I miss her. And some days I miss her a little bit more than others. It’s that time of year when I feel that our family is missing someone more acutely than I feel it at other times. I still enjoy the summer as much as anyone but some things are always tinged with sadness. When I sense that our daughter craves the company of another child or when I think, just fleetingly, about how Tilly would be now and what she would be like.
It’s also a time of year when you seem to strike up more conversations with people (maybe that’s just me), in queues, sat in fields, over a glass of something or lunch where it’s crowded. Often conversations come around to children or jobs. Is she your only one? Why did you decide to become a midwife? Often, I fib, or skirt around the answer. Babies dying is not really the thing to talk about in polite company is it? Maybe this is part of the British sensibility? That we only talk about what is deemed appropriate, but maybe this is what makes loosing a child harder in the long term. That we become self conscious about it, we don’t want to make someone else feel uncomfortable. Maybe we should talk about it. So it doesn’t feel like a dark little secret. Sometimes this is what makes it more upsetting, that fact that once you’ve lost a child you worry more about upsetting others than your own grief.
As September approaches I hear the conversations of the mum’s whose children will be starting school in September, how their babies are all grown up. Sometimes they are friends who I think might remember that my baby would be going to school too, in her tiny uniform, lined up with their beautiful children. Tilly’s first milestone. But my baby never grew up. And sometimes I wish that someone else might remember that too.
