If I, their mother, who had failed to carry them safely through the pregnancy, did not stop and acknowledge their loss, who would?
In May 2021, we went to Sydney. We had friends there; friends who were living in Newtown. We went and we stayed in their tiny two-bedroom townhouse, with the staircase like a ladder and the bathroom across the freezing cold pavers of the back courtyard. On our first day, my friend said, ‘let’s have a picnic and drinks in the graveyard,’ as casually as you might suggest visiting the best café in the neighbourhood. So, we did. The four of us walked, and bought bread, and dips, and wine, and grapes, and off we went to the graveyard together. It is the perfect ideal of a historic graveyard, with falling down tombstones and lush vegetation. The quirky memorials, all weathered by time, aren’t sad anymore, but just part of the scenery. It reminded me of Anne of Green Gables. When studying at Redmond College in Kingsport, in Anne of the Island, Anne finds solace in Old St John’s Graveyard. It had ‘been a graveyard so long it has ceased to be one.’ My friends led the way and we spread our picnic rugs on a patch of grass between the crumbling, leaning slabs of tombstones. We sat down in the May sunshine, and ate, and drank, and talked and laughed. People jogged through the park, or walked their dogs, or strolled in warm afternoon sun of a cold Sydney day. We inched our picnic rug to follow the sun as we shared our lives, surrounded by death.
After, we wandered through the headstones, looking for interesting inscriptions. We tried to make out the faded engravings and occasionally stood still at a particularly tragic life story encased in stone and names and dates. The monument erected by his shipmates to a man lost at sea. The graves of children felled by diseases. The stones that listed generations, all separated by and then united in death. I stood at the grave of a mother and new-born infant, dead within days of each other, for a particularly long time. A graveyard is a place where grief is made physical. It is given form and shape and substance. It says, ‘this person was real, they were loved and important to someone, and we want the world to notice that they are gone.’
Earlier that month, I had stood in a very different space that also brought grief into physical being. The memorial park declared itself an eco-friendly and green alternative to the pollution of the traditional death industry. It was indeed teeming with life, grass and trees, and flowers, rock gardens and a flowing waterfall and stream. Surrounding it all, attached to every rocky surface or mounted on natural looking walls, were the memorial plaques of those resting there. Instead of a graveyard, this was a place for cremated remains. They were also expanding into natural green burials: earth to earth and dust to dust. But the plaque I was looking for was mounted on a rock, placed in a garden, surrounded by plants and flowers. It is to babies who died before birth. This is the final resting place of those children, from my hospital – they are cremated and buried here, at this garden which has become a shrine and site of pilgrimage for bereaved parents. There are an overwhelming number of tributes and memorials left there, to the children who did not live. Rocks with inscribed names and dates, teddy bears, toys, angel statues, pictures, flowers - real, fake and dead – commemorate each loss. This little garden is a shrine to heartbreak. Too many losses. Too many babies. Too many parents left grieving. Too many parents missing children they did not get to hold. Too many parents left grieving ghost children, unable to give their loss any physical form or ritual except for this garden.
My two children, Morgan and Riley, are amongst the many babies buried and honoured here. My two miscarriages, first in November 2020, and then in March 2021 left nothing physical behind. No body, no photos, except the grainy scans that hurt to look at. No clothes or toys or items had been left behind. They were like ghosts, my two babies – never real except inside my own body. I was growing life, until it turned to death. They left, but I remained, stuck. It felt like I had been dealt a mortal blow that could not be healed. For months I dwelt in this land of death. My grief was made worse by the fact there were no mourning rituals, no socially accepted script to follow, when someone dies before drawing their first breath. There is nothing comforting you can say about a life that had not even begun. I spiralled downwards, in this grief that had no way to be made real and solid in the world. Ashamed that I mourned so deeply these two little people who had existed for so short a time.
Terrified that my children would be forgotten, and I would be left to carry this sorrow alone. I was desperate to have something physical to hold on to, something that would last to show that these children existed. I journaled all the dates and events of each pregnancy and we bought candles engraved with their names. But I need something more permanent, more lasting. So, I got a tattoo. “How big should it be?” asked tattoo artist, her hair fashionably asymmetrical. She was older than I expected and covered in tattoos of her own design. Looking at her walls of delicate, detailed and daring art I felt my little sketch of two hearts, linked by dotted lines, was beneath her skills. “Not big. Just like this,” I said, using my hands indicate where on my hip I envisioned the tattoo sitting. I had left my husband at the door. As this was during another wave of the pandemic, I wasn’t permitted to bring in a support person. I walked in alone. While I would have preferred to hold my husband’s hand during the mildly painful ordeal, throughout the loss of our two babies I had gotten used to walking into appointments alone. No support person, no hand to hold through whatever test or scan was required. We had lost our babies together, but I had to endure the physical loss alone. The tattoo hurt, but much less than I thought it would. It was like getting a blood test, and I had gotten plenty of those recently. And at the end I had beautiful black lines engraved into my skin, two dotted hearts whose heartbeats I never got to hear. I needed there to be something that existed in the world to last as a testament, a record. I was terrified they would slip into memory, then be forgotten by time and history. I felt I had to mourn even more deeply, because so few other people would notice the loss of these children. If I, their mother, who had failed to carry them safely through the pregnancy, did not stop and acknowledge their loss, who would?
My grief was all consuming because it had no form– so I had to become the physical representation of this grief. I was wracked with migraines and anxiety, constant nausea, and pain. I was a raw bleeding wound. I had to be shaped and etched and marked with the lives of my children. But the valley of the shadow of death is no place for the living to dwell. You cannot sit with those shadows for too long without longing to become a part of them. I knew in my heart I could not stay with my insubstantial ghosts – I had to re-join the land of the living.
The wound could not stay open without starting to fester and eventually turn deadly. But I didn’t know how. I had no closure, no peace. No way to begin to treat a wound no one could see. Even my tattoo was just another sign that this grief was only made real in my body.
In early May 2021, on the Saturday before Mother’s Day, my closest friends and family – only about a dozen people – gathered at the memorial park. We held a memorial service for the children my husband and I had lost. We spoke the names we had given our children aloud – we mourned for Morgan and Riley. And I was not alone in my mourning. My offerings of flowers and tears were joined by others. My parents brought flowers they had grown from their own garden. My in-laws drove us to the park, stopping at the florist with us on the way. My pastor prayed aloud for my husband and I in our grief. Other people who loved us, and who would have cared for and loved our children, stopped, and acknowledged their brief, but very real lives. And in that process of confronting and accepting their deaths, I began to find some peace. I began to move towards some healing.
The wound that had been raw and bleeding started to stitch back together. Later that month, we wandered through the cemetery in Newtown that had been dedicated to death so long it no longer had living mourners coming to visit. I knew that my dead had a place in the world as well for me to visit. A place I could go, on the days it gets hard, to stop and remember and acknowledge those tiny babes who I never held in my arms. As I walked that Sydney graveyard of the past, my body was still recovering stamina and fitness after all it had endured. But the wound had been stitched closed, by the physical act of gathering with those I love and acknowledging what had been lost.
As I strolled through the graveyard and touched the rough stones, breathed in the chill air, and stamped through the long grass, the wound continued to knit together and to heal. It is still healing. One day, all that might be left behind is a shiny white scar, that will never fade. Like the tattoo on my hip that marks me for eternity – or at least until my own flesh turns to dust – it is a physical testament to what I have endured and the love and loss I have felt.
Grief is invisible. Intangible, untouchable. But of course, it isn’t. Grief is witnessed in funerals and graveyards, in flowers and photographs, in shrines to lost babies and memorials to lost shipmates. Grief is emotional, of course, but it is also physical, in every sense of the word. It is a wound that must be treated and acknowledged if it is to heal. And like all wounds, grief leaves scars.
- Beccy
