The Loss of a Child - a Father's Story - My Story

That day arrives when you find out you are going to be a dad, you are elated, full of happiness and ideas start to fill your head of what you want to do and plans for the future with your unborn child – will they be a boy or a girl, how will your life change, feelings of excitement you haven’t felt before and a feeling unlike any other

You start to plan for the birth of your child, you start to discuss names, you argue about names, you go to all of the midwife appointments and scans and you see the light burning bright in your partners eyes as she starts to grow such a special life and starts to bloom, you leave the house at 3am to find an open shop to fulfill your partners sometimes weird and wonderful cravings, but you will do anything for this special little one you haven’t yet met

The due date is getting closer and panic sets in, have you sorted everything you need to sort, have you got enough baby clothes, is the nursery ready, have you got a car seat for when you leave hospital, the day is getting closer and the excitement is building, both you and your partner just want baby to arrive, you try to picture what your baby will look like, will they have your eyes, will they look like you or your partner

You wake up in the early hours, your partner is unsettled and restless and cannot sleep, baby isn’t due for 3 weeks, she just doesn’t feel right and you ring the maternity ward to ask for some advice, your told to relax and take it easy and to make your way down in your own time, no rush, to have a listen in on baby and make sure everything is ok. You take the meticulously packed hospital bag that has sat there in the bedroom packed for the last 2 months, part of you excited and part of you feeling anxious, could today be the day I meet our much loved baby?

You arrive at maternity and your greeted with smiles and the sound of crying babies and heart beat monitors echoing the ward, not knowing what to expect, holding each others hand tight and being shown to a side room to made more comfortable. 

Out come the monitors and midwifes are making small talk to make you more relaxed, they just want to have a little listen to baby to see how baby is – wait…we must have a faulty machine? They tell you, “I will just get another one and then we can check in on baby”…..”let me just get a more experienced midwife”, “baby is playing up a little bit and we can’t hear them properly” accompanied by a nervous smile….you look at each other and your hands hold each other that little bit tighter…is this normal? Everyone seems so calm so it must be….

Another midwife comes into the room and uses a different machine to listen in to baby….silence….she tries the Doppler….silence….she moves your partner onto her side and tries again….silence…. you look at each other and know something isn’t right, excitement turns to a feeling you cannot describe, beyond any words, you feel sick, you can see the tears starting to form in your partners eyes and the calm atmosphere changes to one that is more tense….they want to get a consultant to have a listen in….but reassure you that baby sometimes get into an awkward position…but you know…… you just know…..you don’t want to think the worse but it starts to consume you….

The Consultant introduces herself and brings in a scanning machine, she angles it so that your partner cannot see it, but from your position you can see the screen even though part of you doesn’t want to – you hold onto your partner tighter than ever before and every second feels like an hour….the consultant starts to move the scanner over mums tummy and you see your little one on the screen, it looks just like every other scan you have seen before but something is different, baby isn’t moving…she stops….freeze frames the image and then it hits you….like a brick, not just one brick but an entire house of bricks….she leans over to a colleague and whispers into her ear…you see baby but you see no beating heart, just a black shadow….a feeling of overwhelming sadness starts to build, one you have never felt before, surely this can’t be right, maybe the machine isn’t working right….then she turns to you both and says “ I am really sorry…”

I don’t remember what followed that sentence….I just know that all of our dreams and hopes for our unborn little boy had come to a tragic end…in the blink of an eye, he had gone…..this special little boy that we had fallen in love with was no longer with us and my world suddenly had the biggest void and emptiness in it I could ever imagine…..

The one thing I do remember from that day was the look in my partners eyes and one that will stay with me forever, an image I that you cannot put into words, that light that was burning so bright in her eyes before, blown out, a look of being heartbroken, full of emptiness and loss….you are the man…you need to be strong…. You need to hold it together…it is what people will expect, you cannot break down….you need to be there for your partner, for the kids, for those around you….don’t let yourself down…..you can’t cry, can you?

I can proudly say now when I look back on that day and although I was there for my partner, I did break down, I did lose it and I was a mess – society may have expected more from or that was my perceived expectation of what was expected from me but I had just lost my son, we had just lost our son….Theo James and nothing else mattered, no one else mattered…

We left the hospital and we went home the very same day, in fact only a few hours later – Theo was almost full term so we had to go back the following day so Sarah could give birth to Theo . A day that when it arrived was full of loss and sadness beyond words, but a day we will remember forever. Remembrance Day….Theo was born and I remember the 21 gun salute playing on the TV that was on in the background, something I will always remember and every time I hear those guns salute I will remember my little boy coming into the world as a sleeping baby…..

We stayed in the Snowdrop Suite at Northampton General Hospital, provided by SANDS Charity, somewhere for us to spend time with Theo and take time away from the world. We made the decision to invite some very close family and friends to come to the hospital and to spend time with Theo over the days after his birth, we were still going to celebrate his birth and wanted those close to us to be able to hold and spend time with our little boy.

At a time of such tragedy and sadness I remember the love that filled that room and how for those very special days after he was born, I felt closer to those people than I had ever felt before. They all came to see our little boy, they wanted to hold him and love him, that meant so much to me, to us. The midwifes were amazing, one in particular will be part of our lives forever, I remember her placing a kiss on his head when she finished her shift and seeing the tears roll down her face, she genuinely felt our pain and loss but had also been a big part of celebrating his life also.

We had gone from all the excitement and build up of welcoming a new baby into the world, to planning their funeral, having to think about who would take the service, who would speak, would I speak? Did I really have that strength inside me? What music would we play and what would happen next, how could we afford a funeral?….

We had amazing support through a charity called Children Are Butterflies….I wonder now what we would have done without them, they arranged everything for us, just as we wanted it, so it was perfect, they took photo’s of Theo and even cast his hands and feet and made us a memory box of various things to remind us of Theo and they fully funded his funeral to take away all of those pressures we had been worrying about.

The day of Theo’s funeral arrived and I was determined to make it a day we would always look back on with pride, I wanted to do the right thing by him, I was going to stand up and say some special words and I was going to carry his coffin into the crematorium. It was the day I decided I would spend the rest of my life building a legacy for Theo, I would build memories and I encouraged everyone who came to the funeral to do the same, to make memories for themselves and for Theo. We all gathered after the funeral for a balloon release, I remember there being more balloons than I had ever soon before and when we let them go, they all stayed together, drifting into the blue sky without a single cloud, like time had stood still…..

I remember walking into the crematorium with our chosen song, carrying Theo’s coffin and thinking to myself, how could this have happened to us, what did we do wrong, were we such bad people that we had this happen to us…but the truth was we had done nothing, we were good people, we were already great parents to our other children and actually why not us….it can happen to anyone

The days, weeks and months that followed that day were tough, incredibly tough, tougher than I could ever have imagined, I would even go as far as to say sometimes I questioned everything around me and what my actual purpose was in life, feelings that when I look back were unreasonable, feelings of guilt, I should have done more, feelings of blame, I should have got Sarah to hospital quicker….

The thing is when you lose a baby, there is no reasonable behavior or thought process, there is no right or wrong way to show your sadness, to grieve or to behave around other people, it is a very personal thing and one that even now is full of questions and what if’s, good days and bad and days when you just sit and think and reflect and still ask the question….Why?

I didn’t just lose a very special son that day, I lost a part of my amazing partner that I will never get back, we have both been on a journey and are still on one, as individuals and together, two very different journeys and very separate journeys but ones that have brought us closer than I could have ever imagined possible and I very quickly came to realize that the love you can have for someone can be in so many ways and on so many levels.

People would often ask me “how is Sarah and the kids” almost as if I didn’t exist, like I wasn’t there and I wasn’t grieving – I knew this was never their intention and lets face it, how do you start conversation with someone that has just gone through such a sad event in their life? I still felt very alone, even though I wasn’t.

We had our little “Rainbow Baby” the name given to a baby conceived after the loss of a child - Jax Rain in October 2017, who is now 7 months old and my little ray of sunchine , a little boy with such a kind soul and adorable smile , I know that Theo lives on in Jax and watches over him. We never got to see Theo’s eyes with him being born sleeping and it’s the one thing we talk about all the time, yet Jax has the most piercing blue eyes you can imagine and everyone who meets Jax is drawn to his eyes, I tell myself this is a gift, something to comfort me, us, for what we didn’t get to see when Theo was born and that’s my comfort – there really is something special at the end of the rainbow, you just have to believe it.

The journey over the last 18 months has been a challenging one, leaving a job I had been in for 17 years, starting my own business and being self employed, all the unknown but I have learnt many things along the way, valuable lessons about people and the way we are treated or should be treated, about what I want from life and how best to achieve those things, the value of my family and friends and how valuable life really is and should be to every single one of us.

I wanted to tell our story from a dad’s perspective, my perspective, as fathers we often are forgotten, we feel we need to fix things and often go the wrong way about things, but we were there, we had to be strong, we had to support our family, return to work, keep our family safe and provide for them, whilst battling with the emotional journey such a terrible loss brings.

I hope that although the contents of this story are very sad, they are not intended to cause distress or upset, but to show you all that despite the worst possible thing happening to me, to us, that we are resilient as individuals and that with support and people around us, we can achieve anything, we just need to speak out and tell people how we feel – don’t be ashamed, don’t think you know what people are thinking or expect from you, don’t be afraid to say you need help, that you are having a bad day, if you can talk to people…talk, don’t try to be your own councilor, share your feelings and let others help when they want to and when you need it most.

Be Strong. Love Unconditionally. Be Aware of your Mental Health. Build Memories. Build a Legacy. Never Take Things For Granted.