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

The Stonemason's Visit

photo by me

I offer here a content warning: go gentle with yourself because I am talking about the death of my daughter.

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Sixteen years ago on a day much brighter than it is this morning, my husband picked me up from the hospital where at seven months pregnant I had been admitted, days before, due to my baby’s movement’s lessening. I’d been given steroid shots to prepare for an emergency birth, and then a strange set of events; a domino fall of miscommunication, led to us suddenly not being treated as an emergency. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the story. This is not what I’m here to tell you about today. The story is exhausting. After sixteen years I find myself wanting on this day, the day of her birth and her death, to remember her as the joy that came into my life and changed me. Not the trauma that almost killed me.

I will tell you this. On that day sixteen years ago, we drove to Leeds, from our little rural hospital, and as we drove we hoped and we wished and we prayed to a god I wasn’t sure existed, and we arrived before the consultant got to his office for the day.

By lunch time we were literally running through the corridors while the consultant was on the phone trying to find a bed for us in NICU. There was a c section which turned into a crash section with a general anaesthetic and she died as she was being delivered, her heart not able to cope with the delivery by that time.

Sixteen years is a long time. I’ve had a long time to return to her death, to write about it, which I have - my poetry collection When I Think of My Body as a Horse is about the coming to terms of it all. My memoir, The Ghost Lake is about finding my way back to myself. I don’t write about it as much now. I want to be a writer free to explore subjects away from that (huge) part of my life. But it’s all there, in my books.

She was an IVF baby; very much loved, very much wanted. Later, an investigation was carried out and clinical negligence was flagged around our care. Later still, after five rounds of IVF and two eight week miscarriages, we called it a day and decided to embrace childlessness. It’s been a journey.

Sixteen is a strange one. When I think about her at sixteen, I keep seeing how I was at sixteen. I was so young and alive and beautiful in the way that all young people are beautiful, and my toes were on the edge life, the world was open to me, everything laid out for whatever path I would choose. It hurts to imagine her like that and to know that she will not have that, that she will not be vital and alive and taking the world in her teeth. I would have wanted that for her, of course.

Even on the big birthdays, the birthdays that feel heavier or more significant, where the pain returns, the frustration, and yes, still anger around the circumstances of her death, nothing changes in real life. The life that I imagine she would have had is entirely generated by me, by my brain. She is alive and going to school and leaving school and seeing boys, or girls, or both, in my mind, while at her grave all things stay the same.

Her grave in the tree shadowed cemetery, her headstone are the focus of my loss, in many ways, they are unchanging, but not still. It is a slow life, in the cemetery, her grave sees a seasonal life of slow changes and animals and insects, and I like that.This is a kind of life for her too. I find it difficult to explain, this concept that she is a part of the nature and the life in the cemetery, of which there is much and often it is this life that finds its way into the birthday poems.

The birthday poems are a way of immortalising her, and of marking the passage of time, of capturing the moments of loss as we grow around it. Unusually, perhaps because it feels like a significant birthday, I have written several poems for today, but most of them are for me, not for you.

This year, after sixteen years, I need to get her white headstone cleaned. It has become darkened, has absorbed the weather and the lettering is becoming unreadable. Tomorrow the stonemason will come and assess her grave. This is where the poem led me today.

The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, but I have a good life, and much of that goodness came from the experience of her loss and being forced to look at life in a very different way.

For this I am grateful.

The Stonemason’s Visit

The year has rolled over us, again. 

Another day of cherry blossom,
of crow-call beneath the beech leaves,
of wind-blown roses; offerings
to the small god of your grave.

The white marble is foxed 
with sixteen years of your loss. 

I imagine the mason’s thumb 
touched to the sharp edge

of your M, of our loved
and   missed   and    wanted,

the way your poem is hushed 
to him on the breeze:

you are still the first sigh of spring.

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Until next time

x