How grief helped me cope with childbirth

Becky Garrod - 30 Jun 16

Grief offers up an array of clichés. It comes in waves is one of them. I have never felt comfortable hearing it: it’s too close to the way my sister died, taken by a sea that went from calm to suddenly, unexpectedly deadly. The words make me close my eyes tight, to squeeze out images of Helen in her final minutes.

But here’s the thing about clichés: there is often truth in them. Grief does come in waves. At first, relentless and so frequent that I felt I would drown, too, in sorrow instead of water. And then, over time, the waves came less often but still with force.

Even now, twelve years since Helen died when she was sixteen, I can be making the kids’ tea, thinking about something stupid, like whether the latest Drake song is sexist, or if it’s OK to like it. And I’ll think Helen would have loved Drake, and a great wave of grief will come crashing over me without warning, so that I hold on to the edge of the worktop to stop myself from falling to the floor. Because I don’t know if she would like Drake, at age 27. Because I can’t ask her. I bow my head and grip the wood. The waves recedes. I pull my shoulders up and back, breathe in through my nose, drain the pasta and shout to the kids to turn the telly off, tea is ready.

I didn’t expect the patterns of grief to be mirrored so closely in childbirth. There in the birthing pool, six years after Helen died, half-cut on gas and air, belly huge and ready to release the baby who would shine a dazzling light into the darkness that had shrouded our lives, I bowed my head and gripped my partner’s hands, and weathered each contraction. A wave of intensity would come, it would pass. I would raise my head and breathe in through my nose, crack another joke, and everyone had to laugh, because I was in labour, goddamit.

With the waves of intensity came a strangely calm knowledge, rather than a conscious thought: I have been here before. I have done this before. I can do this. Losing Helen taught me how.

Because of losing Helen, I knew – to paraphrase a book that is now regularly pulled from our bookshelves by little hands,  “We’re Going On A Bear Hunt” by Michael Rosen- I couldn’t go over the pain of labour, I couldn’t go under it, I had to go through it. Just like in grief, there was no avoiding these giant waves of pain. There was no dulling them. There was no point kicking my legs and crying out that I couldn’t do it, that it was too much. I tried that, sometimes, on my bed, when my bereavement was new, and I discovered that it didn’t make any difference to the fact that I simply just had to do it.

Because of losing Helen, I knew that instead, I needed to breathe through the waves. To recognise that even the most intense contractions (of the womb; of the heart) pass and it becomes bearable, again, to exist.

Because of losing her, I knew the value of good support, and that there was no shame in reaching out for that support- even if that meant blindly flailing in the dark and trusting that my partner would grab my hand / rub my back/ whisper encouragement; and that this support was not (thankfully) conditional on me being my best self.

And beneath and above and behind all of it- the never-ending hours clambering in and out of the pool, flopping over birthing balls, pacing the floor and vomiting into a cardboard hat- there was a sure and certain conviction: if I can cope with losing Helen, I can cope with giving birth to this baby.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that my little sister showed me how to manage labour. After all, it was she who first showed me how to be a mother. She was born, at home, a few weeks after my seventh birthday. I was aware of Mum being in labour throughout the night, and even popped into her bedroom uninvited a couple of times (sorry about that, Mum). In the morning, I went into my parents’ bedroom, and there was Helen on the patchwork bedspread, naked and long. She reminded me of a turtle, with her dark head craning on a spindly neck. Her eyes were black, and I could look so deeply into them that I could see forever. I held her, and felt enormous with pride.

The love I had for Helen was not just sister-love, it was mother-love, too. I know that for sure, now that I have my own babies. It was there in the feeling that I would happily smash in the faces of the kids who teased her at primary school; in the instant tears that sprang to my eyes when she told me that she had got an A in her GCSE dance practical exam (she never got to collect her final GCSE results, because she died between the exams and results day- proof, if ever it was needed, that life can be a bitch- but at least she knew that she had totally nailed the practical exam of her favourite subject); it was there in the fearful sense that she was too precious, somehow- that I was putting myself at great risk, loving her, because of what I stood to lose.

So when my first baby, Leila, finally fell into the world after years and years (or so it felt) of labour, and I grappled with shaking hands for her pink, firm body and scooped her to my chest, I already knew the feeling that rushed through me. I had felt it before, standing at the edge of my Mum and Dad’s bed looking down at my scrawny-necked sister. I knew what to do, and how to be a mother. I knew, because Helen taught me.

Losing the girl who taught me how to be a mother, and giving birth to the girl who made me a mother for real: the two things weren’t so very different. That might sound mad- to compare the loss of a loved one to the birth of a baby. What, after all, could be more different from death than birth?

But here’s another cliché about grief that turned out to be true: it is the price we pay for love. And this is also true of giving birth. It’s just that, when I lost my sister, the love came before the hardship; and when I gave birth to my babies, it came at the end, like a beautiful prize.

Labour lasted for a matter of hours; grief is work that will last a lifetime. But I know two things for sure: I would go through grief for a thousand years to have had the sheer joy of knowing my sister; and I would go through labour a thousand times to have my children. These are the prices I have paid for love, and they have been worth it.

Becky Garrod

TV producer, fiction writer, worrier, mum. Since having two children I'm usually to be found on the verge of tears of happiness or frustration.

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