Too close to see
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I never imagined that we would eventually let our baby die. From the time of his birth we met a steady stream of doctors. The longer he lived, the more doctors we met and the more interventions he had. Like all new babies, he was so beautiful, so small and so helpless. I assumed he just needed a little time to get bigger and stronger.
It’s been nearly four years since he died, and my recollections of those stressful months are getting vague. What is clearer to me now, however, is that his impending death was probably quite obvious to everyone. Except me.
Coming into the world prematurely, he needed help to survive. With good intentions, the medical system went to work to preserve his life. Every new intervention was a progression from the last. Each action was intended to be a small contribution to the repair of the whole. Every specialist focussed on one specific organ, without providing too much comment on any other.
When asked about long-term outcomes, we were often met with vague non-committal answers.
“These babies can surprise you,” they said. Being so close to him every day, I was completely blinded by my extremely imperfect perfect baby. I was just so grateful he was alive I could not see that the path his life was taking was quite different to that of other babies.
With age came missed milestones. His failure to develop started to become more obvious to us and we gradually began to see visions of his future. By now I knew that he would one day die, but I still couldn’t see his death. When readmitted to hospital that first time, I never imagined that I would go home without him. I didn’t. The second readmission was the same. So when I took him for a third time, I packed his supplies including his food and milk and drove him to emergency.
By now I knew what to do.
But this time it was different; he was sicker and there was a greater urgency. His little body was declaring itself and no amount of medicine could make it better. There were still some doctors that believed they could ‘pull him through’ this recent illness, but at what cost? I could now see things clearly and knew what would happen next. In the final days and hours, all of the work that had been done to preserve his life was undone. One by one his interventions were stopped and taken away until all that was left was a perfect baby lying on a bed. Instead of antibiotics and oxygen, he now received morphine. His monitoring devices were removed and we held him until he died.
I look back now at photos us together and I see what others would have seen: a very sick child with a mother that would have done anything to save him.
How has your perspective on trauma and your witness to your child shifted with time?