The Second Year Without Him.
I’ve heard the second year can almost be worse than the first year, and I’m beginning to understand why.
January 21st, 2022 is his birthday. I hate calling it his birthday, but it is. A birthday should be about joy, not about death at the same time. I cannot believe we are now in 2024. And the start of the year, every year, will always be shitty, tainted, despite best efforts, with grief, pain, trauma and triggers. The temperature of this time of the year, even the light the way the sunshines and the light nights are all reminders for James and I. The first year is a haze of grief, trauma, exhaustion, overwhelm and sadness but on top of all that is normal life, work, relationships and then on top the desire to try and heal, find joy etc. etc. which all takes a ridiculous amount of effort. The first anniversary of everything comes along and tears you to shreds again. Once it passes you feel a little lighter, the grief is easier to carry for a moment. The world is still spinning all around you and society compels you to ‘get on with it’, no one in particular says this to you or explicitly pressures you, but there’s an undercurrent of this, a look from some people, nuanced questions from others, a raised eyebrow or a bit of a squirm when you answer a question honestly about how things are still hard and you continue to have days and moments. So, you soldier on, life gets a bit more ‘normal’ for a time. And this comes after the 1st anniversary, so when it comes to the second - well, the expectation would be that you’ve moved on! And the grief and loss community really, really hate that term. I know I much prefer moving forward, not on. Moving on implies we’ve left that person behind, and most of us would be trying to bring the person we’ve lost alongside us in our everyday lives in some small, or big way.
For those of us who’ve experienced baby loss and perhaps go on to have more children, we then go through a huge physical feat and an enormous mental struggle through pregnancy and then the birth, healing no doubt, but another massive life change. And of course those that don’t go on to have more for the many reasons, there’s the emptiness, the silence, the yearning. Just a couple of weeks ago I was looking at the screening questions for PTSD for the first time since I was diagnosed around 6 months after Herb died and I realised, now looking at the questionnaire 5 months postpartum, that I would have scored extremely high on almost every single question during pregnancy after loss. No wonder it was absolutely the second worst thing to ever go through. Answers are on a Likert-scale, meaning there are 5 points - 1 = is not at all, 5 = is extremely likely. There are various different screening questionnaire's out there that professionals use. I reflected that once we were home from the hospital with Rani and I began to heal, I finally felt like I could breathe again, for the first time in a very long time.
To navigate the anniversaries again, but with another child in tow can be a confusing range of emotions. I’ve personally felt a lot of guilt, I guess my circumstances of what happened would always mean I would experience a lot of guilt (that I somehow caused it by catching the parasite that caused Herb to become so unwell and then to have a TFMR, which feels like a choice, but as I’ve discussed before, it was a choiceless choice.) But, I suppose the thing that is probably the hardest, that I’m beginning to realise, with the second anniversary, is the clarity. It feels as raw as it happened yesterday, but somehow it feels clearer. Perhaps time lapsed has focused the vision, you see features and feel feelings you hadn’t accessed before.
I shared last year on each anniversary of significant events that occurred from the 5th January to the 21st January (his birth) what happened in instagram posts. The point of doing those was to keep his memory alive, to keep him here, to continue to say his name as much as I can. But a big part of my reasoning for opening up more about what happened was to help other TFMR mum’s other there, to not feel as alone, to find Herbert’s story and maybe find comfort for a moment, even for a minute. The concept of time really gets me when I think about all of this. During the ambiguous phase of waiting to get MRI’s and get results etc. a minute felt like forever, an hour was an eternity, a whole day was utterly unbearable, but come the other side, once he was in our arms, a minute felt like a nano-second, half a day felt like a minute, two days in the hospital with him will never, ever be enough, and the last 15 minutes with him, before the undertaker was coming at 1pm on Sunday to take him to be cremated will forever be the worst and hardest 15 minutes of my life (and that’s a statement cause a lot of it felt equally the worst and hardest, but this takes the cake by a slice). The feeling of the diabolical doom I felt to have him taken away, the knowledge I will never hold him again, stroke his face, kiss his cheeks, the gut-wrenching desire and need to stay with him forever as his mum and protector, will never leave my bones.
So when we left hospital and I didn’t know what to do with the pain I was feeling, I went and searched all the corners of the internet and social media for stories like ours, at the time I barely found anything on TFMR as it was so rarely spoken of, even though it was just a couple of years ago. Thankfully since then I’ve found a community, and it’s being talked about more and more. Anecdotally in Australia experts believe TFMR’s are double that of the stillbirth rate (around 6-7 a day), however, statistics are not formally collected. So instead of clogging people’s feeds with it all again, I’ve linked them below, just click on the picture to take you to the post. Hopefully a helpful resource to the TFMR loss mum’s, of which I’m truly sorry you’ve found yourself here.
Click on the gallery and click on the caption to go to the Instagram post 🐞
