Poem for my daughter, on what would have been her thirteenth birthday.

I am still rubbing my thumb along the stone called grief that I carry in my pocket

Thirteen years ago about this time (7.20am) I was pregnant in a hospital room, waiting for my husband to pick me up so we could go to another hospital to see why our baby was measuring smaller than she should, why she wasn’t moving as much as she should. I’d had steroid shots to prepare my body and her body, but there seemed little rush to the day. In hindsight, and with the knowledge of an investigation into her death, things were already going wrong with our care, we should have been blue lighted to the hospital. This was just one of the things that went wrong. By 1.30 I was at Leeds being prepped for an emergency delivery, by 1.45 her heart rate had dropped suddenly and I was knocked out for a crash section. At 2.01 they delivered her. They fought to bring her round, but it was too late. I tell you this as background for new followers, and as a kind of incantation for myself, on this day of her birth. My daughter was an IVF baby, and though we had further treatment, and we had two miscarriages, we never had more children. We decided to carry on our lives childless, child free. Thirteen years is a long time, and although I still carry a tonne of emotional luggage with me over the circumstances of her death, (clinical negligence was proved to be a factor) I am glad that I had this one small sliver of motherhood, glad to have had those heavy pregnant days of animal existence, the wonder of it, the love for her.

On her birthday I tend to, or try to, give myself over to being in her presence. To ‘be in her presence’ has changed over time. The further away we get from her physical self, the less I can imagine her. It has become about remembering this time, how it shaped me, as much as it is about remembering her. This is time passing. I never realised grief would change. This is grief. Grief starts as a boulder that you have to carry around with you, that takes up an entire room, that is all you can think about, but slowly, slowly it erodes from your touch, until, eventually, it is pocket sized, smoothed from your hand, familiar, something you rub your thumb over and take out to examine occasionally.

After When I Think of My Body as a Horse came out, I decided not to write more poems about her, or the experience. But on her birthday I write a poem as a marker, a moment of her loss, how it continues to ripple through my life. I’ll be back next week with a normal post.

Thirteen

This year you come to me in the rain,
your name a sudden shock
on the lips of a passing woman

to her daughter, out walking in the lane. 
The two recede. Her daughter’s back 
is sullen under black layers.

The passing cloud
of your impermanence drifts through
and for a second I am in the dark 

lush of your watery air. For a second
I think I feel you there, your shadow
bridging the gap between us, 

petrichor of your shampoo, slight 
weight of your body next to mine,
columns of you drifting across

the distant valley of me.