The Need to Remember - Personal Story

Personal Story...

Unseen, unknown, untouched by human hands. How can there be such sorrow, such a sense of loss, such love? How can there be embedded within the very depths of the heart this deep need to remember, to remember this child? For it is a child I remember, not an embryo, not a foetus, but a child.

I can only share my personal experience of miscarriage. I can only share about my own child. I was already a mother of two beautiful children, a daughter and a son, and I was now carrying within me this mystery, this miracle of life. I was a mother for the third time. No, my wording is not incorrect because for myself motherhood does not begin when labour ends, when you hold that tiny child within your arms, but begins from that moment of conception.

Love began to grow, awareness that I carried a very precious part of myself. I could not embrace my child, yet he was cocooned in this safe haven within me, where he would grow until that moment when my eyes would behold him. He had a name: he was to be called Daniel. Although we can never be sure of the actual delivery date, through calculations we assessed that September 24 th would be his birthday.

Days were passing, everything progressing well and here we were just beginning another quite ordinary day. I was racing around as usual trying to organise the children in order to get them off to school.

It’s strange really how, as I sit here in this room, writing, I can remember that day so vividly as if it were yesterday.

The sequence of events that followed will remain forever, that overwhelming feeling that something was radically wrong. The pain which I began to experience in my stomach, the terrific cramp and tightening, the need to rush to the bathroom, but having to behave in a manner that would not frighten the children.

There in the bathroom, that feeling of total loss and bereavement, the heartbreak as I experienced the expulsion of that which was and was no more. The life, that moments earlier lived and grew within – now erased. That life was now eradicated from the scene of time but was never to be erased from my memory.

I had not held, I had not caressed, I had not kissed or sung to my child, but yet, as difficult as it may be for so many to understand, I had loved, I had known my child in a very intimate way, and now I grieved as I tried to come to terms with this overwhelming sense of loss. There was this need to mourn the loss of my child, yet I realised how difficult it was for others to understand that this was not just the loss of something, it was someone, a person. I had lost a part of me.

The years were passing and time goes on, I needed to remember and have something tangible in memory of my child, which acknowledged the existence of this precious life, so sadly extinguished like a candle in the wind.

This is a very personal and highly emotional issue, for there are so many unspoken words and deep-seated feelings, which have lain dormant for so very long within so many hearts and lives.

Through the poems I have found great release in expressing my feelings as I penned the words. I now pray that in some way, as you read them, you may find within these words a source of comfort as they become expressions of your own heart towards your child.

With much love,

Christine