Oscar, I thought I’d write about anniversaries. And how my year folds, creases, unravels and stretches around them. There are the scans - one of which falls on my husband’s birthday. There’s the day we found out about your heart not growing the way it needed to. There’s the day you passed away. The day you were born. Your funeral. And your due date; 8th March 2022.
8th March is also International Women's Day. A fact I felt camply empowered by when pregnant and disorientated by once you had died. Because of how graphic women being celebrated feels up against all of our gynaecological, fertility, pregnancy, births and losses. The visceral, messy, fierce bewildering realities of our wombs. Yes celebrate and more feminist, anti-racist, anti-ableist research please.
More dates:
There’s your brother Sascha’s birthday; 6th March 2023 and 8th March 2023 is when we took him home from the hospital. A year after what could have been your birthday.
We’d had a home birth partly because I didn’t want to give birth at hospital again (unless I’d needed to) and because we had been at the hospital so much throughout both pregnancies (another blogpost for another time) that we knew the cafe menu off by heart and the receptionists had become friendly but concerned neighbours. So, we had had a home birth but we’d been taken to hospital shortly after you were born because I needed additional care. This time, we left the hospital with a breathing baby instead of a memory box.
The following year, 6th March 2024 - Sascha’s 1st birthday - was the day kind, tired doctors told me and my family that our dear dad would likely pass away. I took Sascha to the park and treaded softly over swirling timelines that again sung to me of simultaneous life and death. Timelines that threatened to crumple again as they do with a stillbirth; birth-death-death-birth. To any outsider - I was just a mum playing with her kid on his birthday.
This year on 8th March, we threw a birthday party for Sascha and a housewarming as we’ve recently moved from Deptford in London to Folkestone. I was overjoyed that celebrating felt possible. Caught between feeling powerful, warm, excited, proud and of course holding the loss of you so very close. All these friends and family who know you but didn’t get to know you. Nevertheless, they blessed our new home and your dear, hilarious, toddling brother.
Do you see and feel the tangle?
There’s hardly a moment's breath before the next anniversary of one kind or another. Is being bereaved a life of synchronicity? Grief-time and life-time. Are they as constant as each other? How can two timelines be equally loud? And, what do we do with our noise?
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