14 years ago, my best friend lost her baby boy.
She went into labour at 23 weeks and her precious son only survived a few hours.
I still remember her voice when she rang me sobbing just after he died. I collapsed on the floor. I cried with her and wished with everything inside me this wasn’t happening to her.
It wasn’t fair.
I was also pregnant, exactly a week behind her, with a baby boy. I also had my one year old daughter trying to hug me through my tears at my friend’s horrific loss.
We had been friends for 18 years. I loved her. I felt her grief. I went to the funeral of her baby boy a week later when my baby was the same gestation to the day as her son when he was born and died. It was an awful coincidence.
We talked a lot but she kept pulling out of meeting with me. I understood. I’m sure my growing belly would remind her of everything she had just lost.
My son was born via elective c-section. She was the only person we told in advance so she could prepare herself. I let her know first after he was born. She wrote back about how she was so sad and had written an article apologising for her behaviour.
A few weeks later, her article was published* on Mamamia, shattering our longstanding friendship forever.
Anyone who has been lucky enough to have a surviving newborn child knows how emotional those first few weeks are. Add in a one year old who still wasn’t sleeping through and life was very emotional. Then add in this loss and this article.
I couldn’t believe what I read. This might have been an apology, but with a few right hooks thrown in.
My birth choices, my newborn son being compared to the plague… It was hard.
But I still loved my friend and tried to pretend to myself it was ok. After all, losing a child would be horrific and I didn’t know how that felt.
I said that to her. I also asked her not to write about my son again. She said I was telling her she couldn’t write about her son again so I was evil and she blocked me. She cut me, and my family and our joint friends, out of her life.
It hurt. So much. But I tried to be forgiving. I knew she had suffered an unimaginable loss, and I hoped that one day she would be able to be my friend again.
Fast forward 13 years later. My oldest child, my daughter that hugged me as I got the news about her son, died by suicide.
I read her article for the millionth time. She is a beautiful writer. I felt her pain in a different way than before. But I also don’t understand wishing this on someone else.
Many of the comments broke my heart with other mums who had lost their babies saying they wished this on other people too. That is not ok.
Especially as sometimes, they will lose a child too.
Losing a child really is the worst thing that can ever happen.
I would never wish this on someone else.
Not the kids who bullied my child to suicide. Not the healthcare workers who dismissed her and ignored her pleas for help. And certainly not my friends.
A few hours after we found my 14 year old daughter, while I was still in shock, I thought about that article. I thought about how happy my “friend” would be to hear I have joined her club.
A club I don’t wish on anyone.
She never reached out. She still has to be the hero with my son “the last remaining germ of bubonic infection”.
She didn’t deserve this. I don’t deserve this. Our children definitely don’t deserve this.
There is no “Why me? Why her?”**. It just is.
I wish no one else ever has to feel this unbelievable loss.
Now I know the pain, she has hurt me in a whole new way. I have to live without my gorgeous, vivacious daughter. The love of my life. And she wanted this for me.
She was never my friend.
* Just after writing this, my friend’s article was removed from Mamamia so I changed the links to the archived version of the article so you can see it as it was.
** This was the name of the article before it was removed Mamamia. A slightly different name is shown on archive.org The article has other errors which is why some statements don’t match with what I write here.
