Four: Milestones
Four years ago today, our daughter Fionnuala was stillborn.
Our second daughter, Muireann, fell asleep last night while reading a story to ‘Fionnuala’, one of her soft toys.
It was given to us by my aunt, and is a little girl holding a doll in her hand. The girl is Muireann, the doll is Fionnuala.
Even though Fionnuala is her big sister, Muireann dotes on her. She turned three last week, the first step on what will forever be a month of milestones.
The dates are etched in our heads. The numbers track a fortnight that changed our lives.
December 9 — the day of our 20-week scan, when the midwife’s erratic behaviour first raised our alarm.
December 12 — the day of our second scan, when Dr Mary Murnaghan told us Fionnuala’s heart had stopped.
December 15 — the early hours of the morning when Fionnuala was delivered by our midwife, Jackie Stacey.
December 23 — the day we buried her at St Mary’s Church, Rasharkin.
The date that affects me most though, is April 23. Fionnuala’s due date.
In December, occasion is everywhere, even amid a pandemic. The very notion of Advent is waiting for something, meeting the next milestone.
We mark the above milestones every year in December. April brings a feeling of being cast adrift. Flailing. There is more time to ponder what might have been.
Muireann was born just under a year after we lost Fionnuala, and is now walking the path her sister would have taken.
She has a little pink coat with unicorns and rainbows on it, the sort of thing most little girls of her age own. Earlier this year, while I was rushing out of the house, the coat — one of many hanging at the back door — fell open on the floor.
The stitched label inside the coat read ‘This has been specially made for’. The line below it was empty.
We’ll never get to write Fionnuala’s name on a school coat. She’ll never have a peg in nursery. She’ll never learn to write her name.
Of course, we’d discussed this at all Muireann’s milestones; crawling, walking, her first words, but it was the emptiness from that label that proved the most potent grief-ridden gut punch.
When I spoke to fellow bereaved parents during Baby Loss Awareness Week, that emptiness was something they all mentioned.
Emptiness creates a vacuum, and a vacuum must be filled.
People fill them in different ways, both healthy and unhealthy. As with any loss, there is temptation to flood it with whatever you can to blur the lines and numb the pain.
But that won’t work. The most petrifying thing about the emptiness is its vastness. Life’s potential is endless, and so your attempt to fill the void must also be.
Loss knows no fatigue. Only memory can fill its void. If you stop remembering, it will swallow you.
We talk about Fionnuala. We include her on Christmas cards and presents. We write about her. We fundraise in her memory.
Muireann knows about Fionnuala. She waves to her as we pass her grave in Rasharkin. She reads to her at night and recognises the first letter of her name.
‘F’ is for Fionnuala in Muireann’s mind. Fionnuala ‘keeps her safe’.
In return, Muireann keeps Fionnuala’s memory safe along with the rest of her family.
Today we would have been celebrating her 4th birthday.
Instead, I’ll call at her grave on the way to work.
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