(Trigger warnings: Pregnancy, ultrasound scan, stillbirth, labour)

On the 20th of March 2013 my beautiful baby daughter’s heart stopped beating, in my tummy, on her due date and without me knowing it, this heralded the beginning of my life as a childless not by choice woman.

This is my story . . .

I woke that morning, a morning supposed to be full of excited nervous anticipation, to the still and silent certainty that I hadn’t felt my daughter move in my tummy for some time.

I took things calmly and slowly, rationalising that if I followed my usual routine, my baby might respond as she normally did along the way to various stimuli.

I sat up very straight in bed and ate my cereal as I had taken to doing. This would usually make her squirm a little in the slightly compressed space.

I had a shower and normally the water playing on my belly must have translated into some kind of sensation for her because she would usually squirm and move around.

Finally, I had remembered reading that if you quickly drink a very large, very cold, glass of water, this could make your baby respond with movement in your tummy.

As I did each of these things in turn and there was no response, the disbelief and sense that I was holding my breath and standing on the very edge of a precipice grew. I rang my husband and told him that I hadn’t felt her move, I’m pretty sure I tried to rationalise it by adding that of course there was less space to move now that she was so big, which could be the explanation. With his clear head he suggested ringing the obstetrician. I did and was calmly and caringly told by the receptionist to make my way to the hospital and that they would let the hospital know I was on my way. I rang my husband again and remember being concerned about parking at the hospital. He suggested I take a taxi and he would meet me there.

I called for a taxi and it took an absolute age to arrive. As it then made its way through the frustrating morning traffic to the hospital, I kept singing the chorus from a Babysitters Circus song “everything’s gonna be alright now” over and over in my head, reassuring myself, breathing, willing myself to remain calm and everything to be ok. When we got near the hospital road, traffic kept stopping and only two cars were getting through the intersection with each change of traffic lights. My anxiety levels kept ramping up – stay calm, stay calm! We finally rounded the corner and sat in a line of stopped traffic. I could see the entrance to the hospital ahead in the distance, so I told the taxi driver that I would walk from there. Unusually, I had cash in my wallet so I handed something over, got out and started walking towards the entrance, able to find awareness even in the moment, of the vague absurdity of a heavily pregnant woman in my circumstances having to resort to puffing along the road - but I just couldn’t sit there marking time.

Hospitals are confusing at the best of times, but I eventually found my way to where I needed to be and was greeted and ushered into a single room near the ward reception.

What happened next plays out in my mind like images in a slightly disjointed and jarring time lapse video.

The young nurse placing the wand of a machine in various positions around my tummy, trying to locate my baby’s heartbeat and the long, long silence until one was detected. Asking if it was my or my baby’s heartbeat, and with a slightly stricken look on her face her telling me it was my baby’s (I was pretty sure it wasn’t) and pretty much running from the room.

A more experienced nurse coming in, taking up the wand and telling me that they were having a bit of trouble locating my baby’s heartbeat, before cleverly talking me through what she was doing step by step “we’ll just try over here. No, nothing there”, “ok, over here, hmm, no nothing there either”. Talking me through a journey to the inevitable conclusion that, having searched everywhere, the answer was going to be that there wasn’t a heartbeat.

My kind and compassionate but slightly shocked looking obstetrician arriving and telling me again that the staff had had trouble locating a heartbeat and that the next step was to have an ultrasound. Asking me if I wanted to wait for my husband. I couldn’t. I needed to know.

Walking down snaking corridors on a cloud of disbelief to an ultrasound machine. Lying down with the screen facing me and seeing a little dark void of black nothingness where there had been the strong quick flick, flick of a tiny heart in all my previous scans.

The jagged pain as I finally exhaled the breath I had been holding all morning as the truth I had not dared fully contemplate roared sickeningly into being and the first of the years of tears I have cried for my precious daughter, burning silently down my cheeks and the first tiny crystals of desolate wasteland starting to form inside my heart.

The slow walk back to the hospital room. The departed hope making my feet scuff and clumsily drag along the floor. The long wait for my husband, filled with informative facts spoken softly, thoughtfully, by the obstetrician who was to tell me that in his eight years of practice, mine was his first stillbirth.

The shock and indignation literally winding me, as it hit me that I would still have to go through the trauma of labour but without the reward of a living baby at the end of it.

The arrival of my husband and the loving, gentle and cautious words we spoke as we started inching our way forward in a world we no longer recognised and hadn’t wanted to be part of.

Sitting in the car as we made our way back home to collect my hospital bag and clothes to dress our baby in, thinking over and over in numb disbelief ‘I’ve got a dead baby in my tummy, I’ve got a dead baby in my tummy’.

The reluctant and traumatic phone calls made to parents and closest friends, all excitedly expecting news, but never that news. The shock. Having to say out loud “her heart stopped beating”.

Searching frantically amongst the clothes we had bought or been given, with rising distress, for something that even came close to being beautiful enough for her to be dressed in – there was nothing, so I took a beautiful blanket – not knowing that of course they can’t give a child back to her parents after an autopsy with their little bodies exposed. Much later my daughter would be returned to us dressed in a frothy ensemble of lemon and lace, undoubtedly made by the loving hand of a volunteer, but jarring in its over-the-top old-fashioned ugliness, and a stinging slap of a rebuke that I was such a bad mother that I couldn’t even manage to dress my baby properly.

The hours lying awake in the hospital bed after receiving the induction drugs, with my husband snoring in a bed alongside mine, trying to sleep but my mind screaming at the top of its voice at me, not giving an inch. Giving up in exhaustion at 2 am and pushing the button to ask for sleeping tablets – I could take any drugs I liked now, nothing could harm my dead baby anymore, she was untouchable.

The complete lack of labour progress overnight meaning my waters needing to be manually, and extremely painfully, broken the next morning.

Things progressing relatively swiftly in labour terms from there. When the moment came, having to walk from the room to the birthing suite – past tiredly ecstatic new parents grinning from ear to ear in their cocoons of bliss. Stopping to lean against a wall and the pillow I was carrying (why was I carrying a pillow?) when labour pains made it impossible to walk for a moment.

Settling into the birthing suite.

Intensely grilling the midwife on every single detail of exactly what to expect at every step of the way going forward. What would my baby look like, was there anything I needed to prepare for, was anything going to be different to a normal labour, did she have any advice, had she been in this situation before, how had others coped etc etc? I had just experienced the catastrophic shock of a lifetime. I was categorically not up for any more surprises.

Being told it would be a while yet so my husband popping out the grab lunch, and the disconcerting experience of being momentarily alone and suddenly realising it was all about to start in earnest and no one was there. Phoning my husband. Pushing the call bell.

The anaesthetist arriving, fresh from his garden, with leaf clippings caught in his hair to prove it, after me deciding that actually, even though I am f-ing tough, there are limits to even my toughness and endurance, and the escalating pain which may have been tolerated under normal circumstances was becoming beyond unbearable in these.

Me “labouring like a trooper” (actual quote from the obstetrician) and delivering my baby in 20 minutes, at 2.13pm on 21 March 2013.

The pain of a deep tear being sewn up.

The obstetrician checking my baby over, putting a nappy and hat on her, weighing her, wrapping her and handing her to my husband. My husband bringing her over to me and me sharply shaking my head – no, I couldn’t hold her just yet.

The weight of her in my arms – the solidity, the warmth, her tiny face. She was real in every way. A beautiful, perfect baby. I can still stroke a specific place on my jaw that feels exactly like she did.

Un-wrapping her, resting her on my legs. Hungrily drinking in every tiny detail. Not understanding, although it seems inconceivable now, why my husband was taking photos of her. Photos that would become a tiny bobbing life buoy to cling on to in the devastating vast ocean of the coming days, months and years.

The obstetrician commenting on the length of her beautiful fingers and me proudly saying that she got them from me – and laughingly observing that she had inherited my chubby thighs as well.

Being wheeled back to our room, through the corridors of live babies and parents who would never know how close by them the ghosts of their alternative realities had slid that afternoon. A clipboard resting across the top of the clear plastic crib so that people wouldn’t be shocked by the bruised and slightly blistered appearance of my baby’s face (this is what happens when babies die in utero).

Being asked by the same kindly nurse who had told me there was no heartbeat, whether we had a name for the baby. Me nodding, but being totally unable to form the sounds out loud. The crushing sense that I was letting my baby down by not being able to tell the nurse her name.

Eventually, it could have been a day or a lifetime later, being able to say her name out loud. Elliot Grace.

There is so much more I could write, about the magnitude of the heartache, the numbness, the longing, the desperation, the deep, deep sadness and desolation, the endless why? why? why? that screamed on loop in my head, the slow realisation that I would never be the same again, that my relationships would never be the same again, and that I would never relate to the world or another being within it, in quite the same way again.

I could write about arriving at the obstetrician’s office at the six-week post-birth check up with a long list of every way I may have been responsible for Elliot’s death, and after about the fourth or fifth item him gently telling me to put the list away, as nothing on it was going to be able to provide the answer or explain it. That sometimes things just happen for which there is no medical explanation. (In a sad twist of fate, the obstetrician himself passed away from cancer a couple of years ago and the shock and pain of knowing one of the few people who had seen Elliot and held her was gone, was unexpectedly distressing.)

I could also write about the eventual and slow burning devastation of realising that not only had the baby I had spent so many months, in fact a lifetime, imaging a shared future with, died, but along with her, so had my precious dream of motherhood.

In the days and years to come my journey would involve far too much time spent busying myself to forget, and then my body and subconscious staging a coup to force me to take a chunk of time off work to spend time remembering - and honouring her and the grief related to her and to my childlessness (and coming to terms with separation from my husband).

It will be 10 years next year and I’ve come so far. I distinctly remember the day I had my first spontaneous positive thought about the future – it took over six years. Fronds of hope and purpose have started unfurling within me over the last few years and if not striding, I am certainly moving forward, finding moments of real joy, and I have made some pretty precious friends in the childless not by choice community, whose support and deep understanding add a richness to my life I could never have imagined back at the beginning.

There are no words to accurately portray how I still occasionally feel, both about Elliot and my childlessness - there is no music, there’s no poetry, there are no movies, or books, there is no art, there’s nothing in nature, nothing that captures it. Nothing quite touches the sides of the deep, deep dark well full of absolutely everything and absolutely nothing at the same time.

OJ