Life is so precious, and the arrival of a new baby is naturally a joyfully anticipated event.
In the weeks before the birth of our second child I had many strangers ask me, ‘when are you due?’ And one old lady who I hadn’t met before but who lived on my waddling route even came out one day and said that she’d been watching me and wondering when I would pop.
Everyone was waiting for this baby. And my husband and I were also eagerly anticipating our second little one’s birth. But for us, behind our excitement was the reality that our first child had died. In July 2020 I gave birth to our daughter, Ellie. She lived eight days in the Westmead Children’s Hospital NICU, before dying from an inoperable heart condition. We returned home without a baby.
Despite stats and the anecdotes of others, one’s first experiences of something leave a mark on one’s expectations.
For me, this resulted in a frequent emotional disconnect with the assumptions behind the confident joy of my beloved family and friends. As though everyone else were able to blissfully expect that I would very soon have a healthy, live baby, as though there were no possibility that anything could ever go wrong… But for me, it had before.
And so I drew this short comic.
The intention of this post is not to have a go at anyone, but rather to share my experiences as a bereaved mother. So that, 1) readers who have not experienced this grief may empathise and have greater awareness of what other people may be going through in a first pregnancy post child loss. And that, 2) those who have experienced grief relating to infants may find some resonance here.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 