My Grieving Experience Was Largely Ignored By Everybody

Is a religious background necessary or not? He turned around, and he looked back at me and he held out his arm. He had brown, curly hair like mine. Luke had straight, blond hair. Ben was wearing little glasses. He had blue eyes, and he just looked so gorgeous. He was just so calm. And he turned around and held out his arm to me as though he was waiting for me to catch up. As Michelle was about to reach Ben, The bloody nurse in the recovery room shook me and said, Michelle, I’m so sorry, but Ben’s not doing well and he’s not going to make it. Do you want us to get a priest to baptize him? Because I had written down that I was Catholic on the form. And I felt like I had been almost sucked out by a vacuum from being in this beautiful place, this tree and the green and the blue sky and my sons. I hadn’t even met him yet. Michelle was bundled into a wheelchair, and Alan, her husband, rushed back to the hospital.

Good Times Bad Times

We sat there, in the intensive care unit. This was the first time I met Ben, and I already knew he was going to die. Even though he was physically in front of me, I felt that he was already gone. His heart was barely beating, and the ventilator was trying to breathe for him, but he had a condition where his lungs were stuck together. That was why he wasn’t going to survive. Michelle and Alan had to decide when the ventilator would be switched off. We held him while he died. It didn’t take long. I remember maybe fifteen minutes or something like that. Just a few months earlier, Michelle’s sister Marea had delivered a stillborn daughter, whom she named April, with the same doctor in the same ward of the same hospital. Michelle had driven Marea to the hospital, was her support person during labor, and was the first to hold April. The uncanny synchronicities surrounding the loss of their children rendered the sisters’ already close relationship even closer, as they grieved for their lost babies together.

Just Like Strange Rain

Michelle had been a familiar face at Marea’s bereavement support group. Now she became a participant, in need of support herself. With the exception of the few people who had met Ben, Michelle recalls, my grieving experience was largely ignored by everybody. Back then it was all about forgetting that you ever had a child and getting pregnant again quickly and having another child. There was not a whole lot of talk about him. And I was absolutely devastated. She described the dream vision she had to her husband, her sister, and other family and friends. To me it was a sign of goodbye and that meant finality. I didn’t know if I was ever going to have any more children or be physically able to have any more children. I felt that I knew what he would have looked like if he was able to grow up here. Thirteen months after Ben’s death, Grace was born. Michelle says, She was a very intentional baby.

Flip The Switch

I was desperate to have another child. Her name is Grace because it was just such a miracle that she survived the pregnancy. She came almost to term. She was born how she was supposed to be born, by cesarean. And she came out with dark brown hair. When Grace got to be three, which was the age Ben was in the dream, she looked exactly like him. She had short curly, dark brown hair, although she didn’t wear glasses. But Ben was wearing glasses in the dream and had exactly the same color blue eyes. I just couldn’t believe it. Echoing Liz’s story, Michelle and her husband also found their marriage under increasing stress, and they separated when Grace was about ten. Then, when Grace was nineteen, the unthinkable happened. She’s rude and funny and inappropriate a lot of the time. She was also pretty feisty and determined. Luke was quite a shy little boy and didn’t talk a lot, but Grace was my talker. She would talk to me about everything, everything. She was the person who helped her friends. She couldn’t decide whether to be a psychologist or to be a veterinarian. Whether to help people or animals. And in the end, she decided she’d be a veterinarian. Michelle and Grace did many things together, but one of their favorites was to head to a secluded section of beach to swim and sit on the sand. They also had their shared rituals. Every Saturday, we used to go to our favorite café, and we would order eggs Benedict and chai latte each, and we shared the eggs Benny. And it sounds so ridiculous, but that was our thing. We did that every Saturday, and the woman in the café didn’t even have to ask for our order because she knew what we had. When Grace was eighteen, she ran into Michelle’s bedroom one evening. She had this piece of paper in her hand and she said, Mum, I’ve just read the most amazing thing I have ever read in my entire life. It was an article about how all the energy in the world is infinite, so when people die, they become energy. I only kind of just half paid attention at the time, but she was absolutely blown away. It talked about how every single human being that is formed is a miraculous accumulation of all the different atoms. It was the only item from her schoolwork that she kept. She continues, We have a day called Anzac Day in Australia. It’s like your version of Memorial Day, where all the soldiers are memorialized. In Australia, it’s become something that I don’t like in that a lot of young people go out and get extremely drunk on that day, and it’s a big excuse for a party.