Disappeared

This is a companion to my previous article for Still Standing, Hidden.

My daughter, Georgina, did not look like the baby that I had imagined. She did not look like the babies that you see on advertisements for diapers or formula milk. She wasn’t softly pastel pink and chubby, rounded. Her eyelids were fused shut at birth. She wasn’t 6 lb, 7oz, she wasn’t even 2lb.

She was scrawny, limbs like small twigs, her skin was mottled red and bruised purple, translucent.

I have, maybe, ten photographs of Georgina whilst she was alive. During that time her eyes opened. She had deep blue eyes. They looked old, like she had seen things not granted to many. She had a sprinkling of tiny fair hairs on her head. She wears a pink woollen hat in the photographs. I didn’t choose her hat but, then, I didn’t choose much for her in her short life.

I have twenty or so photographs of her taken whilst she was dying and of her body. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where, in the sequence, the transition occurs. Between a tiny, tiny baby and a dead body. But they are all of her in my arms or in my husband’s arms. A small comfort.

I used to look as those photographs so often. Now I hardly ever do.

I have never shown them to anybody else. Which is strange as I have shown so many people photographs of what her twin sister looked like after birth over the years. They are on the internet, for anybody to draw hope from, sob over, smile over, gawk at, shudder at, ‘so grateful it wasn’t me’ at, ‘wish it had been me’ at. They are over at my blog. They are on websites offering support for parents of premature babies.

But I have never let anybody see Georgina’s photographs. Perhaps because she did not grow up. There is no context to set her baby pictures against, there is no happy ending. They are the record of her entire life. I don’t want anybody to see them and dismiss her, to think that she is, somehow, less. Because she was born very prematurely, because she doesn’t look like our society’s collective mental image of a baby.

Because the majority of people use that get out clause.  A misguided attempt to comfort and console. Both us and them. The ‘well, it could have been worse.’  That sigh of relief. The look of pity in their eyes that fades a little.

“My daughter died when she was three days old.”

Sometimes they don’t ask any further questions. Sometimes they ask what happened.

“She was born prematurely and she was very ill.”

And the tension is relieved a little. As clearly as though their thoughts were spoken aloud. Because if she was so premature, so ill? She didn’t really count as a person. So it’s fine, it isn’t that bad. It could have been worse.

From the experiences of others. . . .

“My daughter died before she was born.”

The same release of tension. In the eyes of the world, this is less painful?

Because you didn’t really know her? You couldn’t really know him? Despite the fact that your child  accompanied your every breath, your every heartbeat for nine months? Or, as in my case, substantially less. Despite the fact that we surrounded them and nurtured them. That our bodies were their entire worlds.Because it would, somehow, have been ‘worse’ had they lived, if they had been born at term, lived for three years, lived for thirty years, taken a breath outside of the womb? There seems to be a deep need to quantify, to allocate an amount of grief, so much for a first trimester miscarriage, so much for full term stillbirth, so much for the children that will never be at all but who are dearly wanted. And please don’t exceed your allocation.

Although I, for one, can’t imagine how these calculations work. I don’t think you can line us up and rank us as to who feels the worst, who hurts the most. None of us want to be here.

But I fear the judgement, the calculating beady eyes that will mark my daughter down as nothing. I never felt repulsed or disturbed when I looked at her. But I know that the world at large can be unkind. So I have disappeared her. From my life. Even from this strange, shadowy world of the internet.

I look at those photographs again. On the eve of what might have been her fourth birthday. Of my tiny baby. The daughter that was so nearly mine. I still think she is absolutely beautiful. Her soul seems to be nearly visible under her skin, as her blue eyes look piercingly into the camera. Tethered loosely to that tormented, struggling body. That soul, struggling to escape, to be at peace, to be free.

My little girl, wherever you might be now, I hope that you are both of those things. At peace. Free.

Do you have any photographs?

Have you ever been told that it could have been worse?