It's When I'm Not Looking That I Find Her

Anita John

I hated being pregnant - the vomiting, the shape. A few weeks after I'd fallen pregnant with my second child I woke to feel as though my whole body had been battered with a sledgehammer. Just part and parcel of pregnancy I was told and shouldered on.

At 26 weeks, on a Friday night, I lay on the sofa watching Space Odyssey 2010, that dreadful film which is heralded as great cinema but has never done anything for me. I've seen it twice in my life and both times I've come away thinking apes, bones, red sky and de dah! What's that all about then? It didn't help that I had terrible head pains as though a vice had been wrapped around my forehead and was slowly, ever so slowly, being tightened and tightened, pressing harder and harder on the right side of my face and neck. If I moved my head, even slightly, my temple threatened to explode.

The next morning the pressure had eased somewhat and the doctor told me I had probably pulled a muscle in my neck and to get my husband to massage it better. Which I did. It didn't help, not in the slightest. I struggled through Saturday, heaving my body from room to room, task to task. Saturday evening the pain lifted - joy oh joy - I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Perhaps this was the turning point, the point from which everything would start to get better, easier. The point from which I would start to bloom.

Sunday afternoon we planned a walk with our two year old son. I had a sudden urge to use the toilet before we set out, and my baby was born without warning. There were panicked calls to the doctor - my husband running between me and the telephone. When the doctor arrived, he broke it gently. 'I don't seem to be able to find a pulse', he said, sowing the doubt. Then a second time, more firmly, 'I can't find a pulse.'

My baby was perfect - a shot of black hair, beautiful fingernails, ten cherub toes, rosebud lips, apple-rounded cheeks. So tiny and so perfect. Such a fine line between breath and death.

I remember travelling to Simpsons, then in the centre of Edinburgh, in an ambulance, my child clutched in my arms. I remember being wheel-chaired into the hospital, past the pregnant women smoking outside the main door, past the gift shop filled with splashes of colour - bright bouquets of flowers, helium balloons, powder-pink pyjies and dusted blue bonnets - down the long, echoing hospital corridors, past the posters of mothers smiling, nursing their babies with full breasts. My breasts ached and I was wheeled to a room at the far end of a corridor, where I held my dead daughter, licked my wounds, cried salt-streaked tears.

We named her Abigail. A nurse washed and dressed her and we had our photo taken. We held her, my husband and I, for a long, long time. I stroked her cheeks, her eyelashes, thick and black, mascara bright. I only wish I could have seen the colour of her eyes.

Her death was given a name. Pre-eclampsia. Lying in intensive care with drips and a catheter later that same day my condition was prescribed eclamptic. The word sounds like a vice. Hard and tight and nasty. It was a word I'd seen before in the pages of the pregnancy books, tucked into a small, discreet paragraph giving brief details of high blood pressure, headaches, swollen legs, symptoms to look out for. At the time I'd thought 'Ugh, that sounds terrible' and had quickly turned the page to read more pleasurable things. What I didn't realise was that all the tests during pregnancy, the blood pressure, the protein in the urine, the weight gain and measurement of the baby's growth are all to test for the onset of pre-eclampsia. It is one of those illnesses, diseases, conditions - call it what you will - that no-one really knows the cause of, or the remedy for, though there are many theories. And still it takes lives, the lives of babies in the womb, the lives of mothers.

It will be 14 years this January since Abigail died - at 26 weeks only just old enough to be classified as a stillbirth rather than a miscarriage. And sometimes I'm surprised by the anger I feel when I remember some of the comments made to me in the aftermath of her death. Two in particular stand out: 'Perhaps you worked too much in front of the computer - it can't have helped' and 'Isn't pre-eclampsia caused by poor nutrition?' For those who know little about the subject my advice, with hindsight, is don't comment on the cause.

But in hard times, people rally, family, good friends, friends you didn't know you had. Mourning a child you never had the chance to meet is difficult for all concerned, mother, father, brother, sister, grandparents, friends and colleagues. And sometimes, even 14 years later, the mourning takes me by surprise. Often, it's when I'm not looking that I find Abigail. On Islay, a tangle of dark hair and laughter, escaping the storm; on Guernsey, in a dance of May Pole colours; sometimes in the daughter of a friend; and once, at Christmas, I heard her voice rising from the choir, so clear and pure it almost broke my heart.