful hour. No need to panic — terrible words — but Baby Jane was a little listless. She was having some difficulty breathing and had been moved to a different ward. They had administered antibiotics and were confident this would help, but would I come to the hospital straight away? Best not to drive. I stumbled into clothes and out of the house, seizing on the conversation’s positive elements — no need to panic — but unable to forget the phrase ‘some difficulty breathing’, because what could be more fundamental than the need to breathe? ‘Breathe’ and ‘live’, weren’t they the same words? I ran down to Kilburn High Road, found a cab, hurled myself into it and out again, into the hospital, feet slapping on the floor as I ran to Connie’s ward, saw the curtains drawn around her bed, heard her cries and I knew. I pulled the curtain to one side, saw her curled in a ball, her back to me — oh, Connie — and I knew.
Next morning they took us to a private room and let us spend some time with Jane, though I’d rather not go into that. Somehow I was able to take some photographs, some hand- and footprints too. We were advised, though this might feel strange, that we might be pleased to have them in the future, and we were. We said our goodbyes then we were sent home, never more empty-handed.
And so, just as we had informed people of the successful birth, we set about withdrawing the good news. Word spread, of course, bad news moving faster than good, and before long friends and colleagues gathered around. All were kind, their condolences sincere and well intentioned and yet I found myself becoming surly and sharp when they employed absurd euphemisms for our daughter’s death. No, she had not ‘passed away’. ‘Passed over’, ‘passed on’, ‘departed’ were equally repellent to me, and neither had we ‘lost her’; we were all too aware of where she was. That she had ‘left us’ implied willingness on her part, ‘taken away’ implied some purpose or destination, and so I snapped at well-meaning friends and they apologised because what else could they do? Debate the point? Of course I regret my intolerance now, because the instinct to soften the language is a decent and humane one. The term the doctor had used was ‘collapse’. The collapse had come very quickly, he said, and I could comprehend that word. But if someone had told us that she had ‘gone to a better place’ then I might well have struck them. ‘Torn away’ — that might have fitted better. Torn or ripped away.
Anyway, my surliness was unpleasant and unreasonable and there was, I suspect, a sense that I was ‘not taking it well’. Grief is sometimes compared to numbness, though to begin with that was very far from our experience. Numbness would have been welcome. Instead we felt flayed, tormented, furious that the world was apparently carrying on. Connie in particular was prone to terrible rage, though for the most part she kept this private or directed it at me where it could do no harm.
‘People keep telling me I’m young,’ she said, in the calm after one such explosion. ‘They say that there’s plenty of time and we can have another baby. But I didn’t want another baby. I wanted this one.’
So we were not gracious, we were not wise. We did not learn anything. We were ugly and angry, red-eyed and snot-nosed and mad, and so we kept ourselves to ourselves. Friends wrote letters, which we read and were thankful for, and then threw away. What else were we to do? Put them on the mantelpiece, like Christmas cards? The overwrought emotionalism of some of Connie’s friends was particularly hard to bear. Shall we come and see you, they asked in tearful, hugging voices. No, we’re fine, we said, and resolved to let the phone ring on next time. We were dragged into the daylight for the funeral, a brief and tormenting affair — what stories could we tell, what fond anecdotes about a personality so unformed? — and it occurred to me once again that grief is as much about regret for what you’ve never had as sadness for what you’ve lost. Anyway, we got through it somehow. Connie’s mother was there, a few of her close friends, my sister. My father said he would come if I wanted him there, but I did not. We returned home immediately after the ceremony, took off our funeral clothes and went to bed, and for the next week or so that was where we stayed. We would lie around and sleep during the day, eat poor meals without tasting, watch television with our eyes fixed a little to the side. By then we were numb. I’ve never sleepwalked, so can’t confirm the similarity, but we sat and stood, walked and ate without really being alive.
