Wedn 24th Feb: surfing the net and Judith Lucy

I have been looking around the net for blog sites about neonatal death, and there are hundreds of them out there. Some of the resources on the sites are useful, but I don't find other people's stories of such griefs helpful at the moment. I have a hard enough time dealing my my own story, let alone other people's. I expect this will change and at some point I will want to talk more to people who have been through something similar.

It is 4 weeks since Salome was born. I wonder when I will stop marking the days by how long since she was born, how long since she died. In some of the other blogs, women (they seem to be almost all women who write them) are counting the days since their baby died, even 10 or so years down the track. I don't want to be like that: I don't want that to be Salome's legacy in my life. I know I will never 'get over' this, but neither do I want it be consumed by grief or defined by it in years from now.
Here are some things I have regularly said to clients in the past, which are now coming back to bite me in the bum:

1. Grief is not an emotion. It is a process. Grief can have any number of emotional flavours. Grief can be sad flavoured, angry flavoured, shame flavoured etc.
2. The number of tears is no indicator of the depth of grief, nor of the depth of love for the person who has been lost.

I am reminding myself of these neat little phrases often. I think I still believe them. But can I walk the walk?

Today is K's birthday. I am trying to make the day enjoyable for her. Thank goodness my Mum is here to make K's day special.

Here is a quote from the book The Lucy Family Alphabet by Judith Lucy (2008, Viking Press):

"There is always so much to do when someone dies. After Dad died of his heart attack, Mum and I stayed at [my brother] Niall's and filled our days with death related tasks. Choosing a coffin is the most unusual piece of shopping I've done. It's not often that you spend that amount of money on an object knowing it will never give any pleasure. There is no satisfation to be had from your choice - you're not going to flick through the catalogue and say "Bingo! That's the one. That's the casket that will really bring out the best in the corpse". The only party the coffin seems to benefit is the people selling it to you. When I go, just bury me in a cardboard box or a wine barrel (if you want to be vaguely relevant), and do not, at any point, say 'It's what she would have wanted", unless you specifically know that it is. I wouldn't have had a clue what Dad would have wanted- still to be alive would have been my guess. And while I'm about it, don't send any sympathy cards to my loved ones with shells, seagulls, or the ocean on them. I'll be dead, I won't have gone to the beach."

If like Judith Lucy you are interested in being buried in a cardboard box, see these eco-friendly options. I like the wicker basket one in the 'natural' section and the avid gardener one in the 'pasttimes' section.

http://www.creativecoffins.com/