Charles Wallace: A Love Story
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This guest post is by Claire Laura. She is the mother of two babies: one who lives on earth and one who is gone. She works as an archivist and writes in her spare time.
Author’s note: This piece was written in reflection after my second baby, LG, was born alive. For a while after I lost my first baby, Charles Wallace, I couldn’t read the stories of parents who had living children out of jealousy and grief. This is a content alert for anyone who might be in the same place.
“No one wants to talk about dead babies or acknowledge the mum whose baby has died.” Melanie’s quote, from Page 1 of Empty Cradle, Broken Heart : Surviving the Death of Your Baby edited by Deborah L Davis.
I read this while standing in the middle of an aisle at a local bookstore, a week after losing my son. It felt so comforting to read Melanie’s quote. It was plain and real, stripped bare of any of the niceties of sympathy, or attempts to skirt around the edge of the void of baby loss. It dove straight into that void.
I had just lost my first baby after finding out he had Trisomy 18. We made the heart-wrenching decision to say goodbye to him at 25 weeks gestational age. It was early spring, 2024. We named him Charles Wallace.
Because he was my first baby, I didn't really know about the intensity of the physical love for his little body, I didn't know until after he was gone, how badly I would wish to have been able to hold him in my arms.
Charles’ fetal diagnostic ultrasound ended up being the longest time I had to gaze upon him—his perfect form. During the long quiet of it, when the technician said nothing while she pressed button after button, I wanted to sing, but instead I recited poetry to myself. I recited The Song of Wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats. The last stanza goes:
“Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and tides are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.”
I recited this poem at the ultrasound, and then again, and again in the months to come. I still recite it, following the promise of the verse with my whole heart, pledging that I will find where Charles has gone, and then, then! That I’ll have the chance to hold his physical body, to kiss him, to take his hands in mine.
Now it is summer of 2025, and I have a living baby, Charles’ sister, and I am learning what it is like to hold her precious body in my hands. I am learning about all the firsts I have with her… first smile, first coo… each of these moments is tender. They capture this baby in her living journey through the world, and they also provide a window into what I missed with Charles. I didn't know what I was missing, perhaps is the way to say it, even though another part of me did know, did comprehend, not in detail, but by the sheer weight of grief.
* * *
Cover and two pages of “More More more,” said the baby by Vera B. Williams
My childhood friend visited a few weeks ago, and read aloud to LG the children’s book “More More More,” Said the Baby : 3 Love Stories by Vera B. Williams. In the book three care-takers catch their babies up in their arms and adorn them with physical love. A few nights after my friend left again, I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking of my son, Charles Wallace, missing him, loving him.
In “More More More,” the first story is about Little Guy and his Daddy, who has to run like anything to catch Little Guy up in his arms. I too, would have run like anything to catch Charles up. After the loss, JD, my former professor and now friend in the babylost community, says to me, “I know you would have done anything for your baby.” And I say, “yes.” Both of us, ferocious.
Now that Charles has gone, catching him up still happens, even though he is on one side of death and I am on the other. It is our love story. I catch him up, not his physical form, but what feels like the spirit of him. In the swallows dancing outside our apartment, a light green moth hovering near a hydrangea, a robin balancing on a slim branch, a seal disappearing into the waves.
JD shared with me about her practice of gathering rocks for her lost baby, rocks that she can say she collected together with her lost daughter. I adopt this practice too, and catch Charles up in finding rocks to hold, to collect with him in my heart, to say we found them together. That is catching that baby up too. “The rocks find me!” says JD.
A love story. More more more.
* * *
I work as an archivist and think a lot about knowledge being shared between the past and the present. My therapist reminds me that because pregnancy loss and babies dying is so invisible, the knowledge of how to live through the loss is at risk of being lost itself. If our knowledge of how to survive baby loss is threatened, then that threat extends, the shadow of not knowing how to move forward, to survive, grows.
I felt so frequently encompassed, shrouded by shadow after losing Charles. And so I loved the name of this web-community, Glow in the Woods that JD introduced me to. Not denying the shadow, but providing a glow within it. I browse the archive of discussion threads, hungry for other stories like mine. This archive of what happens when you’d run like anything, when you’d do anything, to save your baby, but you can not. This archive of how to catch those babies up after they’ve gone.
More more more. An archive about babies, and the people who love them, who take care of them. So many love stories.
We see parents catching their babies up in the world— it is an easy love to see. But it is harder to see the love we have for those babies who we lost. It is life-saving to be able to say, this is how I catch my lost/gone/dead baby up, this is how I love my baby, and to be able to read, to hear how others love their babies who have died.
* * *
A year before I lost Charles, my friend’s colleague delivered a stillborn baby. My friend received the news over text message, and did not know what to text back. She asked me, and I thought of a poem that was recently shared with me:
Island, by Langston Hughes
“Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.”
I didn't know then about the night and day of having to say the invisible happened, the unthinkable. Of delivering the loss and the news of the loss to the world. I didn’t know that I would be sending similar texts to my own colleagues.
I recited this poem too, over and over, after we lost Charles. The wave of sorrow was so strong, so powerful, as to drown me, but the promise of this poem, that it might take me somewhere, where the sands are fair, helped me live, helped me love through the grief.
A lifetime of love — more more more — not of a living body, but of one beyond the physical — love felt in the network of cells that remember and ache — rocks gathered on the shore — reciting these poems — simply saying the name, Charles Wallace, and I love you — it's catching that baby up too.
* * *
“Alas, mourning is what brings you lasting peace and happiness.” Empty Cradle Broken Heart, Page 339.
And now I say more and more and more and feel for Charles’s non-being, non-body, his absence that has become a presence, a colour that has altered me, as surely as if I smelled different.
A more-ness of mourning-as-love that has allowed me to love both my babies. His sister and him. A star, a baby who faded through the brightening air.
Reciting these poems in the woods, looking for Charles in a robin, a swallow, a seal, it is my version of catching him up and loving on the sweet details of him. Little guy, little pumpkin, little bird.
The neverendingness of this love as grief, of the more more more of it is so important. And equally the community, the knowledge, the gift of the archives of grief-as-love.
* * *
If we cannot be visible, then we will be audible. Alas! The only path to lasting peace. Comes through the both/and nature of loving a living baby and a dead one: I feel this both/and as a doubled-up experience– two realities that exist in my body at once, one happening in the present, and one that happened in the past. Now I am driving a baby crying, and then I am crying holding Charles’ ashes in the passenger seat, now I am in the waiting room with a child who will live, and then with a child whose life we determined was best lived within me. Now, I am leaving the hospital with her in a car seat, and then I am leaving with my body ruined, having left his behind. More, more, more.
It's 3 AM and I am having the normal parent problems of being sleep-deprived. “These are the normal problems we wanted for you,” says my therapist. And the targeted ads on my computer show sleep-deprived parents to living children and I am one of them now, but I am also one of those for whom there are no advertisements, who are sleep deprived from the grief, from waking up, over and over again, to the nightmare of loss.
One of those who pushes a stroller with a living child and one of those who looks away from the person with the stroller, the baby carrier. One of those who puts up internal shields in her mind when the parents with living babies pass by, and also who delights, now, when people stop to admire LG’s little face. One of those who remembers seeing a face those people will never see in the black and white curves of the ultrasound. Let it be said, if it can't be seen, that this is being a parent, being a mom, being someone who cares for her babies— this grief, this joy, this jealousy, this love.
What do we say when the last thing we want to happen happens? I suppose we say the thing that lets us live.
The thing that lets me live is sharing Charles’ story, is reading and learning from the stories of those in this community, those who have said the thing that let them live.
There is a glow in the middle of the woods, and tending to that flame, sitting around that fire with the faces of others whose loss is visible on their brows, their eyes, their mouths, this is another kind of love story too. More more more, we say, we ask– what is your story? What is your little guy, your little pumpkin, your little bird called? How do you catch them up?
How do you catch your baby up?