The Profound Grief Of Having No Proof That Your Baby Ever Existed
The UK's 'Baby Loss certificate' was glimmer of humanity and compassion during a time of cynicism and withering truths
Peopleimages.com - YuriArcurs On 22nd February 2024, the UK government introduced a Baby Loss Certificate. The certificate was to recognize the grief of families who had lost a baby before twenty-four weeks of pregnancy.
This is not a legal document; it is provided free of charge, and it answered a growing call for those who sought recognition for their loss. People wanted a piece of paper to prove that their babies existed.
It was a glimmer of humanity and compassion during a time of cynicism and withering truths, from a government wracked with scandal. It was also a reminder of what our country can do when it is at its best. As I sat in our house reflecting on this news, I found myself looking at our side table which is covered in family photographs taken through the years.
I smiled, as I always do, at the pictures of our sons getting older and ever more serious in later photos, and I began to imagine other photos in the shadows that lay between them, those that were never taken.
I considered the photos of our unborn babies that we had lost before and after our boy’s arrival — they were the ones that got away from us, that started, but never finished their journey.
One of the first things we wanted to know about one another, as we gently explored each other in our first few weeks together, was whether we wanted to have children, and how many. I remember the relief and elation that we felt when we realized that we both wanted to have a large family. Children were central to how we wanted to live our lives.
Certain expectations in our young lives form part of the invincibility of youth. When you are young, there is no reason to question why you should not have everything that you want.
We had both lived idyllic lives, born and bred in the rich, historied countryside of the southeast of England. We were each from large families and had grown up through the innocence of the seventies and eighties — a time before mental health crises and the suffocating pressure of a digitized world. We had an uninhibited excitement for the life ahead of us, that we expected to fulfill.
I think that the point in our lives where we start to grow up is when life shows us that what we want may not be within our control. Understanding that, for much of our lives, we are not the ones dealing the cards and that finding happiness and fulfillment from playing the hand that we are dealt, is what it is to be an adult.
fizkes | Shutterstock
After we were married, we planned to start trying for children straight away.
But it proved to be more difficult than we had expected and a few months after we were married, Lucy experienced her first miscarriage. I have always thought that it is an indelicate word for such a profound event. There is something overtly medical in describing the loss of so much hope as a miscarriage.
The truth of the matter is that, when a desired pregnancy naturally ends early, it is not just a medical event. Our gradual build-up of hope started with the first positive test, then the anticipation of cold gel on bare skin and the probing search for a pulsing sign of life on a hazy screen.
Later, our imaginations ran wild with a myriad of possibilities: Will it be a boy or a girl? What color eyes will it have? Will it be joyful or reflective? Who will it look like? Will we laugh together? What will it grow up to be? Will it have children of its own? Will I be a good parent?
Every thought and feeling in every second coalesced into an unstoppable emotional momentum, building daily in strength and size towards a predetermined endpoint which would be the holding of our newborn baby. Nothing was supposed to impede the growth of our blooming tree of joy.
Timur Weber | Pexels
The rupturing of this momentum was profoundly traumatic but it was not borne out in the culturally accepted public outpouring of grief.
It was a quiet sadness at the loss of something almost imperceptible, a fragment of a beautiful dream that could not quite hold on to the light. It was harder for Lucy because she had held it inside her and she had already started to bond with it. Some would say that it was not a baby yet, that this was common, and that we should start trying again as soon as possible. Be pragmatic.
But the problem with that, and the reason for the quiet, resounding sadness was that, to us, it was already a person. It was the beginning of a life and a life together, and in the weeks and months ahead, there was nothing to prove that our baby had existed.
We did continue to try for a baby. But our journey was derailed by the arrival of breast cancer. Through some cruel twist of fate, the diagnosis was shortly followed by a positive pregnancy test.
We were told, in no uncertain terms, that to keep the baby would be to fan the flames of a hormone positive breast cancer. Through the numbing few weeks that followed, Lucy underwent a termination, and our second baby’s journey was unnaturally interrupted.
This one was not a quiet sadness, but a raging against the world. I had not known so much pain in my young life.
fizkes | Shutterstock
In the years that followed we were blessed with two boys, Aaron and Jack, and the pain of the earlier miscarriage and later termination receded, but it never went away.
When Jack was still very young, Lucy fell pregnant again. It was unexpected as it was now almost ten years since we married, and we had thought it too late to have another baby. But a positive result showed up and we both dared to hope once more.
But the universe had other ideas and during the early stages of this pregnancy, it ended. It was not meant to be, and it hurt.
We still talk about those lost babies. They were the rest of the large family we had dreamed of having when we first met. The noisy dinner table chatter of four or five children, the crazy rush in the morning for school and nursery.
Piles of Wellington boots, outgrown coats, arguments, mass bath times, logistical transportation conundrums, hand-me-down clothes, exhaustion, and industrial scale catering formed the shape of our dreams.
Our boys have brought us so much joy that our cup runs full. I love to look at the photographs on the table under the lamplight, of them growing up so quickly. But I do still linger on the spaces in between them, on those imagined and slightly out-of-focus pictures that might have been.
They reside in the shadows of our real memories. Faint trails of lives that were not lived, smiling at us from somewhere out of reach, the possibility of a story untold.
And I think it is okay to think about them and what they might have become because they were real. They did not emerge into this world, but they started their journey, and we were with them at the beginning and at the end.
We are with them to this day, and they are with us. They did exist.
Phil Cody is a UK-based father, husband, and businessman. Whilst not running his footwear company, his big loves are his family and writing. Phil is a regular contributor on Medium, where he writes about life and family as channeled through his own experiences.