Two Hands To Hold: When The Rhythm Changes

Part I

'Oh gawd David, I'm in so much pain.'

'Baby, I wouldn't have thought we shattered any records just now.'

Already looking far too pleased with himself when I shot him a look to be gratified any further with a response. The smug masqueraded about his face but another cramp doubled me over.

'David, I'm serious this hurts.' Clutching my lower belly.

'I know your joking because there's no way you should be hurting like that.' Resting his papers on the bedside table.

I couldn't speak. Only shook my head while one arm clutched my lower belly and the other supported me bent over the bed.

'Wait, is this the same thing that happened yesterday?' David shot up. Swung off the bed. 'We. Are going. To A&E.' Slapping on an item of clothing with each of his sentences.

'I am fine.' I cried out.

'Liv, fine does not look like that.'

Though the pain had passed, I didn't want to laugh as no part of me wanted to test it. Subsided almost, by the time he'd finished putting me in some clothes. So much so, I really didn't want to leave the house. But it was clear his 'no' was resolute. He'd stepped outside shortly after dressing me. Returning with a black cab he'd flagged down to take us to Royal Free.

Even David looks to be regretting his decision walking into A&E that Saturday morning. The entrance smelled mopped of the remnants of a distillery rather than the antiseptics of a hospital's A&E. The place teemed with the aftermath of Friday night's over indulgences. The effects of terrible decisions sprawled everywhere. A woman sat in what was no longer a white bandeau top and matching skirt of the same bandeau width. Red toes peeped out of the white stiletto of her right foot. Her lap wore the left stiletto while her left foot wore the ice packs, packed onto it. Nearer reception a young man occupied himself across three seats though his head hung off them. It's over a bucket of tears and whatever else is in the bucket the nurse holds. Yet he's calling for a nurse and too, his mom and promising never to drink again.

I'm flashing darker than the incoming lights of the ambulance when David turns me out the room for some air.

Back outside, a groom dressed in trackies argues with another from his stag-do (he too, dressed in trackies), whether calling it a footballing accident would stick. For what seems like the third time, his phone blares I've Gotta Feeling. And for the third time he checks it. His face losing the feeling each time, while he lets it ring out.

Our temporary relocation outside is fortuitous. Dr Maggie Monroe, the daughter of one of David's law Firm's Partners sees him. Comes over. She's about to finish her shift but kindly checks us in. Transfers us to the maternity triage. And I am grateful.

'All right,' she says, 'Let’s have a look.' Snapping on gloves with the gusto of someone just about to start a shift, not the other way round.

I watched as she squeezed a ribbon of gel onto the transducer, pressed it against my belly. Watched as she mapped a route around my stomach.

'There,' she said, angling the probe and turning the monitor so we could see. I flicked from my belly to the screen where David is glued. 'That’s your little one.'

'Is it—?' David leans in.

'It's a boy' Maggie tells us.

'It's a boy?' We repeated as if it were an impossible thing not a fifty-fifty chance.

'Yes, its a boy.' Maggie joining in our moment.

Neither David nor I had cared about the sex of this child. Or, so we told ourselves. All we ever hoped for was good health (and strength, as we like to say back home in the Caribbean). Two hands to hold, legs to run, jump. Ten fingers, toes. That they could see the world, smell the rain, touch, be touched. And just as important, listen to some reggae music and side with me because David clearly doesn't know good music.

That they could simply be. The rest? Their laughter, their dreams, the person they'd grow to become would be ours to nurture, guide, love.

Neither were we medieval in our thoughts, words or our relationship. But a son on it's way put a glint in David's grin he couldn't hide. Had him standing taller, with all the sex appeal of Tyson Beckford on a Ralph Lauren Fall-Winter runway. Somehow the revelation of our first child being a boy seem to aggrandise my entire pregnancy. Somehow, I knew, I could sit a little easier with my mother in law. Soften the blow that David Ellis had gone against Lucinda Ellis' wishes, married that girl from Jamaica.

'Let's check for the heartbeat.' She said, adding more gel to the probe.

Eyes stayed on the monitor. Watching as she retraces. Pressing a little deeper. 'Sometimes the heartbeat can be faint.' Dr Monroe adds, adjusting the volume on the monitor.

Nothing.

She slowed her actions. We locked down the noise of our excitement. Even paused my breathing. Still nothing.

'Maggie.' David said. His call to her nearer a question.

Mini Maracas - Two Hands to Hold

'Let me get a senior opinion on this.'

'A senior opinion for?' David and I chorus.

'Because I'm newly qualified.' She carefully adds. Though we were already aware of this fact.

I caught her expression as she stepped out. David held onto both of my hands with the same amount of grip my chest was devastating me with. Head down, I couldn't look at him. I couldn't even look at myself because as much as I wanted to be hopeful, I knew. Felt it in my bones.

The senior opinion returned with Dr Monroe. A man.

'Mr and Mrs Ellis?' He said, more of a formality than a greeting and introduces himself as Doctor Schuster. I laid there stiff, unmoving, even vacationing my lungs while Dr Schuster did all the things Maggie had done before. No one else moved. Or so much as breathed. Or even spoke. Not even the room.

He didn’t need to say anything. The absence said it first. The stillness, the silence in the room where a sound should've been. A sound we were ready to love even before knowing or hearing it.

And there, on that table, I felt my own heart hammer in the hollow where my son's should have been.

Part II

Two Hands to Hold

I tried freezing those hammering heart beats of mine but that was harder than my heart not beating. What I could do was squeeze my eyes shut. Trap the water welling up there. What I couldn't do, stifle the air that wanted me to survive.

'I'm soo sawry.'

'Liv, please don't do that.'

'I-I-I should've... If I'd...' Blubbering.

I folded on myself. A gut curdling wail from the guts of my despair ate my blubbering words. Shame and guilt came for me. Buried me. But David simply hugged me down.

'Baby, absolutely none of this is your fault.'

His voice as comforting as a stream. Though when he'd finally brought my face level with his, life had left him and that further crushed me. I sat numb and unfeeling, listening but not listening while in the following moments we went through what seemed like never ending procedures and processes. Processes streamlined from the women and families who'd suffered losses before us. Here and there, I had to nod on agreements neither of us realised people ever had to make. Decisions to leave us the least emotional baggage and scarring. Decisions to help us survive this change in our rhythm from a rhythm that was no more.

I had a natural delivery. David held him for the longest time because I couldn't. Didn't want to. But when he said, this little one deserved no less of our love, I finally reached for him. Held him. Cried.

I cried for the life I knew he'll never have. Cried because I'd never hear him cry. Cried because I'd never see him take his first steps. Never see him dance, though if he danced anything like his father, maybe we were all spared. I'll never watch him play basketball or help his grandfather pick a breadfruit from the tree when we holiday back home.

Or if he got David's smile, smile back at me in miniature.

So before they took him away, I sang to him one last time because never again would he hear me sing.

I watched them walk towards the door. Unravelling me like a ball of wool. Wound me down to nothing when they exited the door. Wishing they'd take me instead. Curled up on the bed, I shut out the talk to drown out the pain. Once or twice, David disappeared to the gents, staying longer than any visit I'd ever known him to take. And every so often a nurse checked my vitals, reading wrists and screens as if any numbers and measurements might make me whole again. As if wrist-watching and monitoring would bring my child back.

Vitals climbed to stable, stayed their long enough to satisfy a discharge to home. Maggie had long since left, stayed around longer than either David or I could thank her for. As the sun set on the day, I watched out of the taxi's window taking us home, Londoners going about their Saturday evening. A sparkly hen and her do, friends out for a drink. Or maybe two. Families doing their thing.

That was to be us. David and I. Once we'd managed to tear ourselves off each other. Once David had satisfied himself on the case he was preparing for. We were to go wandering around The Tate, holding hands like the young lovers we were. He dissecting the collection of Soviet-era posters (as was the exhibition I wanted to see). Me like a sponge, absorbing everything he says. Because if he wasn't a lawyer, he'd do just as well as a teacher. (Yes, it's really his bit of smart, broad-minded and worldly wise I fell for). Later in the evening we'd finish by trying some restaurant we'd have found and fancied along the way. And after that, people watch. Particularly those running after their Routemasters. Finish the night with one of us being dessert.

Instead, I am tensing at every pot hole and bump of those busy roads taking us home. Wincing on the ones our driver couldn't avoid.

While David paid the cab, I eased my way into the house and the living room and onto the couch. The popcorn from last night, still on the table, half-eaten and forgotten when Pop Idol stopped being the main event.

After propping pillows around me, he removed his empty beer bottle and the uneaten popcorn to the kitchen. Returns with tea, crackers and salami (my favourite) and sits perpendicular to me.

'Do you want me to call anyone?'

'David who do we call?'

My tone surprising, he pauses. Before continuing. 'Aunty Shelley, your dad.'

'There in Jamaica. What can they do?'

I am too surprised at my tone and so I look away.

He started on a set of papers and pamphlets we'd been given at the hospital. The commentary one way on counselling and resources and this and that. I suspect it was his way of killing this very unfamiliar silence between us. Chin down, eyes fell to my mid section. Muscle memory sent my hands tracing across my belly. Tracing back every thought and action. Analysing every decision between earlier in the morning and the day I'd found out I was pregnant. The 'should haves', the 'what ifs.' What if I didn't eat that peanut butter sandwich last week. What if I had gone to A&E after that very first pain, like David had suggested. What if I hadn't run up the stairs last night. I choked back tears.

He stopped with the papers, looked over at me.

'Liv, I am here. Talk to me.' Scooping down on his knees in front of me. Hands upturned in my lap for me to take. I took them. The only two hands I'd be holding, churching them between his temple and mine. But no words came.

In the other room, the landline went, saving me from having to conform.

His side of the conversation audible, I could tell it was Joseph Monroe, Maggie's dad. Though David confirmed it after he'd hung up. Called to pass on his 'Well wishes'. Gave David some time off. I acknowledged with a small nod. The most I could afford. I'd not even thought about work until then. I'd only been married a few months. In the first job of my legal career when I'd discovered I was pregnant. But I wasn't put off. If anything I was determined. Determined, I set myself on a mission to over deliver. Over deliver, to set my blueprint in place while on maternity leave. And be welcomed back following my leave. But maybe, that's where I'd over exerted mys...

Eyes welled.

Defeated, I sobbed.

'Baby, It's okay, let it out if that's what you want to do.' Holding my two hands in his and back on his knees.  

Nothing formulating in my head was stringing together in a sentence worth putting out. So I shook my head.

'Why don't you eat something?' Looking over at my plate of uneaten crackers and salami after the sobbing had subsided. 'Want me to order your favourite chicken from the Chinese down the road?'

I offered another shake of the head.

'Liv, you know none of this is your fault, right?'

Head down, I shook my head.

'You know this could have happened to anyone, right?'

'But, I'm not anyone, David.'

His face found mine when he asked if I'd prefer having someone else to speak to? Dr Monroe, his dad, Lucinda? And it was serious.

I'd shaken my head on all of the above. However Lucinda got him upturned lips. But I also knew he must be in the depths of despair to have suggested his mother. His mother who's yet to congratulate us on our marriage. So I agreed to Chinese. 

---

Who could have foreseen the outcome since writing and sharing this piece.

If you’ve experienced the loss of a child, you are not alone. There are people who will hold you and your pain, walk with you until you can find your footing again. Reach out. Talk. Cry. Let yourself be heard.

For support in the UK:

• Sands (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity) – 0808 164 3332 (freephone helpline) or www.sands.org.uk

• Tommy’s Baby Loss Support – Call 0800 014 7800 or visit www.tommys.org/baby-loss-support

• The Lullaby Trust – for anyone affected by sudden infant death: 0808 802 6868, www.lullabytrust.org.uk

• Cruse Bereavement Support – 0808 808 1677, www.cruse.org.uk

If you’re outside the UK:

• Share Pregnancy & Infant Loss Support (US) – 800-821-6819, www.nationalshare.org

• Pregnancy Loss and Infant Death Alliance (PLIDA) – www.plida.org

You deserve care, comfort, and community — however long it takes.