Losing Iris

‘This will no doubt be the first of many volumes written to you, for you and about you.’ I wrote these words on the first page of a journal in March 2004. At the time I was four months pregnant with my first child and these words were being written to a yet unnamed baby growing in my belly. As I wrote I had great hope and expectation in my heart. I imagined keeping many such journals over the course of his or her life; recording anecdotes and memories of significant events. I also imagined giving the journals to him or her one day. Now, those first words seem like a cruel portent of the many, many words I have written since July 2007, when my almost three-year-old daughter, Iris Grace Elizabeth Hay, died suddenly and unexpectedly.

That day was like most other Wednesdays. Iris, my baby son, Hugo, and I went to a community music group in the morning. Iris danced, sang and played with her friends, loudly and enthusiastically as ever. It was a sunny, winter’s day so we ate lunch outside. My mum was there, too. Three generations chatting happily in the sunshine. After lunch, Iris asked her nanna for six cuddles and then was tucked into bed. I spent some of the afternoon on the phone to a pregnant friend, talking about how ‘in love’ with Iris I was and how beautiful our days were at that time. As the afternoon drew on, I decided to check in on Iris and that’s when I found her dead. I was at home on my own, Hugo, then 7 months old, was on my back, and I spent the next twenty minutes trying in vain to bring Iris back to life. Then the ambulance arrived and they also tried to revive her. At some point my husband, Rob, arrived home. Then there were police and my parents. We were told that she would have to be taken to the Royal Children’s. Rob and I discussed carefully, lovingly what she should wear and decided upon her pink and blue gypsy dress. We dressed her with all the care and reverence we had been unconsciously storing up for her first day of school or maybe her wedding day, while all the while fighting the thought: none of this matters; she’s dead.

At the hospital, I remember looking from Rob to my father, to the doctor, to a friend who had joined us; looking for some explanation of the horror that had just occurred. I also remember the beginning of a feeling that continues to this day, a feeling of having my heart wrenched out of my chest.

*

The days that followed were a blur of visitors, phone calls, gifts of food, cards, flowers and tears. Somehow we had to plan her funeral. We wanted to plan her farewell as thoughtfully as we had planned her arrival. The sacredness and care with which we approached both events was similar, but there was no joy, no sense of anticipation.

We were able to have Iris home in the days leading up to her farewell. Having her home brought a strange sense of peace to us all, and we were each able to say goodbye in the way we needed to. We filled her coffin with gifts for her journey: her favourite bear, some crayons and paper, her favourite CD, photos, letters and her birthday present.

Her funeral was good; just the way we wanted it to be. There was music, balloons, wailing, keening and Rob and I were able to speak our own words about her and the full and beautiful life she had led. There were more than three hundred people there, and most of them came back to our house afterwards. It was so welcoming to arrive home to a house full of people after such a bleak occasion. A dear friend said to me that he had looked around the crowd (made up of doctors, barristers, judges, psychologists, healers, mothers, fathers and teachers) at the funeral and thought: all these great minds, all these great people, we are all silent, we are all like children in the face of death.

The next day she was buried.

Four weeks later it was her third birthday. This day loomed with equal but opposite intensity to the birthday party we had been planning a few weeks earlier. We decided to complete the chook house and fill it with four Faverolle hens as our gift to her. I also cut up her dresses and sewed them into prayer flags that are now threaded through the gum trees around the chook house. We had birthday cake, cards and tears.

Since that time we have travelled the rollercoaster ride that is grief. Anger, sadness, desperation, emptiness, shock, irritability, exhaustion and fear have been our companions. And now, a year on there is also a resignation: a reluctant acceptance of the reality of the impassable divide that will always separate us from our daughter.

*

Losing Iris has challenged everything I thought I knew about myself and my beliefs about the world. I thought that ‘these sorts of things’ happened to ‘other’ people, and maybe I naively thought that trying to live consciously, gently and ‘with heart’ somehow protected me from such extreme tragedy. Of course, I have done a lot of reflecting, questioning and ruminating over the past year. I have spoken to many good people about death, and Iris’s death in particular. There is no answer to the question of how she died. The Coroner was unable to find a cause of death. And there is no satisfactory answer to the question of why she died. The only answer that speaks in any meaningful way to these questions is that ‘death is part of life’. This, I think, is the most frightening and yet liberating truth to try to understand and embrace. Most of us spend our whole lives denying death’s presence in our lives. We are fanatical about keeping it ‘out there’. News headlines obsessed with death are testament to our perverse need to keep death at a distance, something that affects ‘other’ people, and not to accept the fact that death is a part of all of our lives. The hurtful ostracising of the bereaved after a loved one has died is another way we deny death’s presence in all of our lives at some time.

One of the things I have slowly started to realise is that we have not lost only Iris. We have also lost a naivety and comfort that will never be rediscovered. The resilience I once felt seems to have deserted me. I am good at putting on a brave face, but much of the time I feel vulnerable. I have read many books and articles on grieving and death over the past year and listened to interviews of others who have been bereaved. Sometimes, I have been left feeling confused by those who say that they have learned so much, or become a better person or the like. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s amazing that people can turn tragedy into something positive and meaningful, and I think in our own ways we are trying to do that. Just the act of continuing on with our lives and not becoming bitter or cynical is one way in which we are embracing our loss in a positive way.

Sometime in the past year I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she describes the year after her husband’s sudden death. The title itself was probably the most helpful part of the book. It helped me name this strange, wishful thinking that started soon after Iris died. For many months, when the phone would ring, I would pick it up expecting ‘someone’ to tell me that there had been a mix up, and that the elderly man down the road was supposed to have died that day, and that ‘they’ were in the process of rectifying the mistake. Iris would be returned to us forthwith. I could not put away her clothes because she would need them on her return. I was unable to remove her toothbrush from the cup in the bathroom, just in case. Now, her toothbrush remains in the cup as a protest; a reminder that we did share that small, daily task together. She did exist.

Grief is a lonely, bleak journey and almost every gesture of kindness (no matter how awkward it might feel) is important. It has been truly humbling to have been so well supported and held by our community of family and friends. We have been given food in abundance, flowers, plants, songs, beads, crystals, sculptures, books, chook-food, beer, massages and beautiful, thoughtful words. Sometimes well-meaning friends have said things like, ‘She’s in a better place now.’ Comments like this have upset and angered us, since the very best place for her to be would be with us. Good friends have heard our distress and we have been able to bear the well-intentioned but poorly thought-out comments. Certainly we’d rather be spoken to than not. Sadly, there have been some friends who have found our journey too confronting or difficult and we haven’t seen or heard from them since Iris’s funeral, and perhaps we’ll never see them again.

It has been heart-wrenching to observe the pain and suffering endured by my darling Rob. Sometimes I have nothing left to offer him by way of comfort and I have to let others support him or just watch as he struggles on by himself. Mostly, though, we have been able to cling to each other and ride the waves of grief together. Much remains to be written on men’s reaction to grief.

Watching my parents has also been harrowing. Iris was their first and only grand-daughter and they were totally smitten with her. Not only have they experienced their own extreme grief over losing Iris, but they have also agonised over seeing Rob and me so broken. Through all of this they have provided us with amazing emotional and practical support. They are changed forever, too. There is a sadness behind their eyes, a slightly slumped posture and a wistfulness that weren’t there before. They take great delight in Hugo; he can make them smile and sing and dance even when their hearts are heavy.

*

I had an epiphany of sorts about six months after Iris died. I walked, tears streaming down my face, along the riverbank, with Hugo in the pram and two dogs by my side. I was ruminating on the number of times I had done the same walk with Iris, pointing out birds, koalas and funny looking dogs or explaining to her about shadows, the wind, or clouds. Then I remembered Hugo and thought about how he needed just the same from me. That moment started me thinking about love and about how it is truly an act of love to continue on living and living well after one has lost love in such a tragic way. Until that point, I had been rendered quite powerless in the face of death and the looming path of grief that lay ahead for me. Since I have started to embrace this idea, I have experienced occasional moments of peace. The following Michael Leunig poem speaks well of such things:

There are only two feelings. Love and fear. There are only two languages. Love and fear. There are only two activities. Love and fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear.

Living in love, not fear, means embracing the deep grief I feel and understanding it as a continuation of the deep love I shared with Iris. Living in love means keeping my heart open to Hugo, Rob and my stepdaughter, Eliza, and not pushing them away or smothering them, out of fear of losing them and having my heart torn again.

Hugo is nearly two years old now and is saying and doing many of the things Iris used to say and do. He is different to her; and similar. Sometimes he says things in exactly the same way Iris did and I am able for a brief moment to touch her life again through him. I imagine how they might have played and fought together. I imagine many things. I often wonder how we will ever thank Hugo for keeping us going, when all we have really wanted to do at times was to give up on life. For a while, after Iris died, when people looked at Hugo all they would say was ‘Thank God for Hugo.’ So much so that I feared he might start to think his name was ‘Thank God for Hugo’! He is a bright, chatty, loving little boy and I’m glad that he’s similar to Iris and I’m glad that he’s different, too.

Now there is a new life growing inside me. In two month’s time there will be another child in our family, although he is already very present in my belly. At first I felt sad that none of the pure joy I have felt with my other two pregnancies was present. However, the joy and anticipation has slowly grown as this baby has grown. Rob and I tentatively stepped into having another child with all sorts of questions about our readiness and whether or not it was ‘the right thing to do’. I was concerned about carrying a baby while carrying so much grief; about trying to say ‘hello’ to someone new while at the same time reluctantly saying ‘goodbye’ to Iris. I was also concerned about the fragility of our hearts, and whether or not they could be rallied to love and care for a new baby. Rob was concerned that choosing to have another baby was in some way a sign of disloyalty to Iris; a diminishing of how precious she was to us. Another issue was how we could ever explain to a new child that he wouldn’t have been born if Iris had not died. I expect we will muddle our way through that with honesty and love when it arises.

On reflection, it seems that I have learned a lot over the past year about resilience, kindness, openness and what it feels like to touch the depths of despair. Certainly we have been given many, many gifts by friends and strangers. But I would unlearn the lessons and give back each gift in a second just to have Iris back again.