SARK
The advent of Madeleine and Sebastian has been healing for not only us, but for our entire community of friends and beyond. The arrival of our new two prompted a group of my closest girl friends to bring together women from all the communities of our lives for a baby shower to welcome our boy and girl. Most of these women have in some way or other walked alongside us and supported us through our torrid journey of loss.
As I drew up to the shower venue, the twins accompanying me - dressed in their almost-fitting best outfits, still tiny at just a month old - I caught within myself an overriding sense of sadness and loss. For this happy event was built on the saddest event of our lives. The hole Erin has left felt suddenly impossible to fill. It almost seemed disrespectful to her to be celebrating the advent of two little people who will fill the space in our family that she occupied. For although Erin has been away from our home for 18 months now – one eighth of the time she had been with us – she occupies a disproportionate amount of our thinking and reflections. She accompanies us all the time in our conversations and our memories - a silent presence wending her way in to all our new experiences as we conjecture what might have been…
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I have spent much time trying to understand fully, through the loss of our daughter, the anatomy of love, inter-connectedness and relationships. Michael and I existed very happily before Cameron’s and Erin’s advent. We were self-contained, buoyant with all that life had to offer us, and extremely happy. So how is that in the space of a short almost eight years a young girl can so journey her way in to our hearts and souls filling us with all-consuming love, so much so that the loss of her presence is so devastating to our very well-being?
Having a child is the silent, surreptitious sewing together of lives. Through our children we’ve come to realize what embodies love - the daily acts of sacrifice (the investment of time, of energy, of resources) and the daily engagement and the shared act of living (the shared idiolect and family routines; the delightful emerging idiosyncrasies; the dizzy euphoria of watching the developing personality of a child; the awe as one sees burgeoning independence, the development of moral fabric, resilience and the stepping stones of wisdom in decision-making). Loving requires empathy, trustworthiness, over-riding commitment, self-sacrifice and patience. The act of loving another human being is not a passive act; it moulds anew; it shapes our perspectives and world-view; it contorts our perspective of the past, present and future. Loving changes the very essence of who we are - indeed our very identity. It is not the haphazard and hollow utterance of the words 'I love you' - as we experienced in a message left on our answer-machine by someone who has not once connected to find out how we are nor once made mention of our daughter or what she meant. These small words ring disingenuously without consideration of the awesome, powerful, all-consuming engagement with what loving entails. For loving is a verb of action, of intent and often of sacrifice. Loving Erin shaped and altered us as well as every facet of our lives. When we lost Erin, we lost part of ourselves.
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… I set aside my feelings of sadness and stepped out of the car and entered the home of the baby shower. The immense power and love of women was immediately tangible. The shower was held at a beautiful home on Lion’s Bay’s waterfront and careful thought had been invested in every detail. The theme of purple and turquoise ran throughout - in the bobbing balloons, the delicate flowers, the blown bubbles floating calmly through the afternoon and the ribbons on the bushes in the garden welcoming guests. There were beautiful lavish gifts, wrapped in blue and pink tissue in bright baby bags. Hanging up were bamboo chimes made by the Girl Guides – one chime for each girl – to be carried up to their resting place in Erin’s Enchanted Forest. There was sparkling wine, a remarkable array of edible delicacies and cupcakes adorned with chocolate medallions ‘Welcome to the World, Madeleine’; Welcome to the World, Sebastian’. And what a welcome it was! I felt joy again and there was laughter, too. It was an afternoon of being embraced by the women in our lives who have ventured with us into the treacherous territory of loss; who have negotiated speaking about the unspeakable; who have reached out with gifts of food; who have sought ways to remember and honour Erin’s life in the most remarkable ways. It was an afternoon of celebration for the gift of life (twice-over) and the prospect of loving and learning anew and reshaping our identities once again. It was truly a shower of love.
So there is rebirth, new beginnings and hope for the future. The twins’ lives will pave the way to our healing; to laughter once more; to new adventures and to new discoveries of ourselves and our new identities. And of course there will be more - much, much more - showering of love ahead.
A new journey has begun…