I’ve Long Since Learned the World Won’t Stop for Grief
Eight years on
Four years earlier we’d left the same hospital proudly holding Ida as a new-born. This time we’d just bathed a tiny baby named Eve and left her behind on a cooling table.
Out in the car park, people were angling for spaces, jarring as ever. The hum from the main road took on a strange frequency. There I was, like a taxi driver, dutiful to the last. I strapped Ida’s life-sized Olaf into the back seat and wondered how I would explain to her what had happened to her baby sister.
I was devastated, but unable to show it. I needed to get us home safely, return the parking pass, and we still needed to eat. The memory of Eve’s limp body, her blank stare, and the photograph of us holding her in the Butterfly Room after she had died left me feeling as though I’d been assaulted.
Still on auto-pilot, I dumped Eve’s memory box into the boot of the car as if it were any piece of luggage. Her blankets, feeding tubes and hand imprints. She had survived seventeen days with Edwards Syndrome. I had tried to be her best advocate, and now I just needed to stop.
We returned home to a still, silent house and went to sleep that night with the empty Moses basket beside our bed. I stayed with Ida until she fell asleep and watched her close her eyes, gripped with fear she would never wake up again.
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Eight years on, I still wonder whether it was some kind of nightmare. I remember how well people showed up in the immediate aftermath. Flowers arrived and meals appeared on the doorstep. We received cards from people we hadn’t heard from in years. Work told me to take as much time off as I needed. I remember the attentive care of the clinicians and the nursing teams.
That was all real. But once the impact faded, as the months went on, what I remember most is being alone. There is this tendency to give the bereaved ‘space’. Why is that? There were times I needed to be alone, but I remember a lot of space, and a lot of silence.
It settled in the most mundane, everyday places. In family gatherings where I couldn’t ‘dwell’ on what had happened, and in parent-child groups where we had no milestones to celebrate. The networks at Ida’s primary school lost us to conversations about holidays and kitchen renovations. Endless new initiatives thrown around like confetti at work. The neighbour who told me I ‘should have got over it by now’.
I kept moving through on autopilot. Then one day, I came into the kitchen to find my partner with an envelope. While we were in Bristol with Eve, someone had stayed home with Ida and stocked the fridge, a real help at the time. Now she was holding an itemised breakdown of the money spent — about £30 — with the receipt neatly clipped and the amount to be reimbursed.
I stared in disbelief. It was that moment, not the car park, the Butterfly Room, or the hospital, where I felt most alone. That was the bit that stayed with me.
Yesterday, I sat down and opened Eve’s box. Her Jellycat mouse, her knitted hat, a bag of feeding tubes and heart stickers, the pictures Ida drew. These were the things she was meant to wear, the toys she was meant to play with, and messages from the people she was meant to meet. All the simple, small things we had prepared to welcome her. I realised all I have now is her absence and the hard fact of what happened to her.
In the early days, at the hospital, we did what was expected of us: packed everything inside the first box to hand and left. It was put out of the way above the wardrobe, where it began to gather dust. These days her box lives under a side table in the lounge, brought down from the wardrobe after the rows and isolation nearly broke us. It is a more carefully assembled collection of memories that trace a circle of people that cared in the moment.
I must have heard all the platitudes about loss and grief, that loss is a gift and that you grow stronger. But I don’t see growth or connection; I only feel cut adrift in a place that has no time for it.
Of course, life continues, and people move on. Most conversations still hold safely to planning and doing, and I’ve long since learned the world won’t stop for grief. But the cost of that silence is more than I could write. Perhaps that’s just the cost of being too busy to notice.
